Kari Lippert’s Blog

Let’s face it, the only people who put a dollar value on that crude is BP. To them it might be worth more money than you and I can even imagine, but to me it doesn’t represent a loss of money. The true cost is in the destruction of a portion of our precious planet. Last Friday they were likening the size of the slick to be greater than the area of Maryland and Virginia. It’s Monday – and hurricane season starts tomorrow.

So, I have a question. If this oil is escaping under pressure (as it appears it is), why isn’t a large fitting put over the leak – like an inverted funnel? Let the pressure of the oil drive it up a reasonably large pipe so it can be put in a tanker. There’s only two things I can think of that would make this solution not work. The first is keeping the thing over the well. (I think there’s probably ways around this with a combination of weights and not reducing the size of the pipe very rapidly to reduce the upwards pressure on the dome. The second is probably why it isn’t even a thought: the oil would be contaminated with seawater. I’m not sure, but I suspect that would make it worthless for BP – or increase greatly their costs of processing it. It might not catch it all, but it the 40 days since the explosion, it could have caught some.

Where are the engineers? I’m sure there’s a few that work at BP. Where’s the engineering sense behind the solutions they’ve tried? The “straw in a cork” idea was just plain silly if you consider the physics of the situation. The idea to cap the well with concrete and garbage? Definitely a long shot. Drilling another well? Sure, and 60 more days of leakage if the new drilling isn’t interrupted by hurricane season – and then, only if it works as intended.

But what if this is a smoke and mirrors ploy to divert attention from the real problem? Global Guerillas has an interesting post. I found the video to be very interesting, having missed this particular discussion. The conjecture is that the leak they are trying to stop is minor compared to one several miles away. I don’t have the ability to go look and see – who is checking this out?

Who’s going to pay for the mess? Don’t kid yourself – we all are. The entire earth will pay for this one. It’s unlikely that the billions or trillions of dollars this ends up expending will change that. So what now? We need to solve this problem but we need to prevent it from happening again. EVER.

• I fully support the termination of the off-shore drilling. We can reduce our demand for all oil.
• I fully support measures to restrict consumption of all petroleum products in this country. We can reduce our usage of all petroleum products.
• I fully support the Facebook group NO BP GAS UNTIL THE LEAK IS STOPPED calling for a boycott of BP until the mess is cleaned up. We can apply pressure to force the resolution of this mess. 44581 people agree with me on this one.
• I fully support alternative energy sources and research to make them cheaper and more readily available. We can learn to live a different, more energy frugal way.

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The sun – it comes every day. The wind – on the ground, most days, and at not too great of a height, every day. The water – it is replenished by natural cycles, but what happens when the evaporation is hindered by the film of oil over the ocean?

I think we should all reduce our driving as much as we possibly can. This is an awesome impetus for a behavioral change. I bike to work. I walk to the stores. I take the bus, the train and the metro. In the last 61 days I have driven my car 10 miles (and that, ironically, was to fix an oil leak).

I have reduced my consumption of gasoline by at least 15 gallons a week. That’s over 100 gallons I didn’t use.

How about you?