More on the Gulf

I’d like to direct you to this Orion Magazine article, "The Gulf Between Us," by Terry Tempest Williams.  It gives a human face to the disaster.

The oil is not gone. This story is not over. We smelled it in the air. We felt it in the water. People along the Gulf Coast are getting sick and sicker. Marshes are burned. Oysters are scarce and shrimp are tainted. Jobs are gone and stress is high. What is now hidden will surface over time.

What I want to highlight is not the specific environmental and personal damage caused by the disaster, but to discuss how every choice has a cost.  Our relationship with oil, and fossil fuels in general, has costs that do not appear at the pump or in the electric bill.  We have chosen to use a resource that can cause immediate disaster, like in the article, or the long-term disaster of global warming. 

We choose to mine coal and we get mountaintop removal and a polluted water table.  What we also get when we choose “no more taxes” is not to have our workplace safety regulations enforced.  We have said that an extra $1 in our pocket at the end of the year is more valuable than preventing another mine disaster, more valuable than the lives of the mine workers.

Remember that when it comes time to vote next week.  Remember the theme of this blog: the answer is not “tough luck,” but “we are in this together.”