BP oil leak finally capped. But for how long?

On Thursday July 15th, 2010, BP finally managed to shut off the oil leak. I'm hoping that this will finally stop the leak once and for all, but I'm not getting my hopes up. I knew that their "top kill" plan wasn't going to work, ("top kill", "top hat", "junk shot" - clearly they have some brilliant minds at work on solving this) and I'm suspecting that this won't work either. This is why I think it isn't going to work (or more accurately, why they don't want it to work) - I was watching CBC news earlier this week, and they were talking to an oil industry expert (whose name I can't remember at the moment), and he said that his theory about why this has gone on so long is because in the US, the EPA determines fines for environmental spills by how many barrels of the substance are spilled into the environment. (Whereas here in Canada, there is a set fine per incident per day. Each day that a spill goes on is considered a separate incident, and is issued another fine). He says that BP hasn't been trying to determine how many barrels of oil per day are spilling out of the pipe because if they don't know how much has been spilled, they can negotiate a lower fine.

This theory sounds plausible to me. They clearly haven't been in any rush to cap the leak, and clearly all they care about is money.

I think what's going to happen with the new cap they've put on it (that they're presently testing to see if it can withstand the pressure) is that it's either going to stark leaking because the pressure is too high, or they're going to say they have to remove it because the pressure is too high. With a cap on the pipe, it would be possible for them to measure how much oil is leaking from it, which I don't think they want, so I don't think they have any intentions of keeping the cap in place for very long.

Why I don't think a carbon tax for corporations that pollute is a good idea

It might sound a bit backwards, since the point of the carbon tax for corporations that pollute is to make them pollute less to avoid having to pay the tax, but that's not how I see it playing out. When costs go up for a corporation, the price of their products goes up. If corporations had to pay the extra cost of a carbon tax, they would raise the price of their products. Some people might say they don't mind paying $4 for a loaf of bread, but that's not the point. If corporations that have to pay the carbon tax are raising the price of their products to get that money back, then they're basically passing the cost of the tax on to us. That means that we would be paying the carbon tax instead of the corporation, which defeats the purpose.

More reasons to drive less

According to the most accurate real-time carbon counter out there, carbon is being released into the atmosphere at a rate of 800 tonnes per second. That adds up to 3,642,295,260,000 (that's over 3 trillion) tonnes and counting, as of right now as I'm writing this. To put it in perspective, 3 trillion seconds is 100,000 years. That's a lot of carbon. That's also a lot of warming of the atmosphere. And as we know, excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can cause severe weather such as more severe hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and droughts.

Two more reasons are views like these:





While drivers are isolated from everything around them in their steel cages, riding a bike lets you feel the wind in your hair, hear the birds chirping, and see beautiful sights like this that drivers would miss as they're zipping by, thinking about what they're going to have for dinner or talking on their cell phones.

Transportation Liberation, as presented by ObbieZ and RoZ at the
"Towards Carfree Cities" conference in Portland, OR, June 2008.

Don't believe in global warming? It doesn't matter

There are a lot of skeptics out there who don't believe that humans are causing global warming. They believe that it's a natural phenomenon. Then there are people who don't believe it's happening at all. Because of these views, they don't believe that it's necessary to try to change the way we as a society do things.

Well, here's an argument you might not have heard before.

It doesn't matter if you believe in global warming or not.

There are reasons other than global warming for doing things to help the environment, because those things also help us be healthier. We know that the emissions from cars cause smog. You can't say you don't believe in smog, because you can see it in the air.

This is a picture of the sky over Los Angeles:


This is a picture of what the sky should look like:



We know that smog increases rates of asthma in children and adults, it causes damage to the heart and lungs, it reduces lung function, even in healthy people, it increases the risk of lung cancer, and a Swedish study recently found that people who drive to work as opposed to those who walk, bike or take the bus, have a 70% greater risk of having a heart attack. The World Health Organization estimates that 3 million people die each year from air pollution.
This is a problem we need to do something about, and all of these effects from smog are easily preventable.

Doing things to reduce smog, like driving your car less (or not at all) not only help the environment, but they also help us.

Something to ponder

Something occurred to me last night as I was falling asleep. (I think of these things at the oddest times).
I was thinking about the reuse part of "reduce reuse recycle". If everyone kept things to reuse in their homes, for example plastic bottles, then they would have to get more oil out of the ground to make new plastic (which would be bad for the environment) because they don't have as much recycled plastic to work with because everyone is keeping it. And if everyone did it with cans, they wouldn't have as much recycled metal to work with and they would have to mine more metal from the ground, which damages the environment. The same is true for paper and cutting down trees.
If everyone recycled everything they bought, then they would only have to take a little oil or metal from the earth to make new plastic or cans because they have so much recycled stock to work with.

I think a lot more emphasis should be put on "reduce" and "recycle" than on "reuse".