How TN Floods and Oil Spill Are Related

The recent Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion and the deluges that caused flooding in Tennessee may seem like disparate, wholly unrelated events. Not so, writes Dominique Browning on her Personal Nature blog at The Environmental Defense Fund. She says both represent "a strange and terrible confluence of events," and implores policymakers in Washington to transition to cleaner energy sources, which is the key to preventing both types of events in the future. According to Browning, the Gulf oil disaster is an example of the "significant degradation we have visited upon our earth in harvesting" fossil fuels. Global warming in turn causes extreme weather patterns. "Nature is unpredictable, as we can see from the constantly changing direction of the Gulf gusher," she writes.