The Oil Disaster
I’ve spent a lot of time consuming information, updates and coverage of the BP oil disaster. I haven’t written about it because I’ve had trouble synthesizing all of the information while trying to establish a perspective on what it all means. It’s easy to politicize the disaster by blaming Cheney, Bush, or Obama. It’s our natural reaction to demand that the President “show more emotion” or to advocate for the cockamamie solution of the day (like big vacuums or Russian nukes) or to just get angry. After all, none of us know shit about how to stop the leak, comprehend the physics involved with capping a spewing wellhead 5,000 feet under the ocean, understand the implications of putting BP into temporary receivership, or know whether or not any of the solutions proffered by political pundits on panel shows merit serious consideration.
Instead, like many of you, I’m left feeling an impotent kind of rage, a constant horrible feeling of sad resignation that our country will never again be quite the same.
I keep thinking that this event should be a clarion call for us to realize the cost of our lifestyles, public policy, and the danger of our corporatist government. It is troubling to watch a President and a nation humbled at the feet of British Petroleum. We’ve ceded control of both the immediate fix to the continual stream of oil into our waters and the cleanup operation to a foreign corporation. The failure of our response is predicated on the choices we’ve made as a people, the things we value, the way we live…not because the President is too deliberative or indecisive. He’s struggling to respond because we’ve limited his set of choices.
Every component of the BP response is done with an eye on limiting their long term liability, protecting their shareholders, managing their public image and their ultimate corporate survival. This isn’t news, BP is a corporation and the job of the CEO and Board of Directors is to do just that. I’m sure if they had a fix, they would implement it as that would certainly help their efforts to protect shareholder value. Unfortunately, they have created a disaster that may be remembered on the same level as Chernobyl or Bhopal and it will be incredibly difficult for them to ever return to their previous status.
The part I think we’re leaving out of the equation in our national discussion of this disaster is our ownership of it. It’s also in the interest of our government to help BP limit their liability and protect their shareholders; maybe that’s the tough truth we’re all having so much trouble coming to terms with.
We need oil and we need a lot of it. We need it cheap, we need it now and we need it to subsidize the past 50 years of sprawl and our demand for cheap products and convenience. Oil companies know that they have the upper hand in this relationship, they know that we’re smack addicts who need their product in order to function. It’s why we deregulate their operations and only provide limited oversight of their operations, it’s why we’ve let them subsidize the risk of their drilling operations while maximizing their profit, why we let them increase the risk and drill further and further from shore without preparing tested contingency plans for disaster.
We’re not prepared for a future without cheap oil and our foreign policy agenda, national economic priorities, energy policy, and domestic policy choices are based on maintaining access to it. BP is a global corporate powerhouse with drilling rigs, refineries and distribution points in nearly every nation of interest on the planet. They provide gas and oil to our military and their fuel powers the ships which bring us the food and goods we buy everyday. Their oil goes into the plastics we use and powers the machines in our own factories. Every single step of our production and consumption cycle is influenced by the availability and price of oil. BP (and the other major oil companies) hold significant power with our allies and enemies alike, they are essentially treated with the gravitas of an actual country. Upsetting the global balance of oil can have long term ramifications on our ability to borrow, negotiate, or leverage relationships in our continual two front war and the maintenance of our empire.
Faced with that knowledge and an understanding that there is a limited number of oil companies which have the ability to deliver us this most basic societal and economic necessity, it’s in the best interest of the President to be measured in his response to the crisis. As a nation we are limited in how we can respond, the greatest nation the world has ever known, humbled and subservient to our own need for oil and the companies which provide it.
This, this is what saddens me the most.
and yet, I see that recent polls show that even in Louisiana, support for more offshore drilling remains quite high.
This country is due for a big surprise; I only hope it doesn’t end in fascism here and all the elites off sailing the seas in their giant, Libertarian, Pay-Pal financed country-boat-flotilla.
Chris….great post!
It was my hope that Obama’s speech last night would create a resonating theme to inspire us as a nation that the time has come to start taking our dependence on oil seriously and that we need an alternative way…he almost got there.
The country needs to put politics aside and realize that we are our own enemies in the fight to change our fossil fuel habits.
Chris,
Thank you for the well-written, balanced post on this rather excruciating topic. I too have struggled while trying to grasp all of the important facts and history as I attempt to keep any unfair and uninformed finger-pointing tendencies in check. It’s not easy to do either one of those things.
I’d like to link to this post on my own blog, if you don’t mind. Lately I’ve avoided thinking about this topic because it can trigger a spiral of helpless thinking. When that happens I start to wonder why I bother, if the oil is ever going to stop spewing into the ocean, if this is completely irreversible. But if we the people have caused the problem, perhaps we the people can fix it. We have to demand better. No one else can or will.
[...] …read this. [...]
You beat me to the punch on the topic – great ideas, and similar to mine that have been floating around – I wish I could be nonpartisan on this, but it really bugs me when Obama says things in his speech like “we will” respond to the disaster, instead of “we are.” Like the stupid thing hasn’t been leaking for 50 whatever days. There are too many stories of fishermen sitting around LA asking what to do, or getting paid to do nothing, for me not to vent anger at specific places. Someone will ask why I don’t get mad at BP? Because as you said, they are just pushing the product – we are the one’s who chose to become addicted.
What does it mean that a President that ran on Hope now has a message that their are limits to optimism, limits to capability, and limits to power? That’s an honest question. Is this the defining moment of the Obama presidency that turns him from idealist to pragmatist? He has a problem he can’t solve, and maybe for the first time in his life, he is ineffective and sucking.
The BP Horizon was permitted to be built in a place and in a way that would specifically contribute to this catastrophe. Apparently, the technology to safely drill at that depth is either inadequate, or simple methods to prevent this sort of catastrophe were eschewed because (1) they weren’t mandated; and (2) they cost a few bucks.
So to assail Obama on hope and change is beyond being beside the point. I mean, if, as depicted in your last sentence, Obama can’t solve the problem, how exactly is he supposed to be effective and not suck?
There’s a corollary story that Chris doesn’t touch on because he doesn’t try to politicize his post beyond talking about corporate America’s control over our lives, as well as the power that oil consumption needs have on our economy. That has to do with the clamor from many who detest Obama and his supposed communism who all of a sudden have a burning need for the government to solve their problems.
I know that anti-Obama partisans are trying very hard to gain momentum for the “Obama’s Katrina” meme, but the problem there is that it is a man-made disaster. How many times has the right beat the drum that government is never the solution to our problems – it is the problem. It’s the entire foundation of modern Reaganist conservatism, such as it still exists (which I don’t think it has since Bush 1 left office, but that’s a different story). The corollary to that is that every one of our problems can be solved by private business, private entrepreneurship, free market initiative, so long as government would just get out of the way.
How fascinating to have the anti-Obama right clamor for a governmental response to an environmental disaster. It’s practically the bizarro world in that contemporary Palinist Republicans suddenly give a shit about the environment! About ecological disaster! They want – nay demand governmental action and swift response!
That rank hypocrisy is so very telling, and every time a Republican starts demanding that Obama – that the government – do more, that needs to be thrown directly back in their face because it fundamentally rebuts their entire contemporary ethos.
Well, for the same reasons we protected New Orleans from flooding with ancient levee technology, the US isn’t good on the whole long-run planning thing, and we never have been.
That’s why it’s beyond critical to start finding other sources of energy to power this country. Renewable sources, cleaner sources, sources that don’t make us dependent on foreign corporations or foreign states.
So to blame Obama is just idiotic.
We ourselves are to blame.
So if the Reagan conservative who thinks gov’t is the problem, not the solution, hasn’t been ascendant since Bush 1, why do you keep throwing it out as a strawman, Alan?
You’re absolutely right: The right, corporatist jerks they are, demand gov’t when it suits them. You can see that in the FACT that they (the Republicans!) actually INCREASED the size of the regulatory state every year under Bush. It’s simply a reflection of what we who don’t subscribe to the current 2-party system have been bitching about for years: Dem and Repub, two sides of the same frigging corporatist coin!
You rip on “glibertarians” because, to you, their solutions seem simplistic or cruel or just plain wrong. But in a libertarian world, “deregulation” wouldn’t matter because the companies doing the work would be solely liable for what they do! BP would (a) not be drilling in such deep water and (b) not being cheap-asses because they couldn’t afford not to.
The fact is that the regulations we have are, always have been, and ALWAYS WILL BE bought by the industries being regulated. This has been demonstrated over and over again, and dreaming that if we could just get the “right” people / regulations in place that all would be well is wishful at best.
Republicans don’t have an ideology right now other than getting their own buddies elected. Hypocrisy? Nonsense. It’s not their “entire contemporary ethos” – it’s a strawman you keep on building up and knocking down.
Fantastic post, Chris. I think you sum it up for all of us. We’ve been irresponsible as a nation for a very long time and it’s coming back to bite us in the ass. I’ve blamed BP in a couple of FB posts, but really, until we change the way we live our lives, nothing will change.
I am cautiously optimistic that the centrifuge created by Kevin Costner and his company will at least aide in the fight to clean the water and keep more oil from spreading.
As always, thanks for your intelligent, enlightened thoughts.
As a biologist, my heart is breaking for the entire ecosystem that comprises the Gulf of Mexico, both land and water. The devastation of plants and animals is going to be profound. Chris, you compared this incident to Chernobyl, aptly so, but the effects of this disaster will be much more far reaching. This event has the possibility to wipe out entire species of life. Most importantly, and most susceptible to the oil are the things that are too small to see that are the basis of the entire food web of the Gulf. If you take this foundation out, everything above will begin to crumble. The oil might be cleaned up in a few years, but it’s effects will last forever. The scariest part to me is the possibility for genetic mutation caused by longterm exposure to the dispersed oil underwater. We can’t see it, we don’t know where it is, and we probably shouldn’t be letting them use the dispersants. If the oil were to float to the top we could deal with it. Instead they are emulsifying it as it leaves the wellhead and it is staying mixed in the seawater reeking havoc on life. Even though we can’t see it, I assure you it is still there, and having a grave effect on underwater life, and that could spell disaster on a scale that has never been seen before. Chernobyl was a catastrophe, but it was also isolated. This oil is filling the Gulf, and is poised to make a turn around Florida and into the Gulf Stream. People think it’s horrible now, just wait to oil starts washing up on the East Coast along with other types of sea life…This is going to be the biggest man made disaster ever on the planet, if it isn’t already.
Sadness and helplessness are the only things I can feel at this point because of all the unknowns and intangibles. All so we “can get to work on time.”
$500,000 of prevention is worth billions of cure.
[...] a more political note, I urge you to go read Chris Smith’s post on Western New York Media. It’s a well-balanced view of the disaster, the events leading up [...]
[...] Chris Smith did a great column on the impotent rage the average American feels, and the sense of loss and lack of control. Imagine if you were the President. You can arm twist BP into creating a $20B fund for damages. But you can’t stop the damages in the first place. For the first time in your life, you have encountered a problem you can’t solve. [...]
I haven’t seen a good explanation of why oil-eating bacteria aren’t being considered/wouldn’t work. Anything you’ve run across in your wide reading?
Fuck BP. Their own short-term greed and mismanagement is what led to them drilling in the wrong place and cutting so many corners on the rig itself.
As long as we keep worshiping the god of profit, mega-disasters like this will keep coming. The profit motive is no longer a safe, sane or adequate way of managing the world’s resources.
Also, it’s real easy to cop out and blame this spill on “the people” for being addicted to oil. The average person is too worked to death and dumbed down by the idiot tube in order to think for themselves and realize the only path to a better world is to evolve beyond the stultifying limitations of the mindless consume-consume-consume paradigm. People largely act like sheep and do what they’re told and stick to the script they were conditioned into. It’s really up to the leaders to steer the ship back on course. Seeing that most of the boyz up on the bridge are shit drunk at the helm, I have very little confidence anything will change until a major global economic and ecological meltdown kills enough people for the rest of us to finally wake the fuck up.
Despite all of this, I do have a dream that maybe someday we will finally evolve into a mature, scientific-minded, peace-loving civilization that deserves all this wonderful planet has to offer.
[...] I wrote last week, we all own a share of this tragedy. Let me break it down by the numbers for [...]
[...] did a good job of diagnosing the sense of anger that the ongoing BP disaster inspires in people. Unfortunately, that anger is being wasted in [...]