A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [49]
On May 19, Interior Secretary Salazar announces that he’s dividing the disgraced Minerals Management Service into three units. One might say he’s dispersing the agency. The agency had been created by Ronald Reagan’s infamous Interior secretary James Watt. That explains some things. The current agency’s three missions—energy development, enforcement, and revenue collection—“are conflicting missions and must be separated,” Salazar says. Applause. No more sex, drugs, and rock-and-oil. In a few days the agency’s chief will quit under pressure.
The agency has been collecting royalties from the companies it regulates. That lowers the incentive for strict safety oversight. The new idea: there’ll be a Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (this one will inspect oil rigs and enforce regulations), a Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (this one will oversee offshore drilling leasing and development), and an Office of Natural Resources Revenue (to collect the billions of dollars in royalties from mining and drilling companies extracting resources from American territory).
In Grand Isle and Barataria Bay, Louisiana, hideously oiled gulls and pelicans struggle to keep the life they’ll lose. Parent birds have brought to their eggs coatings of oil, blocking oxygen from entering the shell. Chicks that manage to hatch will know only a short life on the gummy surface of a petroleum-coated planet. Behind the lines of useless boom, oil coats the marsh cane.
“It took hundreds of years to create this,” one fisherman says, low-balling the time required by about six thousand years. “And it’s gone just like that.”
Meanwhile, President Obama announces that automakers must meet a minimum fuel-efficiency standard of 35.5 miles a gallon by 2016. Savings over the five-year phase-in: 1.8 billion barrels of oil. That means saving a million barrels of oil daily, about seventeen times faster than it’s leaking from the blowout.
Gulf breezes smell of oil. Marshes smell of oil. And “All systems are go” for the seventy-fifth annual Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival. Says the festival’s director, “We will honor the two industries as we always do.”
On May 24 in Port Fourchon, Louisiana, seven Greenpeace members board the ship Harvey Explorer that’s heading north in July to support drilling operations in the Arctic. In oil from the blowout, they write, “Is the Arctic Next?” on the hull. They’re all charged with felonies.
No one from BP, Transocean, or anyone else has been charged with anything. That’s our government Bullying People. (It’ll take about three months for the squeaky wheels of justice to dismiss the charges.)
A house divided: Coast Guard admiral Thad Allen says on May 23 that BP’s access to the mile-deep well means the government could not take the lead to stop the leak. Yet a few hours later outside BP’s Houston headquarters, a tough-talking Interior secretary Salazar (who early in the crisis vowed to “keep the boot on the neck” of BP) says, “If we find they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, we’ll push them out of the way.” This prompts the Thadmiral to wonder out loud to reporters, “To push BP out of the way would raise the question of, ‘replace them with what?’ ” He adds, “They have the eyes and ears that are down there.”
Okay, at least now he’s pretty much acknowledged who’s really in charge. Fact is, the government, as the Christian Science Monitor puts it, is “incapable of taking over from BP at the wellhead and unwilling to displace the web of contractors leading the cleanup at BP’s behest.”
Allen remarks about BP, “They are necessarily the modality by which this is going to get solved.”
In my experience, people who use the word “modality” never quite get to the point.
He gets to the point: “They’re exhausting every technical means possible to deal with that leak. I am satisfied with the coordination that’s going on.