A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [41]
But we’ve only just begun.
When Obama announced that he was opening up large new areas for offshore drilling, he said, “Oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.” That’s exactly right. Leaks, spills, and blowouts are never expected. Yet we know they happen. That should make us thorough in preparedness. But the human mind lets down its guard if big danger seems rare and remote.
And so we did. In 2009, the Interior Department exempted BP’s Gulf of Mexico drilling operations from a detailed environmental impact analysis after three reviews concluded that a massive oil spill was “unlikely.” Oil rig operators usually must submit a plan for how they’ll cope with a blowout. But in 2008, the Bush administration relaxed the rules. In 2009, the Obama administration said BP didn’t need to file a plan for how it would handle a blowout at the Deepwater Horizon. Now a BP spokesman insists, “We have a plan that has sufficient detail in it to deal with a blowout.”
Obviously, they don’t. Obviously, they aren’t.
“I’m of the opinion that boosterism breeds complacency and complacency breeds disaster,” says Congressman Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts. “That, in my opinion, is what happened.” Bush and Cheney’s ties to big oil and their destruction of Interior oversight are infamous. But Obama’s Interior secretary’s ties to big energy also make environmentalists uneasy. As a senator from Colorado, Ken Salazar accepted some of BP’s ubiquitous campaign contributions. In
2005, Senator Salazar voted against increasing fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks, and voted against an amendment to repeal tax breaks for ExxonMobil and other major petroleum companies. In he voted to expand Gulf of Mexico drilling. And then as Interior secretary, he pushed for more offshore drilling. The Interior secretary now says there have been well more than 30,000 wells drilled into the Gulf of Mexico, “and so this is a very, very rare event.” The oil from those offshore rigs accounts for 30 percent of the nation’s domestic oil production, he notes, adding, “And so for us to turn off those spigots would have a very, very huge impact on America’s economy right now.”
Probability, however, tells us that the spill’s a very, very inevitable event. Especially with 30,000 wells drilled and roughly 4,000 wells currently producing oil in the region. In 2007, the federal Minerals Management Service examined 39 rig blowouts that occurred in the Gulf of Mexico between 1992 and 2006. So a blowout every four and a half months. I guess most are quickly controlled. Why aren’t we ready for one that isn’t? A car accident is a rare event, but we use our seat belts and we like to know we have air bags.
Rather than plan for the worst, Big Petroleum has indulged in—and been indulged by—a policy of waving away risks. In a 2009 exploration plan, BP strongly discounted the possibility of a catastrophic accident. A Shell analysis for drilling off Alaska asserts that a “large liquid hydrocarbon spill [hydrocarbon meaning oil and gas] … is regarded as too remote and speculative to be considered a reasonably foreseeable impacting event.”
Foresee this: if you think it’s difficult to clean up oil in the warm, calm Gulf of Mexico, imagine trying to do it in Arctic waters with icebergs, frozen seas, and twenty hours of darkness.
Speaking of the cold and the dark, “Drill, baby, drill” queen Sarah Palin just has to say something about all this. So she says we shouldn’t trust “foreign” oil companies such as BP. She says, “Don’t naively trust—verify.” Verified: her husband worked for BP for eighteen years. Palin blames “extreme environmentalists” (c’mon, Sarah, is there any other kind?) for causing this blowout because they’ve lobbied hard to prevent new drilling in Alaska. If you follow what she has in place of logic, it could seem she’d rather that this had happened in her home state.
In and out of the comedy of horrors strides BP CEO and court jester Tony