Rod Rose/ The Lebanon Reporter/ June 12, 2010.

While blame is being assigned for the catastrophic Gulf oil spill, here is a list of those who directly or indirectly contributed to the blowout, the response, and the looming eradication of uncounted life forms, lifestyles and retirement accounts:

President Obama.

Ronald Reagan.

Jimmy Carter.

The Bushes, pere et fils.

British Petroleum, Transocean, Halliburton, Dick Cheney, the Mineral Management Service, Rush Limbaugh, Arianna Huffington, the Sierra Club, the National Association of Manufacturers, climate change denialists, Al Gore, drivers of 12-mpg SUVs …

Actually, all of us.

In degrees great and small, we all share responsibility for the deaths of 11 men, a massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, and the economic (among other) consequences of denying for so many years that a petroleum-based economy was — and is — ultimately unsustainable.

Since the Oil Embargo of 1973, when OPEC, pushed by Arab nations, clamped off petroleum exports to the U.S., we have known that crude oil was a finite resource.

Yet we ignored the warnings, we ignored the forecasts, we blithely burned as much crude as we could pump into our fuel tanks — and now we are experiencing one consequence of that foolish denial of reality.

There’s been much demanding of heads, since the Deepwater Horizon sank and its wreckage destroyed the blow-out preventer that was supposed to contain oil from what should properly be identified as the Macondo 252 well.

Problem is, there are too many heads to collect.

There’s another leak from a Gulf rig, but it’s producing such a minuscule amount of oil, compared to Macondo 252, that it’s drawing no attention at all.

Solutions to sopping up the millions of gallons now or about to wash ashore all along the Gulf coast range from the sublime to the idiotic.

Among the sublime is a technology created by Jeffrey Youngblood, an assistant professor of materials engineering at Purdue University. Youngblood has created a membrane that, he said in a Purdue news release, will remove 98 percent of oil dispersed in water.

Whether production of that membrane, now being licensed through the Purdue Research Foundation’s Office of Technology Commercialization, can be deployed rapidly enough to save the Gulf’s ecology and economy is, presently, unknown.

What is known is that we cannot continue to depend on petroleum alone to power our economy. There could — and having seen a cataclysm that we were told was impossible, probably will — be further spills, perhaps as disastrous as the Macondo 252 catastrophe.

To prevent them, the federal government must immediately impose extraordinarily stringent restrictions on all off-shore oil exploration, while sponsoring a Manhattan Project-level effort to shift our economy from oil to renewable fuels.

Monday, the “American Clean Energy Now Tour” will visit Indianapolis, with a round-table discussion of U.S energy options beginning at 6 p.m. at the University Place Hotel & Conference Center, 850 W. Michigan St. The group includes veterans, labor and religious representatives; organizations participating include the Sierra Club, Pew Environment Group, National Wildlife Federation, Blue Green Alliance, Clean Energy Works, Hoosier Environmental Council and Operation Free.

It is one of the many discussions Americans must have about our energy — and environmental — future.

I’m certain that, in hundreds of university and private industry labs, engineers are looking for ways to make deep-water drilling safer, and to clean up the spill. There is, after all, money to be made from catastrophe.

There’s also money to be made from finding alternatives. And if there is only one lesson we have learned from the Gulf spill, it’s that we can’t afford another.

Rod Rose is the assistant managing editor of The Lebanon Reporter.

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