That’s a half million dollars Americans had to give the government whether they wanted to or not (or at least working and middle class Americans, rich folks seem to have an “or not” clause in the tax code).  That’s the reason for all the indignation.  I think of myself as a cheerful taxpayer; I’m happy to chip in for all those things that we need to share in common.  My own vacations are pretty modest and I don’t want to be forced to send the people who work for me to resorts I can’t afford to visit myself.

At the same time, I don’t need to see a bunch of hearings with Congressmen (who are themselves overpaid and coddled) bloviating at GSA bureaucrats.  That doesn’t make me feel better.  Getting the money back, that’s what’ll make me feel better.  Accountability. Take the top ten people at GSA and charge them $523,000, divide it up however you like.

Can’t do it?  Why not?  You’re Congress or the White House or both.  Write a regulation, put it in the civil service manual, take ‘em to court.  Spending another two million on hearings so politicians with bad comb-overs can posture about excess spending doesn’t help at all.

If Barack Obama or Mitt Romney want a plank to run on, accountability is a good place to start.  Hey, Secret Service agents and Special Forces personnel – you wanna party with whores in Colombia?  You now owe the American people your plane fare, food and lodging expenses and any other additional costs to replace your sorry asses on the mission you just bungled so horribly.  Oh, and please pay your prostitute.  And you’re fired.  What is this “allowed to retire” crap, anyhow?  Allowed to retire on a government pension and then go work for corporate America at twice the salary (and twice the whores) as before?  That’s not accountability we can believe in.

(Let me just say as an aside that I have dealt with the Secret Service, both uniform and plain clothes, active duty and retired and I can say without fear of contradiction that it is entirely in character for them to be the kind of guys to a) solicit prostitutes for sex, b) take them back to a hotel riddled with – d’oh! -security cameras and c) try to cheap out on the price the next morning.  Clint Eastwood, these guys ain’t.)

But I digress. The point is accountability and it should cover the federal (and state and local) government like the dew on a spring morning.  In Afghanistan, we’re apologizing (again) because our troops took frat house photos with body parts.  This after we apologized for burning Korans and that followed the apology for videos of troops pissing on dead people.  Combine stuff like that with kicking in doors in the middle of the night and somehow people will just not want you in their country.

Two years ago tomorrow, the biggest oil spill in US history erupted in the Gulf of Mexico, just weeks after President Obama gave a speech saying those things don’t happen anymore.  Yesterday, that same president’s blue-ribbon commission on the spill blasted Congress for failing to pass laws that might prevent a repeat, while at the same time the administration has granted permission for another giant oil company to drill in the Arctic Ocean, where the Coast Guard says it has no way of responding to, much less cleaning, an oil spill.

This is all from one week.  Four serious incidents, all stemming from the fact that our federal government consistently fails to hold anyone accountable.  No wonder we’re frustrated.

© Mark Floegel, 2012

The gist of the story is that when it comes to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, the White House is pinched.  On one side are environmentalists, whose support helped Barack Obama win the presidency in 2008 but are sure the pipeline will be a blow to efforts to stop runaway global warming.  Bill McKibben arranged for several hundreds of people to be arrested in front of the White House, an embarrassment to the liberal posers inside.

Lining up on the other team are several corporations, unions and the friendly nation of Canada, all of whom stand to make money from the sale of Alberta’s tar sands-derived oil into the US market.  The operative word in that last sentence – in case you missed it – is money, the currency of Washington.

Each side has its list of reasons why the pipeline should/should not be built, all of which are worth mockery/discussion, but when one reads the WaPo, one wants to keep an eye on the politics.

The politics are typical for DC.  For example, it turns out that Paul Elliott, chief lobbyist for would-be pipeline builder TransCanada, was a ranking staffer on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and when Friends of the Earth FOIAed emails between him and State Department aides, the aides were cheerleading for TransCanada.

Not to worry, State had arranged for an environmental review of the pipeline be an outside third party – which happens to be a major TransCanada contractor.  This review found “no significant environmental impact” from the pipeline (except contamination of the largest freshwater aquifer in North America and the heat death of human civilization, but not until after the corporations have been paid, so it’s OK).

In her defense, Secretary of State Clinton told the Post the whole thing had been “delegated to a deputy.”  Well done, Madam Secretary.  Ranks right up there with George H. W. Bush’s weak “I was out of the loop” on Iran-Contra and Al Gore’s “I was in the bathroom,” when illegal campaign fundraising was discussed.

So the greens have truth and justice on their side.  BFD.  The corporations have money, pots of it and an election is coming up.  (“Nice little administration ya got here, Barry.  Be a shame if somethin’ happened to it.”)

Chief of Staff Bill Daley weighed in, saying the White House would stay out of the final decision unless another agency objected to the State Department’s final determination. (“State’s gonna cook the books on this environmental thing and the rest o’ youse is gonna keep yer mouths shut.  Got that?  I’m lookin’ at you, EPA.”)  Thuggish behavior, originating at the Chamber of Commerce, rolls downhill.

“Both publicly and privately, however,” the Post reads, “Obama administration officials have told environmentalists they are better off with the president in office than without him.”  Having completed its downhill roll, the thuggish behavior now lands on the environmental community with a splat.

The problem with liberal Democrats is the gap between what they say they are: defenders of justice and equality – and what they really are: servants of the corporate state.

Bottom line?  One of two things and probably both.  One: Bill McKibben and friends have scared the pants off the above-mentioned posers in the White House, so the posers allow unusually blunt quotes to be printed in the WaPo, hoping to scare him off or at least scare him into silence.  Two: in the end, the environmentalists will lose and the corporations will win.

Six months ago, I would have found this depressing, but I think I’m beginning to see the revolution at the end of the tunnel.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

The outrage addressed in the August missive was Wall Street banks driving up the price of gas by reckless oil speculation.

“There is no more debate. Excessive speculation is a major reason oil prices have risen so sharply,” he wrote, referring to U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission data he recently released. “The data reveals Wall Street speculators played a major role in driving up the price of a barrel of oil to $147 in 2008. During the rampant oil speculation, regular unleaded gas in Vermont hit a record $4.09 a gallon, causing financial hardship for many Vermonters.”

“This report clearly shows that Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and other speculators on Wall Street dominated the crude oil futures market causing tremendous damage to the entire economy,” he wrote

Bernie Sanders is right.  It’s hard enough to bump up against the fact that the easily recoverable oil is gone, that coaxing anything new out of the ground will be expensive and (even more!) damaging to the environment, but the fact that the same jerks that destroyed the housing market and sent the global economy to the intensive care unit are keeping their boot on our necks and still getting rich off us is more than any of us should be willing to stand.

The same week Sen. Sanders emailed, Kevin Drum wrote in Mother Jones about the work of University of San Diego economist James Hamilton.  Professor Hamilton notes that 10 of 11 recessions since the end of World War II have been preceded by a rise in oil prices.

All the more reason to resent the speculators, right?  Right, but there’s more to it than that.  For most of those years, we as a society were able to increase oil supply almost at will, by drilling more holes in the places where we know oil to be.  Not so easy any more.

Not only are the giant oil fields beginning to peak, but the new sources of oil – like Alberta’s oil sands or the arctic fields the corporations are so recklessly eager to get their paws on – take years of slow development before they can be turned into gasoline down at the corner station.

Now throw in political instability in places like Libya, Iran and Venezuela and things get even shakier.  Supply begin to run close to demand or there’s rampant speculation in oil futures – or both – the price shoots up, a recession is born, the economy tanks, demand drops, price drops, the economy picks up again, raising the price of oil, sparking another recession, etc. etc.

This all fits under the rubric of “peak oil.”  Peak oil doesn’t just mean the oil’s running out.  It also means that when it gets so difficult and expensive to bring to market – and becomes so vulnerable to the vampire squids of society – then it’s another reminder that we should have listened to Jimmy Carter 34 years ago.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

I’m typing this from a place freshly ravaged by Tropical Storm Irene.  “Tropical” and “Vermont” don’t belong in the same sentence, but there they are.  Helicopters buzz overhead as they leave to drop supplies in stranded communities.  This is the second hundred-year flood we’ve had this in the last four months and yet it is not these events so recently past that prompt my dire prediction.  It’s what two events of the past week bode for the future.

Friday, the State Department ruled that the 1,700 mile long Keystone XL pipeline – which, if allowed to proceed, will carry tar sands crude to refineries in Texas – will have minor environmental impact.  Experts disagree.  James Hansen, the NASA scientist and leading expert in global warming says that should the pipeline be built, there will be no way to reverse catastrophic global warming.  One would think that’s a significant environmental impact, but the oil companies want it and what the oil companies want….

If you haven’t already learned about the tar sands, extracting oil from them requires massive abuse of forests, clean water and energy, so the tar sands as a whole is a global warming machine gone berserk.  If oil is an addiction, the tar sands are the dirty needle we heedlessly plunge into our arm.

Thousands of people – citizens – have protested in front of the White House, hundreds have been arrested.  Barack Obama likely believes environmentalists have no choice but to vote for him next year, thus revealing himself to be another calculating politician, who’d rather retire in glory as a two-term president than actually accomplish anything of value in either of his terms of office.  In the addiction analogy, he’s the clueless enabler.

Yesterday, ExxonMobil and Russia – two of the planet’s evil entities – announced an agreement that will open the Russia arctic to oil exploration by Exxon.  Exxon – with help from us – has already gone a long way toward “opening” the arctic.  Global warming has meant the retreat of polar sea ice to the point that the Ruxxons can drill for more oil, to melt more ice, drill for more oil, etc., etc.

Exxon maneuvers at its peril, as Russia is famous for shafting its partners after it’s gotten what it wants.  Maybe Rex Tillerson will end up in a cell next to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch and oil billionaire.  Might be a pleasant meditation for a holiday weekend.

Researching something else last night, I came across an article describing the dumping of nuclear waste and over a dozen vessel-sized reactors in the western Kara Sea – where Exxon just won the right to explore.  The currents in the Kara carry water from west to east; that is, from the radioactive taint all across the rest of the local ocean.  Can’t beat those Soviet smarts.

If the tar sands are the dirty needle of oil addiction, then Tillerson and Vlad Putin are the thuggish pushers who will take our money, beat us senseless and leave us for dead.

Cold turkey is starting to look good.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

Using the medical license bestowed by middle age (and hard experience), my friends and I made a preliminary diagnosis of colon cancer and further agree the prognosis is not good.  “It’s a death sentence,” one said as all agreed to schedule colonoscopies.

Next year will be the 20th anniversary of Mr. Chavez’s failed military coup.  (He has been an elected president since 1998.)  It’s the 10th anniversary of a failed, US-approved coup against him.  A superstitious person might expect a major event for him in 2012.

Regardless of how I feel about someone’s politics, I wish them good health and a long life.  If nothing else, it affords one an opportunity to reflect and perhaps repent one’s less-than-charitable moments.  That written, it’s not outside the bounds of propriety to consider the fate of a post-Hugo Venezuela.

Who gets Venezuela?  A pool of oil that big is a global petro-political game changer, whatever happens.

Scenario One:  More of the same.  During Mr. Chavez’s Cuban sojourn, the most visible Venezuelans were Vice President Elias Jaua and Adan Chavez, Hugo’s older brother and governor of the state of Barinas, where the men were born.

Maybe it’s me, but reading the newspapers, I got the distinct impression that Adan Chavez swings more influence than Mr. Jaua.  It has a Putin-Medvedev feel to it.  The Cubans will be eager for these two to find some kind of arrangement.  After losing one major (Soviet) subsidy, the brothers Castro would miss the 100,000 barrels of oil Venezuela ships to Cuba every day.

A lightweight VP and a scowling governor of a brother are stock characters in a caudillo’s death drama, often followed by unrest and instability, which often lead to….

Scenario Two: Back to the Future.  Say what you will about Hugo Chavez, the fact that his political opposition is so vibrant testifies that his record on civil rights is not as bad as it could be.  When Mr. Chavez stops being president – whenever and however that occurs – there will be a rising by the members of the privileged class who lost power 13 years ago.  Count on it and count on the US supporting it, as least (semi) covertly.

Much as Barack Obama resists being George W. Bush, I think the Osama caper may have him thinking of himself as a Bold Actor and since the CIA will likely act regardless of what the POTUS wants, he might figure adult supervision is better than spooks gone wild.

Scenario Three: Who Else?  Well, China.  Not that I expect the People’s Liberation Army to arrive in force, but the (for now) (comparatively) economically healthy Chinese have been securing rights to industrial metals and agricultural production all over the planet.  American politicians can prate about “unlimited growth,” if only for public consumption, but Chinese decision-makers are luxuriously free of such fantasy.  They know an era of scarcity and resource competition is upon us.

How does it end?  I don’t know, but I’ve hedged myself with three predictions.  One thing is sure: the world has changed mightily since Hugo Chavez led his first coup.  The grasping after oil is not as desperate as it will be in 2032, but it will do.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

Spring snow is not unusual around here, but tonight’s will probably carry radiation. It’s been dry since the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. Tests taken by the Vermont Health Department have shown radioactive iodine, presumably from Fukushima is showing up in the state. There’s no safe level of radiation, but what we’re getting in Vermont is no cause for panic.

Now that precipitation is on the way, however, it might be a good time to take a holiday from milk. Not easy to contemplate in a diary state, where small farmers have enough to contend with, but milk drinking was the primary route for radioactive material into people’s bodies after Chernobyl in 1986. Radiation was detected in Washington State milk earlier this week.

Again, it’s not life-threatening, but precaution, a concept that escapes federal agencies – whether the issue is genetically-modified food, toxic pollutants, nuclear devices or climate change – is a good thing. “An abundance of caution.” The phrase looks so old fashioned.

Monday past was the 32nd anniversary of the partial reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island; last Thursday was the 22nd anniversary of the Exxon Valdez spill. The first anniversary of the BP blowout is three weeks from tomorrow and the 25 anniversary of Chernobyl is four days after that. (It’s a busy time for me at work right now.)

A week ago, we learned General Electric, which designed the reactors at Fukushima (and 23 just like them in the US), pays no taxes, despite profits in the billions of dollars, while shipping jobs overseas.

As I mentioned then, America’s nuclear regulators knew in 1972 that the design of the GE reactor’s cooling system was flawed, but kept their mouths shut for fear it would lead to the end of nuclear energy. Four of the six troubled reactors at Fukushima Daiichi are the flawed GE design and were built AFTER the regulator’s memo was written.

Precaution, as I said, is notably absent from our government’s thoughts, even when lives are on the line. OK, so you’re a regulator who wants to cook the books on behalf of the industry you’re supposed to regulate. Could GE quietly be told to stop selling flawed reactors? Could the purchasers of said flawed reactors be quietly told to beef up the power supply for the cooling systems?

Will anyone ever be called to account for this? Doubt it. If you think your government is honest and acting in your best interest, act accordingly. If you think your government is dishonest and not acting in your best interest, act accordingly.

Those people in the tea party are not entirely off base. They’re right to be angry (and scared). I think they’re angry at some of the right people (and some of the wrong people). I think their prescriptions for change are misguided, deliberately misguided by the people on whom they rely for information.

Seismologists say as a result of the March 11 earthquake, the world is spinning faster, by 1.8 microseconds per day. It feels like we’re spinning faster than that.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

I’m escorting two Germans – Joerg and Daniel – documenting the effects of BP oil on the gulf as we approach the one-year anniversary. I’m part guide, part fixer, part cultural interpreter.

The results of their investigation are what you’d expect. I’m not going to blow their surprise if I tell you. The oil is still here, everywhere one looks. The effects on the environment are clear for those with eyes to see past three speeds of spin.

Fast spin is from BP and the other oil companies. “The oil is almost gone, thanks to our efforts and Mother Nature’s oil-eating microbes.” There are still work crews around. In the Louisiana bayous yesterday we saw them and counted 10 workers sitting on boats or driving around for every one actually raking up oil-covered vegetation.

Medium spin is from the government and mimics the corporate spin. It spins faster at the federal level and slows closer to truth the more local it gets. These folks just want it to be over, so they can move on to the economy. They’d like tourists to come back and feel safe spending money; they worry about their constituents’ livelihoods.

Slow spin is from the people themselves. They’re clearly ambivalent when they see us. Last year they were so grateful to know we were telling the world of their plight. Now they’re tired and depressed. Post-traumatic stress disorder is not just for returning soldiers here.

Yellow-ribbon magnets are still on cars here, reminding me this region bears much of the burden of our two wars, the ones we’ve mostly forgotten. They also remind me of the unrest in Middle Eastern countries pushed off the news by the disaster in Japan.

The Germans and I spend our days driving around in boats and cars. We start early and end late. We grab a meal at an IHOP or Waffle House (where cultural interpretation comes in). By the time we get to a cheap motel we’re tired but can’t sleep. We open our laptops and download the latest news from the melting reactors. We’re environmentalists and these are the disasters – massive oil spill, huge radiation leak – we warned against for so long. We talk about radiation poisoning and myriad defects of the GE boiling water reactor with the Mark I containment, a design I know too well, since it’s the same reactor type we’ve been fighting to close at home in Vermont.

I hope I appreciate nature as much as the next Greenpeacer, but I didn’t get into this business because I’m a tree-hugger. I do this for people in the small towns and rust belt cities who bear the brunt of the pollution and degradation (ecological and social) that corporate power delivers. We know the same suffering that continues in the gulf is now visited on Japanese people, only worse.

People here are wary of us this year in ways they were not in 2010. They’re tired; they’re panicking about the future. The tourists aren’t coming back. Maybe it’s oil; maybe it’s just the bad economy. They’ve lived for the last year on handouts they never wanted from a corporation that damaged them in a way they never thought possible. They’re depressed and angry.

They realize the attention of the world has now passed them by. That’s OK, they don’t want attention. They just want things to go back to the way they were before but it’s just starting to sink in that The Ways Things Were Before is a land they will never see again. Their depression and anger grow profound.

While we drive the Germans and I compare the wrecked economies of Europe and the US. We wonder what the effects will be from the blow suffered by the third-largest economy, Japan. It couldn’t have come at a worse time.

The economy, wars, oil spills, nuclear meltdown. The machine we’ve built is broken. It was poorly designed and we’ve run it carelessly for too long; it’s coming apart everywhere. The Gulf of Mexico is one place where the welds have ripped open.

I’ve been using my high school German this week. It gives Daniel and Joerg a chance to laugh, to release stress. We’re bearing witness, as our Greenpeace philosophy says we should. Along the passes of Bayou Batiste yesterday, bottlenose dolphins swam so close to the boat I could hear them breathe. Later, we came across a bottlenose corpse on the bank, its eyes gone, its jaw exposed where the flesh had rotted away. We breathed stench of its decay, bearing witness.

Maybe it’s remembering high school German, but high school poetry has been coming back, too: the apocalyptic Yeats of a century ago and the weltschmerzed Wordsworth of a century before that, at the moment we began this industrial revolution. Mr. Wordsworth was right, the world is too much with us – and we’re too much with it.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

The good thing about beekeeping is you have ready access to bee venom for your arthritic joints. The bad thing is that in winter, when your (and by “your,” I mean “my”) arthritis flares up, the bees are all inside.

Except when the sun shines. Bees won’t defect in the hive, so when you get a warm sunny day like today, the snow around the hives is speckled with yellow bee crap. I went out and thumped a hive and when the girls came out to see what was up, I grabbed one and stung the forefinger that’s been stiff and sore and now I have warm venom coursing through it. First sting of 2011.

It got up to 50 in northwest Vermont today and it’s 17 February. The first week of January, I noted most sub-zero weather in Vermont occurs between 31 December and 15 February. It was unusually warm that first week of January and it’s stayed that way. We did have a week, or almost a week, of sub-zero weather toward the end of January, but that was it. I feel cheated. We’ve had plenty of snow, but then global warming predictions for this area include more precipitation of all kinds.

Following up on another old commentary, I was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong in September when I wrote, “As far as I can see, the only successful facebook campaign resulted in Betty White hosting Saturday Night Live. I CAN attest that attempts at facebook political organizing have and do waste countless hours that should have been dedicated to real political organizing.”

Shut up, Mark. I still think facebook, as most Americans use it, is a waste of time, but clearly on-line social networks have more than earned their keep in recent weeks by aiding democratic and peaceful rebellion in the Middle East.

I’m still thrilled when I look at the news, seeing what’s happening in Arab nations and Iran, yet I fret for the safety of the brave men and women daring their lives for the sake of their nations’ and their children’s future. It’s great theater from our safe remove, it’s another thing entirely if you don’t know whether you’ll get Tunis or Tehran, Tahrir Square or Tiananmen Square. The impulse, I’m sure is to avoid another generation without hope; the feeling that if you have nothing, you have nothing to lose.

Which leads to the final vegetable at the bottom of this bowl of gumbo: oil. I haven’t written about peak oil lately, because the global recession has driven down demand in recent years, but as my erstwhile colleague Jeremy Leggett points out, peak oil is not a “theory.” It will happen, the only dispute is when. When it does, I hope we have humane democracies in place everywhere, because it won’t be pretty.

In what must be some unholy harmonic convergence of Middle East politics, peak oil and WikiLeaks, the UK Guardian published cables from the American embassy in Saudi Arabia from 2007, privately warning that the Saudis were overstating their oil reserves and that given a growth in demand (bear in mind, this is before the financial meltdown), real trouble could hit the oil markets as early as 2012.

On the other hand, that’s when the Mayan calendar runs out, so why worry?

© Mark Floegel, 2011

From there he became something of a prophet. He doesn’t claim any extraordinary powers to predict the future, but says his cold-eyed reading of available facts gives him insight into events he says are inevitable. A documentary about him, “Collapse,” was released in 2009.

Mr. Ruppert has been in the doom and gloom business for a long time now and given what’s happened in the past decade, any such merchant is going to look pretty smart. Just about any unhappy event, from terrorist attack to economic bust to environmental disaster has occurred. (All we seem to be missing is a lightning fast pandemic that kills a few million people – or at least turns them into zombies.)

So Mr. Ruppert brought his traveling lecture to town last spring. I missed the performance, but caught the newspaper article about it. (I’d link to it, but the Burlington Free Press is extraordinarily stingy with their online archives.) During his visit, Mr. Ruppert made five very specific predictions, which he said would be fulfilled by the end of 2010.

In my own act of prescience, I knew I’d be writing a post today, so I wrote Mr. Ruppert’s predictions down on today’s page of my desk calendar. Before I get to them, let me say it can’t be easy being Michael Ruppert. Like any entrepreneur who’s found a bit of success, your customer base will forget about you if you don’t bring new products to the marketplace and they’ll expect each successive product to be more “gee whiz” than the last. Steve Jobs is an example of someone who surfs that particular wave well.

First Prediction: By 31 December, the Dow Jones Industrial Average will be between 4,000-5,000. Mr. Ruppert was wrong. The DJIA opened today at 11,575, so he’s off by a minimum of 6,575 points, barring some wild trading in the next 30 hours.

Second Prediction: Many banks will fail. This is a bit squishy, since I don’t know who defines “many.” But let’s leave the definition to the Washington Post, which Tuesday reported that 2010 saw the highest number of bank failures since 1992. That’s good enough for me. Mr. Ruppert was right. (At this point you might be noticing Mr. Ruppert made five predictions, making a tie unlikely.)

Third Prediction: Oil will cost over $200 per barrel. Well, the price of oil has been rising quickly of late, but at $91 a barrel this morning, Mr. Ruppert is wrong. (The average price of a gallon on gas, BTW, is $3.05, up 44.5 cents from this week last year.)

Fourth Prediction: Gold will cost over $2,000 per ounce. Again, Mr. Ruppert has the trend right, but the prediction is wrong. Gold this morning is selling for $1,410 an ounce. Silver’s at $30.73 an ounce. These are close to record highs. Copper is going for $4.36 a pound, which is huge, so if you’re going to be away from home over the New Year’s holiday, ask the neighbors to keep an eye on your plumbing.

Fifth Prediction: The US and Iran will be at war. Well really, how would we know? I don’t think we’ve had a Constitutionally-declared war since WWII. Korea was a “police action” that is still formally unresolved, Vietnam was not a declared war nor were either of our two Iraqi escapades nor our-near decade in Afghanistan. Seymour Hersh has claimed for some time that US special forces are active in Iran and with all the nuclear stuff going on, who knows?

Bottom line: Times are tough, but they could be tougher. If you look for misery, you’re likely to find it. In the year ahead, I (susceptible to gloom merchant disease) will do my best to appreciate the good things while I can.

Happy New Year.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

So it is with deepwater and/or high pressure oil drilling. Most of the time, it goes well, or well enough to prevent catastrophe, but when things go wrong, as they did on April 20, then 11 men lose their lives and an ecosystem and an economy it supports will never be the same.

“We’ve learned our lesson. We’re going to redouble our efforts to make sure this never happens again.” I could attribute that quote to either BP (or any of its sister oil companies) or the federal government (regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans are holding down the White House and Congress). It’s a choral number.

A few weeks ago, as I was floating around the Gulf of Mexico with marine conservationist Rick Steiner, he told me this story: “The newspaper stories about the Macondo well say the guys drilling it were calling it ‘The Well from Hell’ because of all the gas kicks. You can tell when you’re drilling if the well is going to give you trouble. There’s another well in the gulf, called Blackbeard that ExxonMobil was drilling a few years ago. Even though their tests indicated that there’s a huge amount of oil in the field, the drilling was going so badly that the engineers told Exxon, ‘This is just too dangerous. We can’t control this.’”

“To their credit, Exxon did the smart and responsible thing: they cancelled the drilling and pulled the rig out. Then they did something that was smart – in a way – but extremely irresponsible: they sold the rights to a smaller operator who is drilling the well, but doesn’t have anywhere near Exxon’s resources if everything starts to go wrong.”

I got home from the gulf and checked out the story and sure enough, Blackbeard West (South Timbalier Block 168) is a very deep, very high pressure, potentially lucrative field in the gulf Exxon was drilling in 2006, but then sold to McMoRan Exploration, which resumed drilling on the well in 2008. By 2009, the well was nearly 33,000 feet deep; the deepest drilled to date. Tests indicate that pressure in the field is around 28,000 pounds per square inch (psi). In June, BP’s Macondo blowout was reported to be at 9,000 psi. The only saving grace for this well is that, although it’s six miles down to the oil, the wellhead is in 70, rather than 5,000 feet of water.

What I haven’t seen is any indication on the web that the well has completed its tests and begun production. The two factors which might be keeping the well off line are 1) the BP oil disaster (of course) and 2) the (relatively) low price of oil ($82 per barrel this morning).

It’s that second factor you’ll want to watch, because it’s what drove Exxon and then McMoRan into ultradeep drilling in the first place. If the money’s right, Blackbeard West and other fields – some high-pressure, some deepwater – will be drilled. There will be more incidents – perhaps less; perhaps more devastating than BP’s Macondo. In the end, the factors it will all come down to are oil and money. As long as we keep burning oil at unsustainable rates, the price will rise and exploration companies will go further, drill deeper – and more dangerously – to get it.

© Mark Floegel, 2010