Rush Limbaugh has stated that environmental organizations such as Sierra Club should pick up the tab for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. He feels that these organizations have pushed oil production further and further offshore into more dangerous territory, and therefore they are responsible for the accidents on these deep water platforms. A quite interesting and comedic perspective from one of America's top-rating radio entertainers!
While we can easily argue and place blame on BP and other parties involved with the platform itself, it is neither the oil industry or environmental groups who are ultimately at fault - it is we who decided to have a society so heavily based upon the high-grade, concentrated energy only oil can provide.
We are the culture which is too lazy to walk two blocks, considers the bus to be for low-lifes who can't afford cars, and cycling to be for greenie-hippies or health freaks. It may be possible to blame BP et. al. for deviating from a safety regulation or using a faulty piece of equipment, but in the end the consumers of petroleum must realize that the general problem goes much deeper than this.
As we have laid out our lifestyles to be completely dependent upon personal automobiles, becoming more dependent upon a finite resource all while increasing its consumption, we have failed to find an alternative to the oil industry's product. Nothing else on the planet can provide such large amounts of high-grade energy in such a convenient package, and it does not appear that a drop-in replacement will ever exist. Neither moonshine or fast-food fryer oil will save the car culture. Keeping it going requires going into deeper water and more hostile territory (such as the Arctic) as the "easy" oil reserves decline in production. This means higher oil prices and greater propensity for spills and other disasters.