Some of you may have seen my earlier post on de-demonizing the People of the oil industry. This New York Times article goes into more precise detail about the numbers of people/sizes of communities effected. For example, “the moratorium could last well into 2011, directly jeopardizing 50,000 jobs;” and that’s just deepwater work, expand that to include local oil service companies and the estimate rises to 330,000 people in Louisiana alone.
As a lifelong environmentalist, I have advocated just as much as the next person for cleaner energy. The fact of the matter is that shutting down offshore drilling will not un-spill the oil, nor will it get us over our fossil fuel dependence. We need to get to work cleaning up this mess and focusing on alternative energy sources. In the mean time, let the government (NOT the industry) regulate the heck out of drilling and let the People get back to work, to earning a paycheck to put food on their table.
And to whoever claims that the employees are just as guilty: unless you live petroleum free, so are you, so are we all.
