The period May-June has produced a raft of crisis headlines of late. Last year it was economic blues coupled with an overblown "threat" of swine flu that got everyone in a tizzy fit and then fizzled when flu season actually arrived later that year. This year we get the return of 200-300 point swings in the Dow and the ongoing Deepwater Horizon spill. The crisis continues, still gushing, in all the major systems sustaining our "way of life," energy, finance, debt, jobs, housing, you name it. Talk of "recovery" is about as credible as a BLS unemployment report, (not), or BPs press releases. The oil crisis is just a visible and outward sign of the deeper crisis, no more than an ugly symptom of the choices we have made as a society regarding our energy situation.
The moment that well blew out in April, I knew it was going to be much more trouble than it first seemed on the surface. (See earlier May posts). None of the "official estimates" of how much oil has gushed into the Gulf have proven to be true. BP's anemic 5000 barrels per day has now been shown to be at least 20,000 barrels per day, and we are 46 days into this mess. Do the math. We have at least a million barrels sloshing around out there now, 95% of it still below the surface of the mile deep sea. That's 42 million gallons, and new studies today report that the actual flow rate may be as high as 56,000 barrels per day, over ten times BPs "official" tally. That would mean we have 2.3 million gallons in the Gulf as of this writing, and no end in sight. It's all still gushing, like a deep wound in the gut of our flagging nation. We bleed oil, the very life blood of our economy. Each day we use 8.9 million barrels of oil, or 378 million gallons. The oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak is therefore less than four days worth at our normal consumption rate. Who, then, is really responsible for the disaster in the Gulf? It gets at the question of who is to blame, the drug dealer or the user who buys the stuff. BP is drilling in mile deep waters off our shores because, quite simply, we need the damn oil.
After weeks of low level reporting on the story the media finally woke up to the fact that this was a significant event and began "full team coverage." Now we get the BP CEO making apologies on TV commercials like a dethroned Japanese Prime Minister and, as anyone could have predicted, the oil is slowly spreading and washing up on coastlines from Louisiana to Florida. Realize that what reaches the surface is probably no more than 5% of the oil. The rest is hanging in vast subsurface plumes, killing zones for any living thing that enters them. The killing will go on for years.
In the meantime, we've gone from Top Hat, to Top Kill, to Junk Shot, and now Cut & Cap. Each attempt to stop the oil flow has had little real effect. Video simulations are beginning to hit YouTube showing the oil moving into the Atlantic in the weeks and months ahead. Collapse oriented web sites are saying the spill will be the end of life in the US as we know it. Why? New Orleans is still but a shadow of its former self. Now turn off the $2.1 trillion dollar economies of the Gulf states and add that to our economic picture. At the moment we have fishing industries in limbo, the hotel and tourism industry on the gulf coast holding its breath, literally, as the oil draws near, and you can kiss off the last of coastal housing values in the region as well. Shipping traffic approaching the Mississippi delta now has to slog through the oil and the big vessels will drag it into the fresh river water as they move upstream. Someone will notice this eventually and what will it do to our big river shipping industry in the region? The implications of this "spill" have not even really fully registered. We have yet to see what the hurricane season does with all this toxic waste. So you can see why the markets are jittery, not over the prospect that tiny Hungary might default on its debt and injure a bonus ridden bank's profits (heaven forbid), but over the deeper implication of what this oil spill could mean for us as a nation.
In my novel 9 Days Falling I strangely predicted much of this crisis in fiction, writing a year ago when the world was mostly focused on the swine flu. The story was a series of snapshots of crisis points in our modern world, including the financial roller coaster we've been on, and one plot line featured a catastrophic event in the Gulf of Mexico involving British Petroleum, and a concurrent crisis in the oil soaked waters of the Nigerian Delta as well. Few people realize that Nigeria has oil "spills" on this scale every year, though the mainstream media never moves into "team coverage" mode when it happens over there. ( I put a large chunk of this novel on line here for the curious. )
It takes something like the destruction of the Gulf and a good category 4 hurricane to fling all that oil in our faces before this nation will wake up and realize that "if we keep heading this direction we just might get where we're going." The collapse web sites I visit from time to time are sounding more and more sane these days. The "don't worry, we'll manage" mentality is sounding more and more pathetic. But if this oil catastrophe doesn't shake us from our carbon fuel addiction, what else will but further crisis and collapse? I said long ago, in numerous articles, that I thought the only way we would get real change was to first suffer the painful consequences of our failed systems, be they energy systems polluting our oceans or financial systems gathered in equally dark pools of toxic debt, hidden below the surface of public awareness in "level three" and all neatly marked to fantasy so the banks will not have to incur any losses and the bonus money can flow unimpeded...like that gushing blown wellhead.
Congress looks as feeble as BP when they try to regulate and reform the banking industry. Nothing they have tried has worked. The too big to fail banks are bigger than ever, and public money continues to gush to the rescue of any financial institution that so much as whimpers its discontent.
So I am sad to report that nothing has changed since I stopped my regular biweekly articles on all these issues last January. Things have simple gotten worse. These developing crisis lines will simply have to run their course. We have no solution or reform to the financial crisis. The housing market remains dead. Jobs are not recovering. The economy is not recovering. Debt continues to pile up, and we have no new energy policy that promises anything in relief of our insatiable thirst for oil. We are in for another summer of hot uncertainty and crisis, in financial markets and on the shores of the gulf coast. What will be left come autumn and winter this year?
Looks like I'll have plenty of fodder for continuing that novel...
