Not the ideal week to argue for more oil wells. 5,000 barrels a day of the gloopy stuff is flooding out of an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana. Shrimpers, fisherman and industries that rely on tourism all face collapse, just five years after hurricane Katrina. It is an monumental, horrendous — perhaps preventable — environmental disaster.
Joe Romm, the impeccably angry rabblerouser at Climate Progress, says the disaster is Obama’s “best chance to shift the debate from the dirty, unsafe energy of the 19th century to the clean, safe energy of the 21st century.” Romm, and a group of other writers, think he is blowing it with the president’s characteristically cautious approach.
I'll just sit here until global oil supplies run out
So why is Obama hesitant? Is he waiting for the killer TV image of a stumbling, oil-enveloped seagull collapsing on a blackened beach before he really sticks it to BP and the other oil giants? Or is he slightly sheepish after he agreed five weeks ago, with disastrous timing, that more oil wells could be sunk off the coast of the US? Either way, he needs to argue that oil is environmentally disastrous, it is running out, we need to stop using so much of it and we need to start now. He needs to draw a clear line between the oil disaster and people filling up their cars (and fishing boats, for that matter). This spill is not just a safety failure, it is inevitable if you have an economy that relies on the black gold. If you do not want something like this to happen again, the easiest way is simply to use less petrol.
So is the spill having an impact on the debate in the UK election? Like the herd of major issue elephants in the room, energy has been strangely absent. In an effort to bring it front and centre, Greenpeace campaigner and environmental writer Joss Garman, has attacked the Tory’s policy on increasing North Sea oil drilling, in a great post at LeftFootForward.
In the energy policy paper, the Conservatives say they’d like to open up an area of Ocean off the Shetland Islands that is important for its whale and dolphin populations. The area off the coast of Shetland also contains a couple of ‘special areas of conservation’ such as Darwin Mounds, designated for its cold water corals, and Wyville Thompson Ridge, proposed for its stony reef species and bottle nose dolphins. It’s not clear if these special sites would be under threat from the plan.
As I have argued, there is plenty to admire in the Tory’s energy plan if you do care about the environment. They also stress that increased North Sea exploration would only be a short-term measure as we try to get off oil (the other two major parties have also remained silent on the issue, which is even less admirable). But as the increasingly shrill chant of ‘Same old Tories’ gains momentum ahead of Thursday’s vote, being smeared with the ‘Drill, baby, drill’ tag is not going to help Dave and chums one bit…
