SOLAR TODAY Blog

By Seth Masia
SOLAR TODAY deputy editor

All sorts of ominous news broke last week, but two items in particular underscored the pernicious role that oil companies play in the health of the planet.

In California, a couple of Texas-based oil companies funded a successful effort to put onto the November ballot a measure that would suspend AB32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. That law requires industrial sites to cut greenhouse gases 25% by 2020; the California Air Resources Board estimates that AB32 would benefit the state's economy to the tune of $27 billion. The oil company measure would suspend implementation of the act until unemployment falls below 5.5% for a year - something that may not happen for years (see Paul Krugman's column today in the The New York Times).

On Friday, Rolling Stone published a scary article by Tom Dickinson, BP's Next Disaster, outlining the company's drilling project in the Arctic Ocean. The plan: starting on an artificial island connected to the mainland by a causeway, drill several miles horizontally to tap into an offshore oil resource. It's high-tech stuff, never before attempted at this scale. The big danger is that a well blow-out underneath ocean ice wouldn't be accessible for containment or clean-up until the following summer. By that time it would spread to every shore of the Arctic Ocean and poison the habitat for all marine mammals, including whales, seals and walrus. And the cold waters of Arctic don't harbor the vigorous population of microorganisms that can feed on an oil slick. An Arctic blowout would pollute the ocean for decades.

The Gulf of Mexico blowout is a national disaster. It poisons mostly American waters (right: Cuba and Mexico have cause to worry, too). An Arctic blowout will be a disaster for Canada, Russia, Greenland and Scandinavia.