"Once upon a time ....."

As usual the techno-fantasists are trotting out the old horses – mea and culpa – while promising that they have learned some valuable lessons and that next time, there won’t be a next time. In an article in the NYT, William Broad and the ‘ scientific experts’ he cites, point out that scientific and technological progress always comes at a cost and that failures inevitably bring improvements in the way things are done. And the resulting re-tinkering of things yields a progressively wonderful world of achievement that inevitably benefits all mankind. Uh-huh.

Well guys, it is one thing to improve the stability of bridges and the aerodynamic stability of aircraft; those can be easy fixes. Piercing into the planet’s skin and risking the pollution and degradation of entire ecosystems over thousands of square miles is another thing altogether. An air plane or two falling out of the sky, unless it is carrying an armed nuclear weapon that detonates on impact, isn’t capable of wreaking the sort of havoc that has resulted from the ruptured and exploded Deep Horizon oil well. We are talking about risks of an entirely different category and scale. Even the inclusion in the article of the 1982 incident where an oil rig capsized is fundamentally irrelevant in scope, scale and category to what has happened in the Gulf. Engineering hubris and short-sightedness continues unabated and unrepentant.

Already today the ‘tragedy in the Gulf’ is no longer front page ‘news’ in the NYT. The cap is holding, the oil is invisible, and most of us can just go back to BAU.

Of course it is isn’t really that simple, and the issues haven’t actually been forgotten nor have they disappeared, they've just been 'archived'. Sadly there has been no fundamental discussion of the way we live and work in the US. There still is no real culture-wide questioning of our addiction to oil. Despite all that has happened in the last few weeks, like all junkies, we are still, as a society, in deep denial; We are in no way ready, nor capable of giving up our petroleum blow. Our need for a fix will cost us our home. “And so it goes”, to quote the prophet KV.