Hey Big Oil, Wanna Party?

by Pa rock
Citizen Journalist

Political whores Mary Landrieu and David Vitter, the current United States senators from the state of Louisiana, are so conflicted over oil policy that they have lost the ability to pander for votes and corporate cash in a coherent manner. Yes, they are mad as hell at the Obama administration and anyone else they can blame for the oil that is slowly destroying the entire coastline of their state. And, yes, they want the mess cleaned up and all of their constituents compensated for their losses. But no, they do not favor any moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

The oil is killing their state - but please don't stop drilling because their state needs the jobs! If ever a state suffered from bi-polar disorder, it is certainly Louisiana!

Yesterday I stepped out of the air-conditioned building in which I work - and I stepped onto the asphalt parking lot. The temperature was around 105 degrees, and felt considerably hotter as the heat bounced back off of the asphalt. It was absolute energy - a huge and essentially untapped source of clean energy.

The deserts of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Mexico could quite easily become North America's most significant power source of the twenty-first century. Why aren't we putting solar panels out among the Saguaro instead of drilling wells one and two miles under the surface of the water? If a solar collector breaks, we remove and replace it - in a matter of hours. If a deep-water oil well goes berserk, we stand by impotently as our seas and shorelines are fouled, wildlife die, and whole communities become stagnant cesspools of unemployment. One could be fixed by two guys in a van, the other can't be remedied by all the kings horses and all the kings men - even with unlimited government help.

Any fourth grader would see the folly of propping up the oil industry while basically neglecting solar power. And then there's wind...

Have you ever visited the Dakotas? The wind never stops blowing - ever! North and South Dakota would be a perfect location for endless fields of commercial windmills. The land supporting windmills could also be used by ranchers for cattle grazing as the windmills continue to turn. It's a win-win. Again, a malfunctioning windmill is just a broken piece of equipment that can be fixed with minimal effort - it is not an ecological disaster.

The money that American taxpayers are going to fork over to stop and fix the mess in the Gulf of Mexico could fund thousands upon thousands of windmills - and enough solar collectors to cover the entire American west.

Yet Landrieu and Vitter are begging the federal government to not stop oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The brazen stupidity of that plea would almost make one wonder if they had some vested interest in protecting the oil companies - perhaps something more pecuniary in nature than the votes of a few oil rig workers and their relatives.

The motives of those two southern politicians are as obvious as those of the working girls (and guys) in the French Quarter. Hey Big Oil, wanna party?