"Drill, baby, drill!"
--Republican campaign slogan, 2008
--Mother Nature, as overheard by Mike Ruppert
The water is black--the coast was clear--
Now they're sweating dollars, dripping fear.
What a way to end the fiscal year:
Mopping up the dirty pool.
--Spirit of the West, "Dirty Pool"
For once I think the doomers, if anything, have understated the case. The swiftly growing oil slick--if you can call something soon to be the size of Ohio a "slick"--is already a serious problem. It has the potential to become a real bitch-monster of a problem, real soon. Already there is speculation the oil could actually be driven south of the Florida Keys, killing off the third largest coral reef in the world (and the only one in this hemisphere), before roiling north up the eastern seaboard of the United States.
The response so far is sadly all too familiar in every particular. First, there's the finger pointing. The U.S government blames British Petroleum, who counters that they warned about precisely this scenario a decade ago. The Tea Party folks, predictably, blame Obama. Bill Maher, with whom I emphatically agree, says that everyone who chanted "drill, baby, drill!" last year should be helping with the cleanup.
Reality is, there's plenty of blame (and a great deal of shame) to go around. But can we bloody well fix the problem before we start assigning culpability?
About that problem. BP claims it has no idea what happened. Right. Everyone from Wikipedia on down can tell you it was a blowout. The Forbes blog advances some plausible causes. But if BP were to shout out any theories it may have, that would of course be construed as an admission of guilt. And avoiding guilt is important. Really important. Infinitely more important than letting everyone know exactly what's wrong and how it might be fixed or at least ameliorated.
And--of course--the loonies are out, suggesting this might have been eco-terrorism" or an act of war. After all, it happened on the day before Earth Day! That must be significant!
If THAT theory spreads, we'll get lots more entertaining diversions that will do nothing to solve the damn problem.
What else is predictable? Well, BP first said the leak was 1000 barrels (42000 gallons, 158760 litres) a day. On Wednesday we found out it was more like 5000 barrels (210,000 gallons, 793,800 L) a day. And latest estimates show yet another five-fold increase, to 25,000 bbl (1,050,000 gallons, or 3,969,000 L) a day. At this rate, by the time I wake up in the morning, all the oil in the world will be in the Gulf of Mexico.
So. What does this mean? There is, of course, the obvious environmental disaster, and I'd rather not dwell too much on that lest I burst into tears. I'm becoming increasingly sensitive to animal suffering as I age--credit my wife for this--and this is suffering writ large, boldfaced, and underlined. As Spirit of the West put it in their song "Dirty Pool" (written in response to the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, which this one will very shortly eclipse):
The shoreline's tarred and feathered
And the seagulls look like crows
The unofficial explanation
"shit happens don't you know"
And the seagulls look like crows
The unofficial explanation
"shit happens don't you know"
But this is far more than an ecological catastrophe. It's an economic nightmare as well. Locally, of course: there are plenty of people who depend on the Gulf one way or another for a livelihood that looks to be dead for some time to come. But also globally: what do you think this will do to the price of oil, just as peak driving season hits? $100? $150? Higher? If Katrina was enough to jack the price of oil up to $140/bbl, what will this do? As of this writing, only the folks on the fringe will forecast, and they've been forecasting oil at $200/bbl for years. Nobody's suggesting it will stay that high, not least because the economy would collapse (again). But it could well by that the wolf they've been crying about is actually here.
Spilt milk tears run down your chin
This cryin' shame's a fuckin' sin
Mopping up a dirty pool...
*a quick Google search shows I'm far from the only one to come up with this title. Screw it. It's too good not to use.
3 comments:
It's horrible. Looks like I got my Prius just in time, up to about 57 mi/gal now.
What I do not understand is why they can't just move 50 feet from the current well and drill sideways into the existing pipeline and divert the oil?
Found in my mailbox this morning, for what it's worth. I would DEARLY love somebody to debunk the shit out of this:
An engineer of considerable experience says watch this one evolve carefully because it is destined to continue to grow and he shares this long but worthy explanation why:
"Heard your mention of the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico this morning, and you (and most everyone else except maybe George Noory) are totally missing the boat on how big and bad of a disaster this is.
First fact, the original estimate was about 5,000 gallons of oil a day spilling into the ocean. Now they're saying 200,000 gallons a day. That's over a million gallons of crude oil a week!
I'm engineer with 25 years of experience. I've worked on some big projects with big machines. Maybe that's why this mess is so clear to me.
First, the BP platform was drilling for what they call deep oil. They go out where the ocean is about 5,000 feet deep and drill another 30,000 feet into the crust of the earth. This it right on the edge of what human technology can do. Well, this time they hit a pocket of oil at such high pressure that it burst all of their safety valves all the way up to the drilling rig and then caused the rig to explode and sink. Take a moment to grasp the import of that. The pressure behind this oil is so high that it destroyed the maximum effort of human science to contain it.
When the rig sank it flipped over and landed on top of the drill hole some 5,000 feet under the ocean.
Now they've got a hole in the ocean floor, 5,000 feet down with a wrecked oil drilling rig sitting on top of is spewing 200,000 barrels of oil a day into the ocean. Take a moment and consider that, will you!
First they have to get the oil rig off the hole to get at it in order to try to cap it. Do you know the level of effort it will take to move that wrecked oil rig, sitting under 5,000 feet of water? That operation alone would take years and hundreds of millions to accomplish. Then, how do you cap that hole in the muddy ocean floor? There just is no way. No way.
The only piece of human technology that might address this is a nuclear bomb. I'm not kidding. If they put a nuke down there in the right spot it might seal up the hole. Nothing short of that will work.
If we can't cap that hole that oil is going to destroy the oceans of the world. It only takes one quart of motor oil to make 250,000 gallons of ocean water toxic to wildlife. Are you starting to get the magnitude of this?
We're so used to our politicians creating false crises to forward their criminal agendas that we aren't recognizing that we're staring straight into possibly the greatest disaster mankind will ever see. Imagine what happens if that oil keeps flowing until it destroys all life in the oceans of this planet. Who knows how big of a reservoir of oil is down there.
Not to mention that the oceans are critical to maintaining the proper oxygen level in the atmosphere for human life.
In other words, kiss your ass goodbye.
...your one-stop shop for oil spill discussion: The Oil Drum
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