Year 2012: End of the World

I wish I did not have cause to write this article. Unfortunately the problem that is the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico just does not seem like it will go away. The truth of the matter is the leak could be stopped today and the problems it presents us as a planet, ecologically and economically, will not go away. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex) had the audacity to call a 20 billion dollar restitution fund a “shake down.” If only that were true. The truth of the matter is that 20 billion dollars will not, can not, ever hope to “compensate” for the kind of damages this leak has and is continuing to cause. Sure it will cover the losses of some of the fishing and tourist industry losses for a few years, but to think that this problem is localized in space to gulf coast states such as Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, or in time to a few seasons of fishing is more fantastic than believing a unicorn will enter your bedroom tonight and leave you a pile of diamond dung to cash in tomorrow.

Thanks to the Gulf Stream, the massive current that moves around Florida out of the gulf, up the eastern seaboard, and across the Atlantic to ocean where it becomes the North Atlantic Drift and North Atlantic Deep Water currents, this spill has the potential to effect beaches and fishing territory through out the whole world. There has been little to no testing on the environmental impact of the dispersants BP is using to try and break up the oil. In short, the oil, and the “solution” could result in serious damages to ocean beds and coast lines not just along the Gulf of Mexico, but across the entire eastern seaboard of North America, as well as Europe, and potentially even all the way south to West Africa. The ocean is not a contained body of water, it is interconnected and constantly flowing. While spills off other coasts may have been containable in the past having occurred in harbors or other areas not in such proximity to such massive currents, it is entirely possible that the rate of the current leak, and its proximity to this major ocean current (Seriously. Global weather patterns are effected by the Gulf and North Atlantic, not to mention untold billions in fishing and tourism jobs. There is also the impact on physical food supplies. It taints the fish, it taints the plankton, it taints the soil, it taints the plants, it taints the land mammals that eat the plants. Hopefully you get the picture at this point.) could result in this accident having a global impact for generations to come.

Like any oil leak, the damage is not a brief event that is quickly forgotten. Ecosystems recover, but slowly, and when we’re talking about things like fossilized carbon we’re not talking about processes that take years. We’re talking about decades, possibly centuries for the ecosystem to regain it’s tenuous balance. It is only in the last few decades that humans have consistently survived to the century mark, and perhaps that is part of the problem. Our perspective of life and the world is so often limited to what is ultimately the narrow window of our lifetime that we fail to really grasp the magnitude of things. You can still find oil along the shores of the Prince William Sound where the Exxon Valdez fatefully ran ashore 21 years ago. Just look under the rocks. The native communities who sustained their existence by fishing and living off the bounty of that sea are now decimated. Worst of all, Exxon ultimately was only held accountable for 10% of the punitive damages initially assessed, cynically deciding to tie up restitution in litigation so long that most of the injured parties would be dead. After all, Exxon is a corporation, it can’t die. While BP rushed to get booms in place to contain the spill, it is readily apparent that nobody at BP or anywhere else was actually prepared or capable of handling a catastrophe of this magnitude.

The truth is that a combination of lax oversight from friendly political allies allowed corporations to operate callously with disregard to their potential impact on the untold millions and billions who also make a living “mining” the sea. It was not in the best of interest of the bottom line for BP to install “optional” equipment that might have made containing this leak in a timely manner more possible. The technology was “too advanced, too fool proof” to spend any time seriously contemplating what to do if a well sprung a leak 5000 ft beneath the sea (That’s literally .95 miles or 1.5 km, which for those of you who took basic sciences might recall works out to roughly 166 times the atmospheric pressure here at the surface. In two words, “crush depth.” To put that into context the estimated crush depth of a US Seawolf class submarine is half the depth of this leak.) and as BP has made abundantly clear, nobody has any fucking clue what to do now that there is one.

We can only pray that this leak is somehow, miraculously, stopped sooner than later. Do not kid your self into thinking that the Russian suggestion of using a nuclear bast to turn the seabed to glass would be any safer to the ecosystem or industries that rely on that ecosystem either. What we must do is demand our leaders hold corporations accountable, not after the fact but before. It is the responsibility of government to make certain that private interests act not only on their own financial interests, but consider their impact on their neighbors, their employees, and our planet. The human race has found one planet in all the limitless cosmos that can support it’s survival needs. This one. If we don’t take care of it, it could very possibly mean our extinction coming sooner than later. We’re on the clock people,but not because of any prophecy. If we do not learn to control ourselves, we will destroy ourselves. It is that simple.