A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [23]
Right again. Greenpeace: “Is this President Obama’s clean energy plan or Sarah Palin’s?” The envirogroup Center for Biological Diversity says, “All too typical of what we have seen so far from President Obama—promises of change and ultimately, adoption of flawed and outdated Bush policies.” Republican congressman John Boehner slams the president anyway for not going far enough; he wants to give Big Oil more access. Piling on from the opposite side, Democratic senator Frank Lautenberg rails, “Giving Big Oil more access to our nation’s waters is really a ‘kill, baby, kill’ policy: it threatens to kill jobs, kill marine life, and kill coastal economies that generate billions of dollars. Offshore drilling isn’t the solution to our energy problems. I will fight this policy and continue to push for twenty-first-century clean energy solutions.”
Obama says his policy is “part of a broader strategy that will move us from an economy that runs on fossil fuels and foreign oil to one that relies more on homegrown fuels and clean energy.” And that’s exactly what’s needed. But other pieces of the strategy are not in place; Congress isn’t into clean energy. So Obama’s nuance is lost on everyone. The public impression will cost Obama’s administration the moral high ground, and will seem to translate—another impression, admittedly—into weeks of lost momentum and lagging leadership after the rig explosion.
Who likes Obama’s announcement? Why, it’s Obama’s former opponent for the presidency, Senator John McCain, who Twitters, “Drill baby drill! Good move.”
And it doesn’t exactly sound like pandering to enviros when White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says that sometimes accidents happen; loss of the Deepwater Horizon is no reason to back off the president’s recent decision to expand offshore drilling.
Yet that face-saving will turn butt-biting.
And this from rig owner Transocean itself: “The U.S. Coast Guard has plans in place to mitigate any environmental impact from this situation.” The world’s largest offshore drilling contractor, with a fleet of 140 mobile offshore drilling units, seemingly sees scant need to further trouble itself. And well owner BP says, “We are working closely with BP Exploration & Production, Inc. and the U.S. Coast Guard to determine the impact from the sinking of the rig and the plans going forward.”
Between that line and this one, you can read the following: they have no response plan; they’re unprepared and have no real idea of what to do.
The Coast Guard searches for the lost men. They’ll keep searching “as long as there is a reasonable probability of finding them alive.” There was never a reasonable probability of additional survivors, and the horror of eleven killed begins to sink in.
Rear Admiral Mary Landry’s statement that there’s “no apparent leak” notwithstanding, leaking it is. First estimate: 1,000 barrels per day (a barrel is 42 gallons, so 42,000 gallons). The Macondo well’s oil is not leaking from the wellhead, or from the blowout preventer. It’s leaking from the former umbilicus between rig and well, a kinked pipe broken off when the rig sank, now lying mangled on the seafloor one mile down. The only shard of luck—if that term applies here—is that the hulking mass of the drilling rig itself did not land atop the wellhead, blocking all access to it.
A remotely operated vehicle is sent to shut the leak at the blowout preventer.
Fails.
A few days ago, the gushing oil was termed “manageable.” Now BP executives say at least two to four weeks to get it under control. We don’t hear them say “at least.” We still can’t believe the phrase “four weeks.” (That estimate, too, will get several resets. Four months from now, we’ll wish it had been “four weeks.”) Ideas, anyone?
I did not want to come to the Gulf. It seemed like a good situation to avoid. But I also don’t feel that the information I’m getting from officials and the news media