A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [110]
“It’s doubtful we will ever use it, but this is a risk-management gap we need to fill in order for the government and the public to be confident to allow us to get back to work,” the oil spokesman says. It could be sixteen months before the system is completed, tested, and ready to be used. In a blowout, it could still take weeks to stop the flow. Drawings of the proposed system show a cap and a series of undersea pipes and valves and a piece of equipment that would pump dispersant. Lines would be hooked up to vessels on the surface.
If it doesn’t work, there’s still no good plan for capturing oil.
The oil companies say this initiative is the product of four weeks of intensive efforts involving forty engineers from the four companies. And, of course, they want to deflate the momentum for a series of congressional bills that aim to bring more safety, more oversight, and more unwelcome lawmaker meddling.
One bill they don’t like, for instance, would force companies to drill a relief well alongside any new exploration well. Oil executives argue that this would double the risk because a relief well would be just as likely to blow out. They don’t mention that this would be true only if they drilled the relief well all the way into the hydrocarbon zone—or that they don’t like the fact that it would cost them a bundle more.
But what about that slippery and elusive bigger picture?
In 1969, Senator Gaylord Nelson was so moved by seeing the devastation following the oil blowout off Santa Barbara that he called for a national day to discuss the environment. After the resulting establishment of Earth Day the following year, Republican President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Air Act into law. Congress followed that burst of legislation with the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, and other giant strides of high-minded lawmaking that invented environmental protection and put the United States ahead of any nation on Earth.
Though the Gulf eruption far exceeds Santa Barbara’s ten-day, 100,000-barrel blowout, when President Barack Obama pushes for clean energy, Republicans accuse him of trying to exploit the Gulf tragedy for political gain. Liberals fault him for failing to specifically push for a cap on carbon dioxide emissions.
Santa Barbara’s leak originated much closer to shore, covering miles of California beaches with thick crude oil. Pictures of dead seals, dolphins, and thousands of birds horrified the country. I myself had never imagined a bird coated in oil, and in my mind I still see vividly the television image that shocked me. Santa Barbara’s psychological effect was huge. And the country was more cohesive. We hadn’t yet had thirty years of anti-government propaganda and deregulatory chaos, so we set our government to work passing laws to address the problems.
That was then, this is now. South Carolina republican senator Lindsey Graham worked on a climate-change bill for months before pronouncing it hopeless. And now, in July’s last week, legislation to reduce climate-warming greenhouse gases from fossil fuels implodes in the Senate, derailing the year’s top environmental goal. Not even this disastrous blowout could create a national consensus to move America off dirty fossil fuels and into clean, eternal energy.
Lois Capps, now a Democratic congresswoman representing Santa Barbara and the central coast, was a young stay-at-home mother in 1969. She reminds us that Gaylord Nelson’s speech came eight months after the January 1969 blowout. The resulting Earth Day didn’t happen until April 1970. Not until 1981 did Congress impose a ban on offshore drilling along most of the nation’s coastal waters, an action rooted in the memories of the Santa Barbara spill, more than a decade earlier. (That