A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [32]
“What BP’s doing is throwing absolutely everything we can at this,” says a senior vice president for the corporation.
Does that sound like a response plan or like this thing is totally out of control?
On May 2, BP begins drilling the first of those two relief wells. I say “BP begins drilling,” but actually BP doesn’t actually own any drilling equipment or do any drilling. As always, it simply hires someone else. It’s just the Big Payer. Incredibly, these relief wells are planned to go straight down to around a mile below the seafloor (two miles from the surface), then angle in toward the blowing-out well, whereupon they will hit it 13,000 feet below the seafloor—where it is seven inches in diameter. They’re capable of doing this—but they can’t stop a leaking pipe lying on the seabed.
BP says it will spend a week making a 74-ton, concrete-and-metal box to put over the leak. “It’s probably easier to fly in space than do some of this,” says a BP spokesman.
Florida’s Governor Charlie Crist says, “It’s not a spill, it’s a flow. Envision sort of an underground volcano of oil and it keeps spewing.”
Twenty or so dead sea turtles wash ashore along thirty miles in Mississippi. None with oil on them, but the number’s unusual. They could have eaten oil blobs, a frequent health problem for sea turtles. Or been overcome by fumes. Or drowned in shrimp nets. Fingers get pointed each way. Shrimpers say no way, impossible; they’re required to use turtle-escape devices in their nets. The suspicious say panicked shrimpers tied the turtle-escape flaps shut to get every last shrimp. I’m going with the shrimpers on this one. I think it was the oil. A few years ago, off South Carolina, where there had not been any spills noted, veterinarians showed me how ingesting oil suppresses turtles’ white blood cell counts, their immune system, and makes them unhealthy.
May 7. Along with the oil comes a new vocabulary of silly names for half-baked ideas. Today’s password: “dome.” Use it in a sentence: “BP has constructed a four-story containment dome intended to control and capture the largest of the leaks (yes, the pipe is leaking elsewhere, too).” But even as the dome was lowered, crews discovered that the opening was becoming clogged by an icy mix of gas and water—why didn’t the engineers foresee this?—so they set the 74-ton steel contraption down on the seabed 650 feet away from the leak, “as officials decide how to proceed.” New definition of “decide”: to scratch one’s head in wonder and confusion.
Foreseeing vast costs for cleanup and damage, investors Begin Pummeling, wiping about $30 billion off BP’s value in the first two weeks of the blowout. Outrage spreads. Momentum billows for lifting the recklessness-inducing $75 million cap on oil firms’ damage liability to a more realistic $10 billion.
It doesn’t take long to connect the most obvious dots: The Economist argues that “America’s distorted energy markets, not just its coastline, need cleaning up.” America needs a real energy policy. We need more diversified, cleaner, more competitive energy.
Easier said.
Meanwhile the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman writes that there is only one meaningful response to the horrific oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and that is for Congress to pass an energy bill that will create an American clean-energy infrastructure and set our country on a real, long-term path to ending our oil addiction. The obvious beneficiaries: our environment, our national security, our economic security, innovators, entrepreneurs. “We have to stop messing around,” writes Friedman, “with idiotic ‘drill, baby, drill’ nostrums, feel-good Earth Day concerts and the paralyzing notion that the American people are not prepared to do anything serious to change our energy mix.” He says this oil spill is like the subprime mortgage mess, a wake-up call and an opportunity to galvanize “radical change that overcomes the powerful lobbies and vested interests that want to keep us addicted to oil.”
It all sounds so obvious,