Spill, Baby, Spill!

So it seems the Deepwater Horizon, an offshore oil rig that exploded earlier this week, has now sunk into the Gulf of Mexico - presumably with the bodies of the 11 workers still missing. A prescient name for an oil drill?

Forget the unfortunate dead workers. Like soldiers, they knew the risk. Forget that this will be used as an excuse to drive up crude futures and thereby raise gas prices. Forget that President Obama looked more like Sarah Palin than an agent of hope and change when he recently decided to open up coastal areas to MORE offshore drilling. What you need to know TODAY is that there's potential for this rig to release up to 300,000 gallons of crude oil a day into the gulf. That would impact sea life. That would impact bird life. That would impact delicate marshland wildlife on the Louisiana coast. Incidentally, that figure of 300,000 came from agovernmental group known as the Coast Guard - not an environmental group.

At present, the Coast Guard doesn't know if the Deepwater is spilling crude in the deep water. They do know there's a 1-mile-by-5-mile spill presently on the water.

I'd like to remind you that the cleanup from the Exxon Valdez disaster is STILL ongoing. Still not cleaned up. Still affecting the environment and the local wildlife in Alaska.

More oil is not the answer. It's poison. The money spent on cleaning up after the 858 fires and explosions in the gulf since 2001 could be spent on R&D to make America the biggest, baddest, greenest motherland on the planet. Future generations deserve for us to reverse momentum on all fossil fuels and use of carbon to fuel our activity on this planet.

No oil rigs. No oil disasters. It's just that easy.