As Bob Dylan wrote 48 years ago, "Ramblin' through this world, I've met lots of funny men / Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen". And some will rob you with trillions of gallons of oil.
This is a crime in slow-motion. A crime that has killed nobody yet except for the unfortunate men on the oil platform when it exploded. Unlike a run of the mill mine disaster, unfortunately, the damage is not contained to a few blue-collar grunts; when a coal mine collapses, it doesn't spew tons of coal into the sky for weeks.
BP. British Petroleum, formerly known as AI, or Anglo-Iranian, has an interesting history. Anglo-Iranian took the oil from Iran and sent it to the Anglos. Very straightforward. Iranians had 100% of the oil. England got 90% of the profits. Free Market, bitches!
When an obstinate Iranian named Mohammed Mossadegh was elected by the Iranian people to demand a 50/50 profit sharing scheme with England, he was duly overthrown by Anglo-Iranian oil money and CIA-hired thugs. But I'm getting off track.
BP now is drilling for oil off the coast of the United States. (Didn't we win the Revolution?) Well, it turns out there was an accident. The well exploded. And it's at the bottom of the ocean. And here's where capitalism comes in.
Capitalism demanded that we create technology to drill for oil on the floor of the ocean. But it did NOT demand that we create technology to stop a leak on the floor of the ocean. It also does NOT demand that BP spare no expense in stopping the leak as quickly as possible; instead it demands that BP stop the leak as cheaply as possible.
Again, no civilians have been killed yet by this crime; nobody flew a plane into a building here. But the eventual toll may well be catastrophic. More oil spills into the Gulf every day. That oil washes ashore. When that happens, two things occur.
Firstly, the oil will kill most living things. Secondly it will seep into the groundwater. With all living things dead, the local economy collapses, foreclosures accelerate, etc. etc. etc.
With everything dead in the marshes near the coast, what will happen during hurricane season? Imagine Hurricane Katrina. Now imagine Hurricane Katrina with no marshes to slow its approach, all the while carrying not just wind and water, but trillions of gallons of oil.
Next time, New Orleans will not only drown, it will burn.
This is (I hope) a worst-case scenario. But what is the best-case scenario? However you slice it, it is going to cost this nation billions. Oil spills ain't free. Free market, indeed.
1 comment:
I hadn't thought to make the comparison to coal mining, especially the recent disaster in WV. Its an apt comparison giving that even though the government ostensibly did their job in WV, but did not in the gulf, the company behavior and subsequent outcomes, although different in scale, are the same: cutting corners in safety and environmental assessment leading to tragedy and death.
This brings to mind the related environmental (and human, although that is redundant to say) disaster in the making. Mountain top removal may not be the same order of magnitude of a disaster as the BP gusher is currently, but its slow and steady decimation of the Appalachian wildnerss and accumulation of toxic waste, around populated areas no less, may well reach the a similar level of irreparable waste and damage as BP.
I think it's time for people to get over there loss of view and greenlight those off-shore windmill projects that have been held up around the nation.
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