Man Cannot Live on Oil, Alone / Time to end our dependency on oil before it ends us

On the 20th of April 2010, British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon erupted into a series of catastrophic explosions 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. The deadly explosions took the lives of 11 men, and that was only the beginning of what would become the biggest criminal offshore oil disaster in history. Several miles beneath the ocean floor, the gushing Macondo well, far from a “leak” as it was described by BP at the time, released an estimated 200 million gallons of oil. There are no words to describe the mass fish kill of whales, dolphins, sea turtles, pelicans—except to say that the Gulf of Mexico is now a permanent Dead Zone that smells and looks more like an intoxicating tar pit than an ocean.

This collection of Buzzflash-Truthout.org essays focuses on BP's oil catastrophe and is followed by editorials on major oil drilling and pipe disasters that have occurred since BP’s explosion. Most of these essays are editorials on Big Oil’s reckless plundering of our natural resources and how the oil industry has hijacked our democracy for profits. BP’s massive oil disaster is the centerpiece of this collection: What happened in the Gulf symbolizes everything that is wrong about our forced dependency on oil. Moreover, perpetual oil spills are toxic to all life at all levels of existence. Man-made CO2 global warming is primarily produced from oil and coal pollution; however the oil industry’s many dangerous forms of pollution is the leading contributing cause of rising temperatures, rapid ice melts, and extreme weather disasters.