A Dirty Rotten Shame

Day twenty six:

You wouldn’t know it by any observation of the immediate surroundings here, in the pleasant ambience of the summer-like spring morning: birds are chirping, the air is still and the sun is pushing the temperature up into the range of perfectly comfortable… no you wouldn’t know it at all but possibly one of the worst environmental disasters of the industrial era is well under way.(http://www.energybulletin.net/node/52828)

Ever since April 22, when the burning remains of an exploded deep-sea oil rig collapsed into the waters off New Orleans, 5000 barrels (about 760 thousand litres) of crude oil have gushed forth into the Gulf of Mexico each day (Deep Water Horizon Explosion Oil Spill and Why You Should Care ) – at least those are the official numbers; there seems to be reason to believe that estimate is much too low. (http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0514/76111/ )

Astonishingly it is not the world’s worst oil spill ever, yet. The worst spill occurred in 1979, also in the Gulf of Mexico. In a very similar accident involving the Mexican Ixtoc 1 oil rig, as much as 3.5 million barrels of oil leaked into the tropical waters by the time the well was brought under control nine months later. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixtoc_I)

The only spill worse than Ixtoc 1 was the deliberate dumping of crude oil into the Persian Gulf by Saddam Hussein’s forces, at the tail end of the first Gulf War in 1991, where easily 10 million barrels of oil were released. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills)

The oceans are already in a bad way, with fish stocks depleted by as much as 90%, acidity levels being thrown out of balance by general warming, and huge portions of open water riddled with a mind numbing quantity of plastic debris. Historically the world’s oceans have had to absorb as much as 42 million barrels of oil spilled since World War Two.(ibid)

As enormous as this quantity is, it represents only two days of current consumption by

the US (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_con-energy-oil-consumption), and about twenty-eight days of production from the Athabasca Tar Sands of Alberta (http://oilsands.alberta.ca/519.cfm). On the one hand, it’s a drop in the bucket, as they say. On the other hand it is quite literally much more than a drop in the ocean. In other words, since we consume such stupendous quantities of crude oil each day (about 80 million barrels world wide) allowing even just a fraction of one per cent of it to find it’s way into the oceans is no negligible failure. And the most troubling aspect of this, is that the risk of further spillage is bound increase since most of the equipment being used is old and aging (engineerlive.com)and most of the remaining off-shore oil to be had is deeper and deeper at sea.

Every barrel of crude oil spilled has to be taken seriously since the cumulative effect of industrial activity on the biosphere in general is the number one limiting factor on the viability of that activity. Indeed, oil spills happen in the context of our global project (called “civilisation” I think). Every barrel of oil that does not get spilled gets transformed into fuel (for the most part), plastic, or other chemical products. And most of the fuel gets converted into Green House Gases – and I’m guessing you know where these numbers are heading…. To put it succinctly, the biosphere is pushed to the limit on all fronts.

Elsewhere, in the case of the Athabasca Tar Sands, the spillage is, in a sense, simply part of the process: For every barrel of synthetic crude oil produced, the industry uses 2 to 4 barrels of fresh water (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_sands#Water), which ends up in enormous tailings ponds utterly contaminated. What has become the largest industrial endeavour in history comes with exorbitant environmental impact under normal operations. For Canadians, this is happening in our “own back yard,” but it too is far removed from our daily experience.

Oil is what they call a fungible commodity. Once it is on-line, it is functionally interconnected with all oil on the global market, and the price is set globally according to the costs of production and speculation, all around the world. In this model, any given litre of gasoline stems from the global pool. You can’t separate it from one geographical location or another. It is fitting since the end product of exhaust spewing from a tailpipe knows no geographical bounds either. Let’s hope at least that the current oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico does meet with some degree of containment in the weeks to come.