A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [111]
Agreed, but it’s now been 40 years—14,600 nights—and we still don’t have a clean, eternal-energy economy. My friend Sarah Chasis, who started working at the Natural Resources Defense Council while I was still a college undergrad, says, “I think we’re going to see a really significant response to what happened in the Gulf play out over time. I think it’s going to affect people’s thinking and the way they approach issues for a long time.”
I’d like to think so. An Associated Press poll in June 2010 found that 72 percent of Americans rate the environment as “extremely important” or “very important,” up from 64 percent in May and 59 percent in April. But that’s the problem. We care when it’s headlined, but it’s toast when it’s redlined.
We’re better than we were in 1969 on important issues like civil rights, women’s equality, even on the environment. But that’s mainly because of what was accomplished then. Since then, we’ve increasingly given our economy and our government to the kinds of people who care more about themselves than they do about our economy or our government. They’ve stagnated our energy policy, shipped our manufacturing jobs overseas, and racked up enormous national debt. Why? What was accomplished for America? Mainly, very rich people became extremely rich. Which would be fine, but the widening gap in the middle is very harmful to most Americans. And that gap is where moderation would lie, and from where a sane, enduring, future-forward energy policy would emerge. Thoughtful planning doesn’t come from people who think only of themselves and only of today, traits shared by both the needy and the greedy.
In the deep earth’s wings, the relief wells continue grinding along toward their seven-inch target, the intention still being to “kill” the well at its bottom.
On July 22, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reopens commercial and recreational fishing in 26,388 square miles of Gulf waters, or about one-third of the 83,927 square miles of Gulf of Mexico federal waters that had been closed to commercial and recreational fishing—which itself had been over a third of all of the Gulf of Mexico federal waters.
Fishing means seafood means consumer confidence. So to rebuild consumer confidence, the government hires people to sniff seafood for oil. We’re told the sniffers’ identities will be kept secret to prevent harassment. That seems ludicrous, but then again, this is the blowout. So only the nose knows.
Inanity 101: A professor shows us how to sniff seafood: “Take small bunny sniffs,” she says. No, really.
After the first clean samples, the professor demonstrates with a bowl of shrimp intentionally tainted with a small amount of ammonia. One small bunny sniff, and the verdict?
“It’s pungent and putrid. It smells bad. Eww.”
Well, you put ammonia in it. You didn’t even put actual petroleum in it.
“I didn’t want to use the actual oil with some of the volatile hydrocarbons that are in there just, you know, for safety purposes.”
Oh, puleeez! We who run our lives with gasoline and heat our homes with oil and methane and propane will have our safety compromised by a bunny whiff of oil? We live in the stuff.
The whole idea of sniffing as a test of seafood safety seems iffy. But a deputy from NOAA seeks to reassure us by saying, “If you think about your ability to detect something in your refrigerator, if it has an off odor, you can detect it at very, very low levels.”
So scientific. Don’t you feel confident now?
We’re told that if the sniffers don’t find oil, the samples they’ve sniffed will get chemically analyzed. I hope so, because I have zero confidence in sniffing as a way to ensure the safety of massive quantities of seafood.
And get this: we’re told that the sniffers will “detect whether a sample is normal by testing it against a baseline of seafood caught before the spill.” In other words, seafood that’s been frozen for more than three months will be sniff-compared