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"Drill, baby, drill" must stop

Sarah Palin was once asked whether oil drilling should be freed from its 40-year old environmental shackles. She replied: "The chant is 'drill, baby, drill'. And that's what we hear all across this country in our rallies because people are so hungry for those domestic sources of energy to be tapped into."

Until the recent Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, which could be gushing out as much as 70,000 barrels of oil into the ocean every day, President Obama had seemed to be going along with that chant. But this calamity raises the question for all of humanity, not just the US legislature, of whether it is time to put a stop to the chant of "Drill, baby, drill", in deepwater environments. Is the Macondo spill, as BP boss Tony Hayward says, "just a drop in the ocean"? or will we trash our earth if we continue like this?