And then there’s the incalculable long-term damage to the real-estate market and commercial fisheries.
Energy companies say the technology of extraction has improved substantially, making unlikely the chances of a serious mishap. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California is unpersuaded and remains outspokenly opposed to drilling there.
Yet in Florida, fellow green Republican Charlie Crist, a longtime foe of offshore drilling, recently announced that he—like McCain—has had a change of heart. “Floridians are suffering,” Charlie said, as if oil companies will kindheartedly deflate gas prices once their derricks rise off Destin and Tampa.
Ironically, both the industry and the government believe leases within 100 miles of Florida’s coasts hold mostly natural gas, which will do nothing to help lower the cost of crude. Such details are seldom noted by politicians who disingenuously peddle offshore drilling as a cure for high gas prices. The only cure is to radically reduce demand and to develop alternative energy sources.
The United States owns only about 3 percent of the world’s oil reserves, yet it guzzles 25 percent of global production. Every day Americans burn up 20 million barrels of oil, which is what keeps us slaves to OPEC.
Folks filling up their cars are understandably worried and alarmed. That’s a bad combination in an election year because it encourages candidates to offer false hope and sham promises.
Undoubtedly it’s possible to safely extract more oil from beneath our oceans, but there’s not enough down there to free the United States from its crippling dependence on Mideast reserves.
Drilling in the Alaskan wilderness won’t save us; nor will drilling off the beaches of Florida and California. The main result would be a temporary boost in domestic product, which the oil companies will eagerly sell us at whatever price the market will bear.
Only a sucker would believe otherwise.
May 2, 2010
Gulf Spill Can Kill Our Tourist Season
Oops.
That’s the official position of British Petroleum.
It turns out that oil is gushing from that blown-out rig off the Louisiana coast at a flow of at least 5,000 barrels a day, five times more than BP first estimated. Oh, and if you’re keeping count, by Friday there were three leaks—not two—in the mile-long pipe that connected the platform to the wellhead.
The slick is larger than Rhode Island, and a shift of wind is pushing it into the wetlands of bayou country, imperiling birds, marine life, and commercial fishing. Tourist beaches in Alabama and northwest Florida are also at risk.
Barely a month ago, President Obama announced plans to expand offshore oil operations in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and along the Atlantic coast as far south as central Florida. Fabulous idea! It won’t bring down the price of gasoline one penny at the pump, and it won’t yield enough crude oil to light up America for even a year—but, hey, what harm could it do?
Oops.
The oil companies know how to find oil, and they sure know how to drill. The only part of the underwater operation that they haven’t really nailed down is how to clean up their spills.
Soon after the Deepwater Horizon rig caught fire and sank, killing 11 workers, BP sent remote-controlled submarines to shut a master valve near the source of the outflow. It didn’t work.
Plan B is to dig a relief well in the hope of intercepting the oil before it reaches the fractured pipe. Plan C is to plug up the spewing hole with mud, concrete, or a heavy liquid. At a depth of 5,000 feet, either project will take weeks or months, during which time the oil would continue leaking.
Meanwhile, as this column is being written, BP is lighting parts of the Gulf of Mexico on fire, to burn off some of the slick. So much for high-tech. The company is also assembling an extremely large dome—I swear—that engineers could lower to the ocean floor and place over the leak in an attempt to capture the oil. Maybe when they’re done, they can give it to Wile E. Coyote so he can use it to trap the Road Runner.
BP says everything possible is being done to stop the leak and contain the spill. That’s probably true, which is sobering. Despite all the assurances from Big Oil and the politicians who are in its pocket, the technology of undersea drilling is dangerously lagging when it comes to protecting the coastal communities whose economies depend on clean water, clean beaches, and healthy fisheries.
Last week, BP’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, tried to ease the fears of Gulf residents by saying that the approaching layer of oil was as light as “iced tea.” Good luck trying to sell that line: “Hey, folks, that brown stuff all over the beach? Don’t think of it as tar. Think of it as Snapple.”
On Friday, with the spill blooming into a disaster, the White House announced that no new offshore drilling will be authorized until the Louisiana incident is fully investigated. Under the plan announced in March by Obama, drilling in Florida’s eastern Gulf would expand but remain at least 125 miles offshore. On the Atlantic side, rigs could be erected within sight of the coast.
In Tallahassee, where Big Oil’s lobbyists have been spreading gobs of money, several geniuses in the Legislature will next year continue their push to permit drilling within five miles of some prime Florida beaches. Perfectly safe, they say. Y’all just relax.
Two days after exploding, the Deepwater Horizon went down on April 22 about 50 miles from mainland Louisiana. It took only a week after that for the first streaks of oil to reach the shore.
Miles of protective booms have been laid along the marshes. Officials are considering cannon fire to scare away birds, so they don’t land in the goo. Another idea is to recruit local shrimp boats as oil skimmers.
Because BP hasn’t been able to cap the leak, the Obama administration is sending U.S. military assistance. In other words, the Louisiana spill is an official emergency. If it had happened near Jacksonville or Daytona Beach, Naples, Sarasota, Key West …
Oops.
By all means, let’s surround Florida—a virtual hurricane magnet—with drill rigs. According to the U.S. Minerals Management Service, hurricanes Rita and Katrina destroyed 113 Gulf platforms, damaged 457 pipelines, and caused 146 spills that dumped 17,652 barrels of petroleum. One medium-sized blowout could trash miles of shoreline and kill a tourist season. Nothing sells seaside hotel rooms like YouTube videos of gunk-covered turtles and dead pelicans.
This is a no-brainer. Florida can’t afford offshore drilling. The risk to the economy is ludicrous, compared to the relatively small amounts of oil to be found.
With the crud from the Louisiana accident slopping ashore, Obama should fly down to experience the scene firsthand. I’m sure someone will help scrape the “iced tea” off his flip-flops.
May 16, 2010
BP: And a Child Shall Lead Them
An absolutely true news item: British Petroleum says it is considering a plan to plug the main leak on the sunken Deepwater Horizon oil rig by shooting it full of shredded car tires, old golf balls, and knotted ropes.
British Petroleum announced today that it has fired its top engineer for safety design and replaced him with Jody McNamara, age 12, a sixth-grade honors student at the Dwight Eisenhower Middle School in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
McNamara, who will earn about $350,000 a year in salary and stock options, was offered the BP job after a panel of industry experts selected his 250-word essay, “How to Stop Undersea Oil Leaks Really Quick,” over thousands of other entries.
“Jody is clearly on the cutting edge of deepwater energy technology,” said BP chief executive Tony Hayward. “We couldn’t be happier to have him join our team at such a critical time.”
McNamara was introduced to reporters at a lunch-hour press conference in the school cafeteria. He said his first priority would be devising a new strategy for dealing with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. “I don’t want to talk trash about these other guys,” he said, “but come on—golf balls and car tires? Seriously?”
It was not clear whether McNamara has any prior experience advising major pe
troleum companies. The school yearbook lists him as a member of the Science Club, the Chess Club, and 4-H. His interests are said to include “soccer, skateboarding, and collecting really cool arrowheads.”
The hiring of an outsider didn’t surprise industry insiders, who say BP had run out of ideas in its increasingly desperate efforts to plug the mile-deep Deepwater Horizon. A four-story dome that was supposed to fit over the gushing wellhead became clogged with icy crystals and had to be towed away. Burning off the floating crude has had only limited success, as gobs of tar are threatening shorelines and marine life all along the Gulf Coast.
“What Jody brings to the table,” said BP’s Hayward, “is a completely fresh viewpoint on problem-solving. The principal showed us his class project from last semester—the hamster-powered lightbulb? I’m telling you, this kid is scary smart.”
In his winning essay, McNamara proposed several possible options for sealing the ruptured oil pipeline. He said the most promising plan would require “a super-long straw” and approximately 3,700 metric tons of Quaker oatmeal. “You ever let that goop sit in a cereal bowl for an hour or two? It turns to rock,” the sixth-grader explained at his press conference. “There’s nothing that stuff won’t clog up.”
McNamara said he successfully tested the technique using a homemade LEGO model of the Deepwater Horizon, submerged in a 30-gallon aquarium in his brother’s bedroom. “Don’t worry, we took out all the fish first,” he said.
Hayward later conceded that the aquarium experiment was more sophisticated than any that BP had undertaken. “It could have saved us the fortune that we blew on that stupid dome,” he added ruefully.
Classmates describe McNamara as studious but not stuffy. One recounted a prank that occurred on a recent “Burger Day” when McNamara loosened the cap on a bottle of mustard before handing it to an unsuspecting companion at the lunch table.
“We all fell on the floor laughing,” the classmate said. “Jody’s an awesome dude.”
Said another: “So what if it’s, like, his first really epic oil spill? He couldn’t possibly do worse than those grown-up dorks did.”
Critics of BP expressed guarded optimism about the company’s decision to put a 12-year-old boy in charge of the Deepwater Horizon containment project.
A spokesman for the Department of Interior released a statement saying, “Jody McNamara seems like a bright young fellow, and we are encouraged by BP’s willingness to give him a chance. God knows their own people don’t have a clue what to do.”
Before leaving for an orthodontist appointment, McNamara showed reporters his first memo to BP executives, written as an extra-credit assignment for his English class: “Please don’t build any more offshore oil rigs until you figure out how to shut them off.”
McNamara received an A on the paper.
He promised to get busy working on the oil-spill plan right away, as soon as he finishes his homework and cleans the hamster cage.
June 12, 2010
Now You Don’t Trust BP, but It’s Too Late
Every time a BP executive appears on television, I think of the garage scene from the movie Animal House.
An expensive car belonging to Flounder’s brother has just been trashed on a drunken road trip, and the smooth-talking Otter comforts the distraught Delta pledge with these cheery words: “You f—— up! You trusted us! Hey, make the best of it.”
If only the BP guys were half as honest.
Incredibly, almost eight weeks after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, the company that caused the disaster remains the primary source of information about it. Predictably, much of that information has been stupendously, tragically wrong, starting with the low-ball estimates of how much crude was leaking into the sea. BP didn’t know the answer when the rig went down, and it doesn’t know the answer now. Nobody does.
Every day we see streaming underwater video of that mile-deep gout of oil, billowing and unstaunched. The image is only slightly less sickening than the pictures of dead sea turtles and gagging pelicans. Some people I know can’t bear to watch anymore, so painful are the feelings of helplessness and frustration. What’s happening before our eyes is the slow murder of one of the world’s most bountiful bodies of water, a crime precipitated by reckless corporate decisions and abetted by our own government.
Imagine a so-called regulatory process that allows oil companies to sink a drill 5,000 or even 10,000 feet through a living ocean without any reliable backup for when a blowout preventer fails to prevent a blowout.
Duh, let’s build us a big ol’ steel dome and drop it on the leak.
If that don’t work, we’ll blast us some golf balls and shredded tires into the hole.
Or maybe a giant sody straw might do the trick!
Obviously, these geniuses didn’t have a workable Plan B. Worse, nobody in government figured that out until it was too late. This is what millions of dollars in campaign contributions buys—a free pass from Washington. The federal Minerals Management Service basically worked for Big Oil.
It was a relationship that flourished during the Bush-Cheney years, and not much changed when Barack Obama took office. Despite serious safety issues throughout BP’s North American operations, the MMS blithely accepted the company’s word that everything was peachy on Mississippi Canyon Block 252 in the Gulf of Mexico.
Even today, in the midst of the worst oil spill in history, the Obama administration is still relying largely on BP’s word, although by necessity and not choice. CEO Tony Hayward continues to say things that would merely be silly if not for the dire context. Last week he declared that, despite the findings of several sets of researchers, no submerged plumes of petroleum are spreading through the Gulf. “The oil is on the surface,” Hayward said. “There are no plumes.”
He sounds just like the pet-shop owner in the famous Monty Python sketch who is trying to convince a disgruntled customer that his extremely dead parrot is only napping.
As of this writing, the latest news from BP concerns its new oil-collecting contraption, which is said to be siphoning 15,000 barrels daily from the fractured wellhead. The company has promised that, within days, it will be capturing “a vast majority” of the flow from the Deepwater Horizon.
Unfortunately, attaching the new device required recutting the riser in a way that actually increased the volume of the leak. Many experts believe that millions more gallons than before are now pouring into Gulf waters.
So, at the end of the day, all we really know for certain is this: The oil keeps gushing, and nobody’s figured out how to stop it. That much we can see for ourselves on the dreary underwater video. Back on land, not a soul is able to state with certainty how much has been spilled, where it will end up, or what the ultimate damage will be to the Gulf and beyond.
Meanwhile, the coastal marshes of Louisiana are dying, and brown glop soils the beaches of Alabama and northwest Florida. The seafood industry is being crippled, and tourism is reeling.
And our government, which possesses neither the technology nor the expertise to plug the leak, is stuck in a grim alliance with the perpetrators.
Oil spills are like hurricanes: One is all it takes to change everything.
From the president to the industry’s cheerleaders in Congress to all those state and federal regulators, too many people accepted the oil executives’ sunny assurance that deepwater drilling posed no serious threat to this country.
In the immortal words of Otter, you f——up.
You trusted them.
June 27, 2010
Oil Spill: The Nightmare Becomes Reality
A friend walked out on Pensacola Beach and took a photograph of the oil—miles of oil—on the morning that the gunk first washed ashore.
He e-mailed the picture to me with a note that said it all: “Sickening.”
Pensacola is his home, and the unthinkable has happened. Louisiana’s misery is now officially Florida’s misery, too. For many residents of the Panhand
le, the dreadful wait is over, and their worst fears have come to pass. In a calamity lasting so long and unfolding so inexorably, emotions swing from anger to sadness to grim acceptance. There’s simply nothing to do except struggle to clean up the mess—as Pensacolans quickly did—and pray for the day when it’s over.
The polls say most Americans (although not all) are outraged by the oil spill. Those untouched by the disaster may, if they choose, keep a distance. Along the Gulf shores, workers are scooping up dead dolphins and trucking them off for necropsies. The pictures aren’t easy to stomach, and the impulse is to look away.
It might be difficult for someone who was born and raised far from a beach or a bayou to visualize a place they cherish being poisoned and defaced on such a massive scale. Or maybe not so difficult. Imagine if 120 million gallons of crude oil were flushed into the Minnesota headwaters of the Mississippi River, and for months the sludge was allowed to seep down through the veins of America’s Midwest.
Now you begin to get the picture—the heartbreak, the helplessness.
Far from Pensacola Beach, where tears were shed last week, a certifiable idiot named Joe Barton was apologizing to BP because President Obama had pressured the company into creating a $20 billion compensation fund for victims of the Deepwater Horizon accident.
Barton is a Republican congressman whose district in Texas includes Arlington and parts of Fort Worth, a long way from the Gulf of Mexico. Although he later was forced to apologize for his apology to BP, Barton was cheered by some Tea Party bloggers and others who accuse Obama of shaking down the oil giant.
Talk about misplaced sympathy. Being clueless is one thing. To showcase such an obscene insensitivity to suffering is something else.