$1 Million a Day

I heard that it costs BP (and presumably other companies  as well) $1 million a day to run these oil rigs.  There was another huge number as well regarding the costs of deep water drilling, but I can't remember what it was.  But this just kind of staggered me.  I mean, think how much money it costs with shipping, refining, transportation, et cetera to actually produce energy from these fossil fuels.  It prompted me to post this comment in the NY Times Dot Earth Blog:

I agree that in terms of seriousness, the BP spill is *relatively* small potatoes compared to climate change, but what it does in my mind is provide an additional non-disputable reason to get off fossil fuels. Not only do they pollute the air when burned, they are dirty and risky to extract. Not to mention the wars we have fought for oil, or the funding we provide to regimes that hate us when we buy their oil. Mountaintop removal mining, other mine disasters, etc. Human, monetary, military, environmental costs are just staggering. And they say solar is too "expensive!" If we were setting up fossil fuel extraction from scratch right now, people would be laughing at the absurdity of it.

The only reason fossil fuels are cheap is because the infrastructure is already in place, and much of it has been subsidized either directly by the government through technology development funding, or indirectly through wars to maintain our access to oil.  I mean, think about it: if we were comparing technologies right now, trying to decide which one to go with, the answer would be pretty obvious.  Do we want to go with the dirty, expensive, polluting, environment-degrading, limited quantity fuel that we will have to go to war to protect, or do we want to invest in the clean, unlimited, environment-friendly, non-polluting fuel (the sun) that no one can take away from us?










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