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Gulf Oil Spill: America's Chernobyl
And like the global financial crisis, it all started with the explosion of a bubble, this time of methane gas.
The Wages of Deregulation
In 2008 the Bush-Cheney duo lifted the executive order banning offshore drilling, and the House of Representatives agreed to let a 26-year-old moratorium on offshore drilling expire. Deregulation was moving full speed ahead.
Monitoring agencies were unable to keep pace with British Petroleum’s (BP) operations. Marine biologist Rick Steiner, an expert on oil spills from the University of Alaska, has documented how BP cut corners in its hurry to disconnect and prepare for a production rig. In addition Steiner reveals the blowout preventer (BOP) was not built as designed, included some demonstration parts, and had a failed battery.
Offshore drilling operations in Norway and Brazil use acoustic triggers and remote control cut-off devices to enhance the capacity of BOPs to work adequately. But a report commissioned by the Minerals Management Service (MMS) stated “acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly.” Was former vice president and oil man Dick Cheney behind the Department of Interior’s decision not to mandate the valve for off-shore oil rigs? Nor did the U.S. government mandate the simultaneous drilling of relief wells, as required in Canada’s Arctic. Only now, with the failure of the “top kill” technique, is BP drilling these wells, and they won’t be functional before August.
The MMS also routinely overruled its staff of biologists and engineers, who had raised concerns about the safety and environmental impact of certain drilling proposals in the Gulf and in Alaska. The U.S. government permitted BP and other oil companies to drill with cutting-edge technologies without the usual permits.
Were the government regulators doing their job of regulating, or were they in bed with the industry?
Parallels to Financial Crisis
British Petroleum bragged about being at the frontier of technology. Goldman Sachs and the other behemoths of the financial world also claimed to be at the cutting edge of financial innovation. They all lied, hid information, and speculated behind a facade of corporate professionalism built through their advertising campaigns.
Just like the derivatives that took junk assets into every balance sheet of financial institutions, the Deepwater Horizon disaster has no frontiers. The gushing oil will eventually threaten not only Cuba and Mexico, but it will end up reaching the Gulf Stream. It might even make it to England and several world financial centers.
Many are the scams concocted in the financial world, from structured investment vehicles carrying subprime mortgages to credit default swaps and short-selling. They call it business on Wall Street, but it’s really weapons of mass financial destruction. British Petroleum also has a long list of accidents and incidents, all leading to the loss of life and oil spills (including the explosion in its refinery in Texas City in 2005 that cost 15 lives). There will probably be no bailout for BP, but there already exists a liability cap of $75 million.
That cap is invalid in cases where criminal negligence exists. The U.S. Attorney General has already launched a criminal investigation. Already there is circumstantial evidence that BP’s technicians altered the sequence of events and ordered the removal of drilling mud before the cement cap was put in place in order to gain time. This was done in spite of the fact that BP was already working with a damaged blow-out preventer. If this is confirmed, BP will have a hard time convincing authorities that this was just an accident.
Who’s in Charge?
BP has used more than 800,000 gallons of oil dispersant Corexit on the surface and underwater. Corexit is manufactured by Nalco, whose board includes at least one BP executive. Because Corexit is less efficient and more toxic than other dispersants, the Environmental Protection Agency requested that BP use another dispersant. BP quickly overruled this request, showing who’s in charge.
As he came into the White House, Obama became a hostage of the financial system and essentially gave Wall Street a free hand in solving “its” problems. For weeks after the rig exploded, BP appeared to be the main entity in charge of the response to the oil spill.
Obama’s lack of firm leadership has prompted comparisons with Katrina. But in fact, the similarities with Chernobyl are stronger. Katrina was a natural disaster, while the Deepwater Horizon is a man-made catastrophe related to greed and cost minimization.
Just as the global financial and economic crisis is entering its most dangerous phase, the oil spill is now developing into a catastrophe that will affect ecosystems and livelihoods for decades. It is more like Chernobyl than anything else.
When Unit 4 in Chernobyl exploded on April 26, 1986, it not only caused the worst disaster in the history of nuclear technology. It also shattered the technological prestige of the Soviet Union, boosted concerns about the nuclear safety of the remaining plants and forced Soviet authorities to be less cryptic. Ultimately, Chernobyl ushered in the demise of the Soviet Union. Perhaps the destruction of the Deepwater Horizon will open the way for a new era of accountability and the end of corporate capitalism in the United States.
A version of this FPIF commentary will also appear on the Triple
Crisis Blog, global perspectives on finance, development, and the
environment.
18 Comments so far
Show AllThe USSR was sagging under the weight of an inefficient and corrupt economic system, wasteful spending on weapons and also losing a war in Afghanistan. Then came Chernobyl. Collapse soon followed.
The USA is sagging under the weight of an inefficient and corrupt economic system, wasteful spending on weapons and also losing a war in Afghanistan. Then came the Gulf disaster. Collapse, hopefully, will soon follow.
We have become the USSR complete with our own Politburo - the US media. I hope this is not America's Chernobyl. We just don't know yet. This catastrophe is ongoing.
This country changed with the Kennedy assassination. It happened in Texas and we have been all about Texas ever since - Johnson, Big Oil, the Bushes. Maybe after 50 years this Chernobyl will be the catalyst that gets us our country back.
How does Texas enter into this equation?
Though you are quite right to pay homqage to Texas our #1 state in every way.
I lived in Houston, the oil capital of the world, when I first got out of school. Worked for what is now Halliburton, what is now Transocean and Schlumberger. The only problem with Texas was all the Texans. I thought Yankees were a baseball team till I moved to Texas. (Just kidding, sort of :)
#1 in every bad way. I wish Texans would cut out all the bragging about seccession and just do it, already.
Texas. 10 pounds of bullshit in a 5 pound bag.
For crapsakes!
This whole discusting, FASCIST genocide of our wildlife and coastline is due to Obama's backroom dealing for BP to CAPTURE the oil. And that is exactly what they're still trying to do.
They have never tried to cap it, they have only been interested in capturing it.
Three more months of this? Where are the sane people who can highjack this life threatening criminal enterprise RAMPANT IN THE OBAMA administration?
Are all these people brain damaged stupid?
When the hell are Americans gonna get wise that Obama has all the power
he needs to get BP to fly right, but he doesn't want to.
SCREW THE SCUM AT BP. OBAMA HAS ENABLED THIS.
OBAMA SHOULD BE HAULED OFF TO JAIL.
HE IS A MENACE TO THE NATION AND THE WORLD.
IMPEACH HIM! IF THIS ISN'T HIGH CRIMES, THEN NOTHIN' IS.
This oil disaster can be laid squarely at the feet of Bush and Cheney, two oilmen who turned the country over to the big corporations, especially big oil. We are now seeing another example of the ruin that crew accomplished in eight years. If we are going to let the previous administration off with no prosecution or impeachment, then we do not need to worry about Obama and his people. This problem even goes back to that idol, Reagan, who decided the rich corporations and individuals were all that mattered in our country. Let us have free markets with no regulation, that was the great idea, and now this is what it did for us, a broken wreck of a country that was in decent shape just ten years ago, with a balanced budget, manageable debt, stable employment, and no useless and endless war.
Does anyone really care about BP's oil spill into the Gulf? Traffic jams are up and trains are less loaded in Washington and my stupid family worried about my getting ready to leave my current job perversely believes that I'll be a rich man working for Exxon Mobile ! To them, riding a train to work is what poor people do and that I should lose my mind and travel on those congested roads instead. They're not alone and plenty of stupid Americans share such perverse thinking. Besides, who cares about a financial crisis when stupid Americans are listening to the phony job growth that is based off of Clinton's changes in reporting unemployment?
"Katrina was a natural disaster, while the Deepwater Horizon is a man-made catastrophe related to greed and cost minimization."
Actually, the levy failure after Katrina was caused by funding cuts. The Army Corps of Engineers was denied the money it needed to make improvements on the levy so that the Republicans could give tax cuts to the rich.
Note the wishful conclusion:
"Ultimately, Chernobyl ushered in the demise of the Soviet Union. Perhaps the destruction of the Deepwater Horizon will open the way for a new era of accountability and the end of corporate capitalism in the United States."
And frogs will sprout wings so that they don't bump their asses anymore.
moved below
An interesting blog and an excerpt from a recent post: http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/
". . . we have been exposed to the spectacle of corporate leaders and public officials attempting to operate, for as long as possible, with a mental map that includes a blown-out but otherwise serviceable deep-water oil well in the Gulf of Mexico variously called "Deepwater Horizon" or "Macondo" or "MC252". A number of unsuccessful attempts have been made to capture the oil and gas that have been escaping from it using at least three different techniques. BP—the well's owner—is an oil company, and so their first reaction was to get and sell that oil no matter what. They tried to fit the well with a "top hat" to get all of the oil, but when their contraption didn't work because it got clogged by methane hydrate crystals they stuck a smaller pipe into the leak, just to get and sell some of the oil, and when that worked it made them happy. But, coming under pressure to do something about all the oil leaking out and poisoning the environment, they finally decided to try shutting down the well by squiring various substances into it. The procedures they've tried, going by idiotic Top Gun names like "junk shot" and "top kill"—have all been to no avail. At some point it becomes clear that there is no oil well—just a large, untidy hole in the sea bottom with hydrocarbons spewing out of it, forming huge surface slicks and underwater plumes of oil that kill all they encounter and eventually wash up on land to continue the damage there, turning the Gulf Coast into a disaster area. Starting in another month or so the toxic soup composed of oily tropical seawater and decomposing coastal vegetation and sea life will be stirred up and driven inland by tropical storms and hurricanes. Gulf Coast oil-grunge will become the de facto new national style: oil-streaked skin and clothing and perhaps a dead pelican for a sunhat.
When things go horribly wrong, it is natural for us mere mortals to try to obtain a bit of psychological comfort by holding on to familiar images. A person who has totaled his car tends to continue to refer to the twisted wreckage as "my car" instead of "the wreckage of my car." In the case someone's wrecked car, this may be accepted as mere shorthand, but in many other cases this tendency results in people working with an outdated mental map which leads them astray, because the properties of a wreck are quite different from those of an intact object. For example, our lost leaders are continuing to refer to "the financial system" instead of "the wreck of the financial system." If they had the flexibility to make that mental switch, perhaps they wouldn't insist on continuing to pump in more and more public debt, only to watch it spew out again through a tangle of broken pipes so horrific that it defies all understanding, with quite a lot of it mysteriously dribbling into the vaults and pockets of bankers and billionaire investors. It will be interesting to watch their attempts at a financial "top kill" or "junk shot" to plug the ensuing geyser of toxic debt.
It is natural for us to naïvely expect our leaders—be they corporate executives or their increasingly decorative and superfluous adjuncts in government—to be our betters, having been picked for leadership positions by their ability to lead us through difficult and unfamiliar terrain. We expect them to have the mental agility and flexibility to be able to revise their mental maps as the circumstances dictate. We don't expect them to be stupid, and are surprised to find that indeed they are."
". . . as the American empire has been crumbling, its leaders, both corporate and corporatist, were being specially selected for being unable to draw their own conclusions based on their own independent reasoning or on the evidence of their own senses, relying instead on "intelligence" that is second-hand and obsolete. These leaders are now attempting to lead us all on a dream-walk to oblivion.
Back in 2008 I published the prediction that while Chernobyl was rather decisive in putting paid to the Soviet scientific/technological program and in dispelling all remaining trust in the Soviet political establishment, the US program of scientific/technological progress and ruthless exploitation of nature is more likely to suffer a death by a thousand cuts. But if one of these cuts hits an artery early on, a thousand cuts would be overkill. Just as with any wreck, the properties of a radically phlebotomized body politic are rather different from those of a healthy one, or even a sick one—not that our lost leaders could notice something like that! They will no doubt go on going on about money and oil (and the predictable lack thereof), but they might as well be telling us about their milk and lemonade, and please hold the drilling mud. How embarrassing!"
Newly created maps of the slick are now matching up with the hottest spots on Gulf of Mexico sea surface temperatures. The whole eastern Gulf of Mexico water temperature is nudging past 80 degrees toward 82 degrees now. Temperatures keep rising past seasonal averages from week to week. Once the slick subsides, if a hurricane forms over this water, wind speeds are going to explode. Now, that's a real Chernobyl analogy.
P.S., if you want a pooh-pooh of various dangers, go ask a Coast Guard admiral. She'll give you a slick line.
We can see how BP is going to contain the spill -- it will contain the language used by our mainstream media to describe it. Oil is no longer "exploding" out of the pipes, now that a boat is catching some, it is merely still "slipping" out of the major leak sites. Soon it will be "trickling," and then "seeping," but such changes of vocabulary mean only that the underground pressure of the field has already fully expended itself, poisoning the Gulf of Mexico.
Accidental or otherwise, the Gulf of Mexico has been murdered and all Republicans are instigators and all Democrats accomplices.
Murderer, accomplice...it's all the same to the dead. There is a confidence gulf between Mr. Photogenic and the rest of us. All I can say is, "You're doing a heckuva job, Bamie!" He's worse than Bush. That's quite an accomplishment.
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I would rather vote for what I want and not get it, than vote for what I don't want and get that. -- Eugene V. Debs
Rep. Gene Taylor from Mississippi practically described the oil as no more harmful that "chocolate milk?"
From ThinkProgressive :
"During an interview with Biloxi’s WLOX-TV, Taylor said that the massive oil spill is “not nearly as bad” as he thought it would be and that it “isn’t Katrina. It’s not Armageddon. … A lot of people are scared and I don’t think they should be.” He went on to compare the spill to chocolate milk and said that the oil is “tending to break up naturally.”
"TAYLOR: What I want people to know is this isn’t Katrina. This is not Armageddon. I did this for the Coast Guard many years ago. Yeah, it’s bad. And it’s terrible that there’s a spill out there. But I would remind people that the oil is twenty miles from any marsh. … That chocolate milk looking spill starts breaking up in smaller pieces … It is tending to break up naturally."
Typically, there is no mention of the effect on other Caribbean nations.
Will BP reimburse the Cuban fishermen whose livelihood and children are destroyed by US drilling?
Mexico may suffer extreme losses. Our only concern is to build higer walls and deprive our neighbors of basic human rights.
We are an incredibly selfish nation who does not give a rats ass about our neighbors - the very neighbors who have supported the US in many other catastrophes.
I know what you mean. I have wondered how the Cubans must feel. They have been locked out of the US "economy" for 60 years, but now will be flooded with the pollution that is the product of that "economy". All pain, no gain.