Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Gross Negligence - by whom?

You don't need to sit down for this, in fact most Americans won't even pay attention to the news, but here it comes...

The BP oil spill is the new world record holder for human inflicted environmental disasters. The spill has released just under five million barrels - an estimated 210 million gallons - of oil. That's 20 times more oil than was released during the Exxon Valdez spill--which previously held the record for the worst oil spill on U.S. territory. On top of that we have no estimate on the volume of methane gas poisoning the waters in and around the wellhead.
That figure "blows out of the water" the 3.3 million barrels released during the world's previous worst spill, the Ixtoc spill in the Bay of Campeche off the eastern coast of Mexico in 1979.

Writers Campbell Robertson and Clifford Krauss for the New York Times reported, the official estimate of the amount of oil spill means that BP faces fines of anywhere between $5.4 billion and $21 billion, depending on the degree to which federal investigators decide that gross negligence sparked the spill.

"Gross negligence", hmmmm?

Most Americans would say that's pretty obvious, isn't gross negligence spelled B P?

Negligence, yes, "gross", well I'm undecided. Certainly BP pushed the limits of safety, corporate ethics, destructive capitalism, and we will find out over time a whole host of other practices were compromised or simply toss overboard. But the blame for gross negligence maybe rests more broadly.

For true gross negligence I think we could start with elected officials over the past four to five decades who have failed to implement a comprehensive energy management plan for a nation (and in turn a world - we have been the leaders like it or not.) And then to the lobbying companies like auto makers who have slaved to profit margins, and insured those elected officials played along. But ultimately we have to look in our own rear-view mirrors at the people behind the wheel. WE. We elected official and didn't hold them accountable. We bought cars that ran on oil. We scream everytime gas smells $3/gal. - make it cheaper at "any" cost. We insured the system didn't change because it might be uncomfortable.

WE, you and me, are the ones responsible for the gross negligence.

Real gross negligence is being done by the media and the public indifference to a living planet that, from a human perspective, is being pushed to the limits of survivability. Just this past week the media has begun down playing the "great disaster" they so jumped on a couple months ago: "Where is all the oil?" an AFP headline asked. Time magazine ran a piece suggesting that the environmental impact of the spill has been "exaggerated." The New York Times ran a story that said the "Gulf oil spill is vanishing fast." Yahoo news ran a story suggesting that oil-starved microbes are gobbling up the oil. Anderson Cooper's CNN show ac360 is one of the few that has continued daily reporting from the Gulf Coast - and he too will likely pack up the mobile unit this week as BP looks to finally shut the well.

As for the longer-term, no one really knows what tomorrow's tide will wash up, that will take some drilling into, long into the future. The scientists are already taking sides, some optimistically portend that Mother Nature will mitigate the oils impact - but let's face it, you don't need and environmental PhD to grasp 5 billion of anything spilled into the environment unnaturally does damage, and to some creatures off our homo-centric radars, the damage could be terminal.

Brett Michael Dykes, who writes the Upshot for Yahoo News, reported that Doug Radar, the chief ocean scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, told the Times Picayune that millions of gallons of oil remain unaccounted for.

"If you go back and look at the sheer amount of oil dumped - 60,000 barrels a day for 87 days - you get about 220 million gallons," Radar said. "Of that, 11 million gallons were burned and 30-some million were collected, meaning about 50 million gallons were eliminated. That leaves you about 175 million gallons of oil-based pollution loose in the Gulf. And when it degrades from the thick stuff you can see, that doesn't mean it's all gone. There's still an untold amount of toxins from that oil in the marine environment."
And what about that web-of-life we learned so much about in elementary school? That's the great mystery. Long-term it becomes broken links and chain-reactions, many beyond our best guesstimates. Researchers have already recorded that the Gulf's traditional summer dead zone - the annual dip in oxygen levels along the Gulf shoreline (due to Mississippi River runoff carrying agricultural fertilizer waste) - is twice as large as it was last year, representing an area the size of Massachusetts - stretching 7,722 square miles across Louisiana's coast well into Texan waters, scientists with the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium announced yesterday (Monday).

So gross negligence? BP? My gut says the real criminals will never appear in court. The real crime is being perpetrated everyday by roughly 300 million Americans who won't accept a new energy-use paradigm. 300 million Americans who greedily refuse to become participants (better leads) in a global solution to living sustainably on this planet. The real gross negligence -- the courage-less creature at the wheel of the vehicle that creeps along in our rear-view mirror everyday, around the world, at 8AM and 5PM.

PS - and what about that "other" giant nation consuming oil.
China has overtaken the United States as the world's biggest producer of greenhouse gases and biggest energy consumer, but they are searching for solution to the unsustainable -China Plans Huge Buses That Can DRIVE OVER Cars

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