Once upon a time we had a beautiful Gulf of Mexico, the ninth biggest body of water, known worldwide as one of the greatest natural resources the US could possibly have. It provided jobs, numerous types of lifestyles, and beautiful beaches for all of us to enjoy. The marine life was prospering, and it seemed like it couldn’t get any better. But then, oil-stricken greed sparked in America’s eyes yet again, and we discovered oil deep below the ocean. Our desire for energy took hold of America yet again, and we decided to start drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. This would have been fine if proper procedure was taken to avoid oil pollution. Many companies have had spills, but none as major as BPs, as I’ll explain below.
BP: The Gas Guzzler
BP, also known as British Petroleum or Beyond Petroleum, is basically a major oil drilling industry, which supplies fuel to many gas station chains across the world and mainly in the US. They started in the early 1920s’, selling fuel in Britain. Around the time they formed, the entire world started developing a drastic dependency on oil for transportation and energy of all forms. They built their name on quality fuels for the entire world at reasonable prices, and have grown to be one of the biggest oil drilling companies of today. They provide for our ever growing need for heat, light and mobility throughout the entire world. On top of all that, they promised to harvest oil while remaining environmentally safe. But we now know they weren’t true to their word.
The Operation & Failure
BP started an oil well on the Gulf of Mexico, after a long ban. The reasons for not allowing drilling in the first place is, our government and many big companies were already aware of this happening as a possibility, and they pretended to be ignorant on the subject anyways and repeal the offshore drilling ban. The fact of the matter is, with oil wells there will always be oil spills. So the US government allowed offshore drilling yet again in certain areas of the US out of their own ambition to keep the country healthy while pretending to be naive as possible to what could happen as a result of this. Most people could have told you this would have happened eventually, it's only a matter of time. The first step is to start offshore oil drilling, and then all you need is bad regulation. BP then created an oil well off the Gulf of Mexico and started harvesting oil from a big pocket reserve in the ocean. Little did they know due to bad regulations and operation in general, a major failure a cured taking 11 lives and making the oil well explode. The fail-safe mechanism to keep the oil in the tube so it wouldn't leak didn't activate, thus resulting in an enormous oil spill in our oceans that you can see in the following picture below! We can try to blame BP for this, but it was really a result of our own negligence for allowing offshore drilling in the first place, and then not even regulating it in a way to where this could have all been prevented. Little did the world know, BP has also turned down many fail-safe mechanisms that could have prevented this, showing obvious disregard on BPs' end on whatever happens. It all leads to money and stability in the long run? We spent millions stopping this oil spill, and now we are paying for it with a lot of our taxes on top of all of this. Also, we now have to address the fact that the Gulf might be ruined for years to come due to such a large spill, marine life may not return for some time. Why did this happen? The answer is greed to keep our society stable, in short keeping things running (planes, cars, etc.), the solution to stopping this? An Alternative energy source that needn't be harvested from the bowels of the Earth.
Contemplation
First of all, we need to approach the fact that before this disaster, we didn’t have strong regulations at all for oil drilling. America really just wanted the oil, without a care of what the costs were, hence our many previous wars and political fumbles in the past related to oil. Due to our carelessness and strong addiction, we gave oil drilling industries the room they needed to work fast, to get America as much oil as possible. This being the downfall, we should have instilled stronger regulations from the start, since America has dealt with oil spills on small scales before, and should have known the severity of how bad things could be if something were to go wrong, which it did and now we are paying for it. All of this was inevitable, as Americas addiction to gas just doesn’t want to die. The United States consumes more gasoline than South America, Europe, Africa and Asia combined, yet we make up only roughly five percent of the entire world. Clearly there’s an issue there that we should have addressed a long time ago.
Solutions
Well, we could approach an alternative energy source, such as Brazil using their sugar canes as a fuel source for running cars. The US clearly needs to approach a new source of energy and fast, as the world will eventually run dry of oil at some point, if not we’ll get neglected by other countries eventually and get cut off, as has happened in many wars throughout history. We rely on oil more than any other country in the world, and that is really bad that we rely on something that we have little of. The US is not very rich in oil at all, and the results of drilling where there is a vast source of oil could be extremely bad, like another BP disaster for example. So, we’ll most likely continue this cycle of oil addiction until we find some new source of fuel, but until then, expect nothing less but disaster and dependence for the US.
