Nevada City Advocate - A free news & entertainment Newspaper Serving Nevada City & Greater Nevada County: Your view: Can we leave oil before it leaves us? Your view: Can we leave oil before it leaves us? ================================================================================ Alliance for a Post-Petroleum Local Economy on Jun 16 11:13am What does the Gulf of Mexico oil slick mean for Nevada County? Will gas prices go up? What about food prices or taxes? This oil leak is a sign of things to come in so many ways. Let's tackle just one: as energy markets become tighter, we humans will be obliged to overturn, rewrite, “temporarily set aside” or just plain ignore more and more protections, policies, and regulations in order to get more oil - our favorite drug. Environmental protections, economic protections, public health protections - all are bound to be overturned in one form or another if they stand in the way of our oil. For example: why were we drilling in ultra-deep-water in the first place? From tar sands to ultra-deep-water to oil shale and more, it's becoming obvious that we've already exited the era of cheap easy oil, and now we're on to the hard part. Today's new oil finds, averaged together, are much smaller and much less frequent than in the 1950s and 1960s. When we do make a find these days, the oil tends to be deeper, more remote, dirtier, and more expensive and energy-intensive to extract, to get to market, and to refine into usable products like gasoline or jet fuel. The Gulf oil slick is a sign of a scary trend that's been going on for decades - and we're only going to get deeper into it. It's a trend of increasing desperation to get our next fix. Is this a trend that we're comfortable with? We all use oil. A lot of it. None of us are “clean.” So, that begs the question - who should pay for the cleanup? Somehow we will have to find a compromise between the two extremes: BP, or, the taxpayers. On one hand, if BP blatantly broke the safety regulations that were in place on paper, isn't it a cut-and-dry easy answer that BP should pay for everything? On the other hand, if cheap abundant oil is the very foundation of everything that makes society work, then wouldn't it make sense for society (i.e. the taxpayers) to foot the bill? These are open questions that will probably not be answered in the foothills of northern California. Ultimately, the costs of the cleanup will of course be passed along to the consumer in one form or another. When another spill happens, those costs will be passed along to us also. The question remains: are we comfortable with this trend? If our answer is no, then are we willing to take the difficult steps to ease down from our addiction? The question is a bit more visible now, but remains the same as it has always been: Can we leave oil before it leaves us? Join APPLE-NC in its efforts to help Nevada County become more resilient to the energy challenges that lie ahead. Visit apple-nc.org or stop by our Center at 412 Commercial Street.