The Disgrace of Disaster -- Politics and Corporate Governance As Usual

Yeah, so much to say about British Petroleum, Halliburton, the blatant pay-offs to these oil companies. This is a reckoning of sorts, tied to the lack of environmental impact studies, BP not wanting to spend $500,000 for an acoustic regulator that might have stemmed the flow from that Deepwater Horizon disaster. Eleven men killed in the methane bubble explosion. Drilling 20,000 feet down into the earth's crust in 5,000 feet of water. We've sold off our children's and their grandchildren's futures: solar, wind, conservation, efficiency, co-generation, and other forms of fueling our world should have been on the table 20 years ago, two years ago when Obama took office.

We'll pay the bill. And the 12 to 20 billion dollars in lost economic vitality, and the priceless loss of wetlands and tidelands and the ecosystems? We'll just have to witness BP negotiating a pittance of responsibility, monetary and spiritual and intellectual as we can all see it has complete complicity in this huge oil disaster.

It's spewing 210, 000 gallons a day as of today, May 8, and those ecosystems, the coastal people, the entire legacy of Teddy Roosevelt designating that area, those barrier islands, the entire tidelands, his favorite brown pelican, turtles, all those ecosystem vital to American memory and America's wild history and future, well, we "get it" in the environmental movement: we allowed the oil companies to run roughshod over our country's national heritage of citizen participation, collective comment and the vitality of science and others outside of the corporate structure, those we deem experts, or even the theoretical politician, who are suppose to be working for us, for the land trust of America's shores, reefs, forests, prairies, deserts.

This blog post is just the tip of the iceberg. The calamity of our country's offshore drilling madness and the retrograde thinking when it comes to a true Apollo Program for green infrastructure, green jobs, alternative energy, and sustainability, well, I have many, many words to pen on that, all tied to this lunacy of BP allowing to wreck our environment, our economy, our national pride.