MODERN TIMES
Art Hobson
NWA Times, 18 July 2010
ahobson@uark.edu
The spill:
a disaster beyond reckoning
As though gripped by
some ancient ritual, Americans today sacrifice pelicans and sea turtles to
propitiate the gods of oil and the automobile.
It's the Gulf of Mexico's
largest spill. The White House
calls it probably the greatest U.S. environmental disaster. Between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels per
day, or one Exxon Valdez spill every 4 to 7 days, have flowed into the
sea. As of July 1, the total oil
spilled and not removed by the ongoing cleanup equaled 24 Exxon Valdez
spills. By any standard, the BP
oil spill is dreadful.
A Department of
Energy report estimates that oil dependence costs the U.S. economy $150 to $250
billion per year, excluding military expenditures. It estimates the total economic costs of oil dependence
during 1975 to 2005 at $5 to $13 trillion. Although the fossil fuel industry argues that Americans must
increase oil production to meet increasing demand, there are clearly better
ways. For example, by increasing
fuel efficiencies to 35 miles per gallon, using far more non-automobile
transportation, and maintaining compact cities, average Americans could easily
reduce their gasoline consumption by half.
Spills are common
and can be expected in the future.
There have been 39 oil well blowouts in the Gulf during the past 14
years, 18 of them caused by the kind of cement-related problems that probably
caused the disaster.
One environmental
minefield that's been ignored for decades is the 27,000 (that's right,
twenty-seven thousand) abandoned oil and gas wells lurking in the rocks beneath
the Gulf. There's particular
concern about 3,500 wells classified as "temporarily abandoned." Regulations call for abandoned wells to
be permanently plugged, but this rule has been routinely circumvented and most
of these wells have lingered without permanent plugs, many of them since the
1950s. It's another case of
regulators sleeping at the wheel.
By mid-June, a world
record 22,000 barrels of chemical dispersants had been applied to the spill,
with partially unknown chemical effects.
Dispersants break oil into small droplets and might contribute to the
huge plumes of dispersed oil apparently spreading, with unknown effects, in
sub-surface waters.
Drilling on the
outer continental shelf into an oil reservoir lying beneath one mile of water
plus another three miles of rock is like working in outer space: There's no
room for error. An engineering
study of 600 offshore drilling equipment failures found that 80 percent were
due to "human and organizational factors." The study says "The danger has escalated
exponentially. We have pushed it
to the bloody edge in this very, very unforgiving environment, and we don't
have a lot of experience."
It's incomprehensible
that oil companies oppose a temporary moratorium on deep-water drilling, a
moratorium that would give us a chance to sort out the causes of this disaster
and establish reforms. For them it
seems that only the money counts.
It's as though the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster had just occurred,
killing seven astronauts, and NASA were lobbying for an immediate resumption of
shuttle flights without first examining the accident's causes. In fact, NASA grounded its shuttle
flights for nearly three years while studying causes and solutions. We can thank President Obama for
demanding a deep-water drilling moratorium.
Absent major
changes, such disasters will increase in number and severity. The easy oil is gone. Our lust for the black gold pushes us
into the "extreme oil" of Canadian and Venezuelan tar sands (also
dubbed "heavy oil"), ever deeper offshore oil, fractured shale, and
precarious political environments.
In 1986 only 6 percent of Gulf oil came from wells in water over 1000
feet deep; today, 80 percent comes from such wells. The ultimate disaster awaiting us if we continue our
addiction will be global:
catastrophic climate change.
An absolutely
necessary, but probably not sufficient, solution is to put a reasonable price
on carbon. Despite what you might
think when tanking up, gasoline is practically free today. Numerous expert studies estimate the
real cost of gasoline--including its hidden environmental and health costs--at
$8 to $20 per gallon. Economists
argue that the most efficient method is a carbon tax, which could then be
rebated to all citizens at a few thousand dollars per person per year. A less efficient method is the
cap-and-trade system passed by the U.S. House but not yet by the Senate.
We'd better decide
on something before we're all, like the pelicans, covered in black goo.