USM Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, via The Associated PressSmall oil droplets are visible trapped inside the shell of an immature blue crab collected near Grand Isle by researchers from the University of Southern Mississippi and Tulane University.

There is oil in (some of) the Gulf’s seafood.  Crabs have oil in them. Last night ABC News ran a story about a fisherman in the Gulf who pulled up oiled shrimp.  This photo is from Nola.com‘s website yesterday, August 9th. If you want to believe President Obama and eat seafood that might have oil in it, that’s up to you, but it is clear that our government is worried more about the economy and jobs reports more than peoples’ health.  That means we all have to be better watchdogs for our own health.

There is also still a lot of oil in the Gulf, despite what the politicians insist is a magical situation with oil vanishing in 2-3 weeks. Here is a list of recent Gulf oil sightings.

Now that we can see that the government is not concerned with oil in the Gulf food chain, as pictured on the left, people need to get involved to end the use of oil, coal and other fossil fuels in favor of clean energy.  Our health depends on it. Crude oil has been linked to cancer. If that’s not enough reason to end our use of oil, I don’t know what would be. A temporary moratorium on deep-water oil drilling in the Gulf is not enough. It should be banned.

It’s sad but true:  The U.S. government is not particularly concerned about our health, despite the FDA and the EPA and various other departments.  In fact, for many years contaminated oil and waste has been dumped in peoples’ neighborhoods.  Usually, these are minority areas.  Can you believe it?  Only in America do officials dump coal ash waste and recent Gulf crude oil waste in poor or minority neighborhoods.  This is documented here and here.

The toll on the climate from oil spills and oil burning is enormous, but the health toll on people is also very high.

Below, two women in a recent video from the Center for American Progress discuss health issues and food safety issues below (after the break). You can decide for yourself if these people are being completely honest. (The Center for American Progress is, in some ways, an extension of the Obama administration). At the moment, I don’t believe that BP, the government, or the EPA have much credibility on the safety of the water in the Gulf. If we are to believe the EPA and Carol Browner, millions of barrels of oil just disappeared in a couple of weeks.  We are now seeing evidence to the contrary, and a lot of it, as fishermen and others document what they are witnessing in the Gulf water and marshes.   Also after the break, an article about the health dangers of oil and dispersants.  The two in the [...]

This year's dead zone is the largest ever recorded

“The annual summertime dead zone caused by low oxygen levels in water along the Gulf of Mexico shoreline this year is twice as big as last year’s, stretching 7,722 square miles across Louisiana’s coast well into Texan waters, scientists with the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium announced Monday.

. . . . The size of this year’s dead zone might actually be larger than mapped. LUMCON’s R/V Pelican research ship found a large area of hypoxia, or low-oxygen water, along the coast west of Galveston Bay and offshore in that area, but was unable to finish mapping there before returning to map an area east of the Atchafalaya River.

“This is the largest such area off the upper Texas coast that we have found since we began this work in 1985,” said Nancy Rabalais, executive director of LUMCON and chief scientist for the dead-zone cruise.”

Read more here.

Little by little, we are apparently killing the Gulf of Mexico.  What body of water will be next? Thanks to all the oil and the dispersants now in the Gulf, the dead zone will probably be even bigger next year.  I don’t know at what point people will stop poisoning their environment (and themselves) before they “get it” but obviously we aren’t quite at that point yet.

Along those same lines, that of our destroying our environment willingly, this op-ed piece was published today in the New Orleans newspaper, the Times-Picayune:

“While serving on a panel in Denver discussing media coverage of the Gulf oil spill, I was asked why newspapers hadn’t used the tragedy to start a national discourse about fossil fuel consumption and alternative energy.

I had thought about the idea, but in that moment, I was forced to admit something that no dedicated journalist ever wants to. . . . .

I’m simply overwhelmed by the basic facts: Americans consume the equivalent of 20 million barrels of oil a day. That means that in the 100 days of BP’s spill, we consumed 400 times as much oil as the earth managed to spew out of that broken well.”

The facts are simple: we will never break our addiction to oil as long as oil and coal and other fossil fuels remain less expensive to use than renewable energy. That is why we need a big carbon fee and that is why it’s so hard to get this done. There is no political will in Washington whatsoever to impose a big carbon fee on anyone right now, because 90% (or the majority) of our politicians are  cowards who think only of their next election.  That is political reality clashing hard with environmental reality, and environmental reality is long term so it always loses.

Corsa Futurista

10k race combining sport and culture

September 4, 2010
9:00pm
Circo Massimo, Rome

Organized by O.S.O. – Old Stars Ostia – GURU project & passion

Plus, you can buy a commemorative t-shirt here.

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