It’s Rigged

“It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.” President Obama on April 2^nd after announcing an expansion of off-shore oil exploration. “After a similarly unrelenting spill from an oil rig near Australia last year, oil companies went before Congress and promised that this couldn’t happen here in America. In September, David Rainey of BP [British Petroleum] testified before the Senate that their offshore technology was ‘safe and reliable.’ He pledged that ‘any release from our operations is unacceptable.’ Eight months later, the Coast Guard has set the ocean on fire in an unsuccessful bid to stop the spread of BP’s oil in the Gulf.” FastCompany.com (May 3^rd).

Try these recent “exciting moments in energy exploration” as well: “A $60 million project to extract renewable energy from the hot bedrock deep beneath Basel, Switzerland, was shut down permanently on Thursday after a government study determined that earthquakes generated by the project were likely to do millions of dollars in damage each year.” New York Times, December 10, 2009. “The company in charge of a California project to extract vast amounts of renewable energy from deep, hot bedrock has removed its drill rig and informed federal officials that the government project will be abandoned.” New York Times, December 11, 2009. It was right in the middle of California earthquake country, which made the project to viable (the cracks in the surface made it easier for heat to rise from the earth’s core).

Add this story from the January 10, 2009 Time Magazine: “The ‘clean coal’ campaign was always more PR than reality — currently there's no economical way to capture and sequester carbon emissions from coal, and many experts doubt there ever will be. But now the idea of clean coal might be truly dead, buried beneath the 1.1 billion gallons of water mixed with toxic coal ash that on Dec. 22 [2008] burst through a dike next to the Kingston coal plant in the Tennessee Valley and blanketed several hundred acres of land, destroying nearby houses. The accident — which released 100 times more waste than the Exxon Valdez disaster — has polluted the waterways of Harriman, Tenn., with potentially dangerous levels of toxic metals like arsenic and mercury, and left much of the town uninhabitable.”

Mother’s Day approaches, but one mom – Mother Nature – is pretty much not in a celebrating mood, at least not as far as her children’s attempt to extract energy from her bounteous body. The U.S. government temporarily halted – as best they could – off-shore oil drilling, called for a moratorium on new off-shore drilling, and set a 10 day ban on recreational and commercial fishing from Pensacola, Florida to the Mississippi Delta. Eleven oil-workers are still missing and unaccounted for and more than 200,000 gallons of oil leak into the Gulf each day. The President labeled the Gulf oil rig (BP’s Deepwater Horizon, located about 50 miles off-shore) explosion and ensuing environmental havoc “a massive and potentially unprecedented environmental disaster.” Wildlife was destroyed in incalculable numbers, the stench of the floating body of oil enveloped the region, the entire Gulf fishing industry may be so decimated that it is no longer commercially viable and miles of coastline may suffer long-term if not permanent damage, wreaking havoc on real estate values and tourism alike. It was Katrina, part two, in the Gulf.

While BP is taking full responsibility for the cost of cleaning up damage, BP CEO Tony Hayward cast the real blame for the explosion with a Swiss company – Transocean Ltd. – which owns the giant Deepwater Horizon platform that BP leased. The process to seal the hole that is spewing oil is painfully difficult: “Officials from the Obama administration and oil giant BP say it may take up to three months to seal off a leaking oil well 5,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico ... Hayward said [on May 3^rd] that ‘the worst-case scenario is that we would need to contain this for two to three months whilst a relief well is drilled.’” Washington Post, May 3^rd. A safety valve – known in the industry as a “blow-out preventer” – failed. President Obama, obviously remembering the slow-to-react federal response to the after-effect of Hurricane Katrina, pledged: “We're going to do everything in our power to protect our natural resources to compensate those who have been harmed… to rebuild what has been damaged and help this region persevere like it has done so many times before.”

Is our quest for energy turning us into heroin addicts willing to do anything for a fix? Picture Gulf shrimpers sitting on the docks, for months and maybe years if the shrimp have been killed, unable to work, idle and frustrated… waiting for someone to process their financial claims while their livelihood has come to an abrupt halt. Imagine a seagull in a death struggle enmeshed in a gooey mess or brown-black fish carcasses floating lifeless in an ocean of sludge. Clean coal and safe off-shore drilling are two expressions that really need to be purged from the lexicon.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am deeply saddened by it all.