A Sea in Flames

by Carl Safina

  Docked near Shell Beach lies a red-hulled trawler named Blessed Assurance. These communities could always depend on the marshes and waters and fishes and shellfish, no matter what. But now, that blessed assurance is suspended indefinitely. Human dignity is its own justification, and many people here, citizens of our imperfectly united country, feel that they may have just lost theirs.

  “I’d hate to think that the hurricane didn’t kill me and an oil spill did,” says the sixty-eight-year-old survivor who’d rebuilt his century-old bait-and-fuel business from scratch after Katrina utterly destroyed it. Says his forty-one-year-old son, “This marsh is going to be like a big sponge, soaking up the oil. It’s going to be bad.” Captain Doogie Robin, eighty-four, oysterman, says, “Katrina really hit us hard. And this here, I think this is going to finish us now. I think this will wipe us off the map.” A seafood dealer in Buras, Louisiana, says, “When you kill that food chain, nothing’s going to come back to this area.” A woman in Hopedale says, “If it gets in the marsh, it could be a year, it could be two years, it could be ten years.” She adds, “It all depends on what happens.”

  What happens: By the first week of May, fishing is suddenly a thing of the past in 6,800 square miles of federal waters. More people whose lives depend on fishing realize they’re out of work. Just like that. And the effects ripple further. A restaurant owner catering to fishermen worries, “How is a fisherman going to be able to afford to eat if he doesn’t have a job?”

  Meanwhile, the spokesman for the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board is working to—y’know—promote Louisiana seafood, assuring the public that Louisiana seafood remains available and safe. In 2008, the federal government had estimated the annual volume and value of Gulf-caught fish and shellfish at 1.3 billion pounds, worth $661 million. “We should be fine unless this thing gets totally out of control,” the seafood promoter says.

  “What BP’s doing is throwing absolutely everything we can at this,” says a senior vice president for the corporation.

  Does that sound like a response plan or like this thing is totally out of control?

  On May 2, BP begins drilling the first of those two relief wells. I say “BP begins drilling,” but actually BP doesn’t actually own any drilling equipment or do any drilling. As always, it simply hires someone else. It’s just the Big Payer. Incredibly, these relief wells are planned to go straight down to around a mile below the seafloor (two miles from the surface), then angle in toward the blowing-out well, whereupon they will hit it 13,000 feet below the seafloor—where it is seven inches in diameter. They’re capable of doing this—but they can’t stop a leaking pipe lying on the seabed.

  BP says it will spend a week making a 74-ton, concrete-and-metal box to put over the leak. “It’s probably easier to fly in space than do some of this,” says a BP spokesman.

  Florida’s Governor Charlie Crist says, “It’s not a spill, it’s a flow. Envision sort of an underground volcano of oil and it keeps spewing.”

  Twenty or so dead sea turtles wash ashore along thirty miles in Mississippi. None with oil on them, but the number’s unusual. They could have eaten oil blobs, a frequent health problem for sea turtles. Or been overcome by fumes. Or drowned in shrimp nets. Fingers get pointed each way. Shrimpers say no way, impossible; they’re required to use turtle-escape devices in their nets. The suspicious say panicked shrimpers tied the turtle-escape flaps shut to get every last shrimp. I’m going with the shrimpers on this one. I think it was the oil. A few years ago, off South Carolina, where there had not been any spills noted, veterinarians showed me how ingesting oil suppresses turtles’ white blood cell counts, their immune system, and makes them unhealthy.

  May 7. Along with the oil comes a new vocabulary of silly names for half-baked ideas. Today’s password: “dome.” Use it in a sentence: “BP has constructed a four-story containment dome intended to control and capture the largest of the leaks (yes, the pipe is leaking elsewhere, too).” But even as the dome was lowered, crews discovered that the opening was becoming clogged by an icy mix of gas and water—why didn’t the engineers foresee this?—so they set the 74-ton steel contraption down on the seabed 650 feet away from the leak, “as officials decide how to proceed.” New definition of “decide”: to scratch one’s head in wonder and confusion.

  Foreseeing vast costs for cleanup and damage, investors Begin Pummeling, wiping about $30 billion off BP’s value in the first two weeks of the blowout. Outrage spreads. Momentum billows for lifting the recklessness-inducing $75 million cap on oil firms’ damage liability to a more realistic $10 billion.

  It doesn’t take long to connect the most obvious dots: The Economist argues that “America’s distorted energy markets, not just its coastline, need cleaning up.” America needs a real energy policy. We need more diversified, cleaner, more competitive energy.

  Easier said.

  Meanwhile the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman writes that there is only one meaningful response to the horrific oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and that is for Congress to pass an energy bill that will create an American clean-energy infrastructure and set our country on a real, long-term path to ending our oil addiction. The obvious beneficiaries: our environment, our national security, our economic security, innovators, entrepreneurs. “We have to stop messing around,” writes Friedman, “with idiotic ‘drill, baby, drill’ nostrums, feel-good Earth Day concerts and the paralyzing notion that the American people are not prepared to do anything serious to change our energy mix.” He says this oil spill is like the subprime mortgage mess, a wake-up call and an opportunity to galvanize “radical change that overcomes the powerful lobbies and vested interests that want to keep us addicted to oil.”

  It all sounds so obvious, and too familiar. And that’s the problem: the things that should have us on fire demanding change somehow fail to rouse we, the people, to the passion that could free us from our dependence on our pushers.

  Senator John Kerry, one of the first sponsors of the Senate’s energy bill, back before the blowout, seems to share such sentiments. He believes America is confronting three interrelated crises: an energy security crisis, a climate crisis, and an economic crisis. He says our best response to all three “is a bold, comprehensive bill that accelerates green innovation and creates millions of new jobs as we develop and produce the next generation of renewable power sources, alternative fuels and energy-efficient cars, homes and workplaces.”

  But ironically, because some Republican governors—such as Florida’s Charlie Crist and California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger—are withdrawing support for expanding drilling off their coasts, Republican support for an energy bill—wafer thin at its apogee—is dissolving faster than dispersant-drenched oil. Obama paid the price of reaching for that support by opening new areas, but the blowout has coastal politicians shrinking back in horror. The bill dies. Most proponents say the bill in Congress had been decorated with so many gifts and compromises that it had become a bad bill anyway. That’s an apt balm. It was like the bill had eaten so much fat that it collapsed of arterial blockage.

  Even though it’s a matter of physics that carbon dioxide makes the planet warmer, and even though, because of burning oil and coal, our atmosphere now contains a third more carbon dioxide (and climbing) than it did at the start of the Industrial Revolution, many people just won’t believe we have a big problem. People have a lot of kooky notions, but many who are disconnected from reality on this issue are running or aspiring to run the government of the United States of America.

  Ron Johnson, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from the great dairy state of Wisconsin, doesn’t “believe” that carbon dioxide is causing climate change, “not by any stretch of the imagination.” With his head still in his dairy air, he’s going to Washington. In a few months, Johnson, steeped in tea party support, will beat Democratic incumbent Russ Feingold. “I think it’s far more likely,” Johnson opines of the causes for global warming, “that it’s just sunspot acti
vity.”

  When U.S. senators are offering the same explanation for climate change that were used to explain UFOs in the 1950s—watch out.

  Here is a real conservative, one I admire: Congressman Bob Inglis, Republican of South Carolina:

  As a Republican, I believe that we should be talking about conservation, because that’s our heritage. If you go back to Teddy Roosevelt, that’s who we are. And after all, there are very few letters different between conservatism and conservation. People asked me if I believe in climate change. And I tell them, no, I don’t believe in climate change. It’s not big enough to be a matter of faith. My faith informs my reaction to the data. But the data shows that there is climate change and that it stands to reason that it is in part human caused. And so, therefore, as responsible moral agents, we should act as stewards. Unfortunately, a clear majority of the Republican conference does not accept human causation in climate change. It’s definitely not within the orthodoxy of conservatism as presented by, you know, Sarah Palin and folks like her. So you don’t want to stand against that. And the result is that some people are sort of cowed into silence.…

  It’s really about national security. We are dependent for oil on the region of the world that doesn’t like us very much. We need to change the game there. It’s also about free enterprise, letting the free enterprise system actually solve this problem. Right now, the reason that free enterprise can’t solve the problem is that petroleum and coal have freebies. Accountability, by the way, is a very bedrock conservative concept, even a biblical concept. We insist on accountability. So do we want to persist in a situation where we need to land the Marines in order to make sure that we have, in the future, the access to this petroleum that we must have? Or do we want to use the strength of America, the free enterprise system and the innovativeness of entrepreneurs and investors here to break that dependence? So our choice is, do we play to our strengths? Or do we continue to play to our weakness, which is playing the oil game?

  Anyone expecting thunderous applause for such a rousing call to patriotism isn’t paying attention. Asked what happens to Republicans who respond positively to science, Inglis says, “People look at you like you grew an extra head or something. You’re definitely seen as some kind of oddball, and perhaps even a heretic.”

  Congressman Inglis lost his bid for reelection in the 2010 primaries. Too “moderate.”

  The fact that politicians, media talking heads, and too much of the electorate lost the ability to differentiate between science and ideology is one of the causes of America’s decline. But if Americans don’t understand science, is it really fair to blame Big Oil?

  The government’s main office for gathering all the scientific data on climate change and informing the U.S. Congress, more than a dozen federal agencies, and the American people is called the Global Change Research Program. Rick Piltz was a senior officer there from 1995 to 2005. Soon after George W. Bush took over the White House after losing the “popular vote”—which in other countries is called the “election”—Piltz was putting together a major report for Congress. “We were told to delete the pages that summarized the most recent IPCC report and the material about the National Assessment of climate change impacts that had just come out,” he recalled in 2010. The IPCC is the international scientific body that collects and assesses all the climate research from around the world. The National Assessment was a similar report covering research by U.S. scientists. They’d both concluded that climate change was happening and that human activity was accelerating it.

  But the Bush White House put its fingers in its ears and sang, “La-di-da.” Piltz says the experts had made “pretty clear and compelling statements. And to say that you didn’t believe it was to say that you did not want to go along with the preponderance of scientific evidence.” Until he left, four years later, from almost every report Piltz and his team compiled, the White House deleted references to climate change or carbon emissions. Many of those deletions were made by a guy named Philip Cooney. He was chief of staff for the Bush White House’s Council on Environmental Quality. His previous job had been as a lawyer and lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, and his next job was with ExxonMobil.

  And when we so crucially need campaign finance reform and publicly funded elections to get the money out of politics, in the 2010 Citizens United case, the Supreme Court overturned a century of precedent, and effectively destroyed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform legislation. McCain-Feingold banned the broadcast or transmission of “electioneering communications” paid for by corporations or labor unions from their general funds in the thirty days before a presidential primary and in the sixty days before the general elections. By doing away with that, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to corporate election-distorting money and made it easier for the sources of that money to remain anonymous. All five of the Court’s “conservatives” joined together to overturn a sixty-three-year-old ban on corporate money in federal elections and twenty-year-old and seven-year-old precedents affirming the validity of such corporate electioneering bans. They ignored the protests of their four more moderate (actually conservative, in other words) dissenting justices. Writing ninety pages for the dissenters, Justice John Paul Stevens noted: “Today’s decision is backwards in many senses. The Court’s opinion is a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”

  President Obama called the decision “a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.”

  This “Joke of the Week” arrives in my in-box: “The economy is so bad, Exxon-Mobil just laid off 25 congressmen.”

  I hop onto a small boat that’s already pulling away from the dock in Shell Beach, Louisiana. The captain, Casey Kieff, was a fishing guide until the oil blowout caused an indefinite fishing closure. Now he’s taking some photographers out to have a look at Breton Sound. On board is a reporter from Reuters, a crew from Russian state television, a photographer working for Getty Images, and several others. The captain names a fair price and I jump on, too, wondering if this is his last week of work—and what price could really be fair to him. For decades he’s been guiding people who want to sport-fish for speckled sea trout and redfish. No matter how bad the oil gets, the media attention will wane. Guiding reporters won’t be a new career. So he’s got a lot on his mind.

  We go to Hopedale to pick up a couple of other people. The cops have the road into here closed, but by the grace of boats we have free range of the place. The waterfront is bustling with trucks carrying miles and miles of boom, all kinds of boats getting into the act for a day’s uneasy pay. The National Guard, wildlife enforcement people—all kinds of busyness intent on oil-containment plans that are at worst futile and at best high-risk. There seems both a lot of organization and a lot of confusion.

  In Kieff’s overpowered outboard, we blast through a sliver of the astonishingly vast and intricate wetlands of Louisiana.

  The first thing that really impresses me is the immensity of Louisiana’s marshes and coast. Marshes as far as you can see, to all points of the compass. Bewildering mazes of channels.

  How could this whole coast be protected? And if oil comes, it could never be cleaned by people. It’s a wet, grassy sponge from horizon to horizon.

  The skeletons of oak forests stand starkly on marsh islands now subsiding, too low and too inundated to sustain trees. They’re dying back, and the marshes themselves are eroding away.

  But still, there are miles and
miles of marshes before one gets to the open waters of Breton Sound. As we head toward the Gulf, I notice a few bottlenose dolphins rolling as they snatch air in the mud-murked channels.

  When we reach open water, the horizon is dotted with gas rigs and a few boats that have piled their decks with booms.

  After a long, pounding ride through a stiff chop, our captain steers us to one of the inner islands, Freemason, a barely emergent ridge of sand and shell about a mile long. The innermost of the Chandeleur chain, the island is maybe a mile long. (Katrina dissolved several miles of these islands.)

  The island isn’t well known to people. But it is to birds. Brown pelicans, laughing gulls, herring gulls, black skimmers, and least, Sandwich, and royal terns rest by the dozens. They’re joined by a few itinerant ruddy turnstones, sanderlings, and black-bellied plovers migrating toward their Arctic nesting grounds.

  In some ways, a catastrophe of this magnitude could not have happened in a worse place. Or at a worse time of year.

  The Gulf is a large region, but its natural importance is even more outsized, disproportionate to its area. The Gulf is the hourglass pinch point for millions of migrating creatures that funnel in, and then fan out of it to populate an enormous area of the hemisphere’s continents and coasts. Anything that affects living things inside the Gulf affects living things far outside it.

  In the Gulf in May, with the oil gushing, are loons, gannets, various kinds of herons and others that have spent the winter here but will soon leave to migrate north. Depending on the species, they’ll breed all along the coast from the southern states to as far north as the Maritimes and lakes across much of Canada. Some of the longest-distance migrants on Earth are various sandpipers, plovers, and other shorebirds, many of which winter as far south as Patagonia and breed as far north as the high Arctic. Perhaps a million cross the Gulf in May, and when they reach the U.S. coastline, they must stop to rest and feed. Problems with habitat and food supply have reduced many of their populations 50 to 80 percent in the last twenty years. And now this.