I hate to sound as if I don’t care if people lose jobs in the oil/fossil fuel industry, but LOTS of people in the U.S. have lost their livelihoods in all sorts of industries due to huge sea-changes in our economy. Some industries have gone obsolete and others were step-children of the ponzi-scheme, fake economy of 21st Century America. I don’t hear anyone whining for them. Let me give you a concrete example:

In the real estate and construction industries, millions have lost jobs. Many of these people were contract workers who didn’t have a company paying their benefits or insurance. Nor were they eligible for “unemployment.” Where is all the empathy for them?

I get a little tired of hearing the “we’re losing our way of life” complaint. Many professions and jobs come and go. It’s part of life and part of that system we’re so fond of “capitalism.”

I’ve seen the oilsands of Canada, and it’s an ecological nightmare as the ground is scraped up and processed through a monster processing plant. What’s left behind is a growing pit of desolation and the amount of water needed to process it is turned to poison. Even with “all” the shale oil available, to get it you must destroy the earth above and below. The pulverized dirt runs into streams and eventually the rivers and oceans.

No matter how you look at it oil is a dirty source of power as is coal.

Use Google Earth, if they allow the images to be shown, and you will see a gash in the Earth big enough to swallow most cities. And it’s not “popular” belief that oil is running out. It’s a scientific fact. Oil is a finite commodity.

Short term: unemployment. Long term: destruction of the planet by oil and wars fought for oil. Which is more endurable?

Contrary to popular belief, the world is not running out of oil——it’s running out of cheap oil!  When the price of a barrel exceeds $90, then shale oil becomes profitable and there’s shit-loads of shale in Canada and elsewhere.

The oil is running out folks. The wells here in Alaska are producing about a third of their output 30yrs ago. The oil Palin and here ilk rally for in ANWR would only provide about a months worth of oil at our rate of consumption.

When the last drop is sucked out there will be chaos. Why are we waiting? I do feel for the folks losing their jobs, but as illustrated by the Congressional hearings, all of the oil companies are operating without a spill response plan. What about the hundreds, no, millions of people affected by the Gulf gusher? The cry of jobs, jobs, jobs is why we are still stuck using 18th Century power. It was jobs,jobs, jobs while we clearcut old growth forests leaving sediment and erosion fouling our rivers. It’s jobs,jobs, jobs as an open pit mining company lobbies to operate in the vicinity of our Countries LAST major salmon rivers near Bristol Bay AK.

What good is a job if you and your family is sickened by your job? What good is a job if you are poisoned by your food? What good is a job when the air you breath is a chemical soup?

It’s time for clean renewable energy now, and if the President is serious about moving foward those oilfield workers and many other Americans will have jobs rebuilding our infrastructure and manufacturing equipment for clean energy outputs.

To many of the people reading an article like this, it will seem so surreal that it could well be taking place in another country.
To many of the people reading this article from the comfort of their homes, the air conditioner running to make them comfortable after their long day toiling in their little office cubicle in a climate controlled building, it just seems so surreal.
To many of the people reading this article, they never worked in a small town in America where the two good paying jobs are ones that would not even pay their utility bill for a month.
That computer you are gazing upon is almost totally made from oil products, as is the chair you are sitting in, as is many other items. You can’t make plastic without the oil they are drilling, much less power that useless SUV you have parked.

Anyone feeling smug about people losing their jobs that provide for their families is a sad picture of America of today. You should not laugh too much as that may be you after a few more downsizings or perhaps your company just up and moves to less expensive workers. Sure is not easy finding a job that pays anything in today’s market and getting harder every day.

Why can’t these Idle workers be cleaning ducks or something.

Someone give the idle a wet-vac.

the way I understand it the ban only effects new projects. projects in the “drilling”
phase.  all of the hundreds of other deep water projects currently operating
haven’t missed a lick.

Soooooo ... if we are going to get off of dependence on oil, why not use this terrible disaster as a stepping stone into a less disastrous energy source?
Why not use it as a reason to stimulate building wind-power and sun power—both harmless and more humane.  Both areas are waiting for investment and development, for creation of new jobs, for a New Deal in energy production.  Of resourses were poured into these harmless methods, who knows what great improvements and innocations might occur?

Mainly, the “vested interest” problem holds us back == as in war, as in transportation, as in many other economic sectors. Our leadership needs to learn to look not for “business as usual” but for business as possible. business as innovative, business as humane, business as practical in the long run.