Drill Baby Drill
Drill Baby Drill
You’re Going To Need Those Holes For Your Corpses
[Tampa, FL 10/06/08] As seemingly mindless throngs echo the “drill baby drill” chant like so many corporate robots, I pour over reports of all the oil hurricane Ike poured into the nearby Gulf of Mexico. Ike caused at least a half million gallons of crude to pour into the Gulf (the worst Gulf spill since Katrina).
Living in Tampa, FL, I would be directly affected by the lifting of moratoriums to drill for oil off our coasts. I’m not crying “not in my backyard”, I’m crying that we move into the technologies of tomorrow rather than this incessant backwards thinking desire to continue to power the dirty old internal combustion engine.
The moment I heard the “drill baby drill” chant I fired up my laptop and wrote it as a line of dialogue delivered by my villian in part two of my “Apocalypse Near” book trilogy. Here’s the dialogue as it appears in the book between the inter-dimensional villian and the protagonist. My protagonist is on a mission to enlighten the humans to their oncoming doom and how they might avoid it:
”Yea humans, drill baby drill! Drill; you’re going to need those holes for all your corpses. Finish killing yourselves off; fill the earth with your dead so that we can clear it of your ignorant species without any effort on our part. Drill baby drill; suck your black death from the earth; drain it, burn it and fill the earth with your stupid corpses. You are not smart enough to deserve that planet; the proof is in your unintended mass suicide. Thank you for taking yourselves out of our way.”
That’s part of a fiction I wrote to try to wake more people up to that fact that we are in fact bringing ourselves to the brink of our own destruction with every drop of crude we burn. You can listen to multi-national business propaganda or you can look at the science. One is based in the math of getting you to reach for your wallet without thinking, the other is based in math, period. Math doesn’t lie, people lie for money.
I can extrapolate on the poetic justice of monster storms like Katrina being a possible result of global warming then coming to spill the fuel that gave them birth into the heated waters, but that’s just poetic license on my part. However, the evidence for the continued breakdown of natural order in the biosphere is becoming increasingly visible. Even the most cursory web search on recent natural disasters, environmental catastrophes, unprecedented violent weather patterns, inter-species extinction rates, etc, etc, etc indicate that things are getting more out of balance as the length of time and rate at which we burn fossil fuels goes up. If our answer is to “drill baby drill” then it would just make sense to keep those holes open to fill with the dead born of our over-indulgence in the putrid fruit of the dirty old industrial age. Cleaner technologies exist and only need to be made more efficient. We’ve only lacked leaders willing to invest in the R&D to perfect and deploy these technologies. Once America is smart enough to do this we will then again lead the world economically and politically. Or we can chant “drill baby drill” and stick “I support our troops” bumper stickers on the back of GM S.U.v.’s as we wave the flag and march into our mass grave.
Big oil, small minds.
Tags: Big Oil, Drill Baby Drill, Energy Policy, fossil fuel economy, Hurricane Ike