'Sooner or later, we will get to the far side of our troubled oil addiction, as we will run out of the stuff,' writes Rick Steiner. 'But the sooner we get there, the better chance we have at a sustainable future.'
in the Gulf of Mexico, are easily recognizable disasters that attract widespread public condemnation. Thirty-four years after the Alaska spill and 13 years after Deepwater Horizon, coastal ecosystems have still not fully recovered and toxic oil remains in shoreline sediments. Many oil-producing areas of the world, such as the Niger Delta, the Caspian Sea, and Siberia, have suffered decades of oil spills.
And wherever it is produced, there is a"socio-political toxicity" of oil, a significant distortion of economic, social, and political systems. Rather than the prosperity promised, oil discoveries around the world often become more curse than blessing, causing social dysfunction, assimilation of indigenous cultures, runaway inflation, a decline in traditional exports, excess consumption, abuse of political power, overextended government spending, and unsustainable growth.
While president George W. Bush stunned the world in his 2006 State of Union speech, stating that:"we have a serious problem, America is addicted to oil," his administration did nothing to help recover from the addiction.
As the clear, transcendent lesson of the Exxon Valdez oil spill was that we needed to reduce our use of oil, in that 1989 meeting I asked the VP—"Shouldn't the Exxon Valdez oil spill motivate us to adopt a progressive national energy policy that reduces our use of oil?" The VP's answer:"Well, I like fusion, you know, there is fission and there is fusion....and I like fusion.
Instead, these selfish oil zealots saw trillions of dollars of oil just lying in the ground and seabed waiting to be exploited. They wanted it, they got it, and they got piles of money in their pockets—all at the expense of the planet and humanity's future. This is one of the most extraordinary failures in human history.
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