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It's great news the well has been sealed. It's a tragedy that it took so long. The Gulf and the 14 million Americans who live there will be dealing with the fallout for years.
By any measure, this has been a catastrophe — human, economic and environmental.
This debacle cost 11 men their lives. It put thousands more out of work. It poisoned some of the most productive and diverse ocean, coastal and wetlands habitat anywhere in the world. It killed wildlife — from pelicans to plankton, from sperm whales to shrimp. And it has done untold damage to future generations of marine and aquatic life.
Profound questions remain that will take years to answer.
Just this week, scientists discovered a blanket of oil more than two inches thick covering the ocean floor a mile deep and up to 80 miles from the spill site. What is that doing to fish and shellfish in deep ocean waters? We have no idea.
What has happened to the populations of crabs along the coast, oysters, shrimp and speckled trout in the bayous, wetlands, inlets and bays? We don't yet know.
Where is this oil in the food chain? Did we lose a generation of sea life here? Where is the oil we cannot see? What impact will it have on coral reefs?
These are important questions. The answers will go to the larger issue of whether we'll have a healthy Gulf in the months and years ahead. The Obama administration must produce a Natural Resource Damage Assessment — a federal, state and local inventory of harm done — that is authoritative, comprehensive and faithful to the facts in every way.
Moving forward
What we know already is this: The people of the Gulf are paying a grievous cost for this disaster. We've learned some hard lessons here. Now we have to move forward and build on what we've learned.
This is a national wake-up call, the Three-Mile-Island of the deepwater drilling industry. I believe it's taught us three things.
First, we can't allow this industry to police itself in the way it's done until now. We need stronger safeguards to protect precious waters and habitat from the dangers of offshore drilling. This is difficult, dangerous and inherently risky work. We need to reduce those dangers and manage those risks to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.
Second, the Gulf is a national treasure, and we need to start treating it that way. We need to restore the region, not only from the oil spill damage, but from the ravages of a century of poor management and pollution that is destroying the rich delta that nourishes the Gulf. The country needs a healthy Gulf. We need a healthy delta. And we need to put policies in place to restore that health.
And finally, we need, as a country, to break our addiction to oil and begin moving toward cleaner, safer more sustainable sources of power and fuel.
Oil is precious. It's an amazing substance. It's life, when you think about it, condensed, distilled and naturally processed over millions of years.
And yet, we squander a lot of it in this country. We use 800 million gallons of oil in this country — every single day. If the Empire State Building were our national gas tank, we'd have to refill it every eight hours. That is an extraordinary volume of oil. We can't keep using it the way we do.
A more secure nation
We can cut our oil consumption in half — not overnight, not over the next several years, but over the next four decades — while growing our economy and improving our standard of living. In fact, by creating the next generation of energy-efficient cars and trucks, improving our public transit options and designing communities that reflect the way we live, we can unleash American innovation, put millions of people back to work and lay the foundations for decades of success in the global market for clean energy solutions.
Cutting our reliance on oil will make our country more secure, as presidents dating back to Richard Nixon have said.
"We have a serious problem," President George W. Bush, an oilman and former Texas governor, told the nation in his 2006 State-of-the-Union Address. "America," he said, "is addicted to oil."
Unless and until we change that, the costs to our economy, our security and our Earth will increase. We will put more precious habitat at risk. Because our demand for this fuel will push the people and the companies that find and produce it to got to ever-greater lengths to feed our unbridled demand. That is the great and abiding lesson of the fall of the Deepwater Horizon. That is the cautionary tale we dare not ignore.
Peter Lehner, executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, is the author of the book In Deep Water: The Anatomy of a Disaster, the Fate of the Gulf, and How to End Our Oil Addiction, published this week by OR Books.
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