Oil? Bull.

To quote loud-mouthed, furniture-throwing investments guru Jim Cramer, “There’s always a bull market somewhere.”

In other words, the glass is always half full; it just requires creative thinking at times to see where opportunity lies.

It’s easy to be disheartened watching media coverage of continued devastation and waste in the U.S. Gulf Coast. However, I got to thinking: Perhaps this oil spill is ultimately going to be like World War II in a (hopefully less destructive) way.

It is widely accepted that manufacturing increases for the war effort, plus President FDR’s social programming, helped lift the U.S. out of the Great Depression. Maybe war on an oil-soaked Gulf will help the U.S. recover from the media-dubbed Great Recession.

Imagine thousands of unemployed people put to work cleaning beaches and giving oily wildlife a Dawn (dish soap) bath. It could be a government and BP sponsored program. BP’s gargantuan financial penalties could fund the program. Funding would be administered by the government while know-how would be directed by BP.

Green economics, reducing fossil fuel usage, and lowering carbon footprints are in vogue right now. Oil, the catalyst that has driven the robust economy of the past may be just the catalyst that drives us into new transportation technology: Imagine the engineers and scientists put to work discovering new energy. It may be cleaner, safer nuclear, or a way to harness wind energy without tall, ugly turbines that don’t make much power.

Aircraft, spacecraft, and automobile—these mass-transit industries are what have made America great. To delete even one entity would be seriously compromise progress in this nation and it’s standing as a world leader. But I envision a day where these things won’t run on oil. Maybe what I envision is a utopian society. But like I said before, I hope oil is the very thing that drives America into recovery, progress, and a less oily future.

Pondering on Oil

Stop and think about oil…it’s an amazing thing really. While we may differ on the origins of our planet and how life came to be, oil is super-concentrated energy—the result of organic materials under great duress. The pressure from above forced this material into the depths of the earth. It never ceases to amaze me that technology allows oil drillers to puncture the earth’s crust at a depth of nearly one mile below the ocean’s surface, and then extract this “black gold”.

Unfortunately at Deepwater Horizon, the gash in the earth’s crust has left her bleeding, resulting in another oil spill for the history books. I am confident the sharpest minds at BP are feverishly working to find a solution to not only stop the bleeding, but to repair damaged maritime ecosystems.

In 1979 a Mexican oil well blew up at the Ixtoc I rig, discharging 140 million gallons of crude into the Gulf. It appears the clean up effort—plus nature’s ability to recover over time—has made the Ixtoc incident something that many people have never heard of. With over 30 years of technology under out belts since the late 70s, I remain confident in BP engineers’ ability to seal the well and clean up the Gulf. The Kevin Costner solution may be a start.

BLAME GAME

Perhaps what amazes me more about this is the perceived need to blame someone. Plenty are blaming BP. There are reports of BP being in the proverbial sack with government officials, and whistle-blower accounts of poor maintenance on the rig now sunk in deep waters.

But what amazes me most is President Obama stepping up and admitting he’s to blame. In interest of full disclosure, President O wasn’t my first choice in 2008, and he didn’t get my vote. But he doesn’t seem to me like a choice scapegoat. Do you think BP isn’t doing all it can to fix this problem? The past is the past, and if government regulators let BP’s lax oversight slide, and it led to this catastrophe, then that’ll eventually have to be ironed out. Litigation attorneys will be salivating at this one for years, no doubt.

But is the Obama Administration really in a position of expertise to deal with this?  Especially now that Elizabeth Birnbaum, former head of Minerals Management Services, resigning over the spill? Is she another scapegoat?

I’d just like to know…what can Obama’s administration be doing better? I truly believe BP is doing all it can to bring this under control. What company wants to have a crisis on its hands? This will one day make another case study for budding public relations practitioners, just as Exxon Valdez was a commonly referenced study when I was in PR classes.

To further rile up the public, a live feed of the blowout has gone viral on the ‘Net. It’s disturbing, and yet technology wows me again here. How do engineers submerse a camera to such bone-crushing depths and manage to obtain as bright and clear a picture? This is a YouTube clip of some of the footage:

Waste Reduction as a Lifetime Philosophy

Common sense solutions to waste reduction. That sums up my guiding philosophy. I may not be a Six Sigma greenbelt, but I always look for easy, sensible ways to reduce costs and waste. When a project seems time and resource heavy, I often question the process and if it, along with materials required, are really necessary to meet the objective.

I’m not an environmentalist, but I hate to see perfectly recyclable materials end up in a landfill. That’s why, in tandem with Kohl’s Green Scene, I pushed for recycling more of the waste generated in the shoes department I oversee. (Now if only I could get shoe manufacturers to stop putting so much throw-away stuffing in every pair of shoes! Not only would this reduce waste, it’d be a lot less for me to pick up off the floor every day!)

So imagine how I feel as I watch the Gulf Region become polluted by the worst oil spill in recent history. Oil is a commodity that is quickly becoming sparser. While I realize it’s too early to being playing the blame game, here hundreds of thousands of gallons of “black gold” are going to waste. And they’re polluting our oceans, fisheries, and costal beaches all the while.

Proposing a solution to this problem is far beyond me; I’m certainly no engineer. But how I hope to see something like the failed “dome” project succeed in stemming the deep-sea well’s flow and channeling the oil into a containment device. I even hope the captured oil can be refined and made usable. Perhaps this is impossible, like I said, I’m no petrol expert.

Common sense solutions to reduce waste—waste of our oceans, resources, and natural beauty. I hope that out of this environmental and PR disaster, British Petroleum Co. can find the opportunity to create a solution that not only makes them look good, but that preserves the environment and salvages our precious commodities.