Systems Thinking for the Oil Spill

Sometimes I forget that people don't understand systems thinking for sustainability.  It seems like media, corporations, and the government (well some of them) are all trying to get the message of interconnected problems that our heroine like addiction to oil is causing (Each time I see the video of the deepwater horizon robots I think of the proverbial junkie looking for it's next fix). 

Alas, then I read something like this in the New York Times. 

""Mr. Obama had hoped to spend his summer creating jobs, passing financial reform, promoting his health care program, getting a Supreme Court justice confirmed and an arms control treaty with Russia ratified, pressing for international sanctions against Iran and jump-starting the troubled Middle East peace process. While not abandoning any of those goals, Mr. Obama now must find ways to continue pushing them while demonstrating to the nation that he is concentrating on a spill he has called “our highest priority.”

“This has hijacked his entire legislative agenda,” said Douglas Brinkley, a historian at Rice University who has written about Jimmy Carter, whose presidency was consumed by the Iran hostage crisis. “The White House felt they were on a roll. They were looking to be a new New Deal or new Great Society and they were just getting momentum going. Something this awful has sidetracked the agenda.”

How could job creation, health care reform, arms control, and mid-east peace connect to the biggest oil spill our country has ever seen? 

Well, I think with less need for oil, and any natural resource we have less need for violence.  Renewables obviously can create jobs.  Once we can create more energy here we can keep more of our dollars here, creating more tax dollars here, potentially providing more money for health care. 

That being said Douglas Brinkley is actually a great author who wrote "The Great Deluge", probably one of the most balanced researched recountings of Katrina and everything that conspired before the storm all the way to the early 1900's.

 http://www.amazon.com/Great-Deluge-Hurricane-Katrina-Mississippi/dp/0061124230

Comments

[Melrose]

This is a great article, and a great topic to explore. Thanks for sharing.