On April 20, 2010, two explosions on the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform killed 11 workers and injured 17 more. These workers were working on the Macondo Well, a deepwater oil well about a mile under the Gulf of Mexico. The resulting ‘spill’ — or as I think may be more accurate, ‘gushing wound at the bottom of the ocean’ — lasted for three months and dumped 205 million gallons of crude oil into a vast ecosystem teeming with life. Not only did British Petroleum’s blowout preventer fail when it was needed, many safety regulations to protect the rig workers were ignored.

It is this columnist’s humble opinion that not only did BP act recklessly, but the offshore oil drilling industry has been given far too much leeway in terms of safety and environmental standards.

Why are drillers not required to have relief wells — so if the main well fails, oil can still be captured? Why was Ken Lay of the Enron infamy given the ability to shape industry regulations under the Bush administration? Why do we think free-market policies will ever respect our environment as anything more than resources to be profitably harvested?

The addition of massive quantities of hydrocarbons (read: crude oil) into the Gulf ecosystem formed gargantuan underwater oil plumes as well as the more photogenic surface oil slicks. It is a massive crime against our shared environment. The sheer quantity of oil makes any estimate of environmental damage speculative, but the timing of the spill — during a period of mating and reproduction for species like shrimp, pelicans and alligators — and the obvious disruption of the delicate Gulf ecosystem will carry heavy long-term environmental costs.

‘This is uncharted territory in terms of assessing the effects of a spill from a deep well like this,’ said Judy McDowell of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. We can’t just soak up the visible oil and pretend like nothing happened. Wetlands across the Gulf coast have also been threatened, and with them the many organisms that call them home. We must work to rectify the immense damage, and the recovery process ought to be billed directly to BP’s corporate offices.

This was no natural disaster. This was not inevitable. This was a man-made environmental catastrophe caused by the desire to suck out as much ancient carbon from our earth’s crust as possible to feed the United States oil addiction. Not only are we addicts, but we haven’t even checked into rehab yet. In a bad economy, it becomes politically toxic to try and deal with long-term problems, but every year we wait, the cost only grows. Even if one doubts the effects of greenhouse gases on our long-term climate, the use of nonrenewable energy sources is still irresponsible and reckless. The transformation to a green economy and a more sustainable form of capitalism benefits us all in the long term.

BP’s poor decisions caused the Gulf oil disaster. The true fault, however, lies with the system that forces us to go to extraordinary depths to find the dirty, toxic lifeblood of the American industry. Some may have hoped the oil spill would be our wake-up call, the moment when we hit rock bottom and resolved to clean our act. Clearly, that is not yet the case.

Building a sustainable economy will be the greatest challenge of my generation. The ultimate goal is to move the global economy onto a bedrock foundation of energy sustainability and energy security. Let’s hope we can do it before the prospect of a destabilized climate and the predictions of resource wars actually come to fruition.

Luke Lanciano is a junior political science major. His column appears weekly, and he can be reached at lllancia@syr.edu.

 

 

Published on September 15, 2010 at 12:00 pm