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 Special Report:

Mark Snyder

THE GULF OIL SPILL DISASTER

Update August 2010

I am glad to report that since my last post on this subject, BP has plugged the leak and is in the process of permanently killing the well which leaked millions of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.  Since this time, BP Chairman Tony Hayward (who I don't believe could have really said anything that would have made it better) has been replaced by Robert Dudley, the first ever American to head up the British giant.  Wisely, BP has put as many local American people as possible in the front lines including running tons of commercials showing locals from Louisiana who are in charge of helping to fulfill claims by local business people.  There was no perfect solution to the problem, but I really think that BP is owning up to their responsibility overall.  Time will tell though and stories will come out about shortcomings on the part of BP.  We can depend on American media to help with that.

Encouraging news has been the natural process of oil eating bacteria which has begun to chip away at the oil which spoiled the Gulf earlier this year.  In time, the beaches and the surface of the ocean will heal from this disaster.  What is far more broad reaching however is the permanent affect that the oil has had and will continue to have on delicate wetlands, delta and seabed ecosystems.  Millions of animals, birds and fish have been affected and some of the wildlife will take a lifetime to recover.  The pollution data is staggering and you will soon be hearing about the real long term affects.  The beaches will come back and this is great news.  But neither the fishing, nor the worlds that lives beneath the sea, will come back any time soon. 

The first step of stopping the leak, which was the most critical of steps, has been initiated and we have to be greatful that we are now at a cleaning and repairing stage, and not still bleeding.

Update July 2010

Exactly as I predicted, the scope of the disaster on the environment is beyond what was intially thought and will continue to be found to be beyond what anyone could imagine.  It would be simpler if there were a flat beach coastline.  Protecting beaches is not easy, nor is cleaning them, but it is much easier than protecting delicate deltas and marshland, which Louisiana is absolutely full of.  As sad as it is for me to say this, I will probably never leave to see a completely healed gulf coast.  There are millions of inlets, tributaties and marshes which will be destroyed in the near future if they are not gone already and will not come back to their original states for what could be a century.  Ultimately, nature will be the greatest healer of these areas, but the toll will last further than most of our lifespans.

Additionally, the delicate marine ecosystems which have been destroyed, may never come back and if they do come back, it will only be over many decades.

The disaster is monumental, and while the spill has been curbed and will hopefully soon stop, the volume of crude oil spilt into the ocean is beyond what any of us can picture in our own heads.  Making it through this hurricane season will be a matter of touch and go for Florida and the Southeast coast.  If they can remain oil free for this period, they may likely escape the brunt of damage felt along the Lousisiana, Alabama and Florida coast lines.  However if winds and tides are not in their favor, they too will have to grapple with a more temporary but heart wrenching loss of their beaches.

So, you might be thinking:  What can we do then or what could we do better.  The answer is, I just don't know right now.  Stopping the spill is critical, finding more ways to clean is critical and trying to preserve marine and coastal life in protected envivonrments so that they can be re-established, is also critical.  Beyond that we have to decide if we will still drill for crude oil. 

Original Post

Unlike most of what I post, my thoughts on the Gulf Oil Spill will mostly be echoes of what you will hear from others, with of course my usual practical viewpoint on why it happened and what our response should be.

First of all, I want to address the notion of boycotting British Petroleum (BP) and why this would be one of the worst ideas we could implement.  Boycotting should not be done because we are angry, anymore than beating our children or setting fire to our enemy's house.  A boycott should be used when there is not a market force causing a company to change an unethical practice.  An example of this was the use of child labor to make sneakers and soccer balls.  Companies who did this were making good products at reasonable prices and so there was just no force that would stop them from putting children in dangerous and oppressive work situations.  In this case, you had an ethical issue that needed to be addressed by pressuring those companies to act. 

This is not the case with BP.  We know that they are responsible and they know that they are responsible.  Boycotting them will not make them improve the way that they drill for oil, since they are drilling offshore in the manner that was approved for everyone else.  If they were drilling in an unfair or less safe manner than others, than perhaps a boycott would make sense in certain circumstances but they are just doing the same thing as their peers.

More importantly though, we must not boycott BP for three critical reasons:

1) Most BP gas stations in the United States are owned by American small business owners and you are more likely to hurt them than the parent company with a boycott.  Because cruel petroleum is a commodity, a reduction in demand for BP fuel in the United States will simply result in that fuel being sold elsewhere.  You will hurt US gas station owners but will not hurt BP, the oil drilling company.

2) If we financially choke the company, we are cutting off their money supply and we need them to make money to pay for the cleanup.  This may sound a little ironic that we have to help their business in order to fund them cleaning up their mistake, but the issue is so serious to our economy and our environment, that now is not the time to stand on our soapbox.  BP needs lots of money, as long as they aren't charging more for gas than someone else.  So, if BP has a price at the pump that you feel good paying, go ahead and pay it.  Either your money can go to the shareholders of one of BPs competitors, or your money can go to the company who has taken responsibility for the spill and has committed to pay for the cleanup.  Even if it pains you to give them business, do it for the wildlife, the fish and beaches. 

Bear in mind as well, that even in a situation as bad as this, if we bankrupt them, they can file for protection and that may just cut off the supply of cash that we need to clean up the mess.  If BP goes under, then all of us lose and we lose big.

3) If we boycott them, we may just alienate them.  Right now, they are on our side, feel horrible about what happened and are working with us to fix it.  They have allocated funds to stopping the leak, and funds are moving towards being allocated for those whose businesses are affected.  It is true that the actual flow of cash has not yet begun, and you can be that billions will stay tied up in court for years.  But if we make it easier for BP to just pack up their American operations and go home, than to stay, we will get stuck cleaning up the mess ourselves.

As angry as you may be at BP (and I share your anger, though it was just as plausible that it would have been someone else's rig to blow up), you have to realize that the goal is to insure that action and money keep flowing from BP and that BP has a reason to want to keep investing in both drilling and selling in the Americas.  Those of us who can do nothing about this (which is most of us) will have a tendancy to blame and to demand answers, however the problem created is so bad that our only energy right now should be towards stopping the flow of oil and finding out how we clean up the mess.

As to the disaster itself, my thoughts are no different than anyone else's.  There is no debate about the fact that this is the worst man made ecological disaster that we have seen in modern history.  An event of this magnitude has only occured in prehistoric periods and such events have changed the landscape of the earth.  Whether it was the ice age, or an evolutionary milestone or a reshaping of land masses through massive earthquakes, a disaster of this magnitude in the past redirected the future of life on earth.  We have not yet come out and said it, but the reality is that we have ripped an arterial wall in the flesh of the earth, causing massive bleeding that we currently do not know how to stop.  We are literally filling up a life giving and life sustaining aquatic environment with toxic substance, and like chlorine in a fish tank we are going to gradually destroy that environment.  We are looking at massive migratory stopping grounds for birds being tainted, at whole fish populations being wiped out, at fragile ecosystems adjacent to the coast and in the ocean being destroyed and millions of people being economically devasted by the destruction of coastal tourism and fishing.  While the last two affects probably both most of us who are not living there the most, they are the least catastrophic interuptions to actual life on earth.  Yet since us humans are typically more concerned about ourselves than plant and animal life, the first outrage that you will see is the tainting of beach life and the devastation to both the fishing industry and the ability of American's to afford and eat fish (which may have arguably been the most healthy of the meats that we eat). 

We don't yet understand how bad this is and how bad it will be and human nature will cause us to minimize it until we are face to face with it.  Be sure, Florida is underplaying what is ahead and as you move northward up the east coast, states are terrified of what the gulf stream waters may bring forth to their coastlines.  The only true solutions at this point will not be public relations ones, as those will only delay people's accepting of the reality.  The true solutions will be scientific ones.  British Petroleum needs to offer up massive financial rewards to scientists who can come up with solutions to this problem.  With tens of millions of dollars as a cash prize, the worlds greatest minds will set to work on coming up with a plan.  The great thing is that finding a scientific solution is actually easy to replicate at a micro level.  A sixth grader could put oil in an aquarium and have enough tools to try to experiment with what will clean up the oil or stop it from flowing.

The rest of us, who are less scientifically inclined need to stand behind BP and our government ensuring that we put pressure but also support behind every possible effort to stop the hemorhage and find ways to stop the spread and aid the clean up.  When and if it is all over, however, my guess is that the view from space is going to be a bit different and that billions and billions of plants and animals will have been forever altered in their fragile ecosystems.  I hate to say it, but this is about as bad as it can get....