Oil spill should be a red flag

James Kerr’s letter, “Let’s not abandon deep-sea drilling,” appearing in your Sept. 3 issue, suggests exactly the response to the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster we don’t need and must not accept.

In addition to seemingly hoping we don’t take the messages this disaster indicates, he suggests that oil companies other than B.P. use “pioneered safety precautions,” whatever those are, in deep water. Essentially he seems to want us to believe that the oil industry on the whole operates safely and follows required rules and regulations.

Any objective overview of the oil industry’s history indicates otherwise. Those who support oil-industry activities want us to believe that the Prince William Sound and Gulf of Mexico disasters are just “outliers”: essentially isolated incidents; and that if we just figure out how to fix what happened in these two specific cases we can plow forward with little concern for new spills in the future.

What these two events actually show is that there are innumerable ways accidents can happen and given the massive extent of oil industry activities on our lands and waters, they are going to happen. The causes of future disasters will be different than past events, but the effects will be the same – environmental and economic devastation on a massive scale and taking decades, if ever, to fully recover.

Ultimately, we need to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels to a greener energy-sourced economy. And we must significantly reform federal agencies charged with overseeing energy extractive activities on our public lands and waters. They should think first of ecological health and last of benefiting the oil industry. We simply can’t go on so irresponsibly destroying one part of our country after another.

Sincerely,

Mark Johnston

Kent