Making Monday Worse: Sucking Up Oil Edition

Good news everyone! Remember that damaged drilling operation that is now constantly leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico? The one where no one knows how much oil is being leaked? Yeah, well, problem solved, sort of, according to British Petroleum. But not really, since the tube that is now attached to the leak is a “stopgap measure” at best. Since the leak started, it's become increasingly clear that there wasn't really a plan for this scenario, and all sorts of increasingly absurd-sounding solutions have been publicly mulled over. Can we put a dome over the leak? Fuck, guess not! Can we use disgusting logs of hair (pictured above) to soak up the oil? What about hay? Hey, let's ask the general public for ideas! (My favorite: “Is setting the spill on fire an option?”)

You don't have to be a hemp-wearing environmentalist to think that this whole “Extracting poisonous chemicals from the ground” thing is overrated. But unless you want to go back to the pre-combustion engine days when everyone was churning butter, killing whales to get lamp oil, and worrying about the massive amounts of horse feces clogging city streets, there really isn't a way to stop drilling for oil. A bunch of you just said, “Wind power!” but that's not an option yet, as right-wing asshole Robert Bryce points out. Denmark, which is one of the “greener” countries in the world, gets 15 percent or so of its electricity from wind, but it also engages in a ton of offshore drilling, so much so that it actually exports oil. (Left-wing asshole Matt Wasson notes that CO2 emissions have been reduced in Denmark, but doesn't mention Denmark's drilling and coal importing.) And if one of the most wind-power-reliant countries in the world is getting less than 20 percent of its energy from wind, well, shit.

Update: More good news everyone! The Supreme Court decided (barely) that we shouldn't send teenagers to prison for life if they haven't killed anyone. I for one did not know the US was doing that. Are we still pretending that prison is a place to rehabilitate criminals?