Oil Import Map

When are we going to get serious about cutting off (or at least reducing the size) of those imports? But remember - more offshore oil drilling is (you guessed it) Not the Answer.

See the more detailed, interactive map at http://move.rmi.org/features/oilmap.html

Sherman's Lagoon

Laird Hamilton for Clean Energy

Thanks to our friends at NRDC for this one.

What Were They Thinking?

There's scene in the latest James Bond flick, Quantum of Solace where a female character's nude body is found in a hotel room covered in oil, similar to the famous scene in Goldfinger where a female character's nude body is found covered on gold paint.

I thought of that when I saw this astounding headline:

Florida Tourism Group Endorses Offshore Oil Drilling

Talk about killing the goose that laid the golden egg! I wonder how many tourists they'll get with black, gooey beaches?

More

Big Oil hurt coast, so why doesn’t it pay for repairs?

Below are excerpts from this article about damage to the Louisiana coast from oil drilling activities.

Verdin, a commercial fisherman, says back then, some places here were so thick with trees you could barely see through them. When the oil industry cut canals into the area to get to its drilling sites, he says, things started changing. He says those canals brought the equivalent of poison into the marsh: salt water from the Gulf of Mexico.

"The water flows in and brings all that salt water," Verdin says.

[....]

"Before oil and gas, even after the main river levees, we were holding our own," Professor Oliver Houck says. "Once we started drilling, we started collapsing."

You can see the damage from the air. You see vast, open waterways that began as canals, sliced into the marsh.

"There are 10,000 miles of those canals through the marshes now," Houck says.