Despite the unprecedented environmental disaster that the BP Oil Spill is, the U.S. Congress is no closer to passing clean energy legislation that transitions the United States from depending on oil, which is a nonrenewable and dirty energy resource, mostly derived from hostile foreign sources, to cleaner domestic forms of energy sources that aren’t carbon intensive.
Furthermore, if we’re to continue to evolve as a modern democratic society, then we’ll need to find cleaner forms of energy that are renewable. Additionally, we must balance environmental interests with development goals, since our future well-being is intimately bound up with the availability of natural resources and an access to clean environments.
Here’s a collection of disturbing but oddly comical oil company advertisements from the past—some are eerily prophetic while others are blatantly misleading:
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Given the BP Oil Spill, where are all the Bay Skimmers? This 1980 Gulf Oil advertisement boasts, “I think the best $200,000 Gulf ever spent was for this seagoing vacuum cleaner.” The advertisement further professes, “That’s a lot of oil, and if any of it gets into the water, the Bay Skimmer can pick it up fast. It was tailor-made for this job. We can go right thought an oil slick, and a big belt in the bow simply lifts the oil off the water.” Currently, boats that skim oil are being used in the Gulf of Mexico to clean up the spill. See “Skimming surface, deep dedication,” “$89,000 oil skimmer headed to Louisiana via eBay,” and “More oil spill skimmer, spotter boats activated, mostly in Alabama waters.”
Fossil-fuel companies are Earth’s antifreeze: In a 1940s advertisement for Eveready Prestone antifreeze, manufactured for the National Carbon Company, Inc., there’s a prophetic victory declared over the cold and polar bears:
Fish love oil: For some reason, I doubt the fish of the Gulf of Mexico need “more oil . . . more oil!” Humanity sure doesn’t need more oil. If the United States government is truly serious about energy independence (and there’s a corollary of environmental preservation that follows energy independence), then we need a commonsensical or prudent energy policy that doesn’t include fossil fuels.
Nude model in 1960′s commercial for oil industry: I believe this lady does an exceptional job of capturing our blissful ignorance towards energy, the environment, and entropy.
BREAK
Oysters love oil: The oil industry created this video clip to refute claims made by Gulf fishermen that oil industry activities were destroying oyster beds. The video suggests that oysters love and even can be healed, if sick, by oil industry activities. The video also claims that the oyster’s natural conditions were recreated in the laboratory but note that the tanks do not use any aquarium circulation pump. Given the recent revelation that oil companies included the walrus as part of their Gulf of Mexico recovery plan, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that these oil industry scientists, in the video below, believe these oysters can live in these small tanks without flowing water. Otherwise, the white coats and the oysters in the fish tanks are merely smoke and mirrors. Historically, oysters have been decimated in areas where anthropogenic activities have caused poor water quality, since oysters are filter feeders. Oysters are Nature’s water filtration system, because they filter and clean water. In fact, “an adult oyster can filter as much as 50 gallons of water a day.” To put it another way, “the oysters in the [Chesapeake] Bay could once filter a volume of water equal to that of the entire Bay (about 19 trillion gallons) in a week. Today, it would take the remaining Bay oysters more than a year.” Furthermore, since oysters are Nature’s water filtration system, they easily pick up nasty pollutants and diseases from the water column. This video is another example of the outrageous tactics that the oil industry are willing to use in order to misinform or create doubt.
Shellfish are filter-feeding organisms; they strain the surrounding water through their gills which trap and transfer food particles to their digestive tract. If the water they are housed in is contaminated with disease-causing organisms, these organisms are also trapped and consumed as food. Because shellfish pump large quantities of water through their gills each day, even low concentrations of harmful organisms from the waters can reach dangerous levels in the shellfish. If shellfish containing these organisms are eaten raw or partially cooked, illness may result.
Shellfish are bivalve mollusks such as clams, oysters, and mussels. [The term shellfish does not include crabs, lobsters, or shrimp.] Therefore, to protect public health, it is mandatory that shellfish be harvested from approved shellfish waters where protective standards have been met.
How do diseases and poor water quality affect oysters?
In addition to harvest pressure, the Bay’s oysters face a number of other challenges. One of these is disease. Since the 1950s, the oyster diseases MSX and Dermo have decimated the Bay’s remaining oyster population.
The Bay’s oysters have also been impacted by poor water quality.
Changes in land use over the past century—more agricultural and urban and suburban areas and fewer forested areas—have increased the amount of nutrients and sediment that enter the Bay.
Excess nutrients fuel the growth of algae blooms that deplete oxygen in deeper waters and can hinder the development of oyster larvae.
Oysters that are under stress from poor water quality or burial by sediment are likely more prone to disease.
Spoofs & irony:
This parody illustrates the truth behind BP’s television commercials:
Greenwashing:
BP or British Petroleum campaigns on the idea that BP is synonymous to “Beyond Petroleum.” However, the use of beyond petroleum to describe BP’s energy strategy and policy is contradictory or even misleading. More from Slate.com:
So what’s with this “Beyond Petroleum” stuff? BP has a huge investment in an intensively competitive commodity business. By and large, you’ll get virtually the same performance, price, and customer experience at Sunoco as you will at BP. Cars don’t develop tastes for brands of gas the way humans develop tastes for brands of soda or potato chips. Neither, by my own unscientific polling, do people. Oil retailers differentiate themselves by offering premium coffee in the stores or providing ease of payment through gizmos like Mobil’s Speedpass or, in BP’s case, by projecting a favorable brand image.
Highlighting environmentally friendly products has emerged as a popular way for retailers and consumer-product companies to strengthen bonds with discerning customers. Think Home Depot’s rainforest-free lumber, McDonald’s biodegradable Big Mac wrappers, and the entire Body Shop. Ford briefly aspired to eco-friendliness with its drive for greater fuel efficiency but canned it when the financial going got tough.
By running these ads and by doing things like powering gas pumps with electricity generated by photovoltaic cells, BP sends a message to conflicted SUV drivers—I’m one of them—who sleep better after filling the 14-mile-per-gallon Jeep from an energy-efficient pump. What’s more, it obtains what no global oil conglomerate can buy: positive coverage in the media. (The New York Times in particular seems to have a soft spot for anything that smacks of renewable energy.)
BP’s campaign inspires no small amount of cognitive dissonance. The company proudly notes that it will invest $15 billion in oil properties in the next 10 years. But while a release notes that “BP holds a leading share in the global market for photovoltaic modules, which turn sunlight into electricity,” you’ll search far and wide on its Web site without finding any dollar figures attached to it. You can be sure that “leading share” is a lot closer to $15 million than $15 billion.
More significantly, the Beyond Petroleum campaign seems to argue for the disappearance of the company’s core product. If our kids should be so fortunate as to live in a world beyond petroleum, one in which cars, factories, and electricity plants are powered by an alternative power source—hydrogen, fuel cells, electric batteries, ethanol, fission, or fairy dust—it’s a virtual certainty BP won’t be the one to get us there.
Big players in industries—especially dominant ones—can survive and even profit from dramatic inflection points. IBM adapted from the mainframe to the PC, and Microsoft has survived the transition to the Internet. But giant companies in competitive, capital-intensive businesses, which are owned by shareholders with short time horizons, have difficulty mustering the will to develop a new product that will render existing ventures obsolete.
In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen argued that established players are constitutionally disinclined to develop disruptive technologies on their own. Why? Incumbents spend too much time and resources satisfying their customers’ current needs—in BP’s case, the need for cheap oil and gas. As a result, they fail to latch on to new technologies that may turn into products that customers might need or don’t even know they need.
Oil companies have been greenwashing with the idea of “Beyond Petroleum”—which is mere self-serving propaganda—for years. For example, this 1977 Exxon advertisement highlights the importance of solar energy and energy conservation. However, although solar energy and energy conservation have increased since the 1970s, renewable energy and energy conservation would certainly represent a higher share if both the United States government and energy companies had implemented energy policies that required and incentivized more renewable energy and conservation projects. The advertisement states that the United States’ top priority should be the development of more domestic oil and gas—despite oil and gas being fungible. Also, allowing our growing society to become so dependent on fossil fuels, which are a nonrenewable resource, raises national security concerns. Secondly, the advertisement highlights the importance of coal—despite the negative externalities associated with coal. Lastily, the advertisement states that “solar power can make a contribution.”
These advertisements from the 1970s suggest that you can fight air pollution by burning certain petroleum products. Despite technological advances in the development of cleaner fuels and “despite America’s growing ‘green’ movement, the air in many cities [is becoming] dirtier.” Air pollution from tailpipe emissions impacts human health and the human environment by contributing to ozone pollution, global warming, pollution that damages infrastructure, and ocean acidification.
BOULDER—A detailed computer modeling study released today indicates that oil from the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico might soon extend along thousands of miles of the Atlantic coast and open ocean as early as this summer. The modeling results are captured in a series of dramatic animations produced by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and collaborators.
The costs of malfeasance are too great to ignore. The negative externalities that result from burning fossil fuels are too great to ignore. As fossil fuels continue to dwindle and world governments continue to lack prudent energy policies, environmental disasters will continue, so the true cost of “cheap” fossil fuels will continue to be passed to governments and their citizens, while private corporations bank mammoth amounts of money every day.
And this image, via Digg, shows an oil-covered bottlenose dolphin (or maybe a white-sided dolphin?):
Unlike the birds in the images above, which are visibly being impacted by the oil and will probably die, it might be impossible to discern from the image whether the dolphin died from interacting with leaked oil or from some other cause. However, undoubtedly, the BP oil spill is having a negative impact of all marine life—including cetaceans that are certainly interacting with oil beneath the Gulf and when they come to the surface to breathe air. More from NOAA:
From April 30 to June 1, there have been 29 dead dolphins verified within the designated spill area. So far, one of the 29 dolphins had evidence of external oil. Because it was found on an oiled beach, we are unable at this time to determine whether the animal was covered in oil prior to its death or after its death. The other 28 dolphins have had no visible evidence of external oil. Since April 30, the stranding rate for dolphins in Louisiana has been higher than the historic numbers for the same time period in previous years. This may be due to increased detection and reporting and the lingering effects of the earlier observed spike in strandings.
More than a month has passed since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, operated by BP, blew up, spewing immeasurable quantities of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and frustrating all efforts to contain it. An inspector general’s report to be released this week said that federal regulators responsible for oversight of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico allowed industry officials several years ago to fill in their own inspection reports in pencil, and then turned them over to the regulators, who traced over them in pen before submitting the reports.
Video: Oil Washes Ashore on La. Island:
Video: Jeffrey Brown talks to Admiral Thad Allen of the U.S. Coast Guard for the latest on the spreading contamination and the government’s role in the response:
The figure of 5,000 barrels a day or 210,000 gallons that BP and the federal government have been using for weeks is based on satellite observations of the surface. But NASA’s best satellite-based instruments can’t see deep into the waters of the Gulf, where much of the oil from the gusher 5,000 feet below the surface seems to be floating.
Federal officials testified in hearings on Tuesday that they were putting together a crack team to get to the bottom of big the spill really is. That effort comes a month after the April 20 explosion that triggered the unprecedented oil spill in deep waters of the United States. Experts say knowing that amount is crucial for efforts to cap the broken wellhead and to monitor and clean up the oil.
Steve Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, earlier this month made simple calculations from a video BP released on May 12 and came up with a flow of 70,000 barrels a day, NPR reported last week. Werely on Wednesday told a House Commerce and Energy Committee subcommittee that his calculations of two leaks that show up on videos BP released on Tuesday showed 70,000 barrels from one leak and 25,000 from the other.
He said the calculation could be off by 20 percent — meaning the spill could range from between 76,000 to 104,000 barrels a day. But Wereley said he would need to see videos that were not compressed and showed the flow over a longer period so that it would be possible to get a better calculation of the mix of oil and gas from the wellhead.
The low-ball estimates by BP, and the failure of the U.S. government to determine official estimates could save BP millions in court. More via McClatchy.
Legal experts said that not having a credible official estimate of the leak’s size provides another benefit for BP: The amount of oil spilled is certain to be key evidence in the court battles that are likely to result from the disaster. The size of the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, for example, was a significant factor that the jury considered when it assessed damages against Exxon.
“If they put off measuring, then it’s going to be a battle of dueling experts after the fact trying to extrapolate how much spilled after it has all sunk or has been carried away,” said Lloyd Benton Miller, one of the lead plaintiffs’ lawyers in the Exxon Valdez spill litigation. “The ability to measure how much oil was released will be impossible.”
“It’s always a bottom-line issue,” said Marilyn Heiman, a former Clinton administration Interior Department official who now heads the Arctic Program for the Pew Environment Group. “Any company wouldn’t have an interest in having this kind of measurement if they can help it.”
The size of the spill has become a high stakes political controversy that’s put the Obama administration and the oil company on the defensive. In congressional testimony Wednesday, an engineering professor from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., said that based on videos released Tuesday he estimated that the well was spewing at 95,000 barrels of oil, or 4 million gallons a day into the gulf.
The BP oil spill is unprecedented. The image below reminds me of looking down at a puddle with a huge oil sheen in the middle of it. Instead, the Gulf of Mexico is the puddle, and the oil sheen is the result of poor federal government oversight of natural resources. The situation is extremely disheartening.
The BP oil spill illustrates how humanity can impact the environment on a large scale. If the environment is negatively impacted, then our well-being is negatively impacted. As a result, in order to preserve a future environment that bears fruit or resources (or a healthy economy) for our children to use (or capitalize from), it’s in everyone’s best interest to be an environmentalist.
Furthermore, it’s easy to visualize the BP oil spill and become disgusted by the impacts that are easily observed. However, some anthropogenic activities aren’t readily observable. For example, the anthropogenic release of trapped carbon into the atmosphere and the subsequent changes to the climate are too abstract for some individuals to grasp. Also, all the oil leaking from our automobiles every second into the environment on an aggregate scale impacts the environment negatively—just like the BP oil spill. Therefore, we must be cognizant on how our everyday activities might impact our human environment and make changes accordingly. The federal government has a responsibility to drive these changes too.
Alabama Attorney General Troy King said Sunday night that he has told BP they should stop circulating settlement agreements among coastal Alabamians, the Mobile Press-Register reports. King reportedly said the agreements stipulate that residents will give up their right to sue the company in exchange for a payment of up to $5,000.
“People need to proceed with caution and understand the ramifications before signing something like that,” said King, who noted that he is prohibited from giving legal advice to private citizens. “They should seek appropriate counsel to make sure their rights are protected.”
Meanwhile, lawyers representing environmental groups, rig workers and fisherman hurt by the explosion levied fresh accusations against BP, as well as Transocean and Halliburton. BP was operating the doomed Deepwater Horizon rig, which it leased from Transocean. Halliburton was providing several services on the rig, including cementing, a method of capping the well to control pressure from oil and gas.
At least one worker who was on the rig when it exploded April 20 and who handled company records for BP said the rig was drilling deeper than 22,000 feet, even though the company’s federal permit allowed it to go only to 18,000 to 20,000 feet, the lawyers said.
BP strongly denied that it was drilling deeper than allowed.
Up to $1 billion of the $1.6 billion reserve could be used to compensate for losses from the accident, as much as half of it for what is sometimes a major category of costs: damage to natural resources like fisheries and other wildlife habitats.
Under the law that established the reserve, called the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, the operators of the offshore rig face no more than $75 million in liability for the damages that might be claimed by individuals, companies or the government.
The fund was set up by Congress in 1986 but not financed until after the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska in 1989. In exchange for the limits on liability, the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 imposed a tax on oil companies, currently 8 cents for every barrel they produce in this country or import.
The tax adds roughly one tenth of a percent to the price of oil. Another source of revenue is fines and civil penalties from companies that spill oil.
The result is a rainy-day fund, which over the years has been used mostly for spills that exceed the liability caps by relatively small amounts. But the trust fund managers have warned that a single big spill could make a sizable dent in the reserve.
Personally, I don’t understand how expanding offshore oil drilling is supposed to lead to energy security or lower prices at the pump, since the world’s economic health is measured by continued growth and the world’s economy is so intimately bound up with oil—a nonrenewable resource. Also, there’s another problem with “the ‘energy security’ argument for US oil production: oil is fungible and it is traded widely.”
Oil continues to flow into the Gulf of Mexico at an estimated to 5000 barrels (210,000 gallons) per day from three leaks in damaged piping on the sea floor. This afternoon NOAA tested a new technique to apply dispersants to oil at the source – 5000’ below the surface. Another test and follow-on analysis of the effects of dispersant and dispersed oil in the water column are necessary before the technique is operational, but if successful it could reduce or prevent an oil plume from forming at the surface. Preparation for drilling of a relief or cut-off well is underway – one drilling rig is on site and one should arrive this weekend, but the process will not be complete for several months. Work also continues on a piping system designed to take oil from a collection dome at the sea floor to tankers on the surface; this technique has never been tried at 5000’. High winds and seas curtailed surface skimming and application of dispersant by air today, but production of dispersant has ramped up to 70,000 barrels per day.
Hundreds of thousands of feet of boom have been deployed to contain the spill, with hundreds of thousands more assigned. The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries announced the closure of both recreational and commercial fishing in areas of likely impact and the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals closed molluscan shellfish (oyster) harvesting areas in the coastal parishes of Plaquemines and St. Bernard.
Dead sea turtles are also washing ashore in record numbers. More via the Mississippi Press:
On Saturday the sea turtles started washing up on shore. On Sunday, the turtles were joined by dead catfish, horseshoe crabs, and birds — a duck, a pelican and a seagull.
Before the April 20 rig explosion and oil started pouring into the Gulf, the city might see a small turtle wash up every six months — one that got caught in a net, or died from some natural cause, said Holliman, a City of Pass Christian patrol officer, who works the harbor.
“But we’ve never seen this many,” he says, shaking his head. “Something’s going on; we just don’t know what.”
The animals don’t appear to be coated in oil, but some of the turtles have damaged shells. Though sea turtles can be seen out near the barrier islands, no one is sure where these dead ones are coming from.
Image: Deepwater Horizon Cumulative Trajectory Map via NOAA:
Video: The oil leak seems impossible to stop: Oil Spill Priority One: Seal the Leak
Video: Fears grow over oil spill disaster: Fishers blame the government for a slow response and Halliburton sued
Video: Dead Sea Turtles Washing Up Along Gulf Coast:
Video: Obama says BP must pay
Video: Gulf Oil Spill Swiftly Balloons, Could Move East:
On the Net: Consider these sites for updates on the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill:
Opponents of the offshore wind farm argue, amongst other things, that the turbines would ruin the scenic beauty of Nantucket Sound and harm aquatic wildlife and seabirds. However, Nantucket Sound receives heavy commercial traffic in addition to heavy touristic-type traffic. The anthropogenic footprint on the area is undoubtedly already huge. Furthermore, research shows that impacts to seabirds are minimal.
Given the United States’ need for energy and reliance on polluting nonrenewable fossil fuels (not to mention the recent Gulf of Mexico offshore oil rig disaster, a Brobdingnagian-sized environmental disaster, which will cost that region billions of dollars in economic loss due to the devastation done to ecosystem services), Cape Wind is an important step in the right direction that should have begun many years before.
On January 28, 1969, Union Oil’s Platform A experienced an uncontrolled blowout in the Dos Cuadras field that lasted for approximately eight days. The spill of approximately 80,000 to 100,000 barrels of crude oil affected over forty miles of coastline. Several environmental laws were passed at the federal and state levels following the blowout, including the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Future OCS and state tideland leasing would require a formalized environmental review process.
Given the environmental impacts, the Gulf of Mexico spill will negatively impact fisheries, local economies, local livelihoods, and the health of local populations. In fact, local shrimpers have already filed a lawsuit seeking damages caused by the spill. More from the Houma Courier:
Two shrimpers from Louisiana are among the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed Wednesday in connection with the oil spill related to the sunken oil rig Deepwater Horizon.
Acy J. Cooper Jr. anmd Ronnie Louis Anderson are among the litigants. Cooper is from the Venice area and Anderson is from Montegut.
The class action suit filed in New Orleans federal court seeks $5 million in specific damages and an unspecified amount for punitive damages against Transocean, which owned the ill-fated platform, BP, for whom exploration was being done off the Louisiana coast, and Halliburton Energy Services Inc. and Cameron International Corp., who performed contract work for the rig.
The Gulf of Mexico oil spill is reminicient of the Kingston Fossil Plant coal fly ash slurry spill–another costly environmental disaster. While the coal industry was peddling coal as a clean energy source, over one billion gallons of fly ash spilled over Roane County, Tennessee. The Kingston fly ash spill was “100 times bigger than the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989[, and] the cleanup of the river, which will take years to complete, is expected to cost as much as $1 billion.”
As a nation, we must realize that relying on fossil fuels isn’t prudent energy policy, especially since alternatives exist. Furthermore, fossil fuels aren’t cheap, since significant costs, associated with environmental damage and public health, are passed off to consumers and governments. These externalities aren’t immediately reflected in the price we pay at the pump. Consequently, the “Drill, Baby, Drill” philosophy is shortsigted and reckless or not completely thought out. Bill Maher put it best: “Every asshole who ever chanted ‘Drill baby drill’ should have to report to the Gulf coast today for cleanup duty.”
Video: Oil spill reaches Gulf Coast, threat of worst US environmental disaster
Video: The Legacy Of Exxon Valdez
CBS News Video: Oil Spill Creeping Toward U.S. Coast
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