Seasonal North Country resident, activist and environmental writer Bill McKibben has posted a commentary about the oil spill unfolding in Louisiana.<\/p>\n
He draws a bright line between the devastating spill and the energy politics in Washington.<\/p>\n
The oil spreading across the Gulf is a test, pure and simple.<\/p>\n
Think of its twisted outline as a Rorschach ink blot for a society–maybe for a whole civilization. Will we respond in ways deep enough to matter? Or will we see nothing wrong in the devastating images of the oil slick, and continue on this path of destruction, danger, and dirty energy?<\/p>\n
Forty one years ago, similar pictures of oil-soaked beaches and dying sea-birds off the coast of Santa Barbara, California galvanized the nation and set the stage for the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.<\/p>\n
But over the years, that environmental fervor faded, and we returned to business as usual–mostly, the business of burning more fossil fuel. In late March, President Obama decided to “drill baby drill”, lifting a moratorium on coastal drilling that had its roots in that first spill.<\/p>\n
Just a few weeks ago, Obama said “It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills.”<\/p>\n
How wrong he was.<\/p>\n
So now we’ve got another chance–not just to come to terms with offshore drilling, but far more importantly, to come to terms with fossil fuel itself.<\/p>\n
Please take a few seconds and send a message to President Obama and your Senators asking them to ban offshore drilling, and instead invest in safe, clean energy: www.350.org\/drilling-ban<\/p>\n
The water off the Mississippi Delta is slick with oil, but that’s barely the tip of the damage from fossil fuel. We now know that carbon dioxide spreading invisibly across the atmosphere is driving change on a massive scale: by raising the planet’s temperature, it’s melting everything frozen, raising the level of the ocean, powering ever stronger storms. In the Gulf, and in every other ocean on the planet, that extra carbon is turning seawater acid.<\/p>\n
And there’s no way to prevent global warming with better valves on oil rigs. The only way is by ending our addiction to fossil fuel with great speed. The scrawny climate bill that the Senate may take up later this summer barely nudges the oil industry-as Republican Senator Lindsay Graham explained earlier this week, the big companies helped write the bill themselves.2<\/p>\n
So now is the time to demand more–a new chance to ignite a broad movement to protect everything we hold dear. Can you add your voice today?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
What do you think?\u00a0 Is this another sign of a society that needs to rethink its energy needs?\u00a0 Are spills like this a price we’re willing to pay for cheap energy?<\/p>\n
Commenets welcome below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Seasonal North Country resident, activist and environmental writer Bill McKibben has posted a commentary about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2015"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2015"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2016,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2015\/revisions\/2016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}