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Follow Plutonic on Facebook| Tue May 4, 2010 Out of disaster, an awakening - Ottawa Citizen Publisher: Ottawa Citizen Author: Giles Whittell | |
| The dead turtles washed up along the Mississippi shoreline may or may not have been killed by the oil, but it hardly matters. The slick is out there, visible from space, expanding by at least 900,000 litres a day, waiting for the wind and ocean currents to decide where it will strike. This is the worst-case scenario that BP said it could contain, but which it obviously cannot. It is a gigantic rebuke to what George W. Bush called America's addiction to oil, emulsifying into huge dark clouds beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, where its full effect on plant and animal life won't be known for generations. And it is a personal rebuke to President Barack Obama -- a year ago a beacon of hope to environmentalists the world over -- whose blithe assurance last month that modern oil rigs "don't cause spills" will haunt him for years. Allen Welch knows better. "We always in the back of our mind knew it could happen," he said on the dockside at Venice Marina, a sport-fishing mecca so far out in the Mississippi delta that the only road to it slips under water at high tide. "Now it has happened, the only thing we can do is wait and see." Step onto a charter boat like Welch's, head into the great aquatic prairie that begins where the road ends, and you see immediately why he has chosen to live here, and why he lives in fear. Apart from the marina, human civilization in Venice does our species little credit. It consists of a long row of fenced-in industrial parks and oil installations and a giant heap of landfill. Where the road finally peters out, nature takes over with epic forbearance. In the archipelago of reedbeds and quiet creeks of the Pass-a-Loutre Wildlife Management Area it is possible to forget for hours at a time that 40 per cent of American's domestically produced oil is being pumped to the surface within a half-hour's flight by helicopter. Sandwich terns and seaside sparrows nest in their thousands in three-metre-tall grass that no pedestrian can disturb because there is no land to walk on. We saw scores of jumping mullet and what looked to the untrained eye like a squadron of flamingos taking off in the general direction of Cancun. At the outer edge of the reserve, reality intrudes again. Rigs loom out of the haze along the southern skyline. The site of the Deepwater Horizon disaster is further out still. There, BP and its subcontractors are trying to staunch the flow of one of nature's most addictive yet destructive substances in conditions that none of them has faced before, out of sight of the media. The company has refused to say how many barrels lie still untapped below the well, though sources say it is in the tens of millions. No journalists have been taken to the site and requests by The Times have been politely declined. Back in Venice, BP staff in company T-shirts and baseball caps are facing the music -- and the locals -- offering hazardous-material training courses and contracts for clean-up work. There will be substantial compensation payments, too. Some staff, sotto voce, say they are bending over backward to help the people of the delta region because they are still recovering from Hurricane Katrina, rather than because of the risks posed by the slick. They point out that it is not yet on the scale of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Louisiana's "sweet, light" crude can be dispersed more easily by chemicals and waves than the heavy black oil that wrecked Prince William Sound in Alaska, and the 74-tonne steel and concrete boxes being built to cover the leaks on the sea bed may yet buy time for a relief well to be drilled to fill the gusher with cement. Here's hoping. In the meantime, the past two weeks have made a mockery of BP's long and costly public relations drive to move "beyond petroleum." It has also, by cruel irony, pulled the rug from under a White House energy policy that was bold, hard-headed and progressive. Few in the environmental movement care to admit it, but Obama's plan to expand drilling off Florida and Virginia was part of a good-faith effort to push through legislation that would, for the first time, have forced the U.S. to cut its net carbon footprint. As Obama often observes, American democracy is messy, and the promise of new drilling leases was the only way to win the Republican support without which no energy bill has a hope of passing into law. Since the Transocean rig blew up, Sarah Palin has pledged her continued allegiance to the "Drill baby, drill!" mantra of her 2008 campaign. She has that luxury, the White House does not. All the evidence suggests that it is serious about attempting a transition to a clean energy economy but, in the short term, the political deal-making required for that transition looks harder than ever. In the longer term there may just be a silver lining to the clouds of oil spreading towards the marshlands of Louisiana. Unlike the Exxon Valdez disaster, this one is agonizingly close to home for four states, 30 million Americans, and fishing and tourism industries worth $6 billion a year in Louisiana alone. It may not be enough to wean an entire culture off oil, but its message has already been heard across the divide between business and the environmental movement; oil alone cannot be the answer. On Sunday, professor Willard Kempton of the University of Delaware went on National Public Radio to promote a radical plan for a string of thousands of interlinked offshore wind turbines stretching the length of the U.S. eastern seaboard and meeting most of its demand for power. Unrealistic? Quite possibly. Delusional? Not any more. | |
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