The sudden release of five million barrels of oil, enormous quantities of methane and two million gallons of toxic dispersants into an already greatly stressed Gulf of Mexico will permanently alter the nature of the area.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
As horrific as this impact has been on my constituents, it is only a small part of the overwhelming destruction covering 90,000 square miles of the Gulf Coast.
Places change over time with or without oil spills, but humans are responsible for the Deepwater Horizon gusher - and humans, as well as the corals, fish and other creatures, are suffering the consequences.
Large areas of the Gulf have escaped being scraped by trawls, crushed by more than 40,000 miles of pipelines, or displaced by one of 50,000 oil and gas wells drilled since the middle of the 20th century. Some places have been deliberately protected.
The disaster in the Gulf was no accident. It was the result of years of oil money buying off politicians to lead to an unregulated and ill focused addiction to oil and drilling. The doomed fate of the local fisherman and the environment were foretold in the infamous chants of 'Drill, Baby, Drill.'
Oil is drowning our oceans and drowning our boreal forests.
Opening up Atlantic and Arctic waters to drilling would lock the next generation into burning oil and gas in a way that only makes climate change that much worse, fueling ever rising seas, widening deserts, withering drought, blistering heat, raging storms, wildfires, floods and other hallmarks of climate chaos.
The rapid increase in the production and transportation of crude oil requires additional vigilance for the continued safe movement of this commodity.
New discoveries and production of resources like shale oil and gas are dramatically altering our energy supply outlook and the entire global geopolitical landscape. And the pace of change - particularly in the past few years - continues to accelerate.
Instead of going to the ends of the Earth - and plumbing the depths of the oceans - to squeeze out every last drop of oil, we need, instead, to do everything we can to reduce the risks of offshore oil and gas production.
The gulf coast, we all know now, after Katrina, is responsible for 25 percent of U.S. production of natural gas. Following Katrina and Rita, almost 75 percent of the natural gas production in the gulf was shut down and not producing.