Media is No Help in Oil Disaster

I am so angry... mad, mad, mad! Observe as I stomp my feet and shake my fists at the sky. Behold my clenched teeth and the deep line between my eyebrows. See my body tremble with barely controlled rage as I let loose a long string of stream of consciousness profanity that verges on the poetic. I throw things, I break things, I jump up and down.

OK, now lets check the oil gusher in the gulf; anything change down there?

Yeah, I didn't think so. Some pundits seem to think that the biggest problem with President Obama's response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster has been a lack of visible rage. That's right, the president has been too calm in the face of a nearly unimaginable environmental catastrophe. I'm not sure if he's supposed to go down and slash at the oil slick with a samurai sword or what, but I have my doubts that Obama's rage would be any more effective than mine was. Sure, he's more powerful than I am, but I think we can all agree that believing that reality changes to match our emotional state is a belief in magic. Obama can't intimidate the well into submission by displaying his rage.

What's happening here is that pundits, having no more idea what to do than anyone else does, have to say something. Lights are on, cameras are rolling, say something. They're paid to have an opinion, regardless of whether that opinion is helpful or even makes any damned sense at all. So they do what they do -- they make stuff up. Without any polling data to back them up, they take it on themselves to tell other talking heads "what the American people want." The actual physical problem is beyond them, so they cook up a political problem that didn't previously exist. In other words punditry, you're not helping. Not that you ever do.





I'm not saying I believe that a political take on the problem is unimportant. I just think this particular political take is stupid and counterproductive. It creates an unsolvable problem; if Obama suddenly breaks into a fit of rage, they'll immediately declare it as false as it would be. If he doesn't, they'll continue this idiotic argument. Lose/lose.

Politically speaking, every crisis is an opportunity (and no, I'm not about to give you some self-help crap about Chinese characters). President Obama can lay on his back and kick his feet or he can actually do something constructive. Politically speaking, there's a disconnect between the oil in the Gulf and the gas in our tanks. Add global warming and peak oil to this environmental disaster and it becomes pretty clear that we're going to have to get off this stuff. It is, after all, 19th century technology -- we might as well be using steam engines to get around. NPR's Brian Mann spoke with a few people at a gas station and discovered that this disconnect runs deep.

Gas is something we all want -- and want cheap. Most of the people I talked to were driving what you'd have to call gas-guzzlers, so I asked whether they feel any personal culpability.

"Uh, no," [Dwayne] Carpenter says. When I ask the question, he looks sort of angry.

"You know, we have to survive up here," he says. "The truck is my livelihood. Without it, I wouldn't have my business. So if those gas prices go up, we have to pay it."

I hear this a lot. People are disgusted by the oil spill, but what really has them worried is the idea that gas prices will spike.

Getting off oil seems to be unthinkable. When Carpenter considers helping to avoid future spills, his truck disappears in his mind. Somehow, we've gotten to the point where a machine that works just as well, but doesn't burn petroleum, is fantasy. Get rid of oil and we're all hoofing it. the "teachable moment" is an overused cliche, but if there were ever a time that it fit, it's now. Former CNN correspondent Tony Collins writes that the media themselves have a responsibility here.

[J]ournalists have worked hard to keep us informed on the most important news developments. Now it’s time for news media to focus more on the policy implications. The New York Times had a good editorial Saturday on the need for the Senate to stop delaying and pass the comprehensive energy bill. This oil spill is a terrible tragedy, and there probably is no silver lining, but at least it could be a wake-up call, and journalists should take advantage of the enormous public interest in it to focus more on policy. News media should create a forum for an intelligent, reasoned debate on where we go from here with our energy policy. They should tell us what enlightened policy experts are saying about what we need to do, at last, once and for all, to drastically cut back on dependence on oil.

So no fruitless worrying over whether Obama is emoting enough. We could be at a cultural and technological turning point, the year that everything started changing, and a lot of people seem to think the big political story is the president is taking on the situation calmly -- and that this is a bad thing. Meanwhile, they're not only ignoring the real big story, but are actually distracting from it.

-Wisco


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Cheney's Chernobyl

Let's be clear here, drilling five miles beneath the ocean surface is a desperate move. It's the sort of thing you'd do if you couldn't find oil any place else. Despite what Republicans like Sarah Palin have been saying, environmentalists didn't force drilling offshore by opposing drilling on land in places like the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Like deepwater drilling, drilling in ANWR would be a desperation move. Of the leases of federal land that oil companies hold, 68 million acres are unused. ANWR isn't the only place left. And the final nail in the coffin of "we have to do deepwater drilling" is oil price. If we were really so desperate for oil that we absolutely had to drill deep in the ocean, supply and demand would dictate that oil prices would be through the roof in historical terms. Nearly the exact opposite is true:



There is no logical reason to be drilling this deep. We don't need oil that badly.





As we see the environment in the Gulf Coast slowly poisoned, a common refrain is that this is our fault. It's our unending thirst for oil that forces us to do this -- I've walked down that road myself. But, again, the historical facts and further thought cast doubt this. If demand had forced this to happen, oil prices would reflect that. And, of course, with barrel after barrel after barrel spilling out into the Gulf by the minute, that waste isn't jacking up the price either. Turns out we can pour all that "necessary" oil down a drain and not have it make a dent. Sure, Americans burn oil as if it were our religion and that's a major problem, but to say that our demand has forced this upon ourselves isn't entirely accurate.

The fact of the matter is that the big black cloud of oil darkening the Gulf of Mexico exists for no good reason. A nearly unimaginable fortune of oil is lost and the only impacts are in public health and environment. No gas lines exist, no price spike is breaking us, no engine goes thirsty. Gusher aside, we now see what the world would be like if there were no Deepwater Horizon and we find it changed not at all. Throw in the gusher and we find it would've been a better world without it. I think we can stop talking about the "necessity" of offshore drilling now.

So why do we do this? Because it's expensive. And if something's expensive, then there's a lot of money to be made. You just need to figure out how to pass on that expense, so construction companies like Halliburton can cash in. So you get an army of lobbyists and have government create incentives for oil exploration. Suddenly, a big waste of time and money isn't so personally expensive anymore. It helps to have a corrupt corporate stooge like Dick Cheney to help you out. He actually let lobbyists write energy policy, which turned out to be awesome for the "drilling where we don't need to" industry.

CNN, July 2005:

As the energy bill moves closer to becoming law, debate is still raging over the first overhaul of national energy policy in a decade.

Supporters say the $14.5 billion bill will pave the way for more exploration and ultimately less reliance on foreign oil. Critics say it will enrich the already wealthy oil industry without addressing the need for relief from record oil and gasoline prices.

But if there's one thing that both parties can agree on, it's that the oil industry as a whole stands to benefit from its passage -- which could be an attractive point for investors looking to share the wealth.

"The bill will provide an elimination of royalties that oil and gas companies pay the government for drilling in the deep water in the Gulf of Mexico," CNN reported. "While details still need to be finalized, those companies that drill deeper will receive more relief, said KeyBanc vice president Kim Pacanovsky." The American Petroleum Institute estimated ending royalties amounted to a $5 billion giveaway to oil companies. And the only way oil companies could get that money was to drill where they had no business drilling.

The media has started calling Deepwater Horizon "Obama's Katrina." This is inaccurate.

It's Cheney's Chernobyl.

-Wisco


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Criminal Charges Coming for BP?

BP's efforts to control their gusher in the Gulf of Mexico has hit another little snag. Undersea robots with diamond saws are cutting through the pipe, in order to fit it with what even they concede would be a leaky cap. In the process of doing this, one of the saws is currently stuck. OK, I understand that the pressures five miles beneath the sea are pretty intense, but isn't the pipe they're cutting spewing oil? Oil that has well-known lubricating qualities? How could it be stuck? "If at first you don't succeed, try again. Fail better," is starting to look like BP's motto.

The ongoing crisis would be a comedy of errors, if the consequences weren't so deadly serious. The way of life everyone knew in the Gulf of Mexico may very well be over for at least a generation, if not more, and irreplaceable wetlands and species could be wiped out. Given what's at stake here, one thing is becoming clearer and clearer -- at least to me -- we shouldn't have been doing this deepwater drilling in the first place. A lot of attention has been given to the concept of prevention, but humans being what humans are, we can't make disaster impossible. We can make it less likely, but that's what we thought we did. Turns out we didn't. Corners were cut, laws were likely broken, safety measures were ignored. And, even if every precaution had been taken, if all the laws had been obeyed -- in fact, if BP had gone beyond the requirements and put extra safeguards in place -- no one would honestly be able to say that a disaster like this had been made completely impossible. And we never will. Machines break down, people screw up, the earth itself does unpredictable things. Preventing petroleum contaminations like this are extremely important, but it's only 50% of what should be our concern and the focus of our research. The other 50% should be mitigation and we haven't done a damned thing in that area. The unthinkable has happened and we have no idea what to do. Turns out we got way ahead of ourselves on this one. We're just poking around in the dark.

But there are consequences other than the wetlands and the species and the livelihoods and the public health. There is the law. For their part, the Obama administration is moving to see to it that those consequences come through.

McClatchy Newspapers:

Responding to criticism that it hasn't been forceful enough in its response to the largest oil spill in U.S. history, the Obama administration on Tuesday announced a criminal investigation into the deadly explosion and installed a no-nonsense Coast Guard admiral as the public face of the response, instead of BP.

The effect of the April 20 spill, including "oil for miles and miles" in the Gulf of Mexico, is "heartbreaking to see," Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday afternoon during a visit to New Orleans. He also pledged not to forget the 11 lives lost in the explosion.

The nation has an obligation to "investigate what went wrong and to determine what reforms are needed so that we never have to experience a crisis like this again," President Barack Obama said after meeting at the White House with the two men he'd appointed to head an inquiry into the blast.

"If our laws were broken, leading to this death and destruction, my solemn pledge is that we will bring those responsible to justice on behalf of the victims of this catastrophe and the people of the Gulf region," the president said.

If you're picturing BP execs behind bars -- or even in court -- you'll probably be disappointed. "It's highly unlikely that senior managers of the company were sufficiently personally involved in this to be charged," said David Uhlmann, a University of Michigan professor and former prosecutor specializing in environmental crimes told Politico's Josh Gerstein.

"It doesn't mean BP executives are going to be wearing stripes," agreed David Pettit, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. "If corporations are criminally prosecuted, it's usually resolved in some lawyers' offices."

But the move opens other doors. Right now, BP is under a $75 million liability cap -- which is an insanely small amount of money when compared to the billions this incident is likely to cost. Congress has resisted raising the cap, because they worry that it'd dissuade companies from doing this stupid, stupid, stupid deepsea drilling and this would somehow be bad. I'm not extremely clear on how, but congress has never needed a decent argument before. If BP is guilty of crimes, that all changes.

Writing for Business Insider last month, Gus Lubin reported, "Criminal charges would put an axe through a $75 million cap on civil charges for oil pollution." This is why, after the criminal investigation was announced, BP's stock dropped. In fact, since the Deepwater Horizon wreck, the company has already lost $75 billion in market value.

If this puts off other companies from investing in deepwater drilling, as some in congress fear, then what does that say about the safety of such ventures? Corporations won't want to drill, because the monetary consequences of a screw up would be too great. Isn't this an admission that they see another deepsea disaster as a real -- and prohibitively likely -- possibility? Put a lot of money on the line and suddenly it becomes a bad bet.

If the criminal probe keeps corporations out of the deep water, then it's hard to see this as an argument against it. If corporations don't think their money is safe with these wells, why should we believe these wells are safe at all?

-Wisco


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The Oceans Can't Absorb the Oil -- Here's Why

At one point in my life, I thought brewing beer would be a great hobby. And it was. The brewing itself was great, as was enjoying the beer afterward, but the bottling was a pain. It turned out I didn't like that at all, so I eventually quit making beer. Still, I'm glad I did it, because I learned a lot of things that I still use today. One of those things is the knowledge that beer yeast commits suicide. The yeast eats sugar and produces alcohol and carbon dioxide. The problem is that alcohol and CO2 aren't very good for yeast and they basically change their own environment so much that they can't survive in it. I keep coming back to this in my own mind as a warning to humanity -- if we're not careful, we'll be killed by your own waste. Yeast cells are mindless, we don't have that excuse.

But another, less philosophical lesson is that certain natural processes can be halted by the process itself. The beer yeast are only capable of fermenting so much sugar; if you want much stronger beer than normal, you need a different strain of yeast. Champagne yeast, maybe, or a strain developed for barley wine. If not, all the yeast will die off before the job is done and your beer won't be any stronger, just sweeter.

All of this is just a way to explain the problem with oil plumes from the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Yes, natural bacteria will eventually consume the oil -- unless that oil is too concentrated. In this situation, the bacteria creates an environment where it can't survive. And neither can anything else. In terms of helping sea life, you aren't. You're just making an already unsurvivable environment worse.





A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times spoke with Dr. Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia involved with studying the problem:

"There's a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water," said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. "There's a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column."

The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes.

[...]

Dr. Joye said the findings about declining oxygen levels were especially worrisome, since oxygen is so slow to move from the surface of the ocean to the bottom. She suspects that oil-eating bacteria are consuming the oxygen at a feverish clip as they work to break down the plumes.

Some bacteria, described as "anaerobic," don't need oxygen to survive. But this is clearly not the case here. If it's consuming oxygen, it's using it. The bacteria are creating a dead zone, where even they can't survive. There's too much sugar in our beer. And, of course, this bacteria is dying off before the job is done. This is a double whammy; oxygen in these areas of the sea is depleted and, of course, the toxic oil remains.

This all goes a long way toward explaining the latest stupid thing that BP CEO Tony Hayward has said. In addition to saying that, compared to all the water in the world, his gusher was "relatively tiny" and that workers sickened by the chemical dispersants and oil probably just have food poisoning, Tony also says there ain't no damned plumes.

Associated Press:

Disputing scientists' claims of large oil plumes suspended underwater in the Gulf of Mexico, BP PLC's chief executive on Sunday said the company has largely narrowed the focus of its cleanup to surface slicks rolling into Louisiana's coastal marshes.

[...]

Hayward said that oil's natural tendency is to rise to the surface, and any oil found underwater was in the process of working its way up.

"The oil is on the surface," Hayward said. "There aren't any plumes."

This is, of course, BS. In response, Rep. Edward Markey told AP that BP stands for "Blind to Plumes." Luckily, even without my handy explanation of the problem with having plumes of oil in your beer, the American public isn't buying all this BP spin. A Gallup poll finds that, although people believe the Obama administration has reacted poorly to the situation, they also fault BP's response. In fact, more fault BP than the White House. A lot more. Where 53% say the response from President Obama was poor to very poor, 73% say the same of BP. BP is now as popular as Dick Cheney. I'd imagine both Cheney and the oil company have roughly the same fans.

Still, it's BP who has the equipment to deal with this. Personally, I believe that all the company's American assets should be seized and its presence in this country dissolved forever. But we all know that's never going to happen. So we have to rely on BP to get the job done. But their rampant dishonesty and sophistry isn't helpful. Barring what I consider the sanest solution -- the corporate death penalty -- it seems the wisest thing to do from here on out would be to leave no decision at all to BP. While they're onsite, dealing with the problem they created, they shouldn't even be able to decide what they have for lunch. This seems to be the case now, but it should've been the case all along.

-Wisco


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