A risk worth taking. Five-dollar gasoline will cause people to come to their senses, I suspect.
[Update a couple minutes later]
From an environmental perspective, off-shore oil drilling is far safer than Mother Nature. As the Wall Street Journal noted yesterday, oil that seeps naturally from the ocean floor puts 47 million gallons of crude into U.S. waters annually. Thus far, Deepwater Horizon has leaked about three million gallons. That sounds like a lot of oil, and it is. But the Exxon Valdez leaked 11 million gallons into Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay. Even those figures are dwarfed, according to the Economist, by the amount of oil spilled in man-made disasters elsewhere around the world. Saddam Hussein’s destruction of Kuwaiti oil facilities during the Gulf War dumped more than 500 million barrels of crude into the Arabian Gulf. The 1979 blowout of Mexico’s Ixtoc 1 well resulted in 3.3 million barrels being dumped into the Gulf of Mexico. In short, Deepwater Horizon is an environmental crisis, but not the apocalypse that alarmists claim.
Unfortunately, perspective, and logic, aren’t politicians’ strong suits.
Let no crisis go unwasted. Might as well turn this into the oil industry’s Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, at least as far as oil in the U.S. is concerned.
The added benefit to Venezuelans and other poor, disenfranchised countries from our increased oil imports is good for the world as a whole, right? And $5/gal gas just means that we’ll all be driving plug-in hybrids that much sooner, which is a noble goal as well.
If it’s perspective you want, the politburo will gladly hold your throat with its boot until your vision blurs enough to match their perspective. After all, it’s not them who lack perspective, it’s you, the commoner, that have the WRONG perspective.
There is a Russian proposal to nuke the well head. Well, not exactly at the well head but stood off a little to the side. The idea is to collapse the boring.
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ru&tl=en&u=http://www.kp.ru/daily/24482/640124/
Or, maybe start with a few GBU 57 bunker busters — the Massive Ordnance Penetrator version — and see what happens.
Calling Bruce Willis!
The better option (if possible) would be to plug the hole. This way the oil resource would be preserved.
Regarding amounts, it is not just the quantity that matters, but the distribution as well. Plus the place where it is being distributed. Alaska is not exactly known for having a large population, or sandy beaches. At best one can say it affected fishing I guess. The birds and seals are good photo ops, but the reality is animals are animals and people are people.
Trying to collapse the well shaft with a bunker buster nuke strikes me as likely to fracture rock strata, accelerating natural seepage.
This oil spill is minimal compared to spills that have been occurring regularly over the last thirty years:
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/013934.html
I really hope that they can control the spill as soon as possible. The thunder showers we’ve been having recently have not helped either.