Last month, President Barack Obama proposed the biggest expansion of offshore drilling in 50 years that extended from the coast of Virginia, south Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico and to the waters off Alaska.
It would be safe to guess that Obama wanted to expand oil drills because of the current economic situation.
However, within a month of drilling, there was an oil leak that is oozing 5,000 barrels of oil per day, making this the worst oil spill in history.
An earlier spill in 1989 was by an Exxon Valdez tanker that ran aground in shallow water and leaked 11 million gallons of oil and killed roughly 2,800 sea otters and 250,000 seabirds.
It may have been in Obama’s best intentions to try to improve our current state but oil drills are not the way to go, especially when so close to shore.
The rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico is gushing oil that will be a threat to the Mississippi River Delta and miles along the Louisiana coastline.
Nathaniel Karp, head of the economic research deparment in the Banks of Houston, estimates $4.3 billion in economic losses in the four Gulf coast states and an additional $191 million in Alabama in a recent article in the Birmingham news.
Along with the damage the oil has caused to the already depleting economy, thousands of marine animals are at risk.
Birds can die if their feathers get covered in the muck and animals can get hypothermia, oil in their lungs or can be bound in the mess and become an easy target for predators.
Aside from the death of animals, marine plants are also at risk. Offshore drilling makes the entire U.S. a likely prospect to be weakened by oil rigs. The current leak in the Gulf of Mexico is a perfect example.
People were not immediately affected by this mistake, but it is already costing billions of dollars just to fix a leak that no one anticipated.
If oil drills were necessary to salvage the economy, then at least place them at such a distance that if they were to leak 5,000 gallons of oil daily, the U.S. coast would not be heavily impacted.
The idea of offshore drilling took a bad turn with the current situation.
Hopefully Obama learns from this mistake that using our ocean for quick funds is not the way to provide for our country.