Global ChangeIntersection of Nature and Culture

The significance of the BP oil spill

Sunday, May 2nd, 2010

The contrast in visual symbols from our energy economy over the past few weeks has been interesting.

On one hand, we have the explosion and potentially catastrophic spill of the BP rig in the Gulf of Mexico.  On the other, we have the approval of the Cape Wind Farm in New England.  What should we make of this?

As Lisa Margonelli points out in pieces in The Atlantic and the New York Times today, these kinds of symbols can have powerful effects, including a revitalized environmental movement, a renewed push for clean energy, and a ban on offshore drilling.

However, she’s correct to point out that the story is not so simple, with exporting our oil spills to developing nations being one likely unintended consequence of domestic environmental protection coupled with little reduction in energy consumption.  And she also notes that it’s dependence on fossil fuels—not simply offshore drilling— that perpetuates the suite of environmental problems we are dealing with today (links hers):

The oil spill in the Gulf is horrific and it’s very likely it’ll get worse. While locals get to work scrubbing the oiled birds with Dawn dish detergent,  a fracas will begin in Washington. Generally speaking this is an opera called “The Punishment,” and for the last two major oil spills of great political  consequence (Santa Barbara in 1969 and the Exxon Valdez in 1989) it involved  a moratorium on drilling somewhere in the US. The problem with this, as I lay out in an op-ed in today’s New York Times, is that we basically shift drilling and  its risks to other countries. (The figure that the Niger Delta, roughly the size of England, has suffered the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez of spilled oil every year since 1969 ought to make us cry.)

…Simply pushing oil production away from us does not solve the underlying problem. But much can be done to change drilling on federal lands and possibly make it safer. A good first step would be to reform the federal Minerals Management Service, which is responsible for both environmental enforcement and financial administration of offshore drilling leases. In 2008, this agency was caught up in a wide-ranging ethics scandal — including allegations of financial self-dealing, accepting gifts from energy companies, cocaine use and sexual misconduct — that exposed its ridiculously close relationship with the oil industry.

Several years ago, the agency considered requiring the installation of relatively inexpensive ($500,000) remote-controlled switches on offshore drilling rigs as a backup mechanism for shutting down spills like the one that’s running out of control today — but decided it wasn’t needed because there were other ways for drillers to cut off their wells.

I hope the Deepwater Horizon spill doesn’t get bad enough to join Santa Barbara and Exxon Valdez in the rogues’ gallery of huge environmental disasters. But it should galvanize us to address the real problem with oil spills — the oil.

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Photo Credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/skytruth/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0