Spill, Baby, Spill: When Oil Lust Collides With Economic Necessity

by Tony Chavira

We humans have a bad tendency not to see the bigger picture. Only when environmental disasters affect us and our futures directly do we begin to care about sustainability and environmental issues. It may have been a long time coming, but we’ve finally been given an example of the real risks an oil spill can have on environmental health and the greater society. We can only lie to ourselves for so long about how things will change for the better (or that nothing is wrong in the first place) before we are forced to finally embrace sustainable energy completely. Hopefully that illusion has ended.

It may now be over for the Oil Drilling Lobby. Just watch this commercial you may have seen before on Fox News and try to assess for yourself how you feel about offshore drilling:

In 2008, the states of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi voted for John McCain instead of Barack Obama. A large talking point of McCain’s campaign was that we needed to continue to focus on drilling for oil, with less funding toward alternative energy sources. Since then, President Obama signed into effect a bill that essentially allowed for a trade-off: conceding a degree of off-shore drilling in return for some gains and subsidies for alternative fuel sources. The reactionaries amongst us might immediately think that Obama turned his back on the environmental community, but we all know that Washington D.C. is a place where you have to give a little to take a little. Plus, taking attention away from oil exploration doesn’t negate the fact that practically everyone is still using a vehicle that runs on oil.

Contrary to whatever you might hear uninformed talking heads spew, conspiracy theorist among us have absolutely no platform to say that this was a deliberate ploy by the government to allow for drilling offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. Some of the first off-shore drills and oil rigs were placed off the Louisiana shores in the early 1900s in places like Caddo Lake, Calcasieu Parish, St. Mary Parish and Vermillion Parish. In fact, in 2006 there were roughly 3,858 oil and gas platforms sitting in the Gulf of Mexico. The world’s deepest platform, the Independence Hub, also floats in the Gulf of Mexico, and has drilled down to 8,000 feet. The recent spill is a result of damage to only one of these rigs: the Deepwater Horizon Platform at 5,000 feet below the sea surface. It was built by BP in 2001 and spent roughly nine years drilling with limited regulation under the Bush administration. President Obama did not sign his energy bill into effect with the intention of teaching these red states a lesson about oil consumption. The rigs have been there for a long time now.

Since the oil slick grows at a rate of about 230,000 gallons per day, it has almost matched the size of Jamaica. There are fewer and fewer options to eliminate it, and it’ll be at least another week before efforts to stop the spillage are fruitful. Those are the facts, and there’s only so much that the government can do when BP is only spending $6 million per day and the total cost of the cleanup is estimated at about $200 million. It feels that we’ve all conceded that the local fishing, wildlife and boat tourism industries will simply have to suffer. The attitude I read consistently in news articles is this: “If you want the oil, then you have to shut up and deal with disasters like this when they happen.” And “dealing” is exactly what these communities are trying to do. Fishing has been halted from the Mississippi River to the Florida Panhandle, resorts and cruise lines have closed their businesses to prepare for the murk as it hits their sandy beaches and shores, and thousands of volunteers have been asked to sign up to assist with clean-up services. What else can people do? They’re stuck.

It’s especially hard for communities that rely heavily on fishing, especially when they can already see dead wildlife washing up onto their shorelines. While BP Officials say that it may take weeks (or worse, months) to shut off the spill and liken it to “open heart surgery at 5,000 feet in the dark,” towns like Pass Christian, Mississippi are preparing for a sudden end to their local sources of income, compounding the current economic crisis. Despite worsening economic conditions and its almost total annihilation in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Pass Christian could always rely on the economy from the sea to keep its community alive and industry moving forward. As the clean-up may take weeks and the dispersion of spilled oil months, Pass Christian’s efforts to redevelop and revitalize its urban and walkable landscape may be hitting an impasse. The money businesses will need to develop and thrive in Pass Christian is imperiled. The business tax needed to further redevelop the town’s community spaces, streets and parks may be completely cut off. Developing, changing and enhancing the quality of their built environment are shoved to the bottom of the town’s priority list. All that is left is survival and the tough decisions that the community will have to make about how to fight through the next year, which will arguably be the worst year the town has ever seen, both physically and economically.

And Pass Christian is only one example, with hundreds of other towns along the sea struggling to make these decisions ... desperate to determine what to do next. But how do you put together a livable community when its residents are struggling to live?

Although the oil slick hasn’t yet had an effect on human health, it’s strange to me that it can happen at a time so close to the deaths of those coal miners in West Virginia. Though it seems to be tucked more deeply into the news, eleven people died on the Deepwater Horizon rig when it exploded. Those are eleven more lost lives for the purpose of sustaining an energy status quo (on top of fifteen others who died amid BP’s 2005 refinery explosion and 2006 oil spills in Alaska).

Between the economic tragedies and the actual lives lost, who exactly is at fault here? Is the Bush government at fault for not regulating Deepwater Horizon or BP more strictly for almost seven years? Is the Obama Administration at fault for not having the situation resolved already? Or is BP at fault for letting this happen at all? I’m going to give you the answer, unequivocally: BP is at fault. It’s easy for us very liberal types to say that the Bush administration was lax with its regulations for oil and gas offshore drilling, and it’s just as easy for conservative types to say that the Obama administration is at fault for not diligently overseeing what was happening and keeping a sharp eye on BP. But both of these arguments assume something precarious: that government should have complete authority over an industry and its regulation. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is mandated to monitor workplace safety, but oil and coal lobbyists have been fighting for more lax regulation for ages. Instead of direct government intervention, these lobbyists have advocated for more industry-led safety programs and initiatives, like developing guidelines through the American Petroleum Institute or taking on stricter internal safety guidelines at BP. The more these lobbyists advocate that they can self-regulate and the more that Republican legislators advocate that we “get government out of the way,” the less control federal organizations like OSHA have over workplace safety and the more safety becomes the duty of the company.

In this respect, BP has failed and is solely responsible for all of the damages, which include environment clean-up, economic reparations for industries affected by their sloppy safety management standards, amends or recompense for the deaths of those eleven rig workers (and for others who were injured), and the cost of further investigation into the long-term safety and health implications of Deepwater’s explosion and the oil leak. Despite whatever the New York Times is advocating, this is nothing like Hurricane Katrina. This disaster was directly caused by lax regulations and decisions to shortcut safety by a company, and the federal government has had no choice but to step in to assist in a clean-up for something they had no direct control over. Appropriately, now that BP has screwed up and needs help funding this massive cleanup, cooperation with government over safety precautions is one of their main concerns. Makes you wonder how much money they’ve allocated to public relations damage control that could otherwise go to the clean-up.

USA Today is right to state that: “In 2009, the top five petroleum companies earned $100 billion on revenue of $1.8 trillion. That's nearly as much as the $2.1 trillion the U.S. treasury collected last year. It’s mind-boggling that an industry this flush didn’t anticipate a crisis this serious or spend enough to prepare for it. The industry consortium assisting BP in the cleanup has been overmatched. As a result, the much-disparaged Big Government has had to help come to the rescue.”

We have a choice to make now: to continue to enable organizations that care less about our best intentions than their profit margins, or to take action and begin to depend on ourselves and our government to enforce both stricter regulations and stricter mandates for safety onto them. We cannot forget that we—collectively—are the government. How we vote matters, what we think matters, and how we spend our money matters. Let it be known.

Is lax regulations of offshore drilling worth the financial and political gains when the downside affects so many in so many ways? Isn’t there a better way to leverage sustainable energy development than conceding to more reckless drilling? Fossil fuels may not be going anywhere for a while as an energy resource and they'll continue to be a big part of our economy and lifestyles as years pass, but when something like oil is such a necessity, there's no reason why it shouldn't be legislated over properly (just the way you'd want building inspectors to make sure that the buildings you used were safe, or food inspectors to make sure that your food wasn't poisoned). I just hope we are finally going to answer these question realistically from this point forward.

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