The Gulf Coast Oil Spill

Well it has been a while since my last post on this blog and as I treat this blog as a journal of world events and the happenings of events within Canada, it is more than due for a new post. To start things off B.P. (British Petroleum) has had a off shore drilling platform go catastrophic in the southern United States Gulf Coast. The drilling platform had a blow back and the blow back prevention valve failed to divert the pressure to a burn off pipe, thus sending all that oil and gas to the platform where it exploded and killed I believe eight workers. After a couple of days the coast guard got the fire out and had rescued anyone they possibly could. They later realized that since the fire was out that all the oil and gas that was burning was now spewing into the ocean at an enormous rate, you could see this oil slick from space it was so big. It has been over five weeks of this huge environmental disaster and has still not been resolved, the oil has been washing up on shore devastating the marshlands and bird sanctuaries and breading shores of the sea turtles. President Obama has put together a presidential committee to find out what happened and he did suspend all new off shore drilling until we find out more about this tragedy, he has also lifted the current maximum liability that a company could be responsible for in this type of disaster from seventy million to what ever it takes to clean it up, and he got the company to publicly agree to pay what ever it takes to fix the problem and clean it up. Unfortunately the religious right wing Republican/Conservatives are making political hay out of this by saying that the president hasn't done enough and that he is too cosy with the oil companies. What's weird about this political hay is that during the last election the Republicans/Conservatives were chanting "DRILL BABY DRILL" as a reason to vote for them. Most people know that it was the Bush's Republicans that looked after the oil companies, gave them ultimate power without any regulations to drill where ever and when ever they wanted, heck the Bushes even started a war for oil companies. The whole time this has been going on down in the states our own Conservative government has come out saying that the oil companies have said this could never happen here and just two weeks ago started drilling the deepest oil well ever drilled right off the coast of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. Everyone knows the oil companies don't have the required technologies but they drill anyways and our government does nothing to secure the safety of our shores. There are safer ways to drill for oil and there is a lot of oil on land right here in Canada, however the oil companies would have to invest more money to clean up the on land oil extractions such as the "TAR SANDS". Rather than making the Tar Sands a cleaner viable oil source, the oil companies take a less expensive "DEEP WATER" drilling approach. This is why I have any interest in politics we need a government who works for the people and not the big oil companies and big businesses throughout the world. We need a government who will protect our planet not destroy it and who will build more rail transit and hydro electric power, and solar and wind power. I thought the Liberals with Stephen Dion would be able to do that, however I now see that the Republicans/Conservatives have more power and money to influence our media and our perception of what is actually being done. All I can hope is that one day people will wake up and see how big business mixed with greedy politicians are rapping and pillaging planet all the while we as citizens continue to vote them into power. Anyways I hope that B.P. will finally get control of this spill and prevent this from ever happening again.