Finding out "whose ass to kick"

The oil spill in the gulf of Mexico shows us that the human race’s hunger for oil may have gone too far. Oil is not only about providing fuel for cars; oil has become integral to our modern lifestyle. In one sense, we are constantly surrounded by oil, from plastic to synthetic clothing to the asphalt on our roads. At the same time, most of the energy we consume comes from fossil fuels. In the USA alone, fossil fuel use has increased 20-fold in the past four decades.
It is clear we have little appetite to radically change this way of life but the problem is that we have already consumed most of the world’s easily accessible oil. Consequently, we are forced to look for oil in ever more remote places, deeper and further out of reach than ever before, in riskier and potentially more damaging ways.
In 1969, a US company built a platform near Santa Barbara in California. A pipe failed and a hundred thousand barrels of oil poured info the sea. It took ten days to resolve. The traditional fishing industry of the area was shut down for years.
The current BP spill has spewed out as much oil as the Santa Barbara accident – each day. And it started two months ago! The Santa Barbara well was a kilometre deep. BP’s is 5,5 kilometres deep. As can be seen in the image from the European Space Agency, the spill is huge. And what you can’t see is the oil covering the ocean floor, killing all life, animal or vegetal.
Meanwhile, in Canada, companies are extracting oil from tar sands, a complex and expensive filtering process that leaves behind a devastated landscape.
President Obama wants to know "whose ass to kick". It could turn out to be his own, and yours, and mine. If we do not make moves to release ourselves from the tyranny of oil, disasters like the Gulf of Mexico spill will be ever more common. And the accusation that we are literally killing the planet will become impossible to refute.