I have an opinion column out today in the University of Maryland newspaper “The Diamondback” about what the ongoing offshore drilling disaster means to us, and a call for the passage of clean energy and climate legislation.

It’s that sense that nothing and no one is bulletproof, not even us. Everything has limits and everything has a breaking point. The technological capacity of our government and the private sector to solve this crisis before the entire Gulf of Mexico is a dead zone just isn’t there, and that’s more than devastating to the entire gulf region. It shakes our psyche to the core. What if we can’t fix it? What if there’s no going back?

This goes far behind the offshore drilling disaster in the Gulf.