by Carl Safina
We have to do something. The Gulf of Mexico accounts for almost a third of America’s oil production and most new discoveries. Most of the world’s land has been sucked dry, especially in the United States. And elsewhere, it’s being put out of reach by autocratic, self-protecting governments.
Many people say—and they have a point—that if Americans do not want to hand even more money and clout to the likes of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Venezuela (I certainly don’t), we should drill more at home. I would add: and America should harness all our domestic sources of energy. We should get on an emergency war-footing crash program for creating the jobs and building the infrastructure to surpass China and northern Europe’s renewable-energy race, summon the determination to lead the world into the eternal-energy economy, and emerge again as the greatest country on Earth. You’ll hear me say this again, because, really, that’s the Big Picture here.
In America, there hadn’t been a big offshore oil well leak in forty years. Underwater pipeline leaks declined from an average of 2.5 million gallons per year in the early 1980s to just 12,000 gallons a year in the early ’00s, according to the Congressional Research Service. The National Research Council estimates that offshore drilling, tankers, and pipelines account for 5 percent of the oil that gets into in U.S. waters, while shipping accounts for 33 percent, and 62 percent comes from natural seeps (natural seeps send perhaps 1,000 to 2,000 barrels of oil into the northern Gulf daily, though estimates vary a lot).
This leads us to a question. What’s the worst part of America’s oil addiction: funding foreign dictators, warming the air and acidifying the seas, or drilling holes? Perhaps we should not, after all, keep America’s waters closed to our thirst for oil. Perhaps we should just drink a wider variety of energies that are better for us, better for everything. Americans pay a fraction of the full cost of a gallon of gasoline, if you count the costs of pollution and wars to maintain access. Not at the pump, anyway.
The best way to respond to the Gulf disaster? Not washing oil off birds, picking up turtles, spraying dispersants, or cleaning beaches. Rather, pulling the subsidies out from under Big Petroleum. Since we pay those subsidies in our income taxes and lose sight of them, it’d be better to put them right in our gasoline and oil taxes and let ourselves be shocked at the pump by the true cost we’re paying—and hurry toward better options.
We have a shortage of time and a long way to go. Considering how much damage carbon dioxide is doing to our atmosphere and ocean, it would be unwise to simply assume we won’t need nuclear energy. We in the United States already get about a fifth of our electricity from nuclear, and nuclear plants provide similar proportions for several other countries. (In one sense, all our energy is nuclear, since the sun itself derives its energy from hot nuclear fusion reactions similar to those in a hydrogen bomb.) It might be necessary to accept the drawbacks of more nuclear as a bridge to cleaner energy. But the dangers with nuclear’s spent fuels and potential weapon-building materials make nuclear hard to swallow. The economics are difficult, too: construction and decommissioning costs remain quite high, likely too high. Things can go wrong with nuclear in ways that simply can’t happen with other zero-carbon-emissions sources. (Terrorists can’t do much with windmills and solar panels.) Reasonable people can reach different conclusions about nuclear energy. My conclusion is that our attention ought be firmly focused on clean renewables.
Solar energy delivers power enough to meet our projected future energy demands all by itself. But today solar electricity is just 0.1 percent of total world electricity production and solar heating, a similar 0.1 percent of world energy production. For wind to generate 20 percent of U.S. electricity, we’d need almost ten times the capacity we currently have and we’d need to build 100,000 new turbines.
Replacing just half the power generated today by oil, coal, and gas would require 6 terawatts; renewable energy sources now generate only half a terawatt. But transitions have always been forced by shortages. Necessity is the mother of innovation. During the War of 1812, wood shortages around Philadelphia prompted residents to experiment with burning coal. When Edwin Drake drilled the first oil well in the United States, in 1858, whale oil was already getting harder to come by.
One problem with clean fuels is the perception that “they don’t offer new services; they just cost more,” as one analyst has said. Wrong on both counts, but the statement reveals our inability to understand the effects and costs of energy. The new services are the elimination of toxic pollution, risk, and the climate change and ocean chemistry change that fossil fuels cause. The costs of those things are enormous. The fact that the costs are not in the fuels’ at-pump price is a failure of our economics, not a drawback of clean fuels. We are already paying, and we will pay enormous future costs for the effects of climate change on agriculture, coastal cities, coral reefs and fisheries, security, and the abundance and diversity of wildlife worldwide.
Those costs are serious. A moral and practical answer is to engineer the transition. Shifting massive and guaranteed subsidies away from fossil fuels and into clean renewables would be a big part of the way to accomplish what’s needed.
But because we don’t understand the difference between price, cost, and value, we can’t seem to get our minds unstuck and move beyond or around the idea that we simply don’t want to “pay more” for better energy. On June 20, 2010, at the height of the agony in the Gulf, a CBS News / New York Times poll found that 90 percent of people agreed that “U.S. energy policy either needs fundamental changes or to be completely rebuilt” but that just under half of them—49 percent of people responding—supported new taxes on gasoline to fund new and renewable energy sources. If people don’t want to pay more at the pump, the best thing we can do to save money and buy time until we have better options would be to conserve energy and improve efficiency. Who are the losers there? Everybody wins. But boosting efficiency, too, runs into political trouble.
If we could build the infrastructure to capture and transport energy from renewable sources, the energy itself—sunlight, wind, tides, geothermal heat—would come for free. That’s what “clean, eternal” means. But we hear that energy that comes for free is too expensive. Who tells us clean, eternal energy is too expensive and that it would “wreck the economy”? Why, it’s none other than the big brothers: Big Oil and Big Coal! We’ve crossed that bridge before. There was another time when people vehemently insisted that changing America’s main source of energy would wreck the economy. The cheapest energy that has ever powered America was slavery. Energy is always a moral issue.
Big Oil and Big Coal maintain our addiction to their elixirs. But we allow it, rather than freeing ourselves to a more diverse, decentralized, cleaner, stable array of fuel sources.
The real tragedy is that for thirty years we’ve known that for reasons of national security and patriotism alone, we need to phase out our dependence on oil, coal, and gas. Our foreign dependence, the jobs we’re missing out on, the pollution, the worker-killing explosions, the way we enrich dictators and terrorists—we’ve known all that since the politically induced oil shocks and gasoline lines of the 1970s. I remember those lines with some fondness, because I waited on them as a young high school buck and proud new owner of a used hippie van. But those lines were all we needed to learn that security for the United States, and the globe, requires a future largely free of fossil fuels.
And since the late 1980s, we’ve known that fossil fuels are also destabilizing the world climate. But Big Oil and Big Coal, using the subsidies we pay them, maintain the weakest government money can buy. So most Republicans and a few indebted Democrats scoff at energy efficiency.
Multinational corporations are by definition not patriotic; they can’t afford to be. But we can’t afford for them not to be. Their interests are not our interests. For the main reason behind America’s decline—in manufacturing, jobs, technological innovation, and moral leadership—we need look no further. Multinational corporations have
strangled innovation in its crib. Killed all our first-born ideas and sent the entrepreneurs who could have saved us fleeing to places like China.
China understands its moment. Today China is rapidly becoming the world’s leader in wind and solar energy, electric cars, and high-speed rail. It’s also the world’s greatest lender of money to the United States; we have yoked ourselves to interest payments to the world’s biggest totalitarian government, while forking over union jobs, technological leadership, and the American Dream. It’s been said that empires are not destroyed from the outside; they commit suicide.
Every president since Nixon has talked about our need to kick our oil addiction. Some were serious. But by failing to sweep money out of politics, we disenfranchise ourselves from control of our own government, our own country.
And yet we simply won’t be able to maintain civilization by digging fossil energy out of the ground and burning it. There’s not enough. By the middle of this century, well within the life span of many people already born, we are scheduled to add to the world another two billion people—nearly another China plus another India’s worth of people. Of the truly great human-caused environmental catastrophes, foremost is the human population explosion. The forests, the fishes, and fresh water are collapsing under the weight of the number of people on Earth right now. All the other global environmental, justice, human development, energy, and security problems either start with or are made worse by the sheer crush of our numbers. The projected growth will squash human potential as billions of poor get poorer, while flaring tensions and igniting violence. Being concerned about overpopulation isn’t anti-people; not being worried about it is anti-people.
We run civilization mainly on the energy of long-ago sunlight, locked away in oil and coal. It’s time we step into the sunlight itself and phase in an energy future based on harnessing the eternal energies that actually run the planet. Whoever builds that new energy future will own the future. And the nation that owns the energy future will sell it to everyone else. I’d rather that nation be the United States of America. Did we really wage a decades-long Cold War just so we could anoint China the world’s Big Box Store? So we could be indebted to China for generations? Did we really hand world leadership to the largest autocratic nondemocracy in the history of the world because all it can offer is low wages, no unions, and cheap goods? Is that all it takes to secure our surrender? Where are the patriots?
New details about the Gulf blowout of 2010 will continue to bubble up for quite some time. As the birds of autumn begin rowing through the air near my Long Island home, I begin seeing gleaming white gannets on their way south after nesting in Canada. Last spring, the first oiled bird whose image made news was a gannet that had spent its winter in the Gulf. I realized that the bird would never return to its Canadian nesting grounds, meaning the oil would create problems reaching far beyond the Gulf of Mexico. Juvenile gannets can spend several years in the Gulf, and now I get word that Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary, near Tampa, is still nursing about eighty gannets it received during the summer, debilitated by oil but alive. That means hundreds of gannets died. In Canada, seabird biologist Bill Montevecchi says that his tagging studies suggest that the oil posed a threat to as many as a third of Canada’s gannets. Even if all goes well from now on, it will take a few years for the population, nesting well over two thousand miles from the Gulf, to replace those birds lost to the Gulf oil slicks. And that’s just gannets.
The blowout is both an acute tragedy and a broad metaphor for a country operating sloppily, waving away risks and warnings, a country that does not use care in stewarding its precious gifts, a country concerned only about the next little while, not the longer time frames of our lives or our children’s futures.
In the meantime, we are left with the Gulf itself. Regardless of how fast the Gulf’s waters, wildlife, and wetlands recover from this blowout, Gulf residents will be left with scars and years-long pain. The stamp of this will be on lives, families, marriages, and children for quite a while to come.
During the last week of September, “moderate to heavy oil” washes onto almost one hundred miles of Louisiana’s shoreline. And when Louisiana State University scuba divers go for a look into the waters off of St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes, they see “oil everywhere.”
REFERENCES
BLOWOUT!
1 Deepwater Horizon size, and insured for over half a billion dollars S. Mufson, “Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Creates Environmental and Political Dilemmas,” Washington Post, April 27, 2010. See also “Deepwater Horizon,” at Wikipedia.org; accessed on November 12, 2010.
2 No serious injuries in seven years “Blowout: The Deepwater Horizon Disaster,” CBS News, May 16, 2010; http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/05/16/
60minutes/main6490197.shtml.
3 Drilling progressed to about 4,000 feet “Oil Spill Postmortem: BP Used Less-reliable, but Cheaper Drilling Method on Deepwater Horizon,” McClatchy-Tribune News Service, May 23, 2010.
4 $58 million over budget “AFE Summary for the Macondo Well,” http://www.deepwaterinvestigation.com/external/content/document/3043/
914919/1/AFE%20Summary%20for%20the%20Macondo%20Well.pdf.
5 Casing and drill pipe and “making a trip M. Raymond and William Leffler, Oil and Gas Production in Nontechnical Language (Tulsa, OK: PennWell Corp., 2006), p. 104.
6 It was a world-class rig “Deepwater Horizon’s Cementing Plan Is Under Scrutiny.” The well-drilling description is based on schematic and notes from the Times-Picayune, 2010; see schematic at http://media.nola.com/2010_gulf_oil_spill/photo/oil-halliburton-cement-052010jpg-e618a2271a66c847.jpg.
7 The rig was getting dated, and Lloyd’s findings R. Brown, “Oil Rig’s Siren Was Kept Silent, Technician Says,” New York Times, July 23, 2010, p. A1; http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/us/24hearings.html?_r=1&hp.
8 The rig lost all its fluid I. Urbina, “BP Used Riskier Method to Seal Well Before Blast,” New York Times, May 26, 2010, p. A1; http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/us/27rig.html?_r=2.
9 “We got to a depth of 18,260 feet” “USCG/BOEM Marine Board of Investigation into the Marine Casualty, Explosion, Fire, Pollution, and Sinking of Mobile Offshore Drilling Unit Deepwater Horizon, with Loss of Life in the Gulf of Mexico,” April 21–22, 2010,” testimony of John Guide, transcript p. 87, lines 1–25, July 22, 2010; http://www.deepwaterinvestigation.com/go/doc/3043/856503/.
10 “While drilling that hole section we lost over 3,000 barrels of mud” “USCG/MMS Marine Board of Investigation into the Marine Casualty, Explosion, Fire, Pollution, and Sinking of Mobile Offshore Drilling Unit Deepwater Horizon, with Loss of Life in the Gulf of Mexico 21–22 April 2010,” testimony of Mark Hafle, transcript pp. 42–43, lines 1–25, 1–5, May 28, 2010; http://www.deepwaterinvestigation.com/go/doc/3043/670171/.
11 At over $250 per barrel P. Parsons, “The Macondo Well: Part 3 in a Series About the Macondo Well (Deepwater Horizon) Blowout,” Energy Training Resources, LLC, July 2010, pp. 17, 15; http://www.energytrainingresources.com/data/default/content/Macondo.pdf. See also M. J. Derrick, “Cost-Effective Environmental Compliance in the Gulf of Mexico,” World Energy Magazine 4, No. 1 (2001); http://www.derrickequipment.com/Images/Documents/wemdvol4no1.pdf.
12 Delays cost a week and led to a budget add-on of $27 million “AFE Summary for the Macondo Well,” http://www.deepwaterinvestigation.com/go/doc/3043/914919.
13 Forty-three days behind R. Brown, “Oil Rig’s Siren Was Kept Silent, Technician Says,” New York Times, July 23, 2010, p. A1; http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/us/24hearings.html?_r=1&hp.
14 Crew is informed they’d lost $25 million, “Blowout: The Deepwater Horizon Disaster,” a 60 Minutes report that features Mike Williams, CBS News, May 16, 2010; http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/05/16/60minutes/main6490197.shtml.
15 The final section of the well bore extended to 18,360 feet U.S. Congress, House Committee on Energy and Commerce, June 14, 2010, letter from Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak to T
ony Hayward, 111th Congress: p. 4; http://energycommerce.house.gov/documents/20100614/Hayward.BP.
2010.6.14.pdf.
16 “Cost is not a deciding factor” “USCG/MMS Marine Board of Investigation into the Marine Casualty, Explosion, Fire, Pollution, and Sinking of Mobile Offshore Drilling Unit Deepwater Horizon, with Loss of Life in the Gulf of Mexico,” April 21–22, 2010, testimony of David Sims, May 26, 2010; http://www.deepwaterinvestigation.com/go/doc/3043/670067/.
17 “a win-win situation” USCG/BOEM Marine Board of Investigation into the Marine Casualty, Explosion, Fire, Pollution, and Sinking of Mobile Offshore Drilling Unit Deepwater Horizon, with Loss of Life in the Gulf of Mexico,” April 21–22, 2010, testimony of John Guide, transcript p. 397, lines 18–23, July 22, 2010; http://www.deepwaterinvestigation.com/go/doc/3043/856503/.
18 “With every decision, didn’t BP reduce” “Video: Deepwater Horizon Joint Investigation Footage,” July 22, 2010, Part 36, posted on July 24, 2010; http://www.dvidshub.net.
19 “without a doubt a riskier way to go” I. Urbina, “BP Used Riskier Method to Seal Well Before Blast,” New York Times, May 26, 2010, p. A1; http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/us/27rig.html?_r=2.
20 Jason Anderson’s concerns over safety “BP Toolpusher Jason Anderson Feared for His Life,” June 3, 2010; http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/52541. See also “Deepwater Horizon Victim—Jason Anderson,” http://www.awesomestories.com/assets/deepwater-horizon-victim-jason-anderson . See also R. Arnold, “Son Warned of Trouble on Doomed Rig,” August 16, 2010; http://www.click2houston.com/news/24652197/detail.html. See also T. Junod, “Eleven Lives,” Esquire, August 16, 2010; http://www.esquire.com/features/gulf-oil-spill-lives-0910. See also J. Carroll and Laural Brubaker Calkins, “BP Pressured Rig Worker to Hurry Before Disaster, Father Says,” Bloomberg, May 27, 2010; http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-05-28/bp-pressured-oil-rig-worker-to-hurry-before-fatal-gulf-blast-father-says.html.