The underwater arterial bleeding in the Gulf of Mexico reminded our blogger Bob Ferris of the Saturday night live sketch on Julia child where she cuts herself and bleeds to death over the chicken she’s deboning.

But let’s walk back down the ladder and ask, why are we drilling for petroleum anyway, and is there a better, less wasteful, more “conservative’ use for it?

Two thirds of all petroleum is used for transportation. That means it is ‘consumed”- burned up, transformed into molecular garbage, like hydrocarbon emissions, waste CO2, and fine particles, to get us and our ‘stuff’ where we want to go. Seems like a very brief life and death for material that took nature millions of years to produce, and not a ‘conservative ‘practice in the true sense of the word.

What if we used it for something else?


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Early plastics were developed from cellulose as a synthetic replacement for ivory, and many plastics were subsequently developed to replace natural materials that were in short supply. You could say that plastics have conserved many a tree, walrus (think of all those ivory piano keys), rubber plant, and so forth.  Early plastics like Bakelite even ended up used in jewelry as a sophisticated novelty item- precious because rare and new.

And pure plastics are basically non toxic in their finished state- it’s usually additives (like phthalates) to make them pliable, colorful or more durable that leach out and cause problems. The monomers in used in manufacturing plastics or released if they are burned can also cause problems. But the material itself is durable, versatile, and relatively safe, certainly more so than some of the ‘natural’ products they replaced, like lead pipes in house plumbing, or asbestos in wire insulation or soundproofing.

So why are we burning up petroleum when we could be making durable safe plastic goods from it, taking advantage of its long lifespan by reusing and recycling it again and again, and reducing the need for oil drilling and easing the stress on other natural resources, like forests? Of course plastics can be made from plants as well. But shall we make our goods out of food stuffs. Are crop wastes better suited to mulch and sol amendments than plastics? Are non food crops the answer? These are all questions to wrestle with before we plunge headlong in a promising direction, but one that may have unintended consequences. I don’t want the price of tortillas to soar in

Tijuana so I can drink from a corn cup or have acorn based computer monitor cover.

Seems to me that using the safest plastics we have, time and again, and turning our transport needs to electric cars powered by wind, solar and other clean energy sources is the direction we should be heading. I’m looking at electric bikes, horse and buggy or the Volt or Nissan electric cars for my transportation. We need to pass on petroleum as fuel, use it as recyclable material, and stop the bleeding, before we expire.