A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [66]
The depth of 2009’s global recession sent global energy consumption down for the first time in twenty-seven years, but only by 1 percent. In the same year, China’s carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels rose by 9 percent. Global wind and solar generation rose by about 30 percent and 45 percent, respectively, enormous gains. Who says? A BP energy report says. The world’s oil reserves (including yet-to-be-developed Canadian “tar sands”) appear sufficient to last—at 2009 production rates—for forty-five years; gas will last about sixty-five years, and coal will last 120 years. After that, what? Do you or does someone you love plan to be alive forty-five years from now? This is our wake-up call. Don’t touch that snooze button.
By mid-June the cap is ferrying about 10,000 barrels of oil a day up to a tanker on the surface. The well is leaking much more than that.
Revisiting the basic question: How much oil? A team of researchers and government officials is finally studying the flow rate. Team member and Purdue University professor Steve Wereley says it’s probably somewhere between 798,000 and 1.8 million gallons—roughly 20,000 to 40,000 barrels—daily. He says, “BP is claiming they’re capturing the majority of the flow, which I think is going to be proven wrong in short order.”
Meanwhile, at the start of the second week of June, the tide begins leaving a splattering of oil blobs on Florida Panhandle beaches, from Perdido to Pensacola. Signs warn: Don’t swim. Don’t wade. Avoid skin contact with oily water. Avoid dead sea animals. Notes one: “Young children, pregnant women, people with compromised immune systems and individuals with underlying respiratory conditions should avoid the area.”
Some people are in the water anyway. I wouldn’t want to get in where I can see a sheen, but it’s probably not very toxic in small amounts for short intervals.
Tourism, though, has been completely poisoned. In Mississippi, Governor Haley Barbour angrily blames the news media for scaring away tourists and making it seem as if “the whole coast from Florida to Texas is ankle-deep in oil.”
The fact is, he’s right; it isn’t the same everywhere. As Thad Allen intones, “We’re dealing with an aggregation of hundreds of thousands of patches of oil that are going a lot of different directions. It’s the breadth and complexity of the disaggregation of the oil that is now posing the greatest clean-up challenge.” And so, some places are ankle-deep and some, barely freckled.
Pensacola Beach, Santa Rosa Island, Florida. The sand here makes the “white” sand back home on Long Island seem battleship gray. In bright sun it can be blinding. Workers have picked up the day’s dark tar balls. Mostly.
High-rise hotels and condos loom over the low-slung beach. They shimmer in the sunset. A huge restaurant with a huge fake crab is overbuilt and tacky. The whole place is not my cup of tea. But it’s not my home.
Listen to people whose home it is: “So, this is Santa Rosa Sound,” she says, as if presenting it as a gift. “Really precious.” Then, almost under her breath: “I don’t know, it may be twenty years before it ever looks like this again. The oil’s just a few miles offshore. Oh look—a dolphin.” A moment’s silence, then: “There’s no plan to help the dolphins.”
The evening breeze is still warm enough to raise a sweat. The clouds paint with pastels. A guy with a floppy hat, a waddling walk, arrives, sighs, “I’d like to take one last look at my heaven.”
BP’s full-page ad promises to invalidate their fears. “We Will Make This Right,” it announces, projecting confidence. But just below the horizon, flying under the radar, on everyone’s minds, on their nerves: oil blobs stalk.
At public faucets, moms rinse sand from kids’ toes. News vans, their satellite dishes turned to heaven as if in prayer, stand like military hardware on the eve of invasion. Ready to report attack. We breathe the parked vans’ continuous