Guilty Planet

The Difference between the Exxon and BP Spills? Dollars and Photoshop...

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 10:03:55 -0500

History repeats itself. Boy does it.

This was never more evident than after I finished reading Charles Wohlforth's The Fate of Nature (2010), which has a few ominous chapters dedicated to the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Wohlforth was a journalist who covered the spill in the field and after reading his account, I was humbled by the realization that none of my observations of the BP oil spill were orignal. The landscape is almost exactly the same, except for the fact that BP is going to wind up paying less money for a bigger disaster and that photoshop didn't exist yet, so Exxon couldn't tamper photographs of their control room.

Wohlforth's thoughts about the Exxon spill are in blockquotes:

As I spent more time on the sound, in the oil, the press conferences and carnival of activity in Valdez seemed increasingly irrelevant and disconnected from reality. Exxon officials always announced numbers -- miles of boom, numbers of skimmers, million of dollars spent -- facts that, if they meant anything at all, couldn't be checked.

Yep.

When the workers began landing on oiled beaches they were given oil-absorbent rages to wipe off individual rocks."

In the Gulf of Mexico, it's paper towels and saltmarshes.

A man said that taking an Exxon paycheck for doing nothing was his way of punishing the company."

I heard one fisherman in the Vessel of Opportunity program say that the BP oil spill was God's way of redistributing wealth.

Did the cleanup as a whole do more harm than good? The question is unanswerable without defining good. It benefited Exxon and its competitive corporate-government paradigm. Cleaning eliminated most visible evidence of oil. The effort took so long world attention turned to other issues and anger faded. A diminished Prince William Sound became the new baseline for the next generation of people. Today the spill has passed into history and Exxon still rules the world. Good also, perhaps, from the point of view of human users of the beaches, since the cleanup may have hastened the time when they felt safe eating clams, fish, and seals again. Cleaning probably shortened the the time active contamination affected some species. But if good is defined as the total health of the ecosystem, it's probably that much less cleaning would have been better. Oil would have been dispersed anyway, more slowly but without the cleanup's many environmental costs. And more of the visible black asphalt would have remained, biologically inert but a powerful warning about the costs companies like Exxon impose on our shared birthright. Cleaning removed the evidence, but not the damage.

BP has used more than 1.8 million gallons of dispersant.

"...Kindhearted television viewers were instead dealt the ahppy ending of seeing treated animals released, as if cured, rather than images of terminally disabled otters being euthanized. By denying them the truth, the Fish and Wildlife Service compounded the harm of the oil spill."

BP allows a lot of media access, but it's the kind of media they want. At the rehabilitation center, reporters can watch oiled birds getting clean. They can't see them dead (see photo; that's a crime scene and apparently not media worthy).

Exxon sent checks to vessel owners who had volunteered in the clean up. An average boat chartered for $3,000 a day, almost all profit, since expenses were paid separately by Exxon. As the boats stayed out for weeks and month, often with hardly anything to do, life-changing sums of money accumulated; owners of big boats, or of more than one, became spillionaires.

Yep. This is true, too.

Note: the Center for American Progress also has some excellent posts that compare the two oil spills and analyze how Exxon managed to make money and avoid punishment after their spill.

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By My Calculations, BP Still Owes $47.6 Billion

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 19:37:22 -0500

Let's briefly compare the Exxon and BP spills.

Exxon oil estimated to have spilled into Prince William Sound: 11 million gallons
BP oil estimated to have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico: 172 million gallons

So when we talk about how BP's Oil Spill Bill Could Dwarf Exxon's Valdez Tab we should remember that BP's oil spill also dwarfed Exxon's. And is the assertion that the tab is bigger even true? Well, in nominal and real terms, yes.

Cost of the Exxon clean up: $2 billion (1989 dollars) or $3.58 billion (2010 dollars)*
Cost of the BP clean up: $6.1 billion (2010 dollars)

But if we standardize for size of the spill, BP's tab is far too low. Given that the BP spill is more than 15 times larger than the Exxon spill, we should also assume they should spend 15 times more on cleanup than Exxon did, or around $53.7 billion dollars -- $47.6 billion more than BP has spent.

*Assumes $1.00 in 1989 has the same buying power as $1.79 in 2010

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My Voice from the Spill

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 15:40:00 -0500

Read an interview I did with Mongabay about the Gulf Oil spill more than a week ago (apologies for the lag time). Also watch for a comparison of the Exxon Valdez and Gulf oil spills coming soon...

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Voices from the Spill

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 16:24:17 -0500

In a humble effort at citizen journalism, we went around New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf asking people what they thought of the BP oil spill. Most of victims don't have voices, but here is what a few of the humans thought (they wrote down their opinions or, on occasion, dictated it to us). For the collection, see the Flickr set. If you would like to add your photo and thought to the fray, please email me at guiltyplanet at gmail dot com.

Josiah & Kejeaun, Jennings, LA

Don Houghton, New Orleans, LA

Joshua Carter, Clayton, TX

John Smith, New Orleans, LA

Zack Vincent, Brent Smith, & Robby Khader, New Orleans, LA

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Do People Hate BP?

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 08:21:36 -0500

BP says oil flow has stopped as cap is tested, although we're not sure when there will be a permanent solution. But even if they manage to stop the oil, can BP stop the hate?

Many people are certainly angry at BP. The Facebook Boycott BP page had 350,000 followers in early June and is now up to 825,000 people. BPGlobalPR, an adbusting on Twitter, has more than 186,000 followers. In New Orleans, there were many anti-BP t-shirts. British people we met in New Orleans were hiding their accent. William Wilson from Lincoln, England said this:

Soon after the spill, BP began strategizing about a major ad campaign to convince the public that BP "will get this done" and "make it right". They have invested more than $50 million in their message. Down in the Gulf there is also a lot of media access to the places BP would like media to be. Is all this communication paying off?

A look at BP stock shows that their share price was up even before the cap was in place:

Do people hate BP? Yes. Does it matter? It must. Most CEOs believe that corporate brand reputation outranks financial performance as the most important measure of a company's success. But this ideal is not necessarily mirrored by investors, particularly the batch of people (and there are many) who have recently invested in BP. To them, the potential of profit trumps public sentiment.

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Anti-BP Tees

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 21:13:46 -0500

In the French Quarter of NOLA, shirts about the spill are a hot item. Here are a few favorites around town. For more, check out our Flickr set devoted to oil spill t-shirts.

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Balloon on the Bayou: Grassroots Mapping in Bay Baptiste

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 11:59:02 -0500

"The bucketheads are here," Jeff Holmes radioed back to his camp in Grand Bayou Village, a totally bizarre and charming outcropping of homes built on salt marshes that Holmes is worried will disintegrate under a thin but suffocating blanket of oil that is creeping up the bayou. That is, in part, why he has volunteered to take us out to film the bay as part of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade's Grassroots Mapping Project, which is helping citizens use balloons, kites, and other simple and inexpensive tools to produce their own aerial imagery of the spill (which is then pieced together by GIS experts at MIT and in San Francisco). We stepped onboard his flatboat and made our way out to Bay Baptiste.

This is a red state with a lot of blue problems and Capt. Holmes has the self-sufficiency and paradoxical politics common down here in Louisiana. He built his getaway in Grand Bayou Village (pictured below), which essentially floats on salt marsh mud, using salvaged materials. He voted Obama but likes a lot of what Palin says. He wants to see more renewable energy. He forgot his pistol on our trip. He chain smokes and eats off the land. He loves Louisiana and the bayou. Seeing it through his eyes, it was impossible not to. He was also the only one of us willing to suck helium off the balloon for the sake of a laugh.

Holmes and others are worried about the effects of the spill on the salt marshes. From an abstract of a 2004 paper* on the effects of the Spanish oil spill on salt marsh soils, "oil pollution altered both chemical and physical soil properties, aggregating soil particles in plaques, lowering porosity, and increasing resistance to penetration and hydrophobicity." The wetlands in the Mississippi River Delta already had it rough due to oil development in the area and pollution from upstream. Katrina didn't help, either. Wetlands in the region have been receding by about 24 square miles a year and this makes Holmes and others on the bayou terrified for the wildlife, the fishing, and their homes.

But why bother mapping it? There are many reasons, as Kris Ansin, an MPH student at Tulane who is helping coordinate the mapping effort, pointed out. The imagery has finer resolution than even classified satellites, although many groups are doing aerial photography that will be used in litigation. The project is also a way of decentralizing the mapping process, of empowering communities/citizens to work together to produce their own images and to give them the skills to do it anytime, anywhere. You can use a kite or a balloon (the availability of helium can impede the balloon's use) and a pretty basic camera secured in the top of a two liter soda bottle. We trained earlier this week outside the New Orleans Art Museum with a kite but wound up using a balloon on the bayou because there was little wind. I look forward to sharing the map from our trip, which should take a few weeks to process (in the meantime, check out our grassroots mapping set on Flickr). With very little funding, the project has supported about 50 mapping trips (see some of the data here). They have a gallery of neat images on Flickr, too.

Ansin was also in the GIS course that was setting up an Ushahidi platform (meaning 'testimony' in Swahili; it was first designed to map incidents of violence in Kenya, after the election fall out in 2008 and I wonder if it would be a good way to track llegal fishing reports on the high seas or elsewhere) where citizens could report oil accidents to the LA Bucket Brigade. Although the map was meant to track refinery incidents, it went live the same day the Deepwater Horizong platform exploded.

*Andrade et al. Effect of the Prestige Oil Spill on Salt Marsh Soils on the Coast of Galicia (Northwestern Spain) Journal of Environmental Quality 33:2103-2110 (2004).

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Pepsciblicide: Am I Missing Something?

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 19:20:32 -0500

Even before I knew what it was, I never wanted a blog, because I didn't like how the word sounds. Similarly, the term scibling (which refers to bloggers on scienceblogs.com) always creeped me out. And yet, here I find myself, a scibling and a blogger for more than three years in SEED's network and more or less content. Ask anyone and you'll find I'm fairly uninvolved, rarely take a position, do not contribute to the forums or make a fuss.

Last Wednesday, I saw an email from SEED editor Adam Bly, which everyone knows about by now, in which he defended SEED's decision to allow PepsiCo a platform to voice their wisdom and science of nutrition. I figured PepsiCo's Food Frontiers was actually a new frontier of blogwashing. I also figured Adam was fighting a losing battle when his justification to add PepsiCo included the fact they make Quaker Oatmeal. A few clicks and I realized people were justifiably unhappy. Because I was down here in the Gulf just preparing to post a series of pieces on the oil spill, I had my own self-obsessed worries that I would have to make a quick migration (which, after seeing all the oiled birds, seemed almost apt) out of principle and solidarity. Then, something happened.

The people spoke. And, more important, SEED listened. In the afternoon, Adam sent another email saying that SEED would do a better job in flagging the blog as a corporate blog. This job was not good enough. The next morning (less than 24 hours later) Adam sent another email saying that PepsiCo's Food Frontier blog was cancelled.

In my own mind, I viewed the cancellation as a coup. Yes, I also agree with Abel Pharmboy that everything could have been done better from the start. But Adam's reversal of his decision could not have come easily and was something profoundly democratic -- in a similar vein to what happened on my.barackobama.com after President Obama changed his vote on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (in that case, the people did not get their way, but they also were not silenced; for more on this point, listen to this talk by Clay Shirky). Perhaps feeling the power of social media, Adam even opened his own blog.

And yet I continue to see this mass exodus from scienceblogs. I don't know if this is for the best (i.e., some people are using PepsiCo as a way out of something they wanted out of anyway). Or, rather, if I am missing something. But my main concern is that the system is punishing someone/an institution that ultimately (and quickly) gave in to the system. That doesn't seem fair. It certainly doesn't seem compassionate.

Unless I am missing something, I believe we should all stay. And those who have left should come back. Changing one's mind is the best proof you still have one.

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Protest BP Day in New Orleans

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 21:39:58 -0500

Tonight we made our way to Cafe du Monde in the French Quarter to witness the New Orleans gathering of Worldwide Protest BP Day. The drizzling weather probably served to separate the men from the boys, as they say, and so good intentions and half-baked messages ran high (see photos from the protest on Fickr).

There were plenty of people opposed to the use of Corexit and one woman rightfully demanded to know why it was banned in Europe but still legal in the U.S. (read more about this issue on the ProPublica blog). There were accusations that the President was doing nothing and that everything should be left to the locals. There was another woman who pinned most of her argument on the psychological trauma children experience during disasters. There were boys who calmly asked us to stop driving and to contextualize this spill in terms of neoliberalism. There were cries that we needed to allow scientists more access (that was interesting).

I wondered what William Faulkner, that celebrated southern writer who once lived just up street from the protest (his home is now a quaint bookstore), would have said. One line of his comes to mind: A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

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Saving Oiled Birds in Buras, LA

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 11:44:36 -0500

Here is the dead wildlife tally as of yesterday:

As you can see, birds are hit hardest (or most often discovered). So we headed to the International Bird Rescue's Buras, LA operation, where they take many of the oiled pelicans, gulls, and terns.

Most of the birds spend 2-3 weeks in recovery and they spend the first week very stressed out due to all the human handling. Because of the stress, the Bird Rescue Center often let the bird rest 5 days or so before they begin the cleaning process. Then the oiled birds get washed with Dawn dish soap, hosed with water, and treated with tender care by a team of vet techs. I asked Bruce Miller with U.S. Fish & Wildlife whether he thought these birds were getting better health care than many Americans and responded diplomatically, saying he leaves ideologies at the door and does his job, which is to save these birds. (The people at the Buras facility could not give an estimated price per bird but it cost an estimated $15,000 per marine bird for the 627 birds released after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill).

The brown pelicans (pictured here) have a strong likelihood if survivorship if they can be rescued and cleaned. Their delisting from the U.S. Endangered Species List last November positioned them to be an icon of success of banning DDT and protecting bird habitat. However, the Gulf oil spill is impacting their numbers (an estimated 16,000 nesting pairs along the Louisiana coast) and their nesting sites, which has sparked talks of a relisting. The gulls have also been doing well at the rescue center but not the terns, who are picky eaters and more sensitive to stress.

When asked what made this spill different, Mark Russell of IBRRC said, "it's everywhere". I asked about what would happen with the incoming migratory birds. "We don't even want to talk about them," Russell said.

A lot of people want to volunteer. It's important to realize that BP is obligated to pay for the clean-up so they have hired a gang of recently graduated vet techs. In terms of donations, it's better, Russell said, to give to local wildlife rehabilitation centers that work on these issues year round and don't get high profile exposure.

Outside, the pelicans were looking freshly laundered. There was a reason for this: the Dawn soap also stripped them of their natural oils and so they were in a holding pen until their sleeker look came back. Once they regained their natural waterproofing, they would be transported to a state park in Georgia or Florida perhaps, with hopes that the oil wouldn't reach them again or vice versa. This was another thing that made this spill different. There is just more oil coming, which makes it impossible to release the birds into the same habitat where they were found.

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Gulf Oil Spill: The Stats

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 20:24:45 -0500

Who: BP, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig (owned by Transocean but leased to BP), and Haliburton (responsible for plugging holes in the pipeline).

What: The largest offshore spill in U.S. history. The numbers are fuzzy but estimates are somewhere between 35,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil per day. Today is day 80 of the spill, which means somewhere between 2.8 million and 4.8 million barrels have gushed into the Gulf. More incredible, the U.S. uses around 20 million barrels of oil per day. The oil spill so far, massive as it might be, represents only 15-25% of one day in U.S. oil consumption. If this doesn't put our addiction in perspective, what will?

When: April 20, 2010-present.

Where:

How: Methane gas from the well shot up from the well, expanded, exploded, and sank the rig leaving a damaged and leaking wellhead.

Why: Lack of oversight? Bribery? Sheer accident? Consumer demand? Corporate greed? Faulty equipment? One bouncer we met on Bourbon St. (who used to work on offshore oil rigs) said the blame should be shared between the government, BP, and the rig's equipment. He said that BP hit "the motherload" with this well and the equipment simply wasn't adequate to handle the pressure of this heavy an oil flow, which BP should have known and regulators (like the Minerals Management Agency, which oversees offshore oil drilling) should have caught. Another man on Bourban St. said it's all of our faults for using oil (Tom Friedman likes him). Perhaps the oddest accusation is that this spill is the fault of environmentalists who fight against drilling on land...

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In Pachuta, the Problems Are Different

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 20:14:56 -0500

Jessie and I made a beeline for New Orleans. We stopped only for gas and a night's rest. In Pachuta, Mississippi, we couldn't resist photographing this sign at a gas station (not BP -- we won't be stopping at BP):

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Guilty Planet Heads to the Gulf

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 19:41:18 -0500

President Obama called it "the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced." So I thought I should face it and head to the Gulf. With me is Jessie Lozier, who I have known all of her 18 years (here we are in 1998 and today at our hotel in the French Quarter). As a future biologist and possible veterinarian/science journalist, I thought this would also be good for her to see. We'll be blogging from our trip regularly over the next ten days. I am also now on Twitter. More soon...

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The Paralysis of Thinking Big

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 17:57:04 -0500

Almost every hour I receive some new piece of information that I want to write about on this blog. And yet, as you'll notice, the posts are spotty. The truth is, there is simply too much to criticize. Just consider the oceans this week.

The IWC met to discuss whether to reopen commercial whaling, which, in terms of ethics, is a return to the Middle Ages. Reporters are still calling Daniel Pauly to get him to address the debate (there is no debate) that whales eat all of our seafood (of course they don't; we do). Apparently, the IWC did not reach an agreement so things remain the same. Japan, Iceland and Norway will continue to hunt illegally. Greenland did obtain the right to kill 10 humpback whales per year, claiming they need the food. Can we just package up some extra food for Greenland? Maybe we can redirect some BP clean-up funds for food to whaling nations, since sperm whales (which we've stopped killing directly but haven't managed to stop ruining their lives) and dolphins are among the victims in one of the worst environmental disaster in recent history (although people waste time arguing over that statement's precision). Not that anyone can get too worked up over sperm whales when fishermen are taking their own lives because of the decisions by a clumsy and greedy BP. Yesterday, people all across North America held hands to protest offshore drilling. A friend wondered why they didn't follow up by giving BP the middle finger. The reason: most people are good. But it doesn't take many to ruin it for the rest of us (as Craig Welch points out in Shell Games, his riveting tale of the geoduck fishery, which I already promoted and, this week, so does the Washington Post). Due to a small minority of people, Atlantic bluefin tuna are also probably screwed, because the Gulf is one of the two known spawning grounds for this imperiled giant. And if the oil spill doesn't get the bluefin tuna, the human appetite most surely will, which Paul Greenberg discusses in his heartfelt essay (excerpted from his forthcoming book) in the NYTimes Magazine. As fish like bluefin tuna reach the brink, we can be sure that fishing effort will be redirected to Antarctica, where the Marine Stewardship Council recently certified a krill fishery to the chagrin of conservationists and scientists alike (including me).

That's just this week in the oceans (and I'm sure I missed a bizillion stories). The land is no better, with a commercial highway proposed that would bisect the Serengeti and cut off one of the world's greatest migrations. And never mind the financial crisis, which was so perverse and circular that Wall Street's own analysts don't even understand it (I am still reeling with disgust after reading Michael Lewis' The Big Short). There is just so much information and, furthermore, so many causes. It is hard to come to terms with the idea of information overload (as George Dyson elegantly points out in his short essay on kayaks vs. canoes at The Edge) and hard to admit that there could be some point at which learning and caring too much can become paralyzing.

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Will BP Executives Go to Jail?

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 19:24:36 -0500

This month, the U.S. Justice Department opened criminal and civil investigations into the BP oil spill. Will BP executives go to jail?

The Times has a nice piece on the potential 3-15 years BP executives could serve, suggesting that mid to senior-level managers at BP are most at risk of criminal prosecution for "gross negligence". We know BP's CEO Tony Hayward has no fear of jail time and most people I speak to are very skeptical that any of the BP executives will spend time in prison, despite this Facebook page with more than 1300 members calling to arrest Tony Hayward NOW.

The ecological impacts are currently incalculable but the platform explosion killed 11 platform workers, injured 17 others, and here is the tally of wildlife deaths as of today (presented in an excessively mild format):

To put things in perspective, last year, a man in Washington state was fined $160,000 and sentenced to 30 days in jail for intentionally mislabeling 136,000 pounds of turbot from China as much higher priced U.S. halibut. Also last year, financial mismanager Bernie Madoff received a 150-year prison sentence. An 18-year-old from Texas who graffitied $7,300 worth of property got eight years in prison. But the people responsible for an oil spill that killed 11 people, injured 17 others, and will do at least $20 billion in damages won't go to jail?

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