A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [74]
My camera loads image upon image to its buffer before I give it a chance to save. Maybe I can get it all, take it all out of the ocean.
Corey’s had my headset turned off while he’s been talking to planes and air-traffic control. He hits a button and says to me, “A photo makes it look like one area. Until you get up here and see that it’s as far as you can see in all directions. You can’t get that in a picture.”
Picture that.
At 12:15 P.M. more or less, we’re back over the shoreline. Thick blobs near the shore. Waves lap darkly. The beach is stained. The emerald marsh, bordered black.
But only bordered. I sense the marshes’ restorative power. Nature hurls hurricanes, droughts followed by floods, diseases, famine. But in the long haul—and this will require time—nature is what can get us out of the trouble we keep getting ourselves into. They call it Mother because, though she can punish, she’s why we’re here in the first place. She’s the hope we have while we’re so hopelessly juvenile.
As the heat of June soars, anger mounts over the Obama administration’s recently declared six-month moratorium on exploratory deepwater drilling. The president is in a no-win spot, with people both demanding that he do more and condemning him for what he is doing. The goal was to give the government time to review the rules for oversight of such wells. Many Americans horrified by the blowout welcomed the shutdown.
But here, the moratorium on new drilling is deeply unpopular. Various people are calling it things like “a death blow to Louisiana” that “has and will continue to destroy tens of thousands of lives,” creating “an economic ripple effect that will be catastrophic to our entire region.”
Those working in the petroleum industry see the moratorium as a bigger threat than the spewing oil. Many of the affected rigs will seek to drill in other countries, imperiling an estimated 800 to 1,400 jobs per rig, including third-party support personnel. As many as 50,000 jobs may be affected, though the industry and Louisiana’s elected officials provide the highest estimates.
“From 1947 until 2009, there were 42,000 wells drilled in state and federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico and 99 days ago one of them blew up,” rages Democratic senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. “But no matter how horrible that is, you don’t shut down the entire industry.” She says that a temporary ban on drilling, even if it lasted for only a few months, could affect as many as 330,000 people in just Louisiana.
I’m not downplaying the dilemma here, but I don’t trust her numbers or her hyperbole. The Louisiana Economic Development department estimates that the six-month moratorium will cause the loss of up to 10,000 jobs within a few months. State figures show that the area’s whole oil and gas industry—not just the deep exploratory drilling that is temporarily banned—supports 320,000 jobs, $12.7 billion in wages, and $70.2 billion in business sales.
To the industry, its supporters, and its congressional backers and lobbyists, a moratorium doesn’t make sense when more than 30,000 other wells have been drilled in U.S. waters, 700 of which are as deep as or deeper than the one the Deepwater Horizon was drilling. And they argue that the incentives are already there to avoid the fate of this ill-fated well; no one wants the kind of mess BP now has all over its hands. One rig worker says, “For us to stop drilling in the Gulf is like ending our lives as far as the way we live. It’s really that scary.” That’s what fishermen say about their inability to keep fishing. (The administration will lift the drilling moratorium on October 12.)
President Obama signals what might be the first inflection point from unmitigated disaster to silver linings. It’s part rhetoric, part counter-balance to the panic. He promises, “Things are going to return to normal.” Not only that, but: “I am confident that we’re going to be able to leave the Gulf Coast in better shape than it was before.” He declares seafood from