2:57 pm - Fri, May 7, 2010

2 notes

Oil is dangerous? You don’t say!

The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival just blew through town and, as per usual, it was incredible.  The Levon Helm Band easily won the first weekend, Jeff Beck took top honors for the second, and in between musical acts of all shapes and sizes more or less totally rocked it. Far too often, however, I found that the music acted as little more than a faint sonic backdrop for my quest to consume as many oysters (and shrimp and crawfish) as humanely possible before this BP oil spill destroys the Gulf seafood industry for the next few dozen years.

But even in the midst of what could be a frightening disaster of unparalleled proportions, let’s not sit around and act like this event should be fraught with teachable moments, opportunities for introspection and massive civic action.

Even before this freak catastrophe complete fuck-up, we all knew the dangers of oil. When we import it, we line the pockets of extreme/oppressive/unstable regimes that don’t always agree with our way of life.  When we try to get it ourselves, we put our coastlines and land and citizens in harm’s way. When we use it, no matter where it came from, we destroy the environment.

You don’t need a massive crude leak to make a solid case against off-shore drilling, and even in spite of one I am sure there are still some compelling arguments to be made for its expansion.  And boycotting a particular company - or demanding that campaign contributions are returned, or dressing down a high level executive - does little more than show off the nauseating brand of manufactured populist outrage commonly found at Tea Party Protests and on the pages of The Huffington Post.

The enemy is not the politicians or the regulators or the corporations.  Okay, I take that back. Most of those people are the enemy; but the enemy is also oil. And until everyone is ready to swear off fossil fuels, all our hooting or hollering does is shuffle the deck in a high-stakes, zero-sum game of hold ‘em.

If you think you can make it through a day without using a single petroleum based product, I would be tempted to call you crazy.  While this doesn’t mean that we aren’t allowed to demand answers and action from those responsible for this disaster - quite the contrary, actually - it does mean our singular focus should be taking on the oil spill before we worry about taking on the oil industry.