Maybe this oil mess is not bad enough to make us change. The good intentions of people who want to preserve life on the planet are up against a bloodless system that seeks only this quarter's profit. Fleshy people are vulnerable and sympathetic. Corporations are legal fictions that exist in an abstract world of spreadsheets and digital stock trades. They don't care because they can't care. Even if they wanted to care they would be sued for failing in their fiduciary duty.
Nature has a huge capacity to absorb the assault we make upon it. Massive as this BP crime is, the whole ocean is not going to die right now in response. Life is resilient and tenacious. We are wounded, scarred and suffering, yet we will survive. Like the frog in a pot of water, we adjust as the heat rises and rises.
I trust my own senses. I have seen oil production. I have walked on the grounds of a refinery. Not a blade of grass grows. Not a pigeon, dandelion, ant, cockroach, . . . nothing lives there except human enablers of the machine. And they leave every chance they get. And they die there by chance too.
I have walked in wild nature (or at least as wild as it can be in the 21st century.) It was not as comfortable as sitting in air conditioned comfort watching the nature channel. Some part of me prefers this comfort. I'd rather drive my own car to my son's school and on to work. I can do all this in half an hour. On bike or bus it would be three times that and quite a hassle. And yet, and yet, and yet . . . I was alive in wildness. I was full, overflowing, thrilled, surprised, calmed and whole.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Friday, May 7, 2010
BP disaster
More happy talk from BP on the Deepwater Horizon rig disaster. Dispersants just make it look better and probably make it worse. They're adding another toxin so the first poison will sink and spread out.
Questions: Has a "blow-out preventer" ever worked (or even been tested) at this depth? What do you call a person who installs a device with that fails pretty often and calls it "fail-safe"? (Answer: liar.) How is fishing in Prince William Sound, Alaska 20 years after Exxon Valdez? How about Campeche, Mexico 30 years later? Or Timor Sea after last year's blowout? What of the continuing disaster in the Niger Delta?How is clamming at Summerland, California 40 years after that blow-out?
When we assess risk we need to consider not just the chance of failure but the possible consequences. Since there is no such thing as "fail-safe" we need to insist that even a slim chance of total devestation is not a good bet, especially when the cost is borne by all (plants and animals too) and the benefits go mostly to machines and their servant/masters.
Questions: Has a "blow-out preventer" ever worked (or even been tested) at this depth? What do you call a person who installs a device with that fails pretty often and calls it "fail-safe"? (Answer: liar.) How is fishing in Prince William Sound, Alaska 20 years after Exxon Valdez? How about Campeche, Mexico 30 years later? Or Timor Sea after last year's blowout? What of the continuing disaster in the Niger Delta?How is clamming at Summerland, California 40 years after that blow-out?
When we assess risk we need to consider not just the chance of failure but the possible consequences. Since there is no such thing as "fail-safe" we need to insist that even a slim chance of total devestation is not a good bet, especially when the cost is borne by all (plants and animals too) and the benefits go mostly to machines and their servant/masters.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Louisiana oil disaster
Disaster alley. Strange coincidence that the path of the Deepwater Horizon-BP oil mess mimics Katrina's. Not so strange that our shameful and shameless junior Republican senator wants the federal government to take over the clean up. Privatize gain and when the inevitable result of corporate greed kicks in then we socialize loss.
Talk of clean-up is embarrassing. The oil is projected to make landfall from South Pass at the mouth of the Mississippi to Pensacola on the Florida Panhandle. I think thats about 300 miles. So far 22.5 miles of booms are in place to protect the shoreline, and most of these have been blown ashore or otherwise rendered useless by rough seas. Talk of burning off the oil at the site of the leak is fantasy. Just the image of the Gulf aflame should give up pause. And it won't work. It's too windy and the oil is mixing with water, most of it won't light. Skimming with boat towed booms would be marginal help in the best of conditions and with the wind the way it is on the Gulf they can't even deploy the boats.
I search for vocabulary. This is not an oil spill. A tanker with a drunk at the wheel can run aground and all the oil aboard can spill. That is a disaster, an oil spill of a known quantity. Decades later Prince William Sound is still crippled by the Exxon Valdez spill. Here we have a huge lake of oil, blowing out through a hole we punched in the skin of our home planet a mile below the sea where we have no real chance to patch it. It is expected that the abrasive flow now seeping out of the damaged pipe will cause the whole well head to fail soon and the flow will increase tenfold or more. And nobody knows how much oil we can expect from this.
"Responsible" people point out that there are risks involved, but we need the oil. Who is "we"? BP, Haliburton, Shell, etc. . . they would not exist without oil. For me and for you it would be possible, very hard perhaps but possible, to do without oil. Not so hard really to do with much less. I am reminded of the Lone Ranger and Tonto, surrounded by hostile Natives. The Ranger turns to Tonto and says, "We're in big trouble now," and Tonto replies, "Why do you say 'we,' whitey?"
Talk of clean-up is embarrassing. The oil is projected to make landfall from South Pass at the mouth of the Mississippi to Pensacola on the Florida Panhandle. I think thats about 300 miles. So far 22.5 miles of booms are in place to protect the shoreline, and most of these have been blown ashore or otherwise rendered useless by rough seas. Talk of burning off the oil at the site of the leak is fantasy. Just the image of the Gulf aflame should give up pause. And it won't work. It's too windy and the oil is mixing with water, most of it won't light. Skimming with boat towed booms would be marginal help in the best of conditions and with the wind the way it is on the Gulf they can't even deploy the boats.
I search for vocabulary. This is not an oil spill. A tanker with a drunk at the wheel can run aground and all the oil aboard can spill. That is a disaster, an oil spill of a known quantity. Decades later Prince William Sound is still crippled by the Exxon Valdez spill. Here we have a huge lake of oil, blowing out through a hole we punched in the skin of our home planet a mile below the sea where we have no real chance to patch it. It is expected that the abrasive flow now seeping out of the damaged pipe will cause the whole well head to fail soon and the flow will increase tenfold or more. And nobody knows how much oil we can expect from this.
"Responsible" people point out that there are risks involved, but we need the oil. Who is "we"? BP, Haliburton, Shell, etc. . . they would not exist without oil. For me and for you it would be possible, very hard perhaps but possible, to do without oil. Not so hard really to do with much less. I am reminded of the Lone Ranger and Tonto, surrounded by hostile Natives. The Ranger turns to Tonto and says, "We're in big trouble now," and Tonto replies, "Why do you say 'we,' whitey?"
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