Over 500 fishing boats join Dalian oil spill cleanup operations after pipeline explosion
DALIAN, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Over 500 fishing boats Monday joined a massive oil spill clean-up operation underway off the coast of northeastern China's Dalian City, three days after pipelines exploded near the city's oil reserve base, one of China's largest.
A dark-brown oil slick has stretched over at least 183 square kilometers of ocean near blast-hit Xingang port, with 50 square kilometers severely polluted.
The over 500 fishing boats have been loaded with oil absorbers and dispersants to help in the clean-up south of Dalian's Golden Pebble Beach and east of Bangchui Island.
We never did get that serious debate on our oil dependency and the harm it does to the environment. Instead we got ridiculous politicians like Haley Barbour, drunk on oil money, claiming offshore oil drilling was safe (it's not).
I'd rather we accept the very obvious risks as fact and move forward with the debate from there. If people think the risks are worth continuing our dependency on dead dinosaurs, then explain why. But I suspect we never have these hard conversations because Certain Important People won't like what most people believe in this country. Some facts are a little too inconvenient. So we never have the conversation, we just talk about the unimportant stuff. Nothing to see here, move along.
It's the dirty shame of our current political stalemate that nothing important is every seriously discussed so nothing substantial can ever be done about it. And the money keeps flowing. Huzzah.
Years from now we will look back on this time with astonishment.
