No bonuses for BP execs!
I'm going to get my really pissed-off liberal on for a minute and make a few suggestions that I based on my understanding of the ongoing disaster in the gulf.
1) Top BP execs doubtlessly expect to get bonuses this year. Bullshit. I propose that they direct every damned penny that they (are, truth be told, failing to) earn into Gulf clean-up and that they receive zero compensation until their mess is cleaned up. They do not deserve to be paid for what is happening.
2) We ban any expansion of deep-sea drilling until the safety and spill containment technology catches up to the drilling technology. This means that before a permit to drill is issued, any company who wishes to drill offshore must be able to demonstrate that they can stop a leak w/in 24 hours at any place where they are drilling, even under the most catastrophic of failures, such as the one in the Gulf.
3) I propose a national boycott on BP products and subsidiaries until the mess in the Gulf is cleaned up. Simply fuel at a different gas station. Make it clear that BP's brand-name is no longer an asset.
HJ
Seed Newsvine
3 comments:
You know what would be fun: holding the fossil fuel industries to the same standard of public and environmental safety that the nuclear power industry is held. They'd be bankrupt in a week.
1) Better boycott Exxon, too -- they're just starting to explore for this sort of drilling up off the northern coast of Alaska, where stopping an exploded oil rig would be even more difficult than it is in the Gulf.
2) What would be even more fun: getting a panel of ecologists, engineers, and Superfund accountants to determine the long-term costs of ALL fuel-based (fossil or nuclear) and taxing the energy as it is generated so that we actually paid to clean up our mess as we go. Of course, the costs of both nuclear and fossil fuel would then be vastly higher than anything renewable, and they would go out of business as quickly as renewable alternatives came on line, but that would probably be a good thing -- the amount of fissile material on Earth is so small that it won't last for more than a few decades if we do as the pro-nuclear crowd demand and move to fission ASAP.
Anonymous needs to do more research. Disposal and decommissioning costs are already folded into the cost of fission power. Harry Reid retroactively fucked over electric ratepayers over the past three decades by closing Yucca Mtn.
Renewables have very serious disadvantages with regards to geography (transmission losses), availability, and energy density. Finally, the estimate of fissionable reserves is off by an order of magnitude - there's at least 100 years of fissile material in reserve even without breeding, reprocessing, or moving to a thorium-based fuel cycle.
Regardless, fission should be a stopgap technology until nuclear fusion is a viable alternative. Renewables are definitely part of the energy mix but the technology isn't there yet for renewables to provide baseload generation. I wish it were different but it isn't.
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