Elect Chris Booth to U.S. Senate

The Deepwater Horizon well has now been capped, after about 130,000 barrels of oil were released into the gulf. To me it makes no sense to have the goal of killing the well by using the relief wells to plug it, because we need that oil - you drill a well, you find oil, now capture it and make it available. However, it also makes no sense to remove the cap for three days while you are transitioning to capturing the oil. The cap should have been designed with sufficient valves to allow connection of pipes to capture the oil. If not, then leave the cap on, plug the well, and leave the oil there until it can be safely captured without any significant release to the environment. If it takes a century or two to develop environmentally save deepwater drilling that is insignificant in comparison to the one or two billion years that we can expect to be here on the planet. What we need oil for, though, is petrochemicals, not fuel. We need to transition from coal, oil, nuclear and natural gas to wind and solar for energy as quickly as possible.

There is an 8 cent per barrel tax on oil production to pay for spills, but this should be increased to $1 or $10/barrel, worldwide, and made available to clean up all of the oil spills that have occurred, and will continue to occur. There are other areas of the world that have been affected far worse than Prudoe Bay or Louisiana.