photo by mtsofan (Flickr CC)

In preparation for the eventuality of oil spills resulting from drilling in the icy Arctic region, Shell Oil might be enlisting the help of sniffer dogs as an inexpensive contingency plan.

Shell plans to start drilling off the northwest coast of Alaska as early as June.

Since there are as of yet no methods for detecting oil spills that are covered by ice and snow, the use of dachshunds and border collies could be the best the minds of Shell and other companies have been able to come up with. Personally, I have no idea if this is an effective way of detecting oil spills or not, but Greenpeace doesn’t like it one bit.

From the Guardian:

The idea that small dogs can track leaking oil deep under the Arctic pack ice in the middle of winter is absurd. The fact that they are paying good money to seriously use this as an option shows how much they are scrabbling around for a solution.

–Ben Ayliffe, Arctic campaigner for Greenpeace.

Another environmental group, the US Arctic Program for the Pew Environment Group, described the use of sniffer dogs as ‘embarrassing’.

According to the research, the dogs detected oil 5km (3.1mi) below the surface, were well behaved and tolerant of the harsh Arctic environment.

Shell claims there are as of yet no plans to use the dogs while drilling for oil off Alaska.

image credit: Abaconda Management Group (Flickr CC)

Oil leaking from the stranded container ship off New Zealand’s coast has washed up on local beaches and could continue polluting for weeks, according to authorities.

Beautiful Mt Maunganui Beach in Tauranga has been hit with “tar balls”, aka toxic blobs of oil, prompting authorities to issue a public warning to stay away from the stricken beach.

So far some 10-50 tons of oil are estimated to have leaked from the Liberian container ship, the Rena, since it hit Astrolabe Reef, near the city of Tauranga on Wednesday, poisoning local wildlife. Weather conditions this week are predicted to hamper rescue and clean up efforts, which are minimal even in the best conditions.

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key responded to criticisms on the rescue/cleanup response on a national breakfast program.

He is quoted in the Guardian:

Every year around the world there are ships that get into grief, but not ones that normally just plough into a very well documented reef in calm waters at high speed.

A report by APNZ adds:

Another concern was a number of containers on board that were holding hazardous material, with 11 of the containers holding goods classified as “dangerous”. Another two held goods that could give off flammable gases if they came into contact with water.

According to BBC News some 500 people are involved in the joint effort to salvage and clean up this worsening environmental tragedy.

photo credit: Fred Dott/Greenpeace

The oil leak in the North Sea, which was discovered by Shell last Monday – but not announced until Friday – has been mostly staunched, according to the UK government.

Yet another, albeit much smaller, leak has been found stemming from the same offshore platform and it is spilling some 2 barrels of crude oil per day. The second leak is proving difficult to stop, according to Shell, due to its ‘awkward’ positioning.

Last Monday’s oil spill is already being called the worst to occur in UK waters in the last 10 years.

From an article in the Independent:

An estimated 216 tonnes (1,300 barrels) has already spilled into the sea following the initial spill, which began at the Gannet Alpha platform 112 miles east of Aberdeen last Wednesday.

Though nowhere near the scale of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which occurred in the Gulf of Mexico last year and is considered the worst marine oil spill ever, environmental groups have expressed concern over the recent events in the North Sea.

A spokesperson for the Scottish branch of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) is quoted in an article for the Guardian:

We know oil of any amount, if in the wrong place, at the wrong time, can have a devastating impact on marine life. Currently thousands of young auks – razorbills, puffins and guillemots – are flightless and dispersing widely in the North Sea during late summer. So they could be at serious risk if contaminated by this spill.

Greenpeace and WWF Scotland have also voiced concerns and criticism of Shell’s practices in the North Sea and their handling of the oil spill.

photo by kris krüg (kk+ on Flickr CC)

Documents accessed under the Freedom of Information Act show BP attempting to influence independent research into the effects of the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Environmental activist group Greenpeace got a hold of incriminating emails and passed them on to the Guardian.

Those concerns go far beyond academic interest into the impact of the spill. BP faces billions in fines and penalties, and possible criminal charges arising from the disaster. Its total liability will depend in part on a final account produced by scientists on how much oil entered the gulf from its blown-out well, and the damage done to marine life and coastal areas in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The oil company disputes the government estimate that 4.1m barrels of oil entered the gulf.

Not a big surprise, really. After all, the White House disagreed with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) about how much oil had been cleaned up last summer. With that kind of support of course BP is going to feel emboldened to skew any findings concerning the impact of the spill.

Read more in the Guardian.

Also check out this slideshow of the BP oil spill in the Telegraph and this ITN video report of an anti BP protest in London by activists joined by victims of the spill.

photo by Rainforest Action Network (Flickr CC)

An Ecuadoran court has found oil giant Chevron guilty of contaminating the South American country’s Amazon basin.

A judge in an Ecuadoran court levied a fine of $8bn (€6bn) against Chevron for deaths, illnesses and monetary losses sustained by the local inhabitants of the rainforest from spills of toxic waste and crude oil. The spills are estimated by a Swedish University study to total 30bn gallons (113bn liters). This amount dwarfs the 205m gallons spilt by BP in the Gulf of Mexico.

Though the suit is being touted as a hard fought victory for the indigenous people of Ecuador, the amount fell far short of the $27.3 sought by plaintiffs.

The epic and bitterly fought lawsuit over the “Amazon Chernobyl” has been going on for 18 years. It was brought on behalf of 30,000 people whose health and environment were allegedly damaged by chemical-laden waste water dumped by Texaco’s operations from 1972 to 1990. Chevron bought Texaco in 2001.

–Guardian

Chevron blasted the judgment, calling it “illegitimate”, “unenforceable” and a “fraud”. Due to appeals, the US-based multinational energy company will probably be able to avoid paying out for years. This seems to be par for the course for Chevron.

From a statement by Amazon Watch and Rainforest Action Network via a BBC News report:

Chevron has spent the last 18 years waging unprecedented public relations and lobbying campaigns to avoid cleaning up the environmental and public health catastrophe it left in the Amazon rainforest.

Read more on the story in the Guardian and from AP, including a video report.

Image credit: Greenpeace USA 2010 (Flickr CC)

Though around half of the oil spilt into the Gulf of Mexico following the Deepwater Horizon explosion in April remains unaccounted for, scientists have mapped out a 22-mile (35 km) underwater plume of petrochemicals.

The fact that so much oil has remained underwater instead of floating to the surface is surprising to scientists and also problematic because it makes the oil more difficult to locate. This means that they don’t know what damage may still be occurring in the Gulf and where.

Other unknowns include why the oil didn’t disperse as expected and the unpredictable – and undependable – nature of oil eating microbes.

From an NPR report:

The hydrocarbons, including benzene and toluene, were highly diluted in the water. They were coming from the gushing well, but they weren’t spreading out in all directions. Instead, they followed an invisible underwater channel just over a mile wide and 650 feet thick. The researchers tracked that channel southwest for 22 miles, until bad weather forced them to stop.

Just how much oil from the well is contained in this plume is also unknown, but it is a significant discovery and the best-documented case of its kind.

Debate concerning the amount of oil remaining in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico continues.

The debate broke into the open this week when the Sea Grant team released a short report estimating that as much as 79 percent of the oil that the Deepwater Horizon blowout ejected into the Gulf remains in the environment. By contrast, the unified command’s report suggested that no more than half the oil is still in the environment. Some administration officials went further to say that only about 25 percent remained.

–Christian Science Monitor

For more details on the story see the following article from the Christian Science Monitor:

Gulf oil spill plume stretches 22 miles, not breaking down much

Also check out this short video report from NBC Nightly News:

Mile-wide oil plume spotted near BP spill

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

photo by BP America (Flickr Creative Commons)

As estimates of the oil spilling from the busted well in the Gulf of Mexico shot up like a post-Perestroika stock market on an almost daily basis, so plummeted the credibility of BP and the US government’s estimates regarding the volume of leaking oil. Accuracy apparently is not their strong suit.

Won’t get fooled again.

Or will we? What choice do we have without our own personal oil spill experts replete with super submarines? Even James Cameron wasn’t allowed to look – and he made Avatar, Aliens and Terminator. Surely that’s gotta open some doors?

None of this means the government or BP is outright lying. I’m sure they have different methods of measuring, which provide information for different estimates. But those estimates have not been very reliable and the latest claims that 75% of the oil has been cleaned up, degraded, dispersed, etc., have been proclaimed as if everything is A-OK now. Naturally, scientists and environmental groups have criticized this glossing over of the facts.

Of course, the details of the real report don’t say that everything is fine or certain, even if Whitehouse sound bites suggest it is.

Check out this segment from the Rachel Maddow Show on the credibility of government info regarding the oil spill and the latest bit of positive spin.

Rachel Maddow: Oil claims strain credulity

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

photo by badjonni (Flickr Creative Commons)

Yesterday and today BP crews are attempting to securely seal the leak on the blown out oil well in the Gulf of Mexico by pumping in cement.

Operation ‘static kill’ has so far been successful in halting the flow of oil into the Gulf, which began on April 20^th with the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform. The latest effort began with BP crews pumping in special mud to stop the leak and will hopefully conclude – after the cement on top has dried – with the drilling of two relief wells.

The Obama administration recently announced that around 75% of the oil from the spill had been cleaned up, dispersed, disposed of or evaporated, with the remaining 25% posing little additional risk.

But many environmental groups and scientists dispute this claim as overly optimistic.

From a report by the Associated Press:

The good news is people are seeing less oil, but the bad news is the oil trapped in the marshes is moving out with the tides and sticking on the marsh cane. And that could kill it.

–Maura Wood, National Wildlife Foundation oceanographer

Some scientists believe the White House’s statements to be too simplistic and that they are designed to put a positive spin on the BP oil disaster.

From a report in the Guardian

When these reports go through the spin machine they get distorted. If you look closely at this report, it makes it very clear that this is not over.

–Francesca Griffo, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists

photo by Paul Thomas (Liassic on Flickr Creative Commons)

Despite low public opinion on deep sea drilling and an overall global shift away from the practice, including the Obama administration’s moratorium in the US, the UK government – the ‘greenest government eva’ – has decided to go against the grain and allow exploratory drilling in the North Sea.

A spokeswoman for the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change was quoted in an article in the Independent:

We will not consent to the drilling of any well unless we are convinced that it is designed to the very highest standards, that the equipment used is fully tested and that the people working on the well are fully trained.

Well thank God for that.

Greenpeace has campaigned for the UK to institute a similar moratorium on deep sea drilling like the one currently in effect in the US. Greenpeace has also been critical of the UK coalition government’s new tax policies regarding off shore oil drilling, claiming they make deep sea drilling more financially attractive.

BP plans to drill in the North Sea some sixty miles (95km) from Scotland’s Shetland Islands.

Regardless of safety issues, such a move in the wake of the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is sure to be seen as a bit of political bad timing on behalf of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government.

Meanwhile, European voices are rising in reaction to BP’s plans for deep sea drilling in the Mediterranean off the coast of Libya. The planned well is 200 meters deeper than the one drilled by the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico.

From an article in the Financial Times:

Environmental groups as well as local Italian politicians and Italy’s opposition Democratic party have also called for a suspension of deepwater drilling in the Mediterranean. Libya’s Gulf of Sirte lies some 500km from Italian and Maltese territory.

According to the UN Libya does not have an oil spill response contingency plan as of yet and whether or not Mediterranean states on the whole are capable of dealing with a spill remains questionable.

Additional resources:

BBC News – Greenpeace calls for BP Shetland drill block rejected

photo credit: Greenpeace USA 2010

Yesterday the United States experienced two more oil spills: One in the Gulf of Mexico, the other in the Kalamazoo River in Michigan.

A tug boat, which was pushing a barge, ran into an abandoned well in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday morning, causing gas and oil to spew 100ft (30m) into the air.

The well is located in Barataria Bay, Louisiana, some 65 miles (105km) south of New Orleans. Barataria Bay is an ecologically rich wetlands and fishing area that has been unused since the Deepwater Horizon spill began on April 10^th. This is at least the third oil leak in the Gulf area since the BP disaster.

From a report in the Telegraph:

Admiral Thad Allen, the US Coast Guard chief, said the oil platform was surrounded by a sheen and a vapour that was probably a combination of oil and gas spewing from the well.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, on Monday a pipeline broke in the US state of Michigan, spilling some 877,000 gallons (19,500 barrels) of oil into a creek that feeds into the Kalamazoo River, covering birds, fish and other local wildlife in crude.

From an AP report:

Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm toured the area by helicopter Tuesday night and said she wasn’t satisfied with the response to the spill. The leak in the 30-inch pipeline, which was built in 1969 and carries about 8 million gallons of oil daily from Griffith, Ind., to Sarnia, Ontario, was detected early Monday.

On Tuesday Governor Granholm declared a state of disaster in response to the leak.

Graham Land

Additional resources:

Associated Press – Michigan: 800,000 Gallons of Oil Spill After Pipe Breaks

photo by greenpeacefrance (Flickr Creative Commons)

Here are two video reports on the oil spill cleanup efforts in China’s Yellow Sea.

Two oil pipelines exploded on the 16th of this month in the major port city of Dalian in northern China, resulting in a massive fire and the largest oil spill in Chinese history.

The pipelines have now been repaired, but the environmental damage of the spill will be felt for years to come. The oil has polluted an area of 430 sq km.

The first video is a report from Al Jazeera English on cleanup efforts in the Yellow sea around Dalian; the other is raw footage of the spill and cleanup from Russia Today.

Al Jazeera English – China battles Yellow Sea oil spill

Russia Today – China Oil Spill disaster spreads wide after pipeline blast

Graham Land

photo from Greenpeace UK (Flickr Creative Commons)

Friday’s oil pipeline explosion in the northern Chinese port of Dalian has resulted in a large oil slick in the Yellow Sea. The oil leaking from the two exploded pipelines has been stopped, but not before oil washed up on the coastline, soiling surrounding beaches and negatively impacting local wildlife and economic activity.

Thousands of firefighters, engineers and even a flotilla of 800 fishing boats are involved in cleanup operations which have already reduced the oil slick by a third from its peak of 50 sq km, according to a report in the Guardian.

The leak is likely to add to persistent calls for tighter environmental regulation in China. The need for improved standards was also highlighted by a toxic spill from a copper mine in Fujian month that poisoned a major river, killed countless fish and threatened the drinking supplies of downstream communities.

–Guardian

A BBC News report on the situation in the Dalian area paints a grimmer picture, stating that an area of 430 sq km is polluted from the spill and that annual fishing in the region may be ruined this year.

Though the spill is small when compared to the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, according to Greenpeace, it is China’s worst in recent memory.

One firefighter lost his life during cleanup efforts.

For more on the story see the following report by the Associated Press:

AP – Growing China oil spill threatens sea life, water

Graham Land

Additional resources:

Guardian – In pictures: China tries to stop Yellow Sea oil slick

Greenpeace China – Greenpeace expresses condolences to sacrificed Dalian firefighter

photo by Tabitha Kaylee Hawk (southerntabitha on Flickr Creative Commons)

You thought it might never happen, but yesterday evening BP successfully stopped the flow of oil from the broken well in the Gulf of Mexico.

The cap is a temporary fix – with the lasting solution being the drilling of a relief well scheduled to take place in a few weeks time. Both US President Barack Obama and BP’s chief expressed cautious optimism at the news that the oil leak in the Gulf was under control for the first time in 87 days.

From a report in the Guardian:

Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer, said engineers would be checking carefully to make sure no oil was escaping from the well from previously undiscovered leaks. If that is the case, engineers would remove the cap and ramp up their containment operation from the well.

Since the Deepwater Horizon oilrig exploded on April 20th, the US has experienced its worst environmental disaster and the worst oil spill in history.

For more details on the story see this report from CNN:

No oil leaking as BP conducts critical pressure tests in Gulf oil well

photo by Angela Meurer (anginhamm; Flickr Creative Commons)

In 2000 a massive oil leak from an underwater Petrobras pipeline spilled into Guanabara Bay near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is considered one of Brazil’s worst environmental disasters ever and was given an estimated recovery time of 10 years.

What Al Jazeera English reporter Gabriel Elizondo discovered on a recent trip to Guanabara Bay is that it has anything but recovered during the past 10 years:

The mud is thick, black and lifeless. And it stinks. Dead stumps – what used to be thick green mangrove swamps – protrude out from the mud as far as your eyes see. It looks like a scene captured by a camera attached to an unmanned spacecraft that has just landed on a lifeless planet in another galaxy.

Though the pollution of Guanabara Bay is ‘legendary’ besides the spill, it seems that it is the oil that really destroyed the ecosystem and decimated the local fishing industry which depended on it.

How long it will take for the Gulf of Mexico to recover after the BP spill – estimated at four times the amount of oil spilled in Guanabara Bay – is unknown, but if history is any clue it looks like it will take longer than 10 years.

Read the full report ‘Effects of a Brazilian oil spill 10 years on’ from Al Jazeera English and watch the accompanying video report below.

Lessons in Brazil’s oil spill after a decade

Graham Land

photo by jgmorard (source: Flickr Creative Commons)

Last month an oil spill was discovered in Egypt’s Red Sea by Egyptian authorities. The spill polluted a stretch of coastline dotted with popular tourist resorts.

According to a Reuters Africa report, the Egyptian oil minister has claimed that none of the 188 oil platforms in the Gulf of Suez are responsible for the spill and that the oil may have come from water used to clean out a tanker.

Local environmental groups are skeptical of the Egyptian government’s claims and are accusing the government of a cover-up.

Watch this video report from Al Jazeera English for more on the story.

Egypt covers up Red Sea oil spill

Graham Land

Additional resources:

The Jordan Times – Aqaba environmentalists concerned about Red Sea oil spill

photo from Arquivo Abr (source: Agência Brasil)

Is there is just too much revenue in big oil to stop dangerous deep sea drilling? The oil industry, like the massive investment banks behind the financial crisis of 2008, is considered by some to be ‘too big to fail’. Yet also like financial crashes, disasters are calculated by those in charge as risks worth taking. Sure, a tragedy on the scale of the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico wasn’t expected, but the industry and the government – and everybody – knew that spills happen. Also like the banks, the oil industry is largely self-regulating, so they are able to take more risks and cut corners.

As oil reserves are depleted, drilling becomes more difficult and dangerous, yet the industry is continually propped up by governments in order to help it maintain its long-established dominance in the energy market and generate revenue from publicly owned resources (yes, we actually own the oil). And so the disasters will continue to happen until the oil runs out. Big oil is ironically both too big to fail and too big not to fail.

Even as the BP Gulf disaster remains in full swing the UK government is continuing to aid in the pursuit of deep sea drilling projects both at home in the North Sea, as this article from the Belfast Telegraph explains, but also in more dangerous waters off the coast of Brazil.

The oil and gas reservoirs of the Campos basin are considered some of the most hazardous in the world to access, pushing offshore technology to the limit. The P-52 rig replaced one that exploded and sank due to human error in 2001, killing 11 people.

–Guardian

Drilling in the North Sea is considered ‘less risky’ than what takes place in the Gulf of Mexico because the rigs are anchored. This does not mean that it isn’t still risky, not to mention terribly expensive. This attitude also smacks of NIMBY-ism, since British companies – and the government – are effectively exporting that increased risk to other parts of the world like Louisiana and Brazil.

The fact that the UK government underwrote loans for the construction of the Brazilian platform, which would make it financially responsible should a major accident take place, is not a comforting thought while the Gulf remains in peril. And Brazil’s Petrobras P-52 platform is drilling even deeper than Deepwater Horizon was.

The lack of publicly available information about a blowout risk or equipment to deal with a blowout should it happen – not to mention the underwriting of a dangerous drilling project by the British taxpayers – has naturally resulted in protests from environmental groups.

Read more on this story in the Guardian: UK backing loans for ‘risky’ offshore oil drilling in Brazil

Graham Land

Additional resources:

Deutsche Welle – North Sea oil platforms less risky than BP rig which exploded

New York Times – Tracking the Oil Spill in the Gulf

Guardian – Q&A: BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill

photo by secretagentarthur (source: Flickr Creative Commons)

In a bold statement against arts institutions co-operating with unethical companies, a group of activists poured molasses and threw feathers onto the steps to the entrance of the Tate Britain art gallery in London on Monday.

The activist-artists, calling themselves ‘The Good Crude Britannia’ appeared during a protest outside the BP-sponsored Tate Britain summer party, which commemorated 20 years of BP’s support for the Tate. They were clad in black and carrying buckets of molasses emblazoned with the BP logo, which they emptied over the stone entrance to the Tate, stunning partygoers and causing cameras to flash. The act was an obvious reference to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

An environmental arts campaigner was quoted in a UK Press Association report on the incident:

BP is trying to repair its tarnished reputation and buy our approval by associating itself with culturally important institutions like Tate. We hope that, as happened with the tobacco industry, it will soon come to be seen as socially unacceptable for cultural institutions to accept funding from Big Oil.

–Jane Trowell, Platform

For more on the story, read this humorous account in the Guardian and check out the video of the activists doing the deed, edited with dramatic music and slow-motion to maximize effect, below:

Licence to Spill

Graham Land

photo by Esthr (source: Flickr Creative Commons)

The long dark and gooey shadow of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is shining a gruesome light on offshore drilling, its toll on the environment and the true cost of oil.

Yet the Gulf spill is also getting all the attention, while other environmental issues or injustices suffer from neglect or overshadowing. Bhopal activists have juxtaposed the attention being given to the spill against their unfortunate plight, for instance. Ironically, new remote – and potentially catastrophic – frontiers are being explored for oil at this very moment, yet this is receiving little attention from the mainstream media.

Case in point: British oil exploration and extraction firm, Cairn Energy, is starting to drill off the coast of Greenland. A piece in the Ecologist points this out this fact, while Deepwater Horizon continues to hog the spotlight.

From an article in the Edmonton Journal:

Edinburgh-based Cairn Energy is one of 10 companies that have bought up leases in the region. The speed with which the company got its approvals has been cause for concern for both the Inuit in Canada and for conservationists.

In light of BP’s blowout in the Gulf, how prepared are Cairn if something similar should happen in the Arctic? Canada, who also granted permission to drill in the region, permits oil drilling in ‘marine protected’ areas, according to the WWF. So do Greenland and Norway. What makes these areas ‘protected’ if companies are allowed to do something which is already proven to be potentially hazardous to the environment?

If cleanup is this hard in the Gulf, imagine the difficulties in tackling a major spill spreading under Arctic ice.

Graham Land

Additional resources:

Scotsman – Greenland gives go-ahead for Cairn Energy to begin exploration

dolphins swimming near an oil rig in Santa Barbara, California; photo by ah zut (source: Flickr Creative Commons)

Oil-covered dolphins have been spotted swimming in the Gulf of Mexico exhibiting both unusually agitated and ‘sluggish’ behavior. Both journalists and professional dolphin spotters have noticed dolphins ‘acting drunk’, some with their dorsal fins encrusted in reddish crude.

When we realized what we had discovered, we called Daryl Carpenter, owner of Reelscreamers, and asked him if anyone else had noticed the oiled dolphins or reported it. Carpenter said that news crews had taken video footage, but he did not know if any of the images had been broadcast. So far none of the images have surfaced, and wildlife officials, if they know about this situation, have been mum.

– Georgianne Nienaber, Huffington Post

Harmful, toxic chemicals in the oil are poisonous to dolphins as they are to humans, who have experienced nausea, dizziness and confusion simply by breathing fumes coming from the oil leaking from the breached BP oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. The dolphins, since they live in the water, have no choice but to swim through it.

Read more on this story in the Huffington Post article entitled ‘New Photos Show Oil-Soaked Dolphins Struggling in Barataria Bay, Louisiana’ by Georgianne Nienaber.

Here is a short video report from BBC News regarding the situation with these intelligent and sensitive animals, who are struggling to live through the BP oil spill tragedy.

US oil spill in Gulf ‘making dolphins act drunk’

by Graham Land

photo by Truthout.org (source: Flickr Creative Commons)

Writer and activist Naomi Klein describes in a piece for the Guardian how an overconfident BP recklessly endangered the environment and human culture of the Gulf of Mexico, believing there to be ‘little risk’ of disaster. Even if a spill will to occur, BP believed, it would be minor and easily manageable.

Now that a real – and plainly unmanageable – disaster has actually happened, promises from BP boss Tony Hayward and US President Barack Obama that the Gulf will fully recover are unrealistic and being met with skepticism by Gulf residents.

It all sounded great. But for people whose livelihoods put them in intimate contact with the delicate chemistry of the wetlands, it also sounded completely ridiculous, painfully so. Once the oil coats the base of the marsh grass, as it had already done just a few miles from here, no miracle machine or chemical concoction could safely get it out. You can skim oil off the surface of open water, and you can rake it off a sandy beach, but an oiled marsh just sits there, slowly dying. The larvae of countless species for which the marsh is a spawning ground – shrimp, crab, oysters and fin fish – will be poisoned.

–Naomi Klein

Klein juxtaposes the modern, science-driven developed world’s conceptual attitude of man’s mastery over nature against ancient European and contemporary indigenous cultures that revere the natural world – and are wary of its power. But shouldn’t a truly science-driven culture be more aware and cautious of the dangers associated with drilling, mining, polluting and generally screwing with the Earth? Well not under extreme capitalism, in which the moneymen call the shots.

This Gulf coast crisis is about many things – corruption, deregulation, the addiction to fossil fuels. But underneath it all, it’s about this: our culture’s excruciatingly dangerous claim to have such complete understanding and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and re-engineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us. But as the BP disaster has revealed, nature is always more unpredictable than the most sophisticated mathematical and geological models imagine.

–Naomi Klein

Will big oil and the fossil fuel industry really learn from disaster in the Gulf? More importantly, will we as a society learn not to simply trust that large corporations have our best interest at heart?

Read Naomi Klein’s entire piece, entitled ‘Gulf oil spill: A hole in the world’, in the Guardian.

Also watch this documentary film by the Al Jazeera English program ‘Fault Lines’ for which Klein was a consultant. The Fault Lines crew visited the Gulf coast and looked at big oil’s history and effects on the region.

Fault Lines – In Deep Water: A Way of Life in Peril

by Graham Land

Additional resources:

Naomi Klein website