Lucinda Marshall

One of the problems with the gulf oil disaster is it isn’t a 30 second and we’re done sort of a story.  Nor is it a simple story–the amount of leaking oil, the extent of the damage, who is to blame, the path it will follow and how well the ‘cleanup’ will work are all aspects of the story that will be unknown for quite some time.

It’s a hard story for the media to cover and a hard one for the public to fully grasp.  In an effort to try to understand what we know at this point, I started making a list of links to information about various parts of this story.  And because I’m a really nice person who likes to share, here is what I found:

• AP questions how many times and how thoroughly MMS inspected Deep Horizon.  Hell, even BP questions the safety of its rigs.
• Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski still thinks offshore drilling is a good idea, which is understandable since she raked in $400,000 in contributions from the oil and gas industry during an 8 year period.
• Think this kind of eco-catastrophe like this can’t happen in your area because there isn’t off-shore drilling?  Think again.  And lets be mindful that we aren’t the only country experiencing problems.

Meanwhile, dead turtles like this are starting to wash up on our shores:

• Unquestionably, the damage to the gulf eco-system will be horrific and there is substantive worry about the dispersant agents that are being used. There is also the horrific possibility that cleanup efforts could be thwarted and the damage spread during hurricane season.

And how did it happen–this excellent graphic from NOAA explains:

• So just how much oil is gushing?  Good question–probably more than we’ve been told.
• And as if that weren’t all depressing and infuriating enough, the story that should be screaming at the top of page one but is almost completely awol in the media is this:

Peak oil is coming to an end

• Finally, here is a series of videos running around the web this morning showing just how easy it is to boycott BP–you drive away and go to another gas station to tank up.  While boycotting BP is a worthy idea, doing it in your car might possibly be missing the point.  Here is another idea that makes the point in a slightly more principled way.  Call some friends, get some drums to bang on and make some signs and go stand in front of a well-traveled gas station and make some noise.  Count me in.

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On the morning after the British election Yahoo ran a headline that read, “‘Political vacuum’ sparks market jitters”. Just what we need after the Dow does a stomach tossing dive.

Only for sure thing--a pale white guy will be the next British PM

Should ‘market jitters’ indeed be a cause for concern after a day when the market plummeted? Yes in the sense that it has the potential of further destabilizing the already dicey European markets. But…  My local paper ran a headline about yesterday’s Dow fiasco that read, “Dow plunges on Greek crisis, P&G sell order.”  Truth–the market plunged because those events apparently triggered a bunch of  algorithmic computer-driven sell orders that effectively fed upon each other and that is what really caused the market to plunge. In other words, a bunch of computers came perilously close to plunging the already fragile world economy into a death spiral.

For months now, I’ve been trying to understand how the market could keep going up when down here on the ground, things basically suck. Too many of us are poor, hungry, unemployed, sick and homeless. There is a huge disconnect between the health of the DOW and the health of the economy. What really hasn’t been discussed in depth yet is the impact of the mounting number of huge natural and unnatural disasters on our economic equilibrium; the utter destruction of entire countries in the aftermath of earthquakes, volcanoes that cost the airlines billions and utterly disrupt the transport system that we have become dependent upon.

And now the British Petroleum/Haliburton trashing of the Gulf of Mexico.  A look at the long-term impact of the Exxon Valdez spill is instructive:

Three years after the 11 million-gallon spill in Prince William Sound blackened 1,500 miles of Alaska coastline, the herring on which he and other Cordova fishermen heavily relied disappeared from the area. Platt and some others stuck around, fishing for salmon and hoping things would improve.

The herring never returned to Cordova. Platt’s income plummeted, severely straining his marriage and psyche. He dipped into his sons’ college funds to support his family…

…The herring loss alone has cost the region about $400 million over the past 21 years, according to R.J. Kopchak, a former fisherman who is now developmental director at Cordova’s Prince William Sound Science Center.

The average fisherman suffered a 30 percent loss in income after the spill, but those who specialized in just herring lost everything, Kopchak said.

It is a fair assumption that tourism dollars will plummet along the Gulf and maybe up the eastern seaboard, unemployment in those states will rise, and if you take fish oil for your heart, the price is going up.  And then there is the price that cannot be calculated for destroying ocean and wetland habitats, damage that can never be undone.

The HAL 9000

There are lessons to be learned from oil slicks that spiral out of control and computer programs that take off on their own (shades of Stanley Kubrick’s HAL) and make no mistake about it, these things are going to keep happening but unlike a roller coaster where you know that after the big plunge, the ride will go back up, here on planet Earth, there is no such guarantee.  Time to fasten our seatbelts.