Thanks to the magic of Photoshop, we can cut the Gulf Coast spill & paste it, scaled to size, off the Virginia coast in the area where drilling is planned. Via Twitter’s Brad Johnson, here’s what it looks like proportionately.
Obviously this is not exactly what a Virginia oil spill would look like. There are many variables — wind direction & speed, water current patterns. This is not a forecast, it simply shows relative sizes.
What would all that oil do? Would it head out to sea? Towards the Chesapeake Bay & Virginia Beach? Up to Ocean City? Who knows.
But hey, at least oil spills come with a darkly comic side. Sen. Mark Warner, a relentless cheerleader for oil & gas drilling off Virginia’s shores, is now being listed among coastal-state senators who’ve “expressed concerns about the safety & environmental impacts of offshore drilling.” Who says you can’t have it both ways?
UPDATE by Lowell: Much, much better news!
In a groundbreaking decision that some say will usher in a new era of clean energy, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said today he was approving the nation’s first offshore wind farm today, the controversial Cape Wind project off of Cape Cod.
“This will be the first of many projects up and down the Atlantic coast,” Salazar said at a joint State House news conference with Governor Deval Patrick. The decision comes after nine years of battles over the proposal.
Last I checked, wind power doesn’t cause environmental catastrophes like offshore oil drilling does.
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