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Dear America,
The Deepwater Horizon explosion and its consequences are certainly a disaster, but they are only a message that was sent a long time ago, and it was sent not just by BP, but by the oil industry and the Republican conservative complex (Rcc). The message is that oil and money are not sufficient justifications for the risky business of drilling a mile deep in the ocean, in our national parks and in fragile environments. Certainly BP is, and should be, liable for the harm it has done, and ultimately it will cost the company billions, though what they will ultimately pay is miniscule compared to what they will ultimately make. After all, they made profits of more than $19 billion last year alone and they'll even make money from this disaster. The fifteen thousand barrels a day of crude they are retrieving from the gusher on the sea floor adds about a million dollars to their income every day that it flows. And all of those who sent us the message will try to isolate the blame to BP and Transocean, Ltd., the owner and operator of the rig, and they certainly deserve vilification, but there is plenty of blame to go around, even among those who are now posing against the disastrous background and clucking righteously as if butter wouldn't melt in their mouths.
Energy and the environment have been causes cé lè bre for more than a century. The first big name that we all can identify was probably Teddy Roosevelt, obviously a politician. And since that time, though the intensity of the environmental movement may have ebbed and flowed, pollution of our collectively owned environment has been taboo, which means that every politician has had to give at least lip service to the notion that the environment is sacrosanct. But between disasters, the zeal for that precept ebbs to the point that it is no more than a shibboleth with which the politically savvy identify themselves as our friends. That is where we were at on April 20, 2010 when the first explosion on the Deepwater Horizon occurred. That was the first line of the message, and the last will not be received for perhaps decades, but lest we become inured to the tragedy that has and will follow that explosion, let us look at how it all happened and who sent us the message in the first place. They are the ones we have to thank, and they are the ones "whose asses we should kick" in the immortal words of our President-- all of their asses, not just BP's.
We should start with our politicians. We have accepted from our political establishment that deepwater drilling is a necessary evil, and we have been accepting that claim at least since the first OPEC oil embargo of the seventies. As a nation, our response to that organized extortion was to try to produce more oil rather than looking to find alternatives to it. That did come, that initiative to develop more environmentally friendly sources of power, but it was on the scale on which we always do experimental things inspired by futuristic fascination. Solar power, wind power, the harnessing of potential energy from the tides and other natural and ersatz phenomena, some as simple as gravity, has all been nothing but a matter of fickle curiosity. We regard it with the same detached revelry as we do trips to Mars and the moon: they are novelties, not serious business. We are spell bound, but the urgency, and the practical necessity of pursuing the goal of working with our planet rather than using it up has been nothing but background noise made by people we think of as "tree huggers" and "green" people. Even now, after the news media have wrung enough money out of the crisis that is now floating onto the shoreline of the Gulf Coast, the Deepwater Horizon will become just an awful memory, and we will go on as usual. We must stop asking about research to power our world without destroying it and demand it. It is not a partisan issue, nor is it a function of one's position on the political spectrum. It is a matter of the survival of our species, not to mention our planet and all of the other life on it. We cannot allow ourselves to be diverted by pragmatism, like the need for oil now and the jobs that procuring it produces. Those things should be in the background. Self-preservation for our world should come first.
Bobby Jindal, the engaging governor of Louisiana, is the easiest to identify, but he is by far not alone in his culpability. The Governor has been a staunch Rcc operative in many ways, but salient among them at this moment is his advocacy of offshore deep water drilling for oil. He has now made an assiduous effort to identify himself as an adjuvant in our national effort to overcome the effects of the Gulf spill, and I suppose that in some small way he is to be applauded for doing the only thing that he could do. But he must also be held to account for the recklessness of his priorities as a politician-- as a public servant. When he weighed economic benefit against other considerations, economic benefit won without circumspection. The blind agitation for more oil exploration deeper and deeper in the sea and further and further into our own wilderness has led us here, and Bobby Jindal and his fellow "oilees" have been our guides. It was the priority of discovery and production of oil in the policies they advocated, in the absence of the caution and care that was necessary, that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. It will turn out that it could have been, and should have been prevented, and the fact that our political establishment abdicated its oversight responsibility as our surrogates and fiduciaries is more than just their failure. It is their crime, and we should hold them accountable. When Mr. Jindal runs for national office, and he will unless the people of Louisiana reject him first, we the people of this nation should demand of him that he explain his position on oil and conservation, and that he account for the fact that his advocacy of exploration did not include the caveats and demands for precautions as a condition precedent to drilling that would have prevented this disaster from befalling us all. He and those who are of his school of thought have a great deal to explain, and before we give them the keys to our gubernatorial mansions, congressional offices and our White House, we must demand that they do so, for our own sakes.
Next comes the oil industry. While we have no right to be surprised by what they have done, and more importantly not done, they cannot be excused for their lack of caution and their reckless pursuit of profit over safety. In the common law of negligence, the failure to adhere to an industry standard results in liability, but even the adherence to such a standard is not sufficient to exculpate. The law acknowledges that industry standards can be lax and favor industry over society, and they often do as they have done here, but the law also acknowledges that there is no one in a better position to impose safe standards on an industry than the industry itself, and thus the failure to do so in general leads to inculpation of the individual or corporation just as failure to abide by an adequate standard would. No one knows any industry better than its practitioners and that is why the law places the ultimate burden of liability on them. The oil industry has failed to carry its burden just as BP has, and just as the financial industry is going to be made to do under financial regulation legislation, we will have to impose oil industry regulation as well as collective financial responsibility for the companies that participate in it. They cannot be left to their own devices in this regard, as they have amply demonstrated, and as will be further demonstrated when the thirty three other deep water drilling platforms now in operation are examined. We as a society must demand that the safety of those enterprises be guaranteed before they proceed, and we must demand that the oil industry as a whole be the guarantor not just with their foresight, but with their money. The bottom line is the only thing they understand, which brings me to the next culprit: the entrepreneurial system on which the Rcc prides itself.
We live in one of the most prosperous nations on earth, and we are ruled by our prosperity. Our businesses and industries have placed the universal need for new sources of power down the list of their priorities from the voracious quest for profit. Mind you, I am not asserting that the needs of our people and of our planet need to be the first priority of every businessman in order for him or her to be moral. The nature of capitalism is that it is hypothetical profit that drives the system as a whole, and innovation in particular, and that impelling force in and of itself may well merit preservation for our collective good. But there have been no limits, as the financial crisis has made clear. Profit has become an end in itself as opposed to a derivative of success. We have exalted it over all other considerations, and when I say we, I mean both those who produce what we consume, and we who consume it, America. Business in general, like the oil industry specifically, will not respond to anything but economic stimuli, and providing those stimuli is up to us, which brings me to the place where the buck stops, as Harry Truman used to say.
We are all to blame, America, so let's start with us. Just as we vote in November, we must vote each time we go to the store. We must stop regarding the label "green" as a quaint form of public spiritedness and think of it as a requirement for our loyalty to brand. We must reconsider our thirst for plastic bottles of water and keep it in the perspective of the fact that we have the safest water supply in the world flowing freely from our taps. We must consider not just the mileage our next cars will get, but the mileage of the fleet of the producer of that car as well, before we buy it. And the list goes on and on. The future is in our hands. Shame on us if we don't seize it once and for all.
See you Monday, America.
Your friend,
Mike
