Remember the election campaign mantra on the lips of Sara Palin and the Republicans not so long ago? It's ironic the the Deepwater Horizon well blowout catastrophe happened just days after President Obama opened up segments of our Atlantic coast to offshore drilling, in a grudging admission of the problem that has been facing us as a nation for decades now--a problem our own best analysts in the US military say will be painfully evident by 2015. We are running out of the one commodity that has fueled the engine of our economy and way of life for the last 50 to 60 years--cheap oil.
Even though the world financial crisis has slowed demand so much that oil is being tankered for lack of buyers on the open market, the price has been creeping relentlessly upward, closing at $86.39 a barrel last Friday. This while some 210,000 gallons of oil now surge into the Gulf of Mexico from the ruptured Deepwater Horizon blowout. A post by an engineer has made some ripples on the web in recent days, as he seems to think the problem is much worse than the media or NOAA let on. Here is a passage:
"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 is 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."
Now the massive oil slick is threatening the entire coast of Mississippi, the entire delta region of Louisiana, and the coasts farther east to Florida as well. Prevailing currents could see the contaminants spread into the Atlantic soon. At present, the threatened area generates a full third of our seafood supply in this country. Think prices on oysters, shrimp, crab and other fish are high now? Just wait.
Now a report circulating in official back channels believes the damage could be much more severe. There could be as much as ten times the reported oil leaking into the gulf daily. Our intrepid engineer explains it this way: "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?"
Perhaps the warning is premature, as no one seems to know just how much oil the well has tapped into. If it is a relatively small pocket, then the spill would be self limiting. In fact a similar event occurred in the Timor Sea off the Australian coast, in August of 2009, and while it created a spill nearly the size of the state of Virginia, it eventually sealed up...some five months later. And the Ixtoc spill off the coast of Mexico in 1979 was also much bigger than this one so far, with nearly half a million barrels spilled and a huge swathe of the Texas Gulf coast contaminated. So it remains to be seen if this event becomes a major blow to the world's oceans. The Gulf recovered from the Ixtoc spill in just three years. But the what if in the engineer's warning still gives us pause. What if this is a truly massive pocket of deep oil, so highly pressurized that it blew the drilling rig apart? And what if it grows exponentially and moves from the Gulf to the Atlantic and beyond? This is the worse case scenario, but in any case "drill baby, drill" sounds pretty pathetic now, as hollow as Sara Palin's head.
This is what our insatiable thirst for oil brings upon us--oil that we need because we all need two or three cars parked in our driveways...Oil we need because of the fantasy we call perpetual growth required for our economy. When will the word "sustainable" enter our lexicon of thought, along with other words like "affordable"? And when will we, as a society, ever realize that having enough, is enough, and release this insatiable desire to always have more?
No matter what the size of this latest well blowout, the damage is already registering in lost tourist sales bookings all along the coast. This means more layoffs for the hotels, restaurants, suppliers, all on top of the body blow this has already dealt to the fishing industry in the region.
This is what our insatiable thirst for oil brings upon us--oil that we need because we all need two or three cars parked in our driveways...Oil we need because of the fantasy we call perpetual growth required for our economy. When will the word "sustainable" enter our lexicon of thought, along with other words like "affordable"? And when will we, as a society, ever realize that having enough, is enough, and release this insatiable desire to always have more?
No matter what the size of this latest well blowout, the damage is already registering in lost tourist sales bookings all along the coast. This means more layoffs for the hotels, restaurants, suppliers, all on top of the body blow this has already dealt to the fishing industry in the region.
Good luck at the seafood counter next month.
