From what I read, I am afraid President Obama is going to use his Oval Office speech to create an end-point for the oil blow-out story. It sounds like he will be talking about how it will take a long time to recover, but we will eventually make it. The subtext being, “This is going to last a long time. It’s time to think about something else.” And he may well succeed in producing a big enough public event that it does have that book-end quality.

What I hope and wish he would do is ask the nation to take the spill to heart. I wish he would tell us this is partly our responsibility because of the way we use energy, and would ask us to reduce energy use through rapid, serious changes we could do now. And I would like him to underline his commitment to energy and climate legislation, and say that this disaster puts those issues at the center of the national agenda.

The more we focus on clean-up, the more we will miss those bigger issues. Here are thoughts from a recent post on an Environmental Defense Fund web site:

When we make a mess, we naturally want to clean it up. Many people feel a share of responsibility for the Gulf blowout because they use petroleum products. But we need the sophistication to realize that cleanup is largely impossible. We must prevent oil from landing, and remove it where that can be done with little harm, but it’s immoral to push onward at the detriment of other living things and the ecosystem to assuage our guilt.

Those emotions should be channeled instead toward more fundamental changes in our relationship with the environment, beginning with alternative energy, but also including a reexamination of our materialistic lifestyles. It’s up to opinion leaders to redirect the anger generated by this spill towards purposeful self-examination, so that we can harness the positive actions that are within the power of each of us.