by Avrel Seale
The first shameful waste associated with the BP oil spill was the waste of 11 human lives. No matter how big the story of the BP spill gets, when the history of this event is written, the lede always should remain the loss of human life at its fiery start. That is a loss that cannot be measured against any other, that can never be quantified. Those brothers, husbands, fathers, and friends were Jason Anderson, 35, Aaron Dale Burkeen, 37, Donald Clark, 34, Stephen Curtis, 39, Gordon Jones, 28, Roy Wyatt Kemp, 27, Karl Klepping, 38, Blair Manuel, 56, Dewey Revette, 48, Shane Roshto, 22, and Adam Weise, 24.
The second shame is the one with which we are most familiar, the twin tragedies of the oil’s effect on the environment — oil-coated pelicans, gulls, sea turtles — and the attendant economic catastrophe along the coast affecting fishermen, oystermen, crabbers, and their support industries like ice manufacturing, distributing, and tourism with all its trickle-down effects. It was heartening to see the speed with which people grasped the threat to humans and wildlife relative to eras past, and that cost is being grieved admirably (if never adequately). This second shame has now fed back into that first one; the number of human lives lost to the spill climbed to 12 when fishing charter captain William Allen-Kruse apparently took his own life in June, despondent at the state of his livelihood.
But there is another, third, pang of grief we should feel when we look at the disaster in the Gulf. Without any diminishing of sorrows 1 or 2, I grieve for the waste of the oil itself.
In a story in which we’re understandably used to thinking of the oil as the villain, it might be strange to spend a moment grieving for it. But when I see the live video feed from the bottom of the ocean with thousands upon thousands of barrels gushing toward wherever, I have two simultaneous thoughts: 1) “What a horrible thing for the Gulf, its wildlife, and its people,” and 2) “What a waste of oil.”
Why? Because modern civilization needs oil in a million different ways. One of the best arguments against relying on oil for fuel is that we need it for so many other things, products and materials we won’t outgrow the need for, even when we mercifully transition to renewable fuel sources. When we really accept this truth, it seems like a ridiculous waste to burn such a precious commodity. And you don’t have to travel very far from the car’s gas tank to see where we will continue to need it.
We need it for tires. We need it for belts in the engine. We need it for the molded plastic of the dashboard and other contours of the interior. There’s no question that we’re currently in a period of gross overreliance on plastic, itself one of the gravest environmental problems we face, especially in the ocean. But it’s impossible to imagine a functioning modern world with no plastic, and it takes oil to make that plastic. Oil in the form of plastic is everywhere you look, from your credit cards to your cell phone to the PVC plumbing in your home that helped you shower, flush the toilet, and make coffee this morning.
We need oil as a lubricant for any machine with moving parts. In addition to transportation, our manufacturing sector would literally grind to a halt without it.
We use it to make wax used in the packaging of many different kinds of products, like frozen foods. We need it for tar paper on our roofs. And long after electric cars have replaced gas-guzzlers, we’ll still need asphalt — with its oil — to resurface the roads on which those electric cars will travel.
Without oil for all those other things in life — tires, credit cards, cell phones, tar paper, asphalt, lip balm, trash bags, candles — we’re in huge trouble. So let’s get serious about renewable energy and stop burning oil in engines and heaters as if it were going to last forever.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just 
