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Our response to last year's BP crisis equivalent to "rearranging chairs on the deck of the Titanic"

Tyson Slocum Public Citizen BP Citizens Arrest
Public Citizen's energy program director Tyson Slocum speaks at protest in front of BP's Washington, D.C. lobbying headquarters

Tyson Slocum, Public Citizen’s energy program director has a lot to say about BP one year after the disaster. We have a long history of fighting dirty energy here at Public Citizen so when the spill happened, we unfortunately were not surprised. To us, the spill provided a tragic back drop for us to highlight all that is so wrong with the way we handle safety regulations and energy policy in America.

On the front page of Alternet today, a blog by Tyson Slocum tells of the sad reality: One year later and it’s almost as if the president and Congress have forgotten the Deepwater Horizon Disaster even happened.

Slocum writes,

Sure, President Barack Obama reshuffled the Department of Interior’s offshore drilling regulators and issued a deepwater drilling moratorium while making small improvements to safety and environmental reviews in response to the disaster. But that’s like rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic.  Congress still hasn’t passed a package of basic drilling-related measures that would substantially improve worker and environmental safety. And the oil industry still hasn’t come up with any fail-safe device that works well in deep water.

The questions Slocum poses are critical ones we need to ask ourselves, our family and friends, our representatives and our president as we approach the anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion tomorrow:

If the 4 million barrels of oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico didn’t prompt them to act, would 10 million?

If the 87 days of around-the-clock experts failing to plug the oil didn’t trigger change, would 150 days?

If 11 workers killed on the oil rig didn’t spark them to enact reforms, would the deaths of a whole fleet of workers?

Read the full blog post here and be sure to share with friends.

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