Deepwater Horizon, a second look.

I hadn’t expected to follow up on my last post with another on the same subject, but the continued disastrous consequences of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill have not allowed me to focus on much else.




















I will point out off the bat that two of my favourite bloggers helped keep these fires burning. One entry by Dmitri Orlov, which I hadn’t read until this week, makes the canny comparison of Deepwater Horizon to Chernobyl [http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2010/05/american-chernobyl.html], and the other by John Michael Greer which puts the disaster in perspective, as usual, also touches on nuclear technology, and delves into musings on magic [http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/06/magical-thinking.html]. I recommend both highly.

And now for musings of my own…

The world may now be learning something the oil and auto giants have kept hidden all these years: with petroleum, only the illusion of green is really possible. With persuasive P.R. and marketing, coupled with the sophisticated and refined technology of power, comfort and convenience and you have the very seductive gasoline-powered automobile. Enshrined in the popular culture of our times with god-like status, the car comes complete with a collective blind spot for its drawbacks. Could a singular event spell the undoing of this trance we are under?

Like the Chernobyl core meltdown did for nuclear energy, the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil disaster promises to deliver a severe blow to Big Oil and the auto-makers. It will remove much of the blind spot shielding the industry from common-sense scrutiny.

The immediate consequence of peak oil is that the industrial, economic pressures for sustaining growth demand that any energy shortfall be made up from the next best source of energy. The conventional economic wisdom is that the higher price per barrel will encourage development of the more hard-to-reach sources. If true on paper, it is only thanks to the omission of external costs (to the health of people and the environment). Disastrous accidents put those externalities in the spotlight.

It’s a crying shame that the understanding and acceptance of the facts of this new reality have to come at the cost of the biosphere – almost as a sacrifice – since it is the biosphere itself (of which we are a part) that we are trying to preserve.












Arguably, climate change is supposed to fulfill the role of the global wake-up call, but apparently humans need to see cause and effect spelled out for them in graphic, indisputable events, with a bit of corporate malfeasance on top.

So Deepwater Horizon it is.

But let it serve to remind us that there is nothing particularly green or friendly about the oil industry to begin with: from extraction, to refinery, to the tailpipe, oil is a nasty, persistent and toxic substance. The chemicals derived from it, not limited to petroleum, such as plastic and industrial fertilizers, have had a huge impact on the biosphere in their own right, with plastic-filled oceans and topsoil erosion the respective legacies of each. But like global warming, these are end-use and consequential issues that tell us of the biosphere’s elastic constraints that limit our growth. But they are hard to perceive through the din of the seductive automotive and petroleum industries’ spectacle of marketing – if you took them at their word, you’d see them as the self-appointed custodians of the environment.

Peak oil is a supply related issue. It speaks of the geological constraints that also limit our industrial growth. But it too is hard to perceive, because as the people in the peak oil community will tell you, the taps will not simply run dry over-night.

Conveniently, Deepwater Horizon encapsulates the two: it is the supply of risky and difficult to get oil (post peak source, by definition) transformed instantly into an externality, without the bother of pumping, shipping, refining, marketing, transporting, selling and burning. It’s instant pollution for all to see. The event spells out in plain imagery the nature of our predicament: continued reliance on petroleum is challenging, risky, and expensive, pretty much unacceptable, and for all practical purposes, eventually untenable.

Deepwater Horizon is an industrial disaster of enormous proportion, involving likely disregard for already lax regulation, and complete incompetence and unpreparedness made worse by the most challenging environment on the planet – a mile deep at sea!

And of course it is an environmental nightmare: with the use of dispersants minimising the impact on beaches (not very well, mind-you, but reducing the most visible aspect of its impact – a public image priority for B.P. to be sure), but possibly compounding the effects of the spill in the underwater ecosystems of the Gulf. The whole thing is a high risk experiment with some of the world’s most persistent and toxic chemicals.

Apparently British Petroleum has deep enough pockets that it will go to any length to stop the flow of oil. Little thanks goes to them however when it comes to clean-up efforts, where the incompetence of the corporation has again become self-evident; and where volunteers and the state have had to pick up the slack.


It’s a shame that such gargantuan resources have to be spent on damage control to begin with. Obviously a regulatory preventative measure would have been preferable. Better still, taking away the incentive for oil companies to develop high-risk sources by reducing demand could at least help prevent the risk of future accidents.

Dependence on oil is woven into the way we have set up our living arrangements in the cities and suburbs of North America. We should know better by now. Arguably, at least some of us do. If ever there was a time when we had the technological ability, the intellectual capacity and the moral imperative to change those arrangements by design, it is now. Instead we in Canada have a political leader who pushes the country forward as a petro-state propped up by the dirty oil of the Athabasca tar sands. How much longer will we follow our noses down this path?


Fortunately, as has been said here before at Car Free Mile End, we do have the power to act in many ways in our proverbial back-yard. Living arrangements start in households, and move outward into communities and beyond. Perhaps some of the events that we have planned for our neighbourhood this summer will inspire your participation in the myriad of solutions that will break the dependence that must not continue.