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There will be a great deal of talk, and perhaps increased action, over the coming days about the massive oil mess in the Gulf of Mexico and on the beaches and into the marshes of the coast line. The bottom line, however, is this: it is too late. There is too much oil in too wide an area and too much is already hitting the beaches. You’ve heard of trying to empty the ocean with a tea cup. This isn’t that hopeless, but the idea is kind of the same.
The word going forward to remember is this: mitigation. That’s what the “clean up of the oil spill” is about from this point onward. It is not truly a clean up, but rather an effort to lessen the damage. There is just no way to clean up such a massive spill. It is all about mitigation, not remediation. The true recovery has to come from the Gulf itself and the passage of time, forces that answer to no megacorp and to no government.
It will take years for the Gulf coast, its businesses, people and jobs, to recover. Some businesses based on gathering sea food will go away and never come back. Some businesses will shut their doors, take whatever money they can get from BP and the government and call it quits.
It will also take years for the oil to sink to the bottom of the ocean, be dispersed by winds and tide and to float inland. (A hurricane could obviously speed up that whole process and the Gulf gets hurricanes on a fairly regular basis.) The job of cleaning up, when all the workers in white or orange suits are done, will be left to mother nature.
This is not to say that efforts shouldn’t be made or that those efforts shouldn’t be doubled or tripled in the coming days. But, let’s face facts. There are many millions of gallons of oil out there and there is too much to capture, boom around or pick up in globs on the beaches. Way too much.
CBS News showed close up video last evening (6.14.10) of massive burn off of oil at sea, the ocean in flames with crude oil burning. Great. That will take care of some of it. They are also deploying actor Kevin Costner’s centrifuge machines to extract the oil from sea water so that it can be shipped to shore and processed into oil products. Great. That will take care of another portion. Plus, the booms. Plus the efforts to clean up the beaches (forget the marshes once the oil is in there, you can’t, with current technologies, get it out). But, seriously, how much will all of this, put together, accomplish?
We would be lucky if they got half the oil, which will still leave millions of gallons floating around in the Gulf, washing ashore, killing wildlife, ruining beach vacations and damaging commercial fishing for years. That’s the story. Sad, but true. The sooner we face up to it, the sooner that part of the country can deal with the harsh circumstances facing it. Jobs are leaving, vacation rentals will stop, businesses will close. Unless someone comes up with a kind of miracle, we are stuck with oil in the Gulf for a long time. All of this is yet another lesson that what we do in the world has consequences, that not everything can be put back in order with hard work, money and big technology and that there is a price to pay, sometimes a very dear one, when mistakes lead to disaster.
The anger of the public is understandable. We didn’t ask BP to go into 10,000 ft. or more of ocean water to drill. We didn’t ask the Minerals Management Service of the Federal government to become buddy buddy with the oil companies and take short cuts. We were misled, if not outright lied to, from the start of this disaster and hard information came forward only with demands from the government and news media. We get the benefit of the oil, but we don’t get the massive profits that the oil companies get for taking huge risks with the world’s oceans. They told us everything would be fine. They were wrong.
As a first step forward, it is clear that deep water drilling needs a complete reexamination and, if possible, a new re-certification, through testing, analysis and regulation. Next, the whole process of ocean drilling needs review to make certain the practices are the very best and that corners are not being cut (just because a disaster of this size hasn’t yet happened in shallow water drilling doesn’t mean it can’t Stopping a shallow gusher would likely be a lot less complicated, however).
Next, there should probably be some sort of multi-billion dollar disaster fund set up by the oil industry, with the money held in trust by the government, so that action can be taken more quickly in the future to, first, respond to disasters and, second, to get money in the hands of those directly harmed by oil spills. There should probably also be “pre-paid” penalties for damaging wild life and the environment. If there is to be such a trust fund, it should be a real trust fund, not a phony one like Social Security where the Treasury itself is the guarantor that the funds will be available. In other words, the government doesn’t get to play with the money over the years when there are no disasters.
It is going to take years to unwind this mess. President Obama goes on national television tonight to try to do something he has so far not quite managed, assure the public that he understands the seriousness of the problem and is planning serious, commensurate action. The days of saying, “BPs in charge” are over.
Doug Terry, 6.15.10
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