AFSCME 3357-HOF'S BLOG

Thinking about the BP Oil Spill

I've had a lot of thoughts about the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but until now, I haven't been close enough to the computer to tap them out.

Not to minimize the human and environmental tragedy of this, which is enormous, but look at the picture to the right. Blur your vision just a bit. Doesn't that look like a white baby seal with its guts blown out by a rocket launcher?

Here we are a little over three weeks into the oil spill. BP's stock is trading a bit over 48 dollars a share. Yeah, it was about 60 when the spill happened, but it's not even at its 52 week low. It's 1 year low point was last July at $46/share. What does it take to make them feel it.

Now everybody is throwing out ideas to cap the oil spill. The latest one is that BP is going to throw garbage at it. I started thinking about videos I'd seen of famous oil fire expert http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Adair. He'd use explosives to put out oil fires. Maybe they could use explosives to seal up the hole that the oil is coming out of. Then I read a little more and found out that on land they don't use the explosives to seal the hole, they use explosives to put out the fire by depriving it of oxygen. Then I figured if you used explosives and took a nice orderly hole and turned it into millions of fissures and cracks, maybe that wouldn't be too cool. Maybe we could throw garbage at it.