Drill Baby Drill

All the easy places on Earth to find oil have been explored. The most fragile environments have been left for last. And the oil companies intend to go after them – to satisfy our driving habits. To fill our gas tanks. And, of course, for big oil profits.

The consequences to the environment can most easily be seen in the Arctic, where the last major, undiscovered oil fields remain, and where global warming is having observable, measureable impacts. Sea ice is melting, permafrost is melting, even Greenland is melting.

Wildlife in the Arctic are demonstrating a fatal reaction to global warming, and not just the charismatic polar bears. In Russia’s far east, for example, the walrus are succumbing in large numbers.

As if global warming is not enough, the United States government has leased most of the areas where polar bear dens for oil exploration. It predicts that oil operations have a 40 percent chance of causing a major oil or chemical spill, yet it proceeds because it has a mandate to produce fuel for our engines.

And what will the government do plan if there is a big spill? There is no way to clean up an spill in the frigid, forbidding Arctic. In fact, there is only one way to deal with such a spill.

The plan is to burn it. Drill baby, drill.