How bad does it have to be?

While the White House has reported that 75 percent of the 200 million gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf has been captured, skimmed, burned, or dissolved, that still leaves about 53.5 million gallons of oil in the Gulf.

This amount of oil in the Gulf is sizeable – nearly five times that of the Exxon Valdez spill, which continues to wreak environmental and economic havoc in Alaska, more than two decades later.

The BP oil disaster should be a call to action for strong clean energy legislation, a clear missive that the U.S. must end its dependence on oil, and a major sign of failed safety and environmental policies when it comes to off-shore drilling.

There’s now a massive one-million-gallon-plus oil slick moving down the Kalamazoo River in Michigan, due to a pipeline spill. A recent report from our friends at the National Wildlife Federation showed that “(f)rom 2000 to 2010, the oil and gas industry accounted for hundreds of deaths, explosions, fires, seeps, and spills as well as habitat and wildlife destruction in the United States.”

How much worse does it have to be before we take any of these spills as a sign that we need to end our oil dependence and move toward clean energy?

The oil industry argues that the BP disaster was an isolated event. We agree.  Research confirms that oil catastrophes are strictly isolated to oil industry operations, and we have yet to find oil spills at wind farms or gushers erupting in solar plants.  The best way to prevent another oil disaster is to shift away from oil and onto clean energy.

And it is even more important that we remind ourselves that this problem is much bigger than BP. The entire oil industry has been skirting safety regulations and lobbying against clean energy for years. Over and over again we’ve paid the price.

Off-shore drilling safety policies and environmental reviews need to be revised and inspected. We cannot take the oil industry’s word for it that this will not happen again.

We are hopeful that dilution of the oil into the ocean will help reduce further damage to wildlife and fish. But the oil spill is still a disaster, and we still need to address the problem that led to it.

We need President Obama to stand up to the oil industry. We need a plan to move America off of oil and onto clean energy to create jobs and boost the economy – before we see one more oil spill. And we need the Senate to act as quickly as possible to pass a strong oil spill response bill.

Athan Manuel is the Director of Lands Protection for Sierra Club, the oldest and largest
grassroots environmental organization.