On FOX News Sunday, Brit Hume, the reliable conservative voice, said that the massive oil spill in the Gulf validated environmentalists' claims that drilling for oil off shore is dangerous and a catastrophe was just waiting to happen.
Wallace: Does this accident at the Gulf change your mind about the wisdom of offshore drilling and especially more offshore drilling?
Hume: No it doesn't, but I think this. Think about what the environmentalists have always said about this -- is, is it's not a matter of if they'll be a disaster of some kind resulting of this kind of offshore drilling, it's only a matter of when. This verifies that argument and becomes a powerful factor in the debate over what to do next. I don't see any way around the political reality that this will set back the cause of offshore drilling in the United States and it will set back the cause of making us less dependent of oil brought in from overseas for which we pay out of our national treasure, tons of money of to foreign countries.
We're happy that Hume didn't try and denounce our complaints as if it was mere chance that this disaster happened. Offshore drilling projects will do nothing about our energy crisis as we move forward and it's always been short sighted thinking even when Obama sets his eyes on it as well.
Brit even makes Kristol look more foolish than he usually is for saying we should be drilling closer to land.
If the reports are accurate, the oil is going to keep flowing for a long time and even the solutions they propose are no guarantees.
But the biggest leak, at the end of the riser pipe, which Fryar said was the source of most of the spewing oil, cannot be shut off in this way. The company intends to address that leak by lowering a containment dome over it, and then pumping the oil to the surface. That effort is at least six days away, Fryar said. Another containment dome, for the third leak, on the riser near the wellhead, would follow two to four days after the first.
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"This is like doing open-heart surgery at 5,000 feet in the dark with robot-controlled submarines," Lamar McKay, chairman and president of BP America, said on ABC's "This Week.
And as if our economy isn't bad enough, many jobs could be lost because of the spill as well as unconscionable damage to the ... environment.
Over the next two days, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said, the spill appeared likely to move toward the Mississippi and Alabama coasts and engulf the Chandeleur Islands off Louisiana's southeast tip.
"The oil that is still leaking from the well could seriously damage the economy and the environment of our Gulf states, and it could extend for a long time," Obama said. "It could jeopardize the livelihoods of thousands of Americans who call this place home."
(h/t Heather@ VideoCafe)
