Sign the petition to
President Obama:

200,000 gallons of oil leaking into the
Gulf of Mexico each day.

1800 miles of oil slicks.

11 dead workers.

This is the future
of our energy independence?
The oil rig disaster proves offshore drilling is too risky. Cancel plans to expand offshore drilling and invest in clean energy instead.

Click here to sign.

The Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster is getting worse by the hour. At the Seminal, diarist Seymour Friendly writes that the collapsed well is leaking oil at the pace of 200,000 gallons a day.

At a rate of 200,000 gallons per day, the well leaks will expel 1,000,000 gallons oil. In twenty days, the well will have effectively emptied into the Gulf of Mexico in a spill just under half of the total volume of the Exxon Valdez disaster.

Evidence has emerged that the new total leak rate is in excess of BP’s reported worse-case scenario response capacity.

Janet Napolitano declared the explosion to be an event of “national significance.” Yet despite the explosion, President Obama’s spokesman says there are no plans to reconsider Obama’s proposal to greatly expand offshore drilling in the very same waters where spilled oil now threatens thousands of miles of coastline and ocean.

If Obama moves forward with expanded offshore drilling, this disaster will only be the beginning.

Sign our petition to President Obama asking he end his plans for offshore drilling. We’ll share the petition with the media and start a public call for Obama to change course on offshore drilling and invest in real energy solutions.

This is exactly the kind of disaster critics warned about when Obama changed course earlier this month in announcing expanded offshore drilling as part of his energy plan. Indeed, it’s the very kind of disaster Obama himself warned about when he opposed offshore drilling during the presidential campaign.

Candidate Obama called offshore drilling a “gimmick” that would fail to protect “pristine coastlines” from environmental disaster. He praised the decades-long “bipartisan consensus” against offshore drilling to protect our coasts and criticized John McCain’s flip-flop on the issue to support drilling.

And just weeks after his own flip-flop in favor of offshore drilling, the brutal reality of the dangers of offshore drilling show themselves in an 1800 mile-long oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico.

Forget the fact that offshore drilling is expensive, takes no less than a decade to start extracting oil, and would only yield about one year’s worth of oil anyway. Now we see the very real, deadly consequences of drilling for oil in our oceans.

The oil rig explosion has already covered more than 1800 miles of ocean in oil, killed 11 workers on the rig and harmed untold numbers of animals in the water. It could easily be the worst oil spill since the Exxon Valdez disaster, if not worse. And the slick is just 16 miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River.

Between the mining disaster in West Virginia and the oil rig explosion, it’s clear that we need to come up with new sources of energy that don’t put our environment — and our workers — at risk.

Sign our petition to President Obama to abandon his plans for offshore drilling. Click here to add your name now.