06/24/2010

The Muse

I found Clio in her cave, high above the Aegean Sea. She looked up from the scroll she was writing when I entered; dozens of other scrolls lay half-unrolled, perched on rocks or unwinding across the floor.

“The technology, of course is unprecedented,” she said, knowing already what subject I’d come to discuss, “The other aspects, well…” She gestured toward the piles of parchment. “I’ve seen it all before.”

Clearly, she was happy to have company. “I have so few visitors anymore. I thought Mr. Santayana’s comment would help, but it was about then that things really started to get quiet. The Romans used to come all the time. This place was practically empty in those days. Now my dad has to double the size of the cave every 18 months and I still can’t keep up.”

“But I’m sorry, you came to ask about the oil spill,” Clio said.

“The president has appointed a commission to study what went wrong,” I said. She smiled and pointed to a heap of scrolls. “Those are the commission reports I haven’t gotten around to filing yet.”
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Oceans, Oil | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)
06/17/2010

Out of Commission

On May 20, Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean, leaders of the 9-11 Commission, told a congressional committee that six years after the commission completed its work, the federal government has not taken the steps needed to implement the commission’s recommendations.

The next day, President Barack Obama announced the formation of a commission to investigate the Deepwater Horizon blowout oil disaster and the safety of offshore drilling. He appointed former Florida Senator Bob Graham (D) and former EPA Administrator William Reilly to head the panel.

Flash forward ten years. It’s 2020. Will Sen. Graham and Mr. Reilly be sitting before a congressional committee, testifying that, six years after their commission completed its work, the federal government still has not acted on the key recommendations of its report? The more immediate concern is: Will the commission even make the right recommendations about America’s energy future?

“Blue ribbon” commissions are not the only things 9-11 and the BP disaster have in common. The 9-11 attacks were indirectly – but profoundly – about oil and America’s energy policy, or lack of one.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Oceans, Oil, September 11th | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)
06/10/2010

“We’re Gonna Need Bigger Boat”

My neighbors are starting to refer to our block as “The Farm” because of all the fruit trees and vegetables that grow in our gardens. We have bees and chickens and the guys across the street make beer with hops that grow along our fences.

Margaret is our master gardener, dispensing advice. Last week she helped me prune a young plum tree so it will crown out and have sturdy limbs to support heavy crops of fruit in years to come. She lectured as she cut, telling me that by being selective, the tree would react in certain ways and side growth would be privileged over upward growth.

The world “privilege” stuck in my head. Here we were, Margaret and I, blithely interfering in nature with our bypass shears. The idea was to take certain actions in hope of obtaining particular outcomes.

We all do it, all the time. We choose one thing over another and we change the course of our personal history. Or we refuse to choose and our history is written for us, but it is written whatever we do or fail to do.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Oceans, Oil | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)
06/03/2010

Sickness and Secrecy

Forty days and forty nights into the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and BP is still sticking to the corporate cover-your-ass play book Exxon wrote after the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 and may even be adding a new chapter or two.

As I mentioned two weeks ago, BP’s doing a much better job on the news censorship front than it is on the stopping-the-oil-spew front (although it’s hard to imagine how it could be worse on the latter).

The Washington Post (among other outlets) is reporting Southern Seaplanes of Belle Chasse, LA was temporarily banned from airspace over the spill until they raised hell and called attention to what was up. When I was in Louisiana, our folks rode with Southern Seaplanes a few times. Southern took numerous media personnel up. A Plaqumines Parish official who tried to charter a Southern Seaplane during the ban was told that if he wanted to fly the spill zone, he’d have to contract with a seaplane outfit approved by BP. (Disclosure – I got the story about the official second-hand, but it fits with the general pattern that’s been reported.)
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Oceans, Oil | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)
05/27/2010

The Watershed

It’s been in the 90s this week in northwest Vermont. In May. This is:

a) proof of global warming
b) just deserts for middle-aged idiots who decide to start running again after 30 years
c) all of the above
d) none of the above
e) maybe the above

The correct answer is e) maybe the above. A May heat wave on the Canadian border doesn’t prove global warming any more than a February snowstorm in Washington, DC disproves it. The fact that DC snowstorms are increasingly rare and Vermont heat waves are increasingly frequent, however, reminds us that we burn fossil fuels at our peril.

Down in the Gulf of Mexico, crude oil may have finally stopped gushing from the seabed at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gallons each day. News reports today are cautiously optimistic that the “top kill” attempt has been successful. We all hope so.

I’ve been talking to scientists who are frustrated that they can’t get a fix on the size of the oil spill because the flow of information – unlike the flow of oil – has been quickly and effectively blocked by BP and the federal government.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Global Warming, Oceans, Oil | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)
05/20/2010

Who’s in Charge?

Today is the one-month anniversary of BP’s massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and it’s still spilling. Much has been said, much less done. The question that looms largest in my mind 30 days later is: Who’s in charge?

If you’ve been paying attention, the answer is clearly: BP. There’s some justification there – it’s BP’s mess, BP should clean it or at least pay to have it cleaned. But BP executives shouldn’t be in charge; they’ve proved their incompetence. Yet everything we’ve seen to date indicates BP is firmly in charge and is making decisions based not on what needs to be done, but what will protect its corporate interests. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is taking orders from the oil company. Consider:

Censorship. The US Coast Guard is pushing journalists and environmentalists away from oil-soaked beaches. You can follow the various links (Coast Guard press people deny it), but CBS News has the Coast Guard on tape says “These are BP’s rules, not ours.” Greenpeace has had first-hand experience with this one. A few days ago, one of our crews arrived at such an oil-soaked beach near the mouth of the Mississippi. The Coast Guard arrived and told our people to get off the beach. “Why?” they asked.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Energy, Oceans, Oil | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)
05/13/2010

Unanswered Questions

It’s now been over three weeks since BP’s oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded, burned and sank in the Gulf of Mexico. These have been hectic weeks for all concerned, no doubt, but the paucity of information available to the public is at best, discouraging.

How much oil is flowing / has flowed into the Gulf of Mexico?
The figure we keep hearing is 5,000 barrels or 210,000 gallons per day. After 23 days, that adds up to 4,830,000 gallons. A week into the spill, there was speculation that the rate of flow might actually be 25,000 barrels (or 1,050,000 gallons) per day. If that’s true, then 24,150,000 gallons of oil are now in the gulf, a spill more than twice as large as the Exxon Valdez. Recent news reports stress that no one knows how much oil is flowing, but everyone seems to accept the 5,000 barrels per day figure. We know from past experience that oil companies tend to minimize the amount of oil spilled and unlike a tanker spill, there is no finite amount of oil that can be spilled in the worst case scenario.

Why are we just now seeing images of the leak?
Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) have been working at the site of the spill since the first days after the rig sank. They transmit photos and video to their operators at the surface. Of course, the ROV operators have their hands full, but surely these images must have been passed along to the Coast Guard and other federal agencies that are – we’re told – in charge at the scene. Surely we understand why BP might be slow to release these images, but one would hope the federal government would have more respect for the public’s right to know what’s happening in a publicly owned resource.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Energy, Oceans, Oil | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)