Despite the hullabaloo created around the world by the Deepwater Horizon accident, oil spills are hardly a new occurrence. They’ve been happening since prehistoric man first accidentally tapped into an underground petroleum reservoir.
Long prior to BP’s debacle, yellow and orange booms have permanently ringed rigs in the Gulf – and around the world –, in effort to contain the inevitable daily leakage from a far-from-perfect extraction process. Study the reports from just the past twelve months of leaks and spills in the Gulf; they are common occurrences, though usually measured in the hundreds of gallons rather than millions.
And given our lack of a cohesive energy policy, our national unwillingness to truly commit to developing alternative energy sources and still-growing demand for energy from fossil fuels, such leaks and spills and gushings will continue.
Just read the headlines from the past few days: A thirty-inch pipeline near the Kalamazoo River splits and spills a million gallons of oil into a waterway headed for Lake Michigan. A barge slams into an abandoned well in Barataria Bay at 1 a.m. (an ecologically-sensitive estuary already dealing with a massive oil mess thanks to BP) sending a shower of water, natural gas and oil spewing into the air for days.
(For the rest of my dispatch go to takepart.com)
Last week’s Rally for the Economy in Lafayette, Louisiana, went largely unnoticed outside the state, though 11,000 vociferous oil workers, their supporters and the elected political elite of the state showed up and shouted to the rooftop about their concerns over the continuing moratorium on deepwater oil drilling.
The Cajundome on the campus of Louisiana University was packed with those who see the greatest crime created yet by the BP mess is the federal moratorium which its opponents say has already cost thousands of jobs and taken tens of millions of dollars out of the local economy.
The overarching sentiment at the event, sponsored by the state’s gas and oil lobbying group, was that, yes, the environmental mess may be bad … but the economic hit to the oil industry caused by the moratorium is far worse. The first 3,000 attendees got free t-shirts, others wore their own emblazoned with oil company logos or slogans like “Drill Baby Drill” and “No Moratorium.”
Twin themes emerged as more than a dozen politicians took to the stage. “You’re playing politics with our livelihood!” and “The moratorium is an attack on a way of life!” were the rallying cries, messages that were rowdily applauded here in the heart of Lafayette Parish, where 40 percent of all jobs are tied to oil and gas.
(For more words, pictures and video from the really, go to takepart.com)
The more things change the more they stay the same. The cap plugging BP’s broken wellhead has been holding for nearly two weeks now. Tropical storms are still approaching. Debate continues over the best way to prevent the busted well from continuing to gush, whether to tap it via relief wells or stuff it full of mud. There are some who still believe the well may be leaking thanks to cracks in the ocean floor. Many reports are wondering out loud where all the oil has gone.
While all suggest progress, or at least continued ready-reaction to current events, let’s not lose sight of the fact that there are still tens of millions of gallons of crude oil afloat in the Gulf that weren’t there 95 days ago.
I reached out to a small, diverse trio of Louisianans for an update from this particular ground zero.
P.J. ((“Yes, that’s right, P.J., as in pajamas!”) Hahn, who heads up the coastal restoration department in Plaquemines Parish — home to the port town of Venice and the very camera-friendly Parish President Billy Nungesser — can’t wait to get back to his main pre-occupation these days, cleaning up.
“Certainly I’m glad the well is capped. But we are still crazy busy. We’re meeting with Thad Allen and the Coast Guard as often as we can, to stay on top of its plans for cleanup. That will determine a lot of our agendas.
“I went out over the last few days and boated and flew the coast. Because of the winds and current, we didn’t see too much oil coming ashore.”
(For more of my dispatch from Louisiana, go to takepart.com)
I’ve had several email exchanges with my friend David de Rothschild as he and the “Plastiki” move under tow along the coast of Australia, towards its final stop of Sydney. That 400 mile part of the trip concludes this weekend and the plastic-bottle boat will rest at dock there until it is recycled.
Reports on the boat’s last day at sea were confused, the reporting from Australia varied – was the “Plastiki” “rescued,” did the crew send out a “distress call” – and David wants to make it clear that nothing out of the ordinary happened last Saturday off the coast of Australia.
“We never sent a distress signal, we paid for a charter to pick us up as was always the plan.”
The sail was a remarkable success and we wait news from DdR regarding plans for both the catamaran and his next adventure.
If you think the long-term impacts of the Deepwater Horizon explosion are going to be harmful on a variety of fronts, wait until they start opening up the ocean floor for copper, nickel, gold, silver, cobalt and more a mile below the surface.
Which, if the Chinese have their way, is about to happen, in international waters in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Papua, New Guinea.
So-called “deep sea mining” was first proposed as far back as the mid-1960s, in a book called Mineral Resources of the Seas by J.L. Mero. He described the potential as “limitless.” Over the next 20 years the U.S., Germany, France and others spent hundreds of millions of dollars investigating the possibilities. The Convention on the Law of the Sea created an International Seabed Authority to oversee potential mines; the Chinese have recently applied for a permit.
The possibility of mining the ocean floor 4,000 to 9,000 feet below the surface has been seriously rumbled about in recent years, especially in countries with booming populations thus resource needs. The Chinese are willing to pay for the risky and expensive operation and a Canadian company, Nautilus Minerals, is willing to undertake the labor.
(For the rest of my dispatch, go to takepart.com)
An emotional David de Rothschild called in this afternoon from the coast of Australia, officially announcing that he and the crew of the Plastiki are safely ashore in Australia 122 days after sailing away from its dock in Marin County.
"Plastiki" Skipper Jo Royle
His emotions rode high due to the near-completion of the nearly 8,000 nautical mile voyage aboard his 60-foot catamaran built from 12,500 plastic bottles but also because it has been widely and falsely reported, according to him, that the Plastiki had to be rescued and towed to safety.
Late on Saturday, 200 miles off the port of Mooloolaba in Queensland, a few days sail north of the boat’s planned goal of Coffs Harbour in New South Wales, the Plastiki sent a distress signal, calling for a tow. According to DdR, they had always planned on a charter boat escort to help the Plastiki into port, as they had at other stops since leaving the U.S. in March. Previous stops took them to ports in Samoa and New Caledonia.
Skipper Jo Royle and de Rothschild are the first to admit that their one-of-a-kind boat is slow, not the most maneuverable craft, especially close to shore. On Saturday around 5 p.m. they were encountering a particularly strong Tasman Sea, which threatened to be too much for the boat’s small motor.
“The Plastiki’s quite a difficult boat to sail, she can’t tack she can only jibe. She’s a catamaran,” said Royle.
(For the rest of my dispatch, go to takepart.com)
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