Man's oil exploitation activities may have just ruined an entire ecosystem for generations. Already this event belongs in a catastrophic category alongside the Exxon Valdez spill and the Chernobyl reactor explosion. Ecological disaster is so serious and so threatening to the Earth, its biosphere and its people that severe punishment, to the very limit of what is acceptable in a free and civil society, is both necessary and prudent.
It is simply irrelevant whether the disaster occurred because of human error or equipment failure or negligence or even sabotage. It simply doesn't matter. The prevention of ecological disaster must have primacy. I would only accept foreign military attack as an excuse. British Petroleum must be annihilated for this--all their accounts frozen, their assets confiscated and liquidated. US authorities should think creatively to find ways of confiscating their overseas assets and prevent them and their officers from re-opening for business in the US or investing in US businesses ever again. If negligence can be proven, their executives should receive the same treatment plus criminal charges. That is the only way to contradict much softer precedent and convince other oil companies that, one way or another, they will not survive if a similar incident occurs on their watch.
I was a kid in middle school when the Exxon Valdez spill occurred and I have found it difficult to understand what the impact was. I don't know the geography, the ecology or the economics of that area. All that I know about it is that the ecosystem was severely damaged, that it still isn't the same as it was before the spill, that twenty years later Exxon Mobil sat at the very top of the Fortune 500, and that coastal native Alaskans are now in good company with the rest of the United States' impoverished indigenous peoples.
Either Exxon Mobil has repented and God has smiled down on them in the past 20 years, or oil companies have learned that devastating coastal ecosystems really isn't a big deal. Well, I think We The People should teach them how big a deal it is.
I understand the potential impact of this unfolding disaster much better than the Valdez spill, and I am deeply troubled. As I see it now, the seriousness of this event is the stuff of post-apocalyptic fiction. I have seen the spectacular white sands of the Florida Gulf coast and I fear I will not see them again. Today is Friday, April 30, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon blew up last Tuesday, and I have been reading press coverage of this spill every day. This Tuesday, the message was that the well was leaking 1000 barrels a day and would require clean-up, and that if boom walls couldn't contain the slick they might have to burn it until the robot subs got the spigot turned off. I didn't know how much oil a barrel was (42 US gallons, it turns out), but that didn't sound that bad.
By Thursday the message was quite different. Not only was the well leaking up to 5000 barrels a day, the undersea valve or whatever that was supposed to contain it had failed, rough seas prevented the boom walls from working and prevented attempts to burn the oil, and most likely the Mississippi delta would be oil-stained within a day. Which it was.
Even these summary reports are cause for serious concern. If an ordinary rainstorm at sea is enough to render these boom walls useless, why even bother with them? Does it not rain at sea frequently? Also, why did the panic seem to begin only one or two days before oil actually reached the shore, rather than a week earlier?
This got my attention Thursday, from David Kennedy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, quoted by the Associated Press:
It is of grave concern. I am frightened. This is
a very, very big thing. And the efforts that are going to be required to do
anything about it, especially if it continues on, are just
mind-boggling.
This is past the debate about balance between environment and economics. That this spill occurred at all is unacceptable. That BP and the Coast Guard did not react more quickly and decisively than they did is outrageous. Spills like this simply must not happen. Even facilitating a situation where a spill like this is possible is unacceptable. Events like this have the potential to cause species extinctions and other ecological damage that lasts for many generations. If too many of them occur, the Earth may never recover from them at all.
The news this week that the Obama administration will not approve any new offshore drilling projects until this disaster is fully explained does not satisfy me. Congress should immediately order all work to stop on all existing oil rigs under US jurisdiction, and the President should order the Coast Guard to enforce the stop-work order with military force. Only after processes are put in place that make similar incidents impossible without the simultaneous failure of a great number of human and machine/computer safeguards, or military attack, should any work be allowed to resume.
I am not interested in arguments that we need the oil to sustain our economy, or that I am complicit because I buy gasoline and plastic, or that environmentalists are hypocrites. On this subject, I am willing to concede all these points. They are irrelevant. Ecological disasters like this must be prevented, even if that means a complete and permanent shutdown of all deep sea drilling everywhere in the world.
If oil products become more scarce, people will adapt. It is what we do best. It is only within the past hundred years that people have used oil so heavily. I believe society can stop most of its oil usage without sacrificing all of its progress. Basic economics dictates that because oil products are plentifully and cheaply available, they are used heavily. Shippers use diesel powered ships instead of sails because they can go faster, even though recent experimental designs for wind power for ships promise to be much more effective than old-fashioned sails. Even though fully electric consumer vehicles are available in the United States today, few people buy them because they are more expensive and have a more limited range or have low top speeds.
In many cases, if one person or company decides not to use oil products, they will be not only disadvantaged but also ridiculed for their choice. But if the overall supply is reduced, common practices must and will change. That is the worst case scenario if a full reckoning of deep sea drilling is done, with a more absolute eye towards prevention. I believe it is a fair price to pay to prevent future ecological disaster.