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Missing the Real Drama of the Deepwater Horizon Blowout
When a well started spewing oil off Santa Barbara in 1969, it spurred
the first Earth Day, which in turn launched the environmental movement
and a fundamental questioning of the balance between humans and the rest
of nature. It turned out, in other words, to be a real Moment.
It makes one wonder if there really shouldn't be a little more depth to the endless coverage of the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf. (Which, just to be semantic for a moment, isn't really a "spill," or a "leak," unless you'd also call a knife wound a "bloodspill," or a gunshot to the carotid a "bloodleak." BP has punched a hole in the bottom of the sea.)
Yes, the obvious story is important: There's oil spewing out, BP has demonstrated infuriating nonchalance, shrimpers are watching the sheen wash up on the coastal marshes, etc. This all needs to be covered, and is being covered with the incredible agonizing boredom that only 24-hour cable channels can bring to any issue.
And there's a "political angle," which as usual has been about atmospherics. Is Obama angry enough? Is he connecting with "real people"? This sort of thing is conventional good fun for political reporters (especially when Obama plays along, announcing he's consulting with various academics in order to see "whose ass needs kicking."). But isn't there something more? Isn't this potentially a Moment too?
Let's think about the stories that are suggested by this trouble.
One has something to do with peak oil. BP has gone to all this trouble for a well that taps into what they now think may be 100 million barrels of oil. And that's... five days supply for the U.S? Does that give you any sense of the precariousness of the arrangements under-girding our economy right at the moment?
Another -- even more important -- has to do with global warming. Let's assume that the oil from the Deepwater Horizon made it safely onshore and was refined and then burned in the gas tank of your car. What then? Well, the CO2 in the atmosphere would be doing at least as much damage as the oil spreading across the Gulf. Consider the following things that have happened since the Deepwater exploded:
* Asia and Southeast Asia have each recorded their hottest temperatures ever -- 129 degrees in Pakistan, and 117 in Burma. India is having the worst heatwave since the British started keeping records -- people are dying by the hundreds.
* We've seen the biggest rainstorms ever recorded in lots of places, from Nashville to Guatemala -- the clear result of an atmosphere made 5% wetter because warm air holds more water vapor than cold.
* Satellite data has shown that Arctic ice is now melting even faster than in the record year of 2007.
* NASA has released new statistics showing that the past 12 months were the warmest on record and that 2010 is almost certain to set the title for the warmest calendar year yet.
All of these, it seems to me, could be considered parts of the Deepwater Horizon story because they demonstrate that fossil fuel is everywhere dirty. They change the political question from "is Obama angry enough" to "can Obama lead a credible fight for real energy and climate legislation?" More to the point, they connect with the mood of existential despair and anger that the oil spill has set off across the country. People are sad and bitter only in part because they see those pelicans oiled; mostly, they sense correctly that our leaders have yet to deal with what is clearly the biggest problem we face: the transition off of fossil fuels.
The questions that the Gulf spill raises, in other words, go well beyond: How big an idiot is Tony Hayward? What will happen to the tourist economy of the Gulf? How cool is James Cameron's minisub? The questions are more like: How out of balance with the natural world are we? And what would it require to get back in balance?
You'd need to interview not just oil execs and colorful shrimpers, but nature writers, solar pioneers and psychologists.
There's nothing pat about what's going on in the Gulf. It's the most vivid sign we've yet had that we are running into the kind of limits that people started talking about way back at that first Earth Day. But its meaning risks disappearing beneath the endless stories about Top Hat and Junk Shot. BP's great victory will come if it need merely confess to technical overreach and pay a few billion in fines -- if that happens, it can get back to making serious money, and the planet can get back to burning.
Cross-posted on Neiman Watchdog.
44 Comments so far
Show Alldear mr. mckibben, i admire your tenacity.............
global warming isn't the problem - it's the POLLUTION that is causing global warming that's the problem. we need to start focusing on ways to stop POLLUTION (almost no one denies that pollution is unhealthy) if we have any hope of stopping global warming.
http://www.truthout.org/spaceship-earth-navigators-wanted59735
The exponential rise in the global temperature over the last hundred years is just tracking the exponential rise in human population over the last hundred years.
and your point is?
Only thing that will make any difference is to start to reduce the population.
Western Europe, Japan, Cuba are all on the right track.
Everywhere else is pure insanity.
I dunno. Seems to me there is plenty of room on this earth for everyone once the resources are distributed fairly. The Zeitgeist Movement and the Venus project make a lot of sense to me. The problem isn't overpopulation, it's greedy people who don't want to let go of their gluttonous ways. They would rather kill off a couple of billion people so they can keep their toys I suppose. I think they're called psychopaths or something. Gives me a kinda creepy "final solutiony" feeling.
Anyway, Black Agenda Report has an interesting article titled The "Predatory Buccaneer" and the Overpopulation Lie that deals with this subject. I found it an interesting read. Here's an excerpt or two.
"In other words, myths of overpopulation are generated to protect the imbalance in the world today where, for instance, the U.S. at 5% of the world's population uses 25% of its resources or where 1% of the planet owns 40% of its wealth. Mathus' nonsensical and racist theory that food and other resources are threatened by overpopulation is a white supremacist lie."
And this, "The fact remains that if every human being on the planet were grouped in to families of four that each could live in a small house with a yard and all within the state of Texas. Mother Nature is not the problem. Predators and imperialists are."
Some well meaning progressives buy into the argument that we need to increase the food production to meet the increasing population. Of course the corporations are ever ready to promote GM crops as the answer to increasing the food supply.
I am not sure what all the other living species have to say about your homo-centric position?
As already discussed here on CD, what needs to be done is for BP to be charged with criminal negligence. The BP executives in charge of signing-off on cutting corners on safety should do jail time. And BP should TOTALLY compensate everyone whose life they have destroyed, in addition to paying the entire clean-up cost even if it bankrupts the damn company - period!
The first earth day, the Moment was about the problem out there; we had little sense that dealing with it would be up to us. That's the import of "this moment". No leaders and no system to do it for us.
http://www.radicalrelocalization.com/
Yes, my children, you have sinned mightily. You have punched a hole in your mother earth and her blood now stains your beaches and eliminates your livelihoods. Repent, ye lowly ones and treat your mother earth as you would treat your own mother.
Yep, we're all oiled pelicans now.
'alyceobvious June 9th, 2010 5:28 pm
global warming isn't the problem - it's the POLLUTION that is causing global warming that's the problem. we need to start focusing on ways to stop POLLUTION (almost no one denies that pollution is unhealthy) if we have any hope of stopping global warming.'
It doesn't matter how many times I (and you) say that it is POLLUTION that is the problem.
The One World Government, logically, rationally will attend to this problem. The plague of humans will be wiped out to a degree where Earth can recover from the demands that have been and are being made on her to keep alive these humans.
Otherwise, indeed, all breathing things on Earth (including the powerful elite!) will die out.. Earth's resources are finite and the population is exploding daily.
Earth will bloom again, but not for me.
The fact that Bill McKibben consistently neglects is that the power is in the hands of the people. It isn't an easy lesson to learn, but when the people learn to value the power of the collective-individual then the people will set the agenda, and the agenda will be good.
Maybe Bill McKibben can suggest that the people take on the great task of setting the public policy agenda, and find ways for him and his peers to facilitate that. Meanwhile, he will be operating without the trust/support of the people.
Theoretically you're right, but who exactly are "the people"? McKibben can't simply address "the people" about anything. We're fragmented into myriad competing groups, many of them identity-based, or special interest based to the exclusion of many other scattered special interests. There is no "the people" anymore and hasn't been for quite a long time. So where is their alleged power? And what does it even mean to "value the power of the collective-individual"? This is just some comforting abstraction you seem to cherish, but I can't find any meaning in it. When the people are all over the political spectrum, how can a message like McKibben's squeeze through that would make sense to "everyone"? When over half the people haven't any coherent idea at all what's really going on, what agenda, good or bad, could they possibly set?
Ephraim...
BULLSEYE.
Sadly.
Hello No Name,
It is our opportunity and obligation to ORGANIZE AND EDUCATE those small and competing groups with person to person contact. If the population truly were one amorphous mass, that would be sad, because an amorphous mass can best be influenced by television and the other media, which we don't own. The fact that the population is fragmented is beneficial for the the left, because it means that we can each talk to the sub- group we are closest to. But we first have to educate each other about how to conduct those conversations.
Regards,
Laurence of Berkeley
Yes, it is the old divide and conquer routine. The corporate masters are well aware that if you give a hundred progressives the chance to make a change they will kill each other for the right to choose what color you paint the slogans. The people, indeed.
Native americans used star knowledge to give back the sky to thier children so they would always know where they are in the world. This was a connection to the sacredness of all life and our place in it. I think you must learn to walk in a sacred manner and teach your children.
Well said. This is where I finally end up after a long time of "wandering in the wilderness" of modernity. I still entertain dreams of 25 billion people on Earth. I still hope, as the Hopi say, that the race of the North, the white race, the "keepers of the knowledge of fire"( Red race= earth knowledge, Black race= water knowledge, Yellow race= air knowledge), can bring useful/helpful knowledge to the circle of reunion. I'm an electrician, keeper of the "secret flame" as gandalf said. I bear some responsibility for this knowledge I keep. I'm incubating my future role, my part, to help the healing. We now pass thru the time of the great WOUND, only to provoke the great HEALING to come.
Hi Inb,
As an electrician you have the opportunity to talk to other electricians about sustainable power. Maybe through trade journals and conferences. That is how we can best get our message across - each in our own communities, where we are trusted and know the language. It is the best way to compete with the media. And if you can do it together with a group of like minded colleagues rather than by yourself, that's even better.
sierra7
As we are suffering from the toxic financial meltdown, we suffer from the pollution one.
We will get what we deserve.
The writer I know writes sarcastically, but no oil company, bank or politician really gives a hoot....
We don't deserve "mother earth", never have, never will.....
Katrina, The Great Financial Meltdown, now the BP disaster are all brothers of the same family...or "derivatives" of the same portfolios....greed. Nothing else; just plain, unadulterated greed...both on the producing end and on the consumer one.
Thanks Bill for once again getting to the heart of the issue. I have been appalled by the vehemence of the blame and anger, and the obsession with Obama's every word, while reading very little about how we all demand cheap oil and plenty of it.
We have to get off the stuff- and somehow we have to then show the rest of the world that a low-energy-dependence lifestyle is preferable to the old ultra-consumer rat race. India and China are watching.
Is it not possible, to hang on Oilbama's every word, and Hayward's every word, and hold them accountable for this disaster, AND also do what we can to move away from cheap oil?
Why are you appalled by the vehemence of the blame and anger?
I suggest you lower your dose of meds.
"How out of balance with the natural world are we? And what would it require to get back in balance?"-we are completely out of balance and the only people worth talking to are the ones we have never listen to: the Native Americans. Let's not only get off oil but restore this land and return sovereignty to the Indigenous people. As for the US government and its corporate friends they are completely discredited and should be treated as such.
We have been utterly and completely abandoned by (the hollow shell that used to be) our government. We will receive no help from them, only resistance to any change in the established arrangements of power. Our ruling elites are not that concerned about the details policy. They'll even take a hit on profits from time to time. They will not, however, compromise or surrender their power to go on running the show, with minimal interference from us. Their profits are important, but more important are their prerogatives. McKibben is right; if BP gets off with some promises and a couple of $billion in payments, they win, our relationship to BP remains the same and the exploitation of people and planet continues.
We, who want to save this planet, have our own prerogatives. We have to tip over the whole apple cart, folks. And if we try that, the smiley "Hope" mask and the kid gloves will come off. The "rabble" will have to be "taught a lesson, for their own good!". Make no mistake, friends, that's where we are. Everybody up for this?
@jareilly You're still making it be about them and fighting them. I share your despair about them doing it for us, but take it one step further and get on with doing it ourselves. As in the Relocalizer's Manifesto!
I declare it's obvious as hell
we can take care of our ourselves,
we the neighbors, we the friends,
we the face-to-face people.
We can grow our own food
and enough for others too
- if we work our asses off.
We can make our foolery and finery
- make our own bedevilment and divinery.
We can work close by and make the neighborhood ring.
There's no army to shoot us when we don't buy a car,
no knock on the door if we plant a cabbage
where the driveway was.
No tax on the burgeoning compost pile.
Most every one will like the fruit trees
and the fish in the fresh dug pool.
Because it is so
I declare our collective smarts
brighter than our solitary darks.
I acknowledge our collective intelligence
past the laments
and the governments.
The road's not far,
and we'll be glad we went.
Don't need our country uber alles
and mine's not strong or free.
But we can take care of it
pretty much locally.
(radicalrelocalization.com)
This works for middle class people with some capital or those who already own land. It would help if you knew something about growing things too. Most people in Brooklyn or Detroit or a hundred other cities do not have cash to get beyond the end of the week, no less to pick up and move somewhere and start homesteading. You have to obtain land, for one thing. Most land is already owned by someone else. There is no give away. Even buying shovels and plows is beyond the ability of many who can barely buy rice and milk, jackets and sneakers. There are too many of us, too many urban poor, to rely fully on a Tolstoyan dream.
Joe
I thought there was a familiar ring to all of this....And i just remembered.
The missing photos of wildlife - deadness. It is missing.
Just as the coffins of american soldiers have been missing in our 'wars' of the past nine years.
It seems as if the same strategy is in operation. Hide the bodies. Hide the death.
This gets worse every day. I think we cannot fathom what has been unleashed here. It is an epotheosis of.......all we have wrought.
Hope ........Who knows?
BP just bought the rights to the words 'Oil Spill' on internet search engines. Who knows, maybe in the future when you Google 'Oil Spill', it'll direct you to a picture of dancing babies.
'Ain't no oil spill around here, folks. So just move it along, move it along...'
Hey, Bill, how about learning to write well, first.
Anyway, Obama will not and cannot do anything about the oil spill.
For one little item, it's not so much global warming as it is the oil slick. Sea surface temperatures in the strait between Florida and Cuba hit 84 degrees Fahrenheit today. The huge slick has cut evaporation and turned the eastern Gulf into a giant solar heat storage pond. Not good news for this hyper hurricane season. When the oil slick eventually is gone (by September?), that's when the Gulf explodes.
We whine and fume and point fingers in all directions, but the truth is, we literally cannot wipe our butts without a helping hand from big oil. Hold your lover close as she/he has not yet been brokered by BP etc
I don't understand why some are so determined to wipe BP's butt, in regard to deferring blame to the rest of us for somehow making them commit criminal negligence.
GULF TRAGEDY MANDATE
The Gulf of Mexico tragedy underscores the crucial need to force meaningful regulations, which the industry has impeded, along with efforts to reduce our dangerous fossil fuel dependency, through decades of lobbying, misinformation, & fabricated science.
Sadly, it requires severe calamities, such as this and 9/11, to force regulations that were obviously needed beforehand. What may be history's worst artificial environmental disaster, could have been averted had they been required to drill relief wells simultaneously with offshore production wells.
This tragedy provides our president with the opportunity to detooth the energy cartel, and force vital measures for fossil fuel reduction as well as for drilling safety.
If he defaults, history will treat him harshly.
"...we are running into the kind of limits that people started talking about way back at that first Earth Day. But its meaning risks disappearing beneath the endless stories about Top Hat and Junk Shot."
The real meaning of "that first Earth Day" disappeared long ago. The guide book for 1970 - The Environmental Handbook Prepared for the First National Environmental Teach-in - described the problems and offered solutions.
But three things happened since then: (1) americans made excuses for their pollution, and the majority of them are still living in denial and putting all the blame on BP, forgetting about their choice of vehicles and their driving habits, (2) americans have allowed Corporate America to control their lives - even to the extent of allowing them to take over Earth Day, and (3) the perfectly good guidebook for 1970 has been abandoned and certain egotistical, environmental writers have felt that swamping the reading public with their own books on the topic was the key to educating the masses, with the added benefit of turning themselves into rich celebrities. Al Gore and Bill McKibben come to mind.
Drama? Isn't this a LEGAL case of criminal negligence, racketeering, and corruption--from BP/Halliburton/Transocean to the media to the MMS/Federal government?
If so, then why isn't the article about the REAL drama--criminal negligence and racketeering at the highest levels of government, oil corporations, and their media?
It is, in fact, a legal case, but one which probably will never be resolved. Remember the mine disaster in Utah a few years ago? That was due to negligence too. Did the mine owner even have to pay a fine? A tax-deductable fine at that? And nothing will be done to Massey Energy in W. Virginia because the owner of the mine also owns the state's Supreme Court.
The worst that will happen to BP is that it will split into two companies, a production company that will be bought by Exxon/Mobil and another one that has all of the liabilities due to the spill in the Gulf. That one will declare bankruptcy, so BP will walk away free.
So now that you realize that your being 'played'what do you plan to do about it? The polution in the gulf has wired out all the fishing and other shell fish etc. from the dinner plates of every AMERICAN and any others that use those products, not for a few monthe but maybe over one hundred years, given the Exxon Valdes spill as a guide. Of course the politicians and corporate elite will be able to afford to buy the very expensive substitutes (get tax write offs etc). The time to begin the revolution is, now! We can only hope that some of the military will side against the monster!
I have the answer--just wait. Keep on doing what we are doing in terms of energy use and keep those CO2 levels rising until Oklahoma turns 129 degrees, until the air conditioning in Atlanta can't keep up, until violent weather incessantly lashes even the temperate parts of the country which are left. Until our government falls because of its inability to cope with the fury that nature unleashes on us. Its called a cleansing. In a few thousand years things will get back to normal and if there are any human survivors they will have gotten the message. Problem solved. It's just a blink of an eye in Mother earth's life. Don't worry all you tree huggers--Earth is going to be fine.
This article makes some really good points about peak oil and the ultimate unsustainability of the current system, but I heard Rush Limbaugh blame the oil spill on tree huggers, so I just don't know who to believe.
As I see it the only way human sapiens and a livable earth can prosper would be for some center of power (ideally egalitarian or whatever) must come up with a Earth System Design in which such questions as those that must be answered when an astronaut is put in space are worked out and enforced. i.e. what resources are available and how will they be divided to keep life sustainable. After all the earth is in fact a very real space ship. And it has been demonstrated over and over in the last years that it must be managed very much like one or its environment will crash and burn and return to some primitive state that has been explored in various science fiction stories etc. However I am not a spring chicken and I seen humans in action for many years and my conclusion as of now is: crash and burn here we come!
The reality is, except for a small minority who have kept their spiritual connection to the earth as much as possible, the majority of humans, like lemmings, will be, and are being, stampeded right over the cliff. There is no mustering of political forces to change the situation here in the U.S. of A. Corporate control, the trojan horse ruin of unrepresentitive democracy, the hardwiring of mass collective brain tissue neuron pathways to the pleasure/thrill delusions of electronic gadget trance states, the propaganda of individualized loyalties to brands, to parties, to the illusionary self, is past the point of no return. We have no "government of the people", it's all "public relations", damage control, and management of perceptions by the corporate class.
But this gusher from the damaged ocean floor is a planetary game-changer. Information is being suppressed. They can't stop it, and I can't help but think it will shut down Gulf oil production, especially when it eventually blows wide open. The contamination will spread to the Seven Seas. The hurricanes will blow it inland. We also stand on the edge of the Abyss of great wars, famine, genetic mayhem unleashed on the terrestrial environment, radiation spreading all over the planet from the use of uranium munitions, and vast, intensive, novel chemical contamination infiltrating streams, rivers, soil, the atmosphere, and the flesh of all humans and animals.
My hope is in a rapid crash, an end of Empire, and a break-up into smaller parts, where local survivors can restore a sane and beautiful "Way of Life" again in balance with Nature, as is our Birthright.
It's the worst of both worlds -- the oil has been spilled, and now it's being burned, dirty, not even refined to remove any particles. The article does not say why the stuff is being burned instead of just having the tankers take it to refineries. This must be the greatest environmental disaster in recorded history.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_gulf_oil_spill;_ylt=A2KIKwEIGBFMRwMAvBas0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTNocmptNG5mBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTAwNjEwL3VzX2d1bGZfb2lsX3NwaWxsBGNjb2RlA21vc3Rwb3B1bGFyBGNwb3MDMQRwb3MDMgRwdANob21lX2Nva2UEc2VjA3luX3RvcF9zdG9yeQRzbGsDYnB0b3N0YXJ0YnVy