It's bad enough that Sarah Palin is saying stuff like this. It really pisses me off when this is a headline on the first page of the Los Angeles Times!
Katrina was not a man made disaster. The hurricane did not last for 5 weeks with no end in sight. There were very low tech solutions to rectifying the damage to the city and the delta area. The government's response department, FEMA, knew what it needed to do and simply did not have the expertise to actually implement the disaster relief plans that had worked many times before.
So.. is Obama somehow responsible for this disaster? Is Obama to be held responsible for not figuring out a way to deal with this environmental nightmare fast enough?
That would assume that he , and the current administration, know the solution to this problem and actually have the capability, the equipment & the engineering skills to somehow stop the leak!!!
Actually, we are more to blame than either Bush or Obama; we allowed the legislature to water down all the safety regulations already in place. It's more than safety inspectors accepting tickets to the Super Bowl Game. Even those inspectors who tried to get bp to correct safety violations were ignored. They apparently didn't even have the power to force bp to pay a fine, much less force bp to fix the problems!! /why? Because ultimately, we trust big business to protect our interests. Because ultimately, we believe that big business is equally concerned with both safety and profit margin. Because ultimately, every American citizen has voted to support federal, state and city who put short term job creation and getting elected ahead of long term safety issues. We have the science to go to the Moon because we allowed NASA to use science as their guide and followed their lead in crafting regulations, instead of allowing Martin Marietta or other aerospace companies to write their operational manual.
Let's hope that in the future, we will not allow private industry to put our economy and environment at risk. Maybe we need to continue drilling for oil..... but shouldn't we make sure that we hold the oil companies to the strictest standard before allowing the wells to go online!
Our Congress does not have a stellar record of responding to environmental disasters with effective legislation ; after the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, the Congress approved regulations which gave the oil industry until the year 2015 to replace their single hulled tankers with double hulled tankers. Not even one (except the Valdez of course) single hulled tanker was pulled from the fleet.
What do you think?
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If the energy companies aren't doing more to solve this problem because they're not motivated by the destruction of the environment...perhaps they could be motivated by the loss of profit producing product blasting out of the pipe in copious quantities.
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