First, I will apologize for the hiatus I've taken from posting. I try to write something at least once a week, but I've been heavily involved in re-vamping my website in addition to my two jobs and numerical analysis class, so I'll play catch up tonight.
In the wake of the BP spill that is dominating at least 90% of CNN's programming every day, I feel like this disaster is worth another post from a slightly different approach. I'd like to play the blame game along with all the other pundits, politicians, and professionals out there, but I'm not going to tell you what you want to hear...
YOU are to blame. Not just you though, I am to blame, and so is every other person living in the modernized world we are a part of. Both directly and indirectly, and I doubt most people realize just how much they use petroleum-based products. Besides the obvious use of gas and oil in your car, most commercial plastics are actually made from petroleum, and if you haven't looked around lately, you probably use plastics more than any other single material in your home or place of work. So, we can sit here pointing fingers at the BP executives, but they were simply obeying the laws of the capitalist system that America provides them (maximize profit, even if it's risky), and we each have the right to change our government via elections, revolutions, etc., so once again, the blame circulates back to us.
I say all that, and it sounds like I'm spouting idealist-socialist-hippy-bull...poop, but that is not actually my point. My point is that nothing is free, and when you as a voter, consumer, and citizen choose to remain ignorant about an industry that you freely choose to support, you cannot later place blame on that industry just because you naively trusted them with not only your life, but the lives of your fellow man and your environment.
So rather than sit around debating which executive or politician you can point your fingers at, and lamenting the destruction of the environment over a cup of Starbuck's coffee, get up and find a way to improve the technology and energy sources that you and I rely on daily. The US Government is likely to crack down, and spend millions (or billions) re-writing and enforcing new regulations on the oil industry, when the long-term answer lies not in enforcement, but improvement. The latest economic crunch has led schools (including UT) to make cuts in all areas, including science, engineering, and math, but in the light of disasters like this, I think it's time we re-thought our priorities in regards to education. Without getting into that argument, I think that we as citizens here need to take the time to try to understand and educate ourselves on these modern conveniences that we take so much for granted, and realize that nothing comes for free.
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2 comments:
Thank You! I'm glad I'm not the only one who is looking at it from this point of view. So many people are saying "Shame on BP," SHAME ON US!
Starbucks may not have a good recycling program, but at least they now offer free WiFi. I'm sure that will increase revenue much more than the recycling program would have. Again, it's all about making money, not the consequences of our actions.
I don't think it's necessarily a "shame on us" type thing, so much as I think it should be a learning experience. It's impossible for any complex piece of engineering to NEVER fail, and while the necessary precautions were not taken to prevent this accident, we can take this and learn a lot about the limitations of our technology. If we learn from it, and make the world a safer, better place in the long-run, then it's a "hooray for us" moment, but time will tell.
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