We all know that a deep water oil rig suffered a blow out. Safety equipment on the rig failed. Several people died. Down at the bottom of the ocean, a pipe was blown apart in such a way that emergency shut off equipment couldn't function to stem the flow or oil. Oil has been spewing out of the ocean floor at a rate estimated to be between nineteen thousand to two-hundred thousand gallons per day. Several attempts to stop the oil have failed due to a number of reasons. It is speculated that the well might not be capped until November and the environmental damage estimates and economic damage estimates are rising daily.
All in all, a bad situation. Along side of all the real problems are a host of bloggers, so-called reporters, activists, environmental radicals. anti-capitalists, anti-oil, pro-oil and pro-capitalists logging onto the internet with accusations of all kinds of nefarious plots designed to slant opinion towards a particular point of view. It should be mentioned that none of the fire-bomb throwers offers anything like a solution but plenty of them offer endless prose about how evil and inhuman PB executives are because they are destroying "our" gulf. What a crock. First it's our gulf then our ocean then our planet. Maybe in a very limited tribal sense, we only inhabit for a brief time and nobody really owns anything.
Long ago, rights of ownership were determined. It's basically: If you can get something, hold onto it and make it prosper and defend it, It was yours. (By the way, even tribes follow this rule: Defend your village against usurpers and you can keep your village and hunting grounds. Lose the fight and your tribe faces endless nomadic treks to find another place to live.) Cries by certain people that BP isn't "us" somehow obfuscates the situation. These same people, who decry the oil industry, also drive, live in houses and shop at stores. All are dependent on oil. There are people who think that we should only use alternative, non-polluting sources of energy. I hate to bust bubbles but even wind turbines require oil and silicon-base photovoltaic batteries also require oil in many phases of transportation and distribution. So regardless of how earth-friendly one might be, oil is a fact of life. As the population expands, oil will play a more important role. Even is a hydrogen-based engine could reduce oil used by a drastic amount, phasing in such a system worldwide will take fifty years or more. That doesn't even consider getting rid of all the existing technology and infrastructure built around oil derivitive transportation. Many people think we should use vegetables oils for transportation. Well, a gallon of cheap olive oil costs around twenty to thirty dollars. Compare that to the three to four dollars for a gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel. Also, olive oil is a food source. I can't think of a worse idea than competing for food sources to determine whether we eat or drive. It's insane.
Is BP at fault? One would have to say yes. It was their job to oversee anyone they subcontract to carry out the operation of any component so it operates within established safety guidelines. But as with the waste treatment industry, there are situations where current regulations are not enforced based on a number of criteria. Every once in a while, this behavior backfires and problems happen. In waste sewage, it's spills. In the oil drilling industry it's blow outs. However, if one looks at the numbers of active wells in the gulf alone, the safety record is stellar. So why now the condemnation of the whole industry?
I blame it on the press and the ability of the press to raise hysteria to panic and the government. First, let's look at the EPA. Environmentalists have been working for years to eliminate shallow water (Under 500 feet.) drilling. But they were OK with deep water drilling. Before this blow out, one could say that the decision seemed sound. But just as in waste treatment, they allowed older wells to bypass new safety upgrades based on costs and difficulty of execution. After all, it's one thing to fix something 500 feet below the surface and quite another to fix something one mile below the surface. So politically motivated government organizations like the EPA (Make no mistake about it, the EPA is almost entirely motivated by politics. While many of the scientists are after real solutions, the general mandate changes from administration to administration and often mandates are issued based on faulty or misleading data.)
There have been accusations the BP has thwarted much of the cleanup. Could this be true? What could be the motivation of BP to hinder any kind of cleanup? They already have a bad rep from the management of the platform and the blow out and strange as it may seem, they are more of a problem than part of the solution. That have gotten in the way of many proposals and plans to clean up the shore and also to prevent oil landing on the shore. BP has actively worked to suppress photos and access to the damaged areas. The fisherman who have been hired by BP aren't talking because they want what little money they get from BP to keep flowing. However, there are intrepid souls who risk penalties and firing from their temporary employers to let the facts speak for themselves. To this end, several have taken established reporters out to areas where damage has occurred.
To speak of idiocy and self-destructive behavior, BP has to take the cake. Whoever is running their operation should be criminally charged with malfeasance and whoever drafted this coverup plan should be fired and jailed for something so anti-public. Sure they want to minimize potential law suits but there is no minimizing this mess and the sooner BP stops wasting energy, the sooner rational minds can find solutions that will work.
Here's a warning to BP: Get your act together on behalf of the people who need the gulf as much as you. Press and public sentiment outside of the bomb throwing crazies that inhabit most of the net are turning on you. If you think the blow out is bad, the blow up over your behavior will make the spill look like kittens play.
How about the press? Egad. Need I say more. The press has never seen an occurrance they couldn't turn into a crisis, a crisis into a disaster and a disaster into an apocalypse. It's hard to see the press as anything but sensational craving vampires looking for victims to elevate into national heroes.
So what can be done? We can't trust the administration because they have an agenda. We can't trust the press because they exaggerate everything. We can't trust BP because they underplay everything. So where do we go? I would suggest we let local government set the criteria for everything in their domain and the federal government assist them. BP pays for it all regardless of who fronts the money. If the government puts out funds, BP reimburses. We use a bunch of different approaches in the beginning and refine those that work the best. Obviously, not every approach works for every situation. What's good for the ocean probably won't work in a wetland. What works on a beach will not work in a swamp. So a lot of different approaches must be tried.
In the end, we must be careful about anyone who has an agenda in regards to this accident. Extreme environmental activists must be approached with caution because their end result is predetermined which influences what and what isn't acceptable. It's an old and sad adage that politics is the ultimate game. Unfortunately, when looked at with that perspective, politics loses power and it has been the goal of the press, government and politicians to elevate politics above everything else. This is bad for every American because over time, less and less can be accomplished as simple activities become the focus of political struggle.
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