A Son of the Rock

I’ve not written anything so far about the huge oil leakage in the Gulf Of Mexico as it’s not really something you can do anything about except deplore it. It’s also far enough away from Britain as not to be a main news story in the middle of an election.

I would say, though, that this has been an accident waiting to happen. It was almost certain that with widespread offshore drilling a major ecological catastrophe would ensue.

I suppose since the industry doesn’t have a good safety record overall it could have happened to any oil company engaged in deep sea drilling. So it was partly bad luck it was one of BP’s rigs that exploded. But BP do seem to have made a decision to go specifically for oil growth and not diversify into other options.

So; is this the price we have to pay for oil? Are we too wedded to the lifestyle oil has helped to foster? (A lifestyle encouraged by governmental decisions which have downplayed public transport options and failed to invest in them or, in the case of the US, deliberately in the 1920s and 1930s built infrastructure that relied on the motor car as a means of getting about.)

Despite its myriad other uses the main thing we do with the stuff is simply to burn it away – which is really a criminal waste. But it is still the cheapest and easiest way to carry on modern life.

Yet oil, via the motor car, is probably the prime factor in the atomisation of people’s lives which has led to the erosion of the civil society I recall from my youth.

Is a disaster like this enough to turn our species away from the path of exploiting ever more remote sources of the thick, sticky black liquid?

The answer to that last one is likely to be. No.