by Naomi Klein
Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican Party policy since May 2008. When gas prices soared to unprecedented heights, the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less,” with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich’s telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be—locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore—was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring about the environment was for sissies: as Senator Mitch McConnell put it, “in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty.” By the time the infamous “Drill, baby, drill” Republican National Convention rolled around in 2008, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-extracted fossil fuels that they would have bored under the convention floor if someone had brought a big enough drill.
Obama, eventually, gave in. With cosmic bad timing, just three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon blew up, the president announced that he would open up previously protected parts of the country to offshore drilling. The practice was not as risky as he had thought, he explained. “Oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.” That wasn’t enough for Sarah Palin, however, who sneered at the Obama administration’s plans to conduct more studies before drilling in some areas. “My goodness, folks, these areas have been studied to death,” she told the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans just eleven days before the blowout. “Let’s drill, baby, drill, not stall, baby, stall!” And there was much rejoicing.
In his congressional testimony, BP’s Hayward said, “We and the entire industry will learn from this terrible event.” And one might well imagine that a catastrophe of this magnitude would indeed instill BP executives and the “Drill Now” crowd with a new sense of humility. There are, however, no signs that this is the case. The response to the disaster, at the corporate and governmental levels, has been rife with the precise brand of arrogance and overly sunny predictions that created the blowout in the first place.
“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean,” we heard from Hayward. “The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.” In other words: don’t worry, she can take it. Spokesman John Curry, meanwhile, insisted that hungry microbes would consume whatever oil was in the water system because “nature has a way of helping the situation.” But nature has not been playing along. The deep-sea gusher has busted through all BP’s attempts at control, the so-called “top hats,” “containment domes,” and “junk shots.” [Three months after the blowout, the wellhead was finally capped.] The ocean’s winds and currents have similarly made a mockery of the lightweight booms BP has laid out to absorb the oil. “We told them,” said Byron Encalade, the president of the Louisiana Oystermen Association. “The oil’s gonna go over the booms or underneath the bottom.” Indeed, it did. Marine biologist Rick Steiner, who has been following the cleanup closely, estimates that “70 percent or 80 percent of the booms are doing absolutely nothing at all.”
And then there are the controversial chemical dispersants: more than 1.3 million gallons dumped with the company’s trademark “what could go wrong?” attitude. As the angry residents at the Plaquemines Parish town hall rightly pointed out, few tests had been conducted, and there is scant research about what this unprecedented amount of dispersed oil will do to marine life. Nor is there a way to clean up the toxic mixture of oil and chemicals below the surface. Yes, fast-multiplying microbes do devour underwater oil, but in the process they also absorb the water’s oxygen, creating a whole new threat to marine health.
BP had even dared to imagine that it could prevent unflattering images of oil-covered beaches and birds from escaping the disaster zone. When I was on the water with a TV crew, for instance, we were approached by another boat, whose captain asked, “Y’all work for BP?” When we said no, the response, in the open ocean, was “You can’t be here, then.” But, of course, these heavy-handed tactics, like all the others, have failed. There is simply too much oil in too many places. “You cannot tell God’s air where to flow and go, and you can’t tell water where to flow and go,” I was told by environmental justice activist Debra Ramirez. It was a lesson she had learned from living in Mossville, Louisiana, surrounded by fourteen emission-spewing petrochemical plants, and watching illness spread from neighbor to neighbor.
The flow of denial shows no sign of abating. Louisiana politicians indignantly opposed Obama’s temporary freeze on deepwater drilling, accusing him of killing the one big industry left standing now that fishing and tourism were in crisis. Palin mused on Facebook that “no human endeavor is ever without risk,” while Texas Republican congressman John Culberson described the disaster as a “statistical anomaly.” By far the most sociopathic reaction, however, came from veteran Washington commentator Llewellyn King: rather than turning away from big engineering risks, he said, we should pause in “wonder that we can build machines so remarkable that they can lift the lid off the underworld.”
MAKE THE BLEEDING STOP
Thankfully, many are taking a very different lesson from the disaster, standing in wonder not at humanity’s power to reshape nature, but at our powerlessness to cope with the fierce natural forces we unleash. There is something else, too. It is the feeling that the hole at the bottom of the ocean is more than an engineering accident or a broken machine. It is a violent wound in the living organism that is Earth itself. And thanks to BP’s live underwater camera feed, we can all watch our planet’s guts gush forth, in real time, twenty-four hours a day.
John Wathen, a conservationist with the Waterkeeper Alliance, was one of the few independent observers to fly over the spill in the early days of the disaster. After filming the thick red streaks of oil that the coast guard politely refers to as “rainbow sheen,” he observed what many had felt: “The Gulf seems to be bleeding.” This imagery comes up again and again in conversations and interviews. Monique Harden, an environmental rights lawyer in New Orleans, refuses to call the disaster an “oil spill” and instead says, “we are hemorrhaging.” Others speak of the need to “make the bleeding stop.” And I was personally struck, flying with the US Coast Guard over the stretch of ocean where the Deepwater Horizon sank, that the swirling shapes the oil made in the waves looked remarkably like cave drawings: a feathery lung gasping for air, eyes staring upward, a prehistoric bird. Messages from the deep.
And this is surely the strangest twist in the Gulf Coast saga: it seems to be waking us up to the reality that the earth never was a machine. After four hundred years of being declared dead, and in the middle of so much death, in Louisiana, the earth is coming back to life.
The experience of following the oil’s progress through the ecosystem is itself a kind of crash course in deep ecology. Every day, we learn more about how what seems to be a terrible problem in one isolated part of the world actually radiates out in ways most of us could never have imagined. One day we learn that the oil could reach Cuba; then Europe. Next, we hear that fishermen all the way up the Atlantic in Prince Edward Island, Canada, are worried because the bluefin tuna they catch off their shores are born thousands of miles away in those oil-stained Gulf waters. And we learn, too, that for birds, the Gulf Coast wetlands are the equivalent of a busy airport hub. Everyone seems to have a stopover there: 110 species of migratory songbirds and 75 percent of all migratory US waterfowl.
It’s one thing to be told by an incomprehensible chaos theorist that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas. It’s another to watch chaos theory unfold before your eyes. Carolyn Merchant puts the lesson like this: “The problem as BP has tragically and belatedly discovered is that nature as an active force cannot be so confined.” Predictable outcomes are unusual within ecological systems, while “unpred
ictable, chaotic events [are] usual.” And just in case we still didn’t get it, a few days ago, a bolt of lightning struck a BP ship like an exclamation mark, forcing it to suspend its containment efforts. And no one dares speculate about what a hurricane would do to BP’s toxic soup.
There is, it must be stressed, something uniquely twisted about this particular path to enlightenment. They say that Americans learn where foreign countries are by bombing them. Now it seems we are all learning about nature’s circulatory systems by poisoning them.
• • •
In the late 1990s, an isolated indigenous group in Colombia captured world headlines with an almost Avatar-esque conflict. From their remote home in the Andean cloud forests, the U’wa let it be known that if Occidental Petroleum carried out plans to drill for oil on their territory, they would commit mass ritual suicide by jumping off a cliff. Their elders explained that oil is part of ruiria, “the blood of Mother Earth.” They believe that all life, including their own, flows from ruiria, so pulling out the oil would bring on their destruction. (Oxy eventually withdrew from the region, saying there wasn’t as much oil as it had previously thought.)
Virtually all indigenous cultures have myths about gods and spirits living in the natural world—in rocks, mountains, glaciers, forests—as did European culture before the scientific revolution. Katja Neves, an anthropologist at Concordia University, points out that the practice serves a practical purpose. Calling the earth “sacred” is another way of expressing humility in the face of forces we do not fully comprehend. When something is sacred, it demands that we proceed with caution. Even awe.
If many of us absorbed this lesson at long last, the implications would be profound. Public support for increased offshore drilling is dropping precipitously, down 22 percent from the peak of the “Drill Now” frenzy. The issue is not dead, however. Many still insist that thanks to ingenious new technology and tough new regulations, it is now perfectly safe to drill in the Arctic, where an under-ice cleanup would be infinitely more complex than the one under way in the Gulf. But perhaps this time we won’t be so easily reassured, so quick to gamble with the few remaining protected havens.
Same goes for geoengineering. As climate change negotiations wear on, we should be ready to hear more from Dr. Steven Koonin, Obama’s undersecretary of energy for science. He is one of the leading proponents of the idea that climate change can be combated with techno tricks like releasing sulphate and aluminum particles into the atmosphere—and of course it’s all perfectly safe, just like Disneyland! He also happens to be BP’s former chief scientist, the man who, just fifteen months prior to the accident, was still overseeing the technology behind BP’s supposedly safe charge into deepwater drilling. Maybe this time we will opt not to let the good doctor experiment with the physics and chemistry of the earth, and choose instead to reduce our consumption and shift to renewable energies that have the virtue that, when they fail, they fail small.
The most positive possible outcome of this disaster would be not only an acceleration of renewable energy sources like wind, but a full embrace of the precautionary principle in science. The mirror opposite of Hayward’s “If you knew you could not fail” credo, the precautionary principle holds that “when an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health,” we tread carefully, as if failure were possible, even likely. Perhaps we can even get Hayward a new desk plaque to contemplate as he signs compensation checks: YOU ACT LIKE YOU KNOW, BUT YOU DON’T KNOW.
POSTSCRIPT
When I visited the Gulf Coast for this report, the spill was still ongoing and most of the lasting impacts were still unknown. Nine years later, it’s clear that some of the direst predictions were proven to be correct. Research from the National Wildlife Federation indicates that three-quarters of pregnant bottlenose dolphins were not able to give birth to viable offspring in the years after the disaster. By 2015, reports indicated that the spill had been a factor in the deaths of at least five thousand mammals, many of them dolphins.
Additionally, anywhere between two to five trillion young fish were lost in the aftermath, along with more than eight billion oysters. This contributed to losses for the fishery industry of roughly $247 million in annual revenue, according to a 2015 report from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). And just as the fishing people I met worried would happen, about 12 percent of all bluefin tuna larvae in the Gulf were contaminated by oil during the 2010 spawning season, according to a study from the NRDC, with long-term population impacts that are still unknown.
The birds I saw on oiled marsh grass likely did not fare well either. Research in 2013 from Louisiana State University found that only 5 percent of sparrow nests in oiled parts of the marshland survived after the spill, compared with roughly 50 percent in marshland that was not directly impacted by oil. Findings from the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative show that marsh grass as far as thirty feet from shore was destroyed and that large amounts of oil remained buried deep in the sediment, where it was churned up and released during Hurricane Harvey in 2012 (and will likely be released again in future disasters). According to a 2017 Florida State University study, there has been a staggering 50 percent loss of biodiversity in coastal sediment impacted by the spill.
CAPITALISM VS. THE CLIMATE
There is simply no way to square a belief system that vilifies collective action and venerates total market freedom with a problem that demands collective action on an unprecedented scale and a dramatic reining in of the market forces that created and are deepening the crisis.
NOVEMBER 2011
THERE IS A QUESTION FROM a gentleman in the fourth row.
He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Maryland’s Carroll County because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually “an attack on middle-class American capitalism.” His question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel, is this: “To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?”
Here at the Heartland Institute’s Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, the premier gathering for those dedicated to denying the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet, this qualifies as a rhetorical question. Like asking a meeting of German central bankers if Greeks are untrustworthy. Still, the panelists aren’t going to pass up an opportunity to tell the questioner just how right he is.
Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who specializes in harassing climate scientists with burdensome lawsuits and Freedom of Information Act fishing expeditions, angles the table mic over to his mouth. “You can believe this is about the climate,” he says darkly, “and many people do, but it’s not a reasonable belief.” Horner, whose prematurely silver hair makes him look like a right-wing Anderson Cooper, likes to invoke Saul Alinsky: “The issue isn’t the issue.” The issue, apparently, is that “no free society would do to itself what this agenda requires. . . . The first step to that is to remove these nagging freedoms that keep getting in the way.”
Claiming that climate change is a plot to steal American freedom is rather tame by Heartland standards. Over the course of this two-day conference, I will learn that Obama’s campaign promise to support locally owned biofuels refineries was really about “green communitarianism,” akin to the “Maoist” scheme to put “a pig iron furnace in everybody’s backyard” (the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels); that climate change is “a stalking horse for National Socialism” (former Republican senator and retired astronaut Harrison Schmitt); and that environmentalists are like Aztec priests, sacrificing countless people to appease the gods and change the weather (Marc Morano, editor of the denialists’ go-to website, ClimateDepot).
Most of all, however, I will hear versions of the opinion expressed by the county commissioner in the fourth row: that climate change is a Trojan
horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism. As conference speaker Larry Bell succinctly puts it in his new book, Climate of Corruption, climate change “has little to do with the state of the environment and much to do with shackling capitalism and transforming the American way of life in the interests of global wealth redistribution.”
Yes, sure, there is a pretense that the delegates’ rejection of climate science is rooted in serious disagreement about the data. And the organizers go to some lengths to mimic credible scientific conferences, calling the gathering “Restoring the Scientific Method” and even adopting the organizational acronym ICCC, a mere one letter off from the world’s leading authority on climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the scientific theories presented here are old, and long discredited. And no attempt is made to explain why each speaker seems to contradict the next. (Is there no warming, or is there warming but it’s not a problem? And if there is no warming, then what’s all this talk about sunspots causing temperatures to rise?)
In truth, several members of the mostly elderly audience seem to doze off while the temperature graphs are projected. They come to life only when the rock stars of the movement take the stage—not the C-team scientists but the A-team ideological warriors like Morano and Horner. This is the true purpose of the gathering: providing a forum for die-hard denialists to collect the rhetorical baseball bats with which they will club environmentalists and climate scientists in the weeks and months to come. The talking points first tested here will jam the comment sections beneath every article and YouTube video that contains the phrase “climate change” or “global warming.” They will also exit the mouths of hundreds of right-wing commentators and politicians—from Republican presidential candidates like Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann all the way down to county commissioners like Richard Rothschild. In an interview outside the sessions, Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute, proudly takes credit for “thousands of articles and op-eds and speeches . . . that were informed by or motivated by somebody attending one of these conferences.”