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Tip of the Day
When given the choice, take the stairs instead of the elevator to save energy and workout at the same time!
New deep sea drilling happening off Greenland coast
photo by Esthr (source: Flickr Creative Commons)
The long dark and gooey shadow of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is shining a gruesome light on offshore drilling, its toll on the environment and the true cost of oil.
Yet the Gulf spill is also getting all the attention, while other environmental issues or injustices suffer from neglect or overshadowing. Bhopal activists have juxtaposed the attention being given to the spill against their unfortunate plight, for instance. Ironically, new remote – and potentially catastrophic – frontiers are being explored for oil at this very moment, yet this is receiving little attention from the mainstream media.
Case in point: British oil exploration and extraction firm, Cairn Energy, is starting to drill off the coast of Greenland. A piece in the Ecologist points this out this fact, while Deepwater Horizon continues to hog the spotlight.
From an article in the Edmonton Journal:
Edinburgh-based Cairn Energy is one of 10 companies that have bought up leases in the region. The speed with which the company got its approvals has been cause for concern for both the Inuit in Canada and for conservationists.
In light of BP’s blowout in the Gulf, how prepared are Cairn if something similar should happen in the Arctic? Canada, who also granted permission to drill in the region, permits oil drilling in ‘marine protected’ areas, according to the WWF. So do Greenland and Norway. What makes these areas ‘protected’ if companies are allowed to do something which is already proven to be potentially hazardous to the environment?
If cleanup is this hard in the Gulf, imagine the difficulties in tackling a major spill spreading under Arctic ice.
Graham Land
Additional resources:
Scotsman – Greenland gives go-ahead for Cairn Energy to begin exploration
Tags: arctic, Cairn, Canada, coast, Deepwater Horizon, drilling, energy, greenland, Gulf, ice, oil, spill
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Thanks for that very poetic comment, Melvin.
There are foibles in all of us. There are even Physics Foibles. Entropy is one of them.
Inside a warm damp cave, completely sealed off from the outside world, will life survive?
Answer: No life forms could flourish indefinitely.
In an isolated system, entropy always increases. Life tries to push entropy in the opposite direction. When life is created, entropy decreases in the cave but nature demands a greater entropy increase offset.
The cave, being sealed, would mean that entropy would reach its max, thus energy necessary to sustain and generate new life would be unavailable.
Maybe we should learn a lesson from this. Available energy is mandatory. Wealth may equate to available energy. If you want to live in a nation that is prospering, make sure that its available energy supply is abundant. Don’t overuse it. Protect the environment.
The oil spill should not be used as a political football!!