After BP’s 2010 catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill, this is the nightmare we knew was coming: 90,000 gallons of crude from an underwater oil well owned by Shell are flooding the Gulf of Mexico and no one knows what happened.
The slick on the Gulf is 13 miles wide and the main well feeding the leak is a mere 165 miles south of New Orleans. It’s a grim irony that the leak took place just as thousands of climate activists across the world were preparing to launch the Break Free from Fossil Fuel mobilizations taking place all this week.
Even a spill of this magnitude is a fraction of what is waiting for us if we don’t get realistic about offshore drilling. In this election year, we need real commitment from our presidential candidates to stop this sadistic practice: Shell’s unexplained spill is yet more proof that a cataclysmic disaster is literally right around the corner unless we act right now.
Join us and demand answers from Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump: will you support a moratorium on offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico?
Big Oil simply doesn’t understand that no leak is acceptable. Not 100,000 gallons, not 10. The PR Royal Dutch Shell has been running has been breathless: the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement has already given Shell permission to resume operations. As always, our climate, our ecosystem and our future comes second to the profits of a massive, foreign multi-national corporation committed to destroying our planet -- just like in 2010 when BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster left 11 workers dead and 4.9 million barrels of crude in our oceans.
With so much at stake this November, the candidates for president have no choice but to listen to the people voting for them -- corporations have to take a back seat for a change. This is a massive opportunity to put a full moratorium against offshore drilling on the table -- and keep it there.
Remember: President Obama might have signed the paper, but it was us -- hundreds of thousands of us -- who stopped the Keystone XL pipeline. We can end offshore drilling too.
Make our next president tell us where they stand: do they want another Deepwater Horizon nightmare or not?
More information
Vice. 13 May 2016.
The Guardian. 16 May 2016.