Black or Green?

Going 'Green' is much more than buying a hybrid car, or putting a solar panel on your roof, or installing energy efficient light bulbs in your house. You have to do them all, every thing you can do to go 'Green'. Whether it is to save money, or save our planet, you do it because of the guilt we all have for polluting our world.

Here in Curaçao our new government wants to go 'Green' as well, new wind turbines, cleaner gas, and so on. One problem though, we have the biggest oil refinery in the western hemisphere sitting in our harbor, good for the rest of the world, bad for our Island. How can we here go 'Green', if we are one of the most polluting places this side of the world? Well simple, we get rid of the refinery. Now allot of people would say, we need it for our economy, cleaning the mess in the harbour is impossible, jobs will be lost, and so on. Yet these arguments are all false, some jobs will be lost, but many others will be created by the project of disassembling the whole place and building something else. Cleaning the harbour is not impossible, with such a small entrance to the harbour blocking it off and draining the whole thing would be relatively easy, this step is crucial to cleaning as the deep layer of oil sitting on the bottom would have to be dug out in order to go any further with the cleaning process. And concerning the economy, all the jobs from cleaning to dismantling, and rebuilding would give money to those in need of a job, which intern supports our economy, and I don't think we actually make that much money from the refinery in ht first place.

If you look at the harbour you can see how much pollution comes out of it daily, so much so that going 'Green' would be a farce and a joke if not done to the highest degree.

What would be good to have replace the oil refinery? A truly 'Green' project, hotels, apartments, beaches, coral reefs, and all of it done in such a way that it would remain 'Green'. Hotels running on purely 'Green' energy from wind turbines, solar panels, any other form of clean energy. Rejuvenating the coral reefs in the harbor, springing life back into it and creating a beautifully addition to the Island. Beaches stretching along the coast of the harbour bringing in a clean way to have people enjoy the water, to go diving, boating, swimming, and playing beach games, a far sight from the giant oil tankers and smoke stacks rising out of the ground and water, killing any thing nearby.

Would it not be better for everyone to have the oil refinery disappear and in its place see and beautiful clean harbour teaming with life from all sides, underwater and above. Seeing beach going tourists instead of clouds of smoke and poison, setting an example for other countries around the world sowing how the worst of places can be turned into the most beautiful of them all, made by the combined efforts of humanity to do the right thing instead of just leaving it at what it is and thinking we can still go 'Green'.

If we put it there we can take it away, and if we take it away, clean it up and bring it back to its former glory, our planet will thank us. Because what is more important than our mother earth?

For more information and pictures on the Curaçao Oil refinery please visit; http://www.gcmonitor.org/article.php?id=92

Than send an email to our government, voice your opinion, and make a differance!