Unsurprisingly, BP’s “Top Kill” maneuver, consisting of plugging the oil gusher with heavy mud and kill shots of shredded tires and golf balls, failed. And now the failed drilling zone is spilling an Exxon Valedez’s worth of oil in the Gulf of Mexico every three and a half days.
Unplugged, it will take 7 years for 2.1 billion gallons of oil to drain from pressurized undersea site. That’s roughly 3500 Olympic swimming pools’ worth of oil poured into the fragile Gulf Coast ecosystem. With nearly 4000 oil and gas platforms in the vicinity (as of 2005), we risk further devastation daily. In 2008, Hurricane’s Katrina and Rita leveled 113 such platforms.
While we can hope repercussions for BP will be steep, the odds are that it, much like the banking system, is too big to fail. The EPA could do as little as provide a slap on the corporate wrists to, at the opposite end of the spectrum, pull the plug on its US operations and federal contracts, which account for 39% of the company’s oil and gas revenue annually. Given BP has 22,000 oil and gas wells in the US, punishing BP would also be punishing local economies that rely the jobs BP creates and the disposable incomes that those jobs yield. Oil-coated greed does not scale well when a company reaches a size that allows it to act as it pleases, knowing that there’s very little regulators can do to enforce compliance and punitive measures
Undoubtedly, the government has culpability in creating the situation. When BP filed with the U.S. Minerals Management Service, their exploration plans offered assurances that the company could handle a spill 60 times larger than what is currently playing out in the Gulf, while neglecting to provide any details as to what could be done to staunch the flow from a damaged well head. Government regulators meant to be on the side of the American people should have asked for more detailed filings before further consideration and licenses were granted. Which of the other platforms in the Gulf are ticking eco-bombs waiting to self-destruct, having been approved with such loose emergency plans in place?
There is one upside to this disaster. As more photos (here, here and here) or the environmental impact of this spill makes their way online and into newscasts. The importance of environmental stewardship is, once again, trending as an important environmental issue. Per a new Gallup poll, Americans are realizing the cost of our oil dependency, even in the most superficial manner, and recognizing we actually need a planet to live on.
Unsurprisingly, as Mother Jones points out, self-identified Republicans still overwhelming support sourcing energy over keeping the planet a healthy enough place for the people living on it.
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