A Sea in Flames

by Carl Safina

  “So,” adds Allen, “since Kemp’s ridley turtles don’t start breeding until they’re twelve years old, we won’t know for twelve years what happened with this year’s hatchlings.”

  Kemp’s ridleys were probably the most at-risk of the Gulf’s wildlife. “This was a critically endangered population finally coming back because of turtle excluders in fishing nets and better protection of their nesting beaches in Texas and Mexico,” Jane notes. “They were really coming back. And then with this, they were hit very, very hard—they were hammered.”

  What about dolphins? “It doesn’t look like many died,” Lubchenco says, brightening a bit. “We brought some people in to tag them. And from the tagging we can see them still moving around, alive and seeming to behave normally.”

  Corals? Oyster beds?

  “So far we haven’t seen oil in corals,” Lubchenco says, “though we haven’t finished looking everywhere yet. But oysters—they’re toast.”

  “In Louisiana,” says Allen, “they decided to send so much fresh water through the delta to keep the oil outside the marshes, they committed oystercide—or whatever you’d call it.”

  In May, Louisiana’s Governor Bobby Jindal, supported by local parish officials, ordered technicians to open giant valves on the Mississippi River, releasing torrents of fresh water with the idea of pushing any oil off the coast. The fresh water largely demolished southeastern Louisiana’s oyster beds, killing far more oysters than did the oil.

  “Again, that’s local officials doing what they think is expedient. Oyster beds have to be reseeded and started over again.”

  (In September, it seems as if shallow-water coral reefs may escape oil damage. But in November 2010, researchers on one of NOAA’s ships will find dead deep-water corals seven miles southwest of the Macondo well, 4,500 feet deep, where researchers last spring had discovered drifting hydrocarbon plumes. The expedition’s chief scientist, Charles Fisher of Pennsylvania State University, will comment, “We have never seen anything like this at any of the deep coral sites that we’ve been to, and we’ve been to quite a lot.” Dr. Lubchenco will say, “This is precisely why we continue to actively monitor the Gulf.”)

  Lubchenco starts to gather her things and says, “I really have to get going, but we’ve been talking about the ecological dimensions of this disaster, and yet the human disaster here is very, very real.”

  “We on the government side need to get better at making it known that we understand that people’s emotional reactions—the passion and the angst—are the right way to feel about this,” Allen adds. “This is grieving.”

  “So many communities, so many individuals are just devastated,” Lubchenco points out. “The federal government did an insufficient job communicating real compassion. Not that those in government didn’t care, but it didn’t come across to people as compassion.”

  “I’ll give you a good example of the problem here,” the admiral says. “We are not allowed under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 to use money from the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund to do anything about behavioral health.”

  Lubchenco shakes her head and breathes, “Isn’t that just ridiculous?”

  “It’s not allowed,” Allen says. “Nor was BP, the responsible party, required to do anything for mental wellness.”

  “A lot of changes need to be made,” Lubchenco says, though her agency’s charge is oceans and weather forecasting, not emotional health.

  Of course, that’s the space between angst and suicide.

  “So we had a charter boat captain in Alabama who did commit suicide,” Allen says somberly. “So I went to BP and said, ‘You have to give money to these states to set up an 800 number for suicide prevention counseling.’ This had nothing to do with my job as national incident commander. But it’s what the country expects out of the whole government response. And that’s a conversation we have to have.”

  This conversation is coming to a close. We’ve been here for two hours; Jane’s got a plane to catch. We rise and shake hands, and I thank them for their valuable time.

  Allen begins to turn away, then suddenly turns back to me and says, “One last thought: large corporations and the government are usually not capable of the conspiracies that are attributed to them. A lot of what seems like conspiracies has to do with just plain culture, capacity, and ineptness.”

  Lubchenco nods and agrees: “I can’t believe all the conspiracy theories I’ve heard.” She rolls her eyes and smiles, and says, “It’s been hell.”

  On Sunday, September 19, with the cementing done, Admiral Allen declares America’s worst oil leak “effectively dead.”

  Two months after the oil stopped flowing, currents and oil-eating microbes continue steadily dissipating and degrading the oil. NOAA’s Dr. Steven Murawski says that even to the most sensitive instruments, the oil deep in the open Gulf is fading to levels barely detectable, making the underwater plumes “harder and harder to find.” The oil is becoming, Murawski says, “like a shadow out there.”

  In the last week of September and the first week of October, NOAA will reopen fishing in almost 17,000 square miles of Gulf federal waters. BP ends its boat employment, and Jane Lubchenco’s agency—in an unusual move—opens fishing for the hugely popular red snapper as a boost to tourism and to anglers who’ve missed a whole spring and summer’s fishing. If fish could think, they might find themselves feeling nostalgic for the summer of pax petroleum.

  Those fish that got a few months’ peace—oil notwithstanding—remain to be caught in numbers anglers are not accustomed to. “Red snapper are unbelievable right now,” says one fisherman. “You could put a rock on the end of a string and they’ll bite it.”

  What are scientists finding?

  “It’s not what you would have guessed,” says Dauphin Island Sea Lab senior marine scientist John Valentine. “You would have expected something horrible, but that’s not what we’re seeing.” Ironically, the blowout’s most powerful environmental effect seems to be both indirect and positive: the fishing closures. Fishing is designed to kill things living in the sea, and it does so effectively. It’s been by far the major agent of change in the world’s oceans until now. And if all of us use petroleum, most of us also eat seafood. Valentine’s finding about three times as many fish now compared to before the blowout, and they’re bigger.

  Likewise, Sean Powers of the University of South Alabama finds that even some coastal Alabama shark populations have tripled in number, and a lot of that comes from this year’s young. Normally, shrimp nets kill a lot of small sharks. “It’s just been amazing how many more sharks we are seeing this year,” he says. “I didn’t believe it at first. What’s interesting to me,” he adds, “we are seeing it across the whole range, from the shrimp all the way up to the large sharks.” Ken Heck, also of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, says species whose young live in sea-grass meadows also appeared robust. “It’s quite amazing. Everyone speculated that an entire year class of larvae and young might have been lost, smothered in oil,” Heck says. “That hasn’t happened.”

  Oddly, this seems almost troubling to researchers wishing to understand the effects of oil itself. “The problem with the fishing closure is, that impact is so large it is probably going to swamp any impact of the oil spill,” Powers says. “We’re not saying we didn’t lose any fish to the spill. We’re saying it is going to be harder to detect any smaller changes due to oil spill contamination. We’ll have to look carefully.”

  Valentine notes, “This was the first time we’ve ever seen such a large-scale cessation of fishing.” I note, nature’s resilience is truly magnificent.

  Well, what does all that tell us? It tells me that restoring a healthy ocean must also involve mixing fishing into the big-picture strategy. An oil lease is a piece of seafloor specially set aside for oil extraction. Why don’t we also set aside other places, to restore a better ocean? If it’s in the national interest to produce oil and gas, it’s as much in the national interest to protect other social
and economic and living interests. There are more than eight thousand active oil and gas leases on America’s outer continental shelf. In addition to setting those places aside for taking oil and gas, why don’t we insist on setting special places aside for protection? Right now, less than 1 percent of all federal waters of the United States have been protected as national marine sanctuaries or any other safeguarded areas.

  In an e-mail to various folks, the indefatigable Dr. Sylvia Earle exhorts:

  To compensate the Gulf, and provide hope for recovery, actions should be taken ASAP to identify and protect areas that are still in good shape. Obama has the power to do as Presidents T. Roosevelt and G. W. Bush have done in the past—under the Antiquities Act—to declare National Monuments. What better way to “give back to the Gulf,” and to the people whose livelihoods depend on a healthy Gulf, than to protect the deep reefs and string of “topographic highs” in the Northern Gulf, the spawning areas for tuna, the critical places for menhaden, grouper, snapper, shrimp and others, as well as the vital—but neglected—seagrass meadows of Florida’s Big Bend area. Respect for the importance of the floating forests of sargassum and their role in providing nursery areas, food and shelter—as well as taking up carbon and generating oxygen—might be considered in an overall recovery plan. This could be the moment to act to secure protection for Pulley Ridge, the extraordinary system of deep reefs 150 miles offshore from Sarasota. And time is of the essence. Maybe now is the time, when the need is so obvious, to act.

  When BP announces it has spent $9.5 billion cleaning up its mess (a helium-filled figure that will keep floating upward over the next weeks and months), I’m not sure how I feel about it. It’s nice of BP, but they could have saved themselves and all of us the trouble by saying, “Wait a minute” when they saw pressure on the gauge during the afternoon of April 20. Maybe next time they won’t keep driving when the oil light comes on.

  But what will the next time be? Just as the federal response plan failed this blowout because it was designed to fight the next Exxon Valdez, we’re gonna need something that doesn’t just plan to fight the last war. Some added thought is called for. Some vision. What might be the next big problem in the tapping and transport of oil, the one nobody is anticipating?

  More than 27,000 abandoned wells lurk beneath the Gulf of Mexico. With some abandoned as long ago as the 1940s, deteriorating sealing jobs may already be failing. About 13 percent of them are categorized in government records as “temporarily abandoned.” Temporarily abandoned wells are supposed to be plugged within a year. That’s routinely ignored. Many “temporarily abandoned” wells have been sitting since the 1950s and ’60s. No one—not the oil companies, not the government—is checking whether they are leaking. Meanwhile, cement and pipes never intended to last so many years are aging in the seafloor. All this raises the possibility that old wells may spontaneously blow out.

  If that happens, it seems unlikely that companies will rush forward to accept responsibility. BP alone has abandoned about 600 wells in the Gulf. “It’s in everybody’s interest to do it right,” says a spokesman for Apache Corporation, which has abandoned at least 2,100 wells in the Gulf. But early on, the rules were less strict than they are today, and many—tens of thousands—of wells are poorly sealed.

  Texas alone has plugged more than 21,000 abandoned wells to control pollution in state waters. Other places have similar problems. California has resealed scores of abandoned wells. But in deeper federal waters, the U.S. Minerals Management Service has typically inspected only the paperwork, not the real job. Over five years, from 2003 through 2007, the MMS fined seven companies a total of only $440,000 for improper plug-and-abandonment work.

  The Government Accountability Office, which does congressional investigations, warned as early as 1994 that leaks from offshore abandoned wells could cause an “environmental disaster.” The GAO pressed for inspections of abandonment jobs, but nothing was done. A 2001 Minerals Management Service study noted concern that “some abandoned oil wells in the Gulf may be leaking crude oil.”

  Nothing came of that, either. In 2006 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said, “Well abandonment and plugging have generally not been properly planned, designed and executed.” The EPA was talking about wells on land, where wells abandoned in recent decades have leaked so routinely that dealing with the problem is called “re-plugging” or “reabandonment.” The GAO estimated that 17 percent of the nation’s land wells had been improperly plugged. If offshore wells are no worse, thousands of wells in the Gulf of Mexico alone are badly plugged.

  Various people, from the president on out, have called this blowout “the worst environmental catastrophe in American history.” Some simply said “in history.”

  Well, no. I heard a lot of catastrophizing on both ends. I read everything from how the Deepwater Gulf blowout would trigger a massive seafloor methane release that would kill the whole world (actually, global warming is beginning to trigger a massive methane release), to BP’s Tony Hayward saying it’s nothing much, really. Usually the truth is somewhere in the middle. But this time, the truth is closer to one end of those extremes.

  BP’s Tony Hayward became the most hated man in America for saying that the amount of oil leaked was “tiny” compared with the “very big ocean.” He might have been making excuses for BP; I’m certainly not. BP, Transocean, Halliburton, and others had to screw up big-time half a dozen different ways to get this well to blow. And in order to be 100 percent unprepared, Big Oil and our own anti-government government regulators had to ignore Ixtoc and the world’s other blowouts, cut and paste walruses into their response plans, and do the sloppiest, most cynical job money can buy. BP, Transocean, and Halliburton’s legal, fiscal, and public relations nightmare is far from over, and that’s fine by me. But whether he realized it or not, in one sense Hayward was right.

  In the blowout, 206 million gallons of oil mixed with the Gulf’s 660 quadrillion gallons of water. That volume of water could greatly dilute the oil. But the carbon dioxide we’re adding to the atmosphere isn’t getting diluted; it’s building up.

  The oil that is getting into the ocean has everyone’s attention. It was supposed to be refined to help power civilization, not spew waste and devastation. But Plan A, burning the oil—and coal, and gas—in our engines is continually adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere at the inconceivable rate of a thousand tons a second, billions of tons a year. That spill is invisible. Rather than washing up on one coast and scaring tourists, this spill, spread in time and space, is slowly coating the whole world. There is no single company at which to point fingers.

  In this, we are all involved. Our everyday use of fossil fuels is changing the atmosphere, ruining the world’s oceans. The top-tier journal Science has published a special issue called “Changing Oceans” that summarizes major changes being seen in marine life and ocean function—and the significant implications for human health and the food supply. Calling the world’s oceans the heart and the lungs of the planet, one of the authors says, “It’s as if the Earth has been smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.” The oceans produce about 50 percent of the oxygen we breathe, but absorb 30 percent of the carbon dioxide our burning produces, and also absorb more than 85 percent of the extra heat trapped by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide isn’t just warming the world; it’s making seawater more acidic.

  Because we’ve bet the house on burning oil, coal, and gas, our atmosphere’s concentration of carbon dioxide is a third higher now than at the start of the Industrial Revolution. As environmental catastrophes go, that dwarfs the Gulf blowout of 2010. That’s just a fact, and, again, I state it with no intended disrespect to the people of the Gulf whose lives were so horrendously distorted by the blowout.

  The worst environmental disaster in history isn’t the oil that got away. The real catastrophe is the oil we don’t spill. It’s the oil we run through our engines as intended. It’s the oil we burn, the coal we burn, the g
as we burn. The worst spill—the real catastrophe—is the carbon dioxide we spill out of our tailpipes and smokestacks every second of every day, year upon decade. That spill is changing the atmosphere, changing the world’s climate, altering the heat balance of the whole planet, destroying the world’s polar systems, killing the wildlife of icy seas, killing the tropics’ coral reefs, raising the level of the sea, turning the oceans acidic, and dissolving shellfish. And as the reefs dissolve and the productivity of oceans and agriculture destabilizes, so will go the food security of hundreds of millions of people.

  Fossil fuels are great fuels. They are very energy-dense for their size and weight. You can’t eat them, so their use as fuel doesn’t compete with people’s needs for food or farmland. (If the entire U.S. corn crop went to make ethanol, it would replace only 15 percent of America’s gasoline usage.) Clean renewables have drawbacks. A coal plant can keep producing energy whether or not the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. Wind is clean, but many people object to the sight of turbines (they should see how the oil rigs dominate the view in the Gulf), to their sound, or to the fact that they kill birds and bats. Large-scale solar projects need a lot of land.

  But fossil fuels have drawbacks, too. One, they’re not eternal and won’t last forever. Their production is likely to peak in a few decades. Two, in the process of getting them, workers die and dictators thrive. Three, they’re hurting the world’s life-support capacity.

  It is hard to imagine how solar power or wind or algae could power all of civilization. But not so very long ago, the present scale and difficulty of coal mining, oil drilling, and civilization itself—for that matter—was impossible to envision. Even though fossil fuels elicited giddy attraction, ramping them up to dominance took the better part of a century. No matter how good a fuel is, it takes time to create the technology to produce it, the infrastructure to transport it, and the consumer demand for it.