BP or Us?

I think the author makes a very good point here.

Quote :

Who’s the biggest culprit in the Gulf disaster? Everyone’s talking tough about BP and their culpability. The President, in my opinion, said exactly what he had to say about the catastrophe 36 hours ago. Late last night, I saw where one lawmaker, referring to BP CEO Tony Hayward’s testimony before congress later today, said “They’re going to take his hide off, as they should.” All reports point to a corporate culture of risk-taking at the expense of safety, the story says. There’s talk of extracting massive reparations from BP for damages to the region.

This is reasonable. Livelihoods are being lost. In all likelihood, thousands of jobs will be lost as a result of the fact that you can’t fish there anymore. And it isn’t just commercial fishermen, either. The sport fishers support local hotels, restaurants, retail, and the like.

And that’s only the human side of it. Most of the victims in this disaster can’t hire attorneys for a class-action lawsuit. Countless creatures are dying, and precious wilderness is being spoiled for decades, or even generations. We likely have very little idea what the long-term toll to the environment will be. So clearly, BP should pay.

But the BP blood-lust, and the countless newspeople who are fanning those flames, are completely missing the real point. Because the ultimate fault lies not so much with some foreign corporation, as with us. We are to blame, and we’re going to cause even more of these disasters. How can that be?

We’ve created a suburban nation, where the only way to get around is to drive. The easy oil to support that lifestyle has been pumped years ago, so oil companies are having to go to greater and greater lengths to find new reserves. Much has been made over the fact that the gusher is buried a mile deep in the Gulf. Drilling so deep was unthinkable just a few years ago, but expect it to become much more common in the near future....

It continues here.
http://www.originalgreen.org/OG/Blog/Entries/2010/6/17_BP_or_Us.html

I just want to say that I'm as much to blame as anyone else. The question is, what do we do about it?

Walk whenever and as much as we can, consolidate/pick fewer activities(hell, we may find time to actually enjoy our lives )so as to not make twenty trips a day, and advocate fervently on behalf of folks like Lomborg and the Copenhagen Consensus in pursuing cogent, pragmatic measures rather than Utopian ones.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/lomborg63/English
http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/CCC%20Home%20Page.aspx