Now what, BP?
By Alex Pearlman and Jen Schmidt
This is Part III of III in a series. Read Part I and Part II.
This weekend, BP’s short-term, mediocre fix, the “containment cap” caught 16,000 barrels of oil flowing out of the leaking pipe in the Gulf. That sounds like a lot. But actually, it’s a tiny margin of the amount that’s still free flowing into the water.
Now, as oil continues to disrupt the shorelines of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, Florida has been added to the list of affected states. The spill is creeping closer to the Gulf stream, which will threaten the entire East Coast and the ocean at large. Species of birds are being added to the endangered species list. And Congressional hearings continue.
So what does this all mean for us and for you?
Well, at the simplest levels, we can all say “goodbye” to cheap domestic seafood for the foreseeable future. As oil seeps into the soil of the Gulf Coast, and sinks deeper and deeper into the underwater currents, unsafe levels of heavy metal contaminate the food chain, the water, and the soil.
What’s worse is the lingering fear that the oil slick may reach the loop current and enter further into the Atlantic Ocean, threatening the entire Eastern Seaboard, and those entire ecosystems.
Furthermore, and probably most important, are the necessities that we now all face. We must demand actual regulation from our federal government and from the oil industry as a whole. We must insist that regulators follow through on the promises we were fed.
A natural disaster of this nature and of this magnitude has certainly happened before, and is bound to happen again, so we, the Millennial generation, ask for protection, we ask for accountability, and we ask for the assurance that you are doing all you can. Because this is our problem too.
