With regulations on deep water drilling facing a marginal change at best, deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is about to resume. We've already forgotten about the dead birds and decimated ecosystems. But hey, gas is up 20 cents a gallon (despite the fact that there has been zero decline in oil supplies), so kill all the birds!!!
My Recent US History course just read and discussed Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. It's a very good book, though as depressing as you might imagine. In honor of that, this week I will be highlighting environmental disasters in US history.
And yet another oil rig explodes off the coast of Louisiana. Supposedly, it's not producing at the present. But if it wasn't producing, why would it explode? And we didn't think the first oil rig was that big of a deal for the first week.
Good times in America.
It's an impressive number. Judge Leonardo Ordonez, president of the provincial court of the Sucumbios in Ecuador's Oriente, has said he won't be able to rule this year on the suit between indigenous communities of the region and Chevron Corporation in part because of the extent of the filings in the case, totaling 182,152 pages. How many of those pages are superfluous motions, document dumps, and the like by Chevron? The case has dragged on for 17 years now.
It's barely worth commenting on Dick Cheney slamming Obama for not responding more boldly over the BP oil spill. It's certainly not surprising that the architect of the Bush Administration's non-action on any issues that concerned the deaths of poor or brown people would be a hypocrite. But the sheer gall of saying this when the whole Bush Administration clearly didn't care about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina because black people weren't going to vote for Republicans is just outstanding.
I was asking this very question about the oil spill. After the Exxon Valdez disaster, you saw endless pictures of dead birds and marine life. But with the BP oil spill, we've hardly seen any such pictures. In fact, with my little oil spill photo series, I've been shocked at the paucity of images to choose from. Now we know why. Since BP is in charge of the clean up, they also have the power to control access to public beaches in Louisiana. And they are not granting access to the media.
A CBS News crew was threatened with arrest when it tried to photograph the spill, and a BP representative in Louisiana told a Mother Jones reporter that she couldn’t visit the Elmer’s Island Wildlife Refuge without a BP escort.
On Monday, journalists from the New York Daily News were also “escorted away from a public beach on Elmer’s Island bycops who said they were taking orders from BP.” However, they managed to get a covert tour of the Queen Bess barrier island from a BP contractor who is fed up with the oil company’s attempt to cover up the disaster:
“There is a lot of coverup for BP. They specifically informed us that they don’t want these pictures of the dead animals. They know the ocean will wipe away most of the evidence. It’s important to me that people know the truth about what’s going on here,” the contractor said.
“The things I’ve seen: They just aren’t right. All the life out here is just full of oil. I’m going to show you what BP never showed the President.” [...]
The grasses by the shore were littered with tarred marine life, some dead and others struggling under a thick coating of crude.
“When you see some of the things I’ve seen, it would make you sick,” the contractor said. “No living creature should endure that kind of suffering.”
“BP is going to say the deaths of these animals wasn’t oil-related,” the contractor added. “We know the truth. I hope these pictures get to the right people — to someone who can do something.”
Sorry for my lack of blogging for the past two days--I was in New Orleans at a hotel that said it had wireless but then did not. Very irritating.
Anyway, I am going to put up a photo of the BP oil spill every day until the well is shut off. Just to help us all remember this horror.
Worker shoveling oil, Fourchon Beach, Louisiana.
Lord knows I loathe James Carville. And people calling the BP oil spill "Obama's Katrina" is absurd and nothing more than a Republican talking point.
However, Carville is right to criticize Obama's handling of the oil spill:
Democratic strategist James Carville, who is also a resident of New Orleans, attacked President Obama's response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf Coast today, saying: "You got to get down and take control of this, put somebody in charge of this and get this thing moving. We're about to die down here."
On Good Morning America, Carville said that "the political stupidity of this is just unbelievable," and that he has "no idea why their attitude was so hands-offy here."
"The President of the United States," Carville continued, "could've come down here, he could've been involved with the families of these 11 people" who died in the oil rig's explosion.
"These people are crying, they're begging for something down here. It just looks like he's not involved in this," he said.
Joe Stephens has an interesting piece in the Washington Post about The Nature Conservancy's ties to BP.
While a lot of Nature Conservancy supporters and environmentalists are upset to hear this information, I don't really have a problem with it. There are many ways to create change. We tend to romanticize those who work outside the system. We certainly need radical groups who protest BP and other companies. That's absolutely vital to forming a successful environmental movement. But it doesn't hurt to have organizations who work within the capitalist system as well.
The Nature Conservancy does a remarkable job of protecting (often) small pieces of important habitat that is threatened by development. They don't focus on the southwestern deserts, sublime beauty, or highly touristed areas. Rather, they worry about biodiversity--which is really far more important to protect than more desert wilderness.
In order to protect these lands, they work with big corporations. As the article states, BP has helped The Nature Conservancy protect Bolivian forests and gave TNC 655 acres of land in Virginia for wildlife conservation.
Does this strategy allow BP and other corporations to greenwash their actions? Yes. Does the 655 acres make up for the massive damage caused by the oil spill? Of course not. But BP is going to drill for oil regardless of whether TNC exists or not. And those 655 acres have important meaning. It's a good thing TNC worked with BP to save this land.
There's no question that TNC gets a bit too cozy with its corporate sponsors. A few years back, there was a small scandal when it came out that TNC executives were working with corporations to get those companies big tax breaks on conservation easements. Groups like TNC or the Sierra Club or the World Wildlife Fund need watchdogs to make sure they stay true to their mission. But that doesn't mean they don't do good and valuable work.
When the oil spill hits the Cuban coast, as now seems likely, it's really not going to help US-Cuban relations.
Rick Perry again proves that his well-coiffed hair has grown into his brain.
Or maybe he is just evil.
In fact, it's clearly the latter. Perry has claimed that the oil spill may be an "act of God."
Calling disasters acts of God is a tried and true strategy of industry (especially the insurance industry) and conservative politicians to deflect blame for the aftermath away from people.
We've seen this in any number of ways. People argued you couldn't blame the Bush Administration for the post-Katrina disaster because the hurricane was an act of God. Of course, not getting those people out of the way or having no plan to save them had nothing to do with Katrina.
As historian Ted Steinberg has pointed out in his excellent book Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America, this kind of argument has a lengthy past. In 1993, for instance, the Missouri and Mississippi rivers flooded. In Hannibal, Missouri, local leaders had decided to protect the historical district where Mark Twain grew up. They put up large levees around this part of town. But all those levees did was force the water further south where it exploded upon the poorer area of the city south of the historical district. Local leaders then said they weren't responsible because it was an "act of God."
You see this all the time--when heavy rains fall and cause a poorly built dam to burst, it's an act of God. When a tornado rips through a mobile home and leaves well-built homes standing, thus killing the poor, it's an act of God, never mind that the larger issue is that poverty forces people to live in homes without foundations. When deforested mountains and mountaintop removal cause erosion and clogged riverbeds that leads to flooding in West Virginia, it's an act of God.
But Rick Perry takes this morally bankrupt claim to a nefarious new level. At least when people usually claim something is an act of God, there is some kind of natural process involved--hurricane, tornado, earthquake, fire, etc.
In this case however, nothing remotely "natural" happened at all. I guess it's the Gulf Coast's fault for having oil underneath!
If this is an act of God, what isn't? I guess mountaintop removal will be an act of God! And the cancer caused by chemical plants in Perry's state of Texas? Also, an act of God!
Utterly revolting.
I wrote a lengthy piece at Global Comment on the oil spill. In part, I said:
Now we have the oil spill. This disaster will exacerbate the region’s problems. It will devastate the fishing industry. It could kill millions of birds, some of which are endangered species. Spring is the migration and breeding season and thus the spill’s damage to birds will be more far-reaching than if it happened in December.
But perhaps we can find a silver lining in this catastrophe. American reliance on oil imports means that we can remain ignorant about drilling’s effects. Not since the Santa Barbara, California oil spill of 1969 has a major spill affected the Lower 48 states. That previous incident helped shape the environmental movement that created the first Earth Day in 1970 and a tremendous amount of legislation during the next decade which cleaned up our rivers, air, and soil, placed industries under new regulations, and led to the recovery of many endangered species.
Moreover, the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska turned much of the American public against oil drilling in our most beautiful places. Memories of this event and the millions of dead birds, seals, and fish made it impossible for George W. Bush to open Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to drilling. Yet none of this has dampened Americans’ zeal for consuming foreign oil, where we can’t see the consequences.
Perhaps then it is better that the oil spill happened in the United States instead of Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, or Venezuela. A giant spill and subsequent environmental disaster means nothing to most Americans if it happens far away. The oil industry has created ecological and human catastrophes across the world for a century. But we keep driving our vehicles, oblivious to our impact upon the world. Seeing that damage in the form of oil-covered herons and alligators may create a moment for serious reflection of our actions.As they say, read the whole thing and such.
I am sure am glad Obama opened up offshore oil drilling off the Atlantic Coast. What could possibly go wrong?
On the other hand, it's about time Americans saw the cost of their obsession with oil. Unfortunately, like with the Exxon Valdez in Alaska, it will affect one of the nation's most important wildlife habitats, the extremely fragile wetlands of Louisiana. If this happened in Nigeria or Venezuela or Saudi Arabia, no one in America would know. And most wouldn't care if they did.
There have been some pretty terrible news stories regarding the Amazonian basin over the last few days that are worth pointing out.
First, a leading Amazon activist was shot and killed yesterday in the state of Para, just hours after a court delayed the retrial for the murder of Dorothy Stang. Pedro Alcantara de Souza was the leader of landless farmers in the rural state of Para, and two men on motorcycles apparently shot Souza 5 times in the head while Souza was riding his bicycle. While authorities are sending a team from Belem (the capital of Para) to investigate, the murderers have not been taken into custody. I usually hate to jump to conclusions, but given the strength of elite landowners in the region, combined with Souza's opposition to what are often illegal land-grabs on the part of those same elites, this was almost certainly a contract murder. Such is the way it often works when individuals fight for greater land reform and more equal distribution in the Amazon; it happened with Stang, it happened with Chico Mendes, and it most likely has happened again with Souza.
Additionally, foreign industry is also taking a toll on the environment, with the government's help. I've commented before that environmental policy may be one of, if not the single, deficiencies historians may find in Lula's government. These problems are not always limited to the Amazon, either; a hydroelectric dam that the Brazilian government contracted out to a Canadian company is wreaking havoc on both the environment and citizens in rural Minas Gerais. The dams are one of Lula's pet projects, and he's pushed heavily for hydroelectric power to supply Brazil's growing population with energy. In doing so, he's been nearly blinded by the highly-problematic use of dams, even while ignoring less destructive options like sun- and wind-power (and with well over 4500 miles of coastline, Brazil could easily take advantage of both). Instead, people in the interior are forced to witness dislocation and destruction in the name of hydroelectric power. Certainly, as he gets ready to leave office, Lula is enjoying some of the highest approval ratings he's ever had. However, it's worth repeating: his administration has been far from perfect, and as we begin to assess it historically, environmental policy will mostly likely be a dark stain on what has probably been one of the greatest administrations Brazilian history has seen.
Of course, Brazil isn't the only one facing these issues from foreign investment. This week, a court ruled in favor of Chevron in an arbitration case between the oil giant and Ecuador. Chad has commented before on the role of petroleum companies in the Spanish Amazon. Certainly, oil companies didn't need any more encouragement to degrade the environment and the residents of the Amazonian basin, but the court's ruling in this case certainly strengthens Chevron's arguments that it has done nothing wrong in spite of overwhelming evidence otherwise.
