When you get the reports coming out of the Gulf of Mexico regarding the fact the BP has capped off the ruptured undersea oil well; It’s easy to get the impression that everything is just fine now. Nothing to see here, move along, move along. But that’s not the reality of what’s happening. Rev. Jennifer Kottler is the Director of Policy and Advocacy at Sojourners. A long-time advocate for justice, Jennifer has served in advocacy ministry for more than seven years through her work at Protestants for the Common Good (Chicago, IL), the Let Justice Roll Living Wage Campaign, and the Chicago Jobs Council. She writes: Attention Must Be Paid: The Gulf Oil Spill Is Not Over. Mother Jones is reporting that BP is firing 10,000 workers. New BP CEO Bob Dudley wasn’t kidding when he announced last week that it was time for the company to scale back oil-spill cleanup operations. In fact, by the time he’d said that, the responder force had been drawn down by about 25 percent.
Riki Ott, also a community activist, a former commercial salmon “fisherm’am,” and has a degree in marine toxicology with a specialty in oil pollution. She is the author of Sound Truth and Corporate Myth$: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill and Not One Drop: Promises, Betrayal, and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill (Chelsea Green, 2008). She is also the founder of three nonprofit organizations that deal with lingering harm from man-made environmental disaster. As health, economic, and environmental related problems begin to surface she talks and writes about the similarities in the Gulf to those of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska twenty years ago. If history has taught us anything this is far from over.
The BP oil rig explosion is not a wake up call, it is Americas’ stone age energy policy literally washed ashore. The fire department is at the door screaming get out now your house is on fire. Over 70% of the oil consumption in the United States is for automobile transportation. That is why the announcement from a UK company called GENeco is so interesting. Genoco has introduced the BIO-BUG. A Volkswagen that runs off do,do. That’s right do,do, human excrement, the stinky, stinky stuff you flush down the toliet everyday. Geneco is a waste treatment company the has transformed a Volkswagen Bug to run off human waste. A truly remarkable example of recycling. In Canada a 14 year old has converted his grandfather’s gas powered Volkswagen into an electric vehicle. Now the big players in the automobile business Tesla/Toyota, Nissan and Porsche and others are moving into the electric vehicle business and electric recharging stations are popping up around the country. In Santa Rosa California ZAP has been on the forefront of electric vehicle manufacturing for years. You can hear ZAP consultant Ginny Medeiros interview with QuestPoint N the Mix discussing the field. From solar powered homes to poo powered vehicles the options for alternative sources of energy are coming into focus. And think of it…converting that gas guzzling SUV into an electric vehicle you can recharge at your solar powered home can be what you do to get off drugs, ah I mean oil.