A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [116]
ExxonMobil said in 2009 that it would invest $600 million over the next few years to produce algae fuels comparable to fuels refined from conventional crude oil. So the tiny organisms that produce petroleum may be the liquid fuel of the future—without us having to wait, say, 300 million years.
Sounds good. Why aren’t we rushing to do this? Why isn’t this a national priority?
For a very short course on oil’s influence in Louisiana politics, meet Professor Oliver Houck. In a Tulane University Law School office with well-stocked bookshelves and a small aquarium, the floor piled with documents organized for a new book he’s writing, Houck sits back casually in his swivel chair.
He sees Louisiana as a petro-state, its petro-dictators propped up by oil money spread across parties. No candidate can really stand up against oil and gas. Louisiana, in too deep, is stuck.
Houck notes, “There’s a kind of toilet mentality in states where resources are abundant. There’s no ethic of conserving. In a timber state, the feeling is there’s nothing wrong with clear-cutting. In Wyoming, it’s a crime to say something bad about coal. In Texas, you can’t say something about beef. Florida’s never been oil-dependent; it’s dependent on white-sand beaches. Oil impregnated Louisiana politics a long time ago.”
But we are a union of fifty states. Nationwide, might this blowout eventually change the mood on energy?
“In the people, yes. In Congress, no. And there’s no connection. Nationally there’s a feeling of being fed up with oil; that the oil companies can’t be trusted. I think the people would strongly support an energy bill that would go far beyond anything now in Congress. But they’re not passionate about it. So members of Congress don’t fear getting tossed out by voters based on their record on energy. And in Louisiana we have two of the most sorry-ass senators in Congress. They’re hacks. But they’re hacks with enormous power, because whatever party is in the majority is there by just a razor-thin margin. So suddenly they’re swing hacks with enormous influence.”
You will not be surprised to learn that Louisiana’s congressional representatives have tried to get rid of Houck and this law clinic. “The only reason I’m not gone,” Houck explains, “is that I’m at a private university.”
On TV, Congressman Ed Markey is complaining that the oil companies “basically owned and operated their regulator but [the blowout] will catalyze Congress to create legislation to end this. We cannot continue to allow their cozy complacency between regulator and regulated.” It’s so much worse than he says. Oil companies basically own the whole Gulf region.
Republican tea-bagging superstar and knucklehead Senator Jim DeMint is putting a hold on a bill that would let the commission investigating the blowout subpoena needed information. DeMint says, “When Obama says, ‘Yes we can,’ we’ll say, ‘No you won’t.’ ” He doesn’t care “what,” only “not.” DeMint appears to be doing his personal best to “shrink government,” and government could hardly get smaller than having senators like him. When men like him cast large shadows, it must be pretty late in the day.
When a certain tugboat captain—a man I’ve known for several years—comes ashore after an extended stay in the waters of the open Gulf, he’s got a few frustrations to relay.
“We were never given a big-picture speech about what we were all trying to accomplish,” he says, “where we each fit in. It was just, like, Okay, go out to here and drive around for a while.”
“Nobody really knew what they’re doing,” he continues. “It was very half-assed. The guy in charge of our task force, he’s a nice guy, but he was lost. He’s got all these shrimp boats and charter boats, and we tried to organize them into search patterns so we could know what we did. We said to the guy, ‘Do you want us to give these boats courses and legs to run searches