Rude, Crude, and In Your Food

I suppose I should comment on the disaster in the Gulf.  Just after it occurred, I posted a few places saying, in essence, yuck but I don't think it will get too bad.  Boy, was I wrong about the scale.  Unless the second "top hat" works, the Mississippi Canyon "incident" will end up being the 2nd biggest oil spill in history, ahead of Ixtoc I but less than the disaster precipitated by the first Gulf War.

But there isn't too much point in unleashing an extended rant.  Even a disaster on the scale of this spill won't change many people's minds about petroleum production and utilization.  Americans seems permanently locked into the conceptualization of oil as it stood in the mid-1980s.  The Exxon Valdez spill and two wars in the Persian Gulf didn't change anything fundamental.  The loss of the eastern Gulf of Mexico fisheries won't change anything.  The only thing that will change Americans' attitudes is an actual, long-term shortage.

It's coming.