This is What the End of the Oil Age Looks Like

Over the past few weeks, i've been following the continuous epic fails of BP to staunch the Horizon Deepwater flow. It's taken on a surreal fascination for me, this worst-case-scenerio play-by-play of All That Could Go Wrong Offshore. The Oil Drum has had practically immediate updates, and the latest is that top kill didn't work.

So i got a text the other day, as most of my friends' geologist/environmentalist/future-pragmatist in-action (LOVE IT!!), asking, 'so I just heard someone refer to the oil spill as the largest environmental disaster in the history of the Earth. Thoughts?'

Thoughts?! Well, why yes, have them i do; my tweet-length response was simply, 'BP spill is def in the top 10 manmade 'disasters,' but earth's seen much worse-it's just that this shit happens so often lately is why it's a problem.' Make no mistake: this oil spill is a really big deal. Fisheries will collapse. Beaches will be unusable for months, maybe years. Species will go extinct. The water column is poisoned top to bottom.

So, let's go backwards through the chain of events here. The leak started because of an explosion on the rig, caused by a kick--inflow of liquids--into the well, possibly caused by methane hydrates, when 13 people died. The one thing that should have been noticed a bit earlier was a gain in pit volume even after they stopped pumping, a common sign of kick in a well. At that point, the crew probably had a few hours to figure out what was going on, but clearly no one did quickly enough. Well kicks rarely lead to explosions these days, after the fabulous gushers of the Texas oil boom era (and... massive associated death), a handy device called the blow-out-preventer was invented as a giant plug on the hole. At the Deepwater Horizon, that failsafe mechanism failed... to be safe.

At the time of the explosion, the drilling crew was already rigging down their equipment, in preparation for the production crew to come onsite; ie., some personnel including mudloggers and measurement-while-drilling people had already gone back to shore, and some of those crew would have hypothetically been the ones to be watching for non-normal events like what caused the kick in flow to the surface. In the next few weeks, there will certainly be better updates on how the "accident" happened, but for now these are the things we know.

Before that, suppossedly not enough cement was used in the final casing and that possibly the Schlumberger people were run off from the site, because they warned that something was wrong with the well. Things will certainly come to light later on in the federal trial, but frankly those kind of things aren't rare in the oil field. That's one of the many, many reasons oil is a risky business: not only is it complex, there is an incredibly wide variety of people working in the field, who simply don't always get along (what other line of work that has coined its own terminology for being asked to leave (ie, 'run off')?). The energy business is not really like other businesses. The crews don't go home at the end of the day to their wives and kids and dogs, they live onsite for months at a time, and then get months off. Crews rotate in and out frequently, and exhaustion is a very real problem in the oil field.

Apparently there had already been some concerns raised about BP's offshore operations, but none of it had come to consequence-time yet as of when this explosion/leak started. For now we have the blame game, Transocean vs. Halliburton vs. BP vs. ... who knows, everybody. There's postulation that since BP was behind schedule, the stage was set for disaster. The thing is, many, many people and pieces of equipment had to fail for this all to go down. So yes, complexity? Definitely a factor.

And, oh yeah, why was the rig out there in the first place? Simply because oil is the lifeblood of the world economy. Cheap energy is what makes growth as we know it possible. For four generations now, we have had had continuously more and more, and at this point in time we are near the peak of oil production. As oil productions plateaus, and then begins declining (when in the wonderful words of the Oil Drum we will have "continuously less and less"), more and more marginal places to acquire energy will be tapped. The Gulf, America's third coast, the vast already fragile ecosystem, will be drilled even though we know it's dangerous, if we expect a growing economy.

We know we should stop drilling. But we drill because we're greedy. We drill because of an unwillingness to face an unknown future. We drill because, even with the immense--maybe even incalculable--harm, it is still easier than all the unknown alternatives. We drill because of a lack of imagination.

Some people, of course, have already thought through the post carbon future (if this is a term unknown to you, prepare to spend a lot of time on your comp catching up!). Grist ran an article on cutting the oil habit, wonderfully parsed by the oil drum here.

As for whether this is the worst environmental disaster in the history of the earth... well, no. Here's a few pretty bad examples of other oil disasters. And as for other disasters going down lately: desertification, coral bleaching, species loss, deforestation, aquifer drawdown, water contamination, monoculture, subsidence, dams realigning watersheds, toxic rain, mountain-top-removal coal mining, and so on and so on. There's a new top 10 list of manmade environmental disasters at truthout, but i distinctly recall in college writing a paper on this, and the top historical anthropogenic environmental disaster was usually considered the deforestation/desertification of the (once) Fertile Crescent (references once/if i can ever find them again). Plato even wrote about deforestation, already a notable issue in the 4th century BCE. For a bad time, i took the bait & googled "top 10 anthropogenic environmental disasters" leading to a world... of... something. Hadn't even heard of the Italian dioxin or the Spanish cyanide spills before... (and good lord, i'm not googling that again soon, thinking about Bhopal makes me cry every time).

And as for worst disaster ever? It really depends what you consider a 'disaster.' "Disaster" literally means from the stars; that is, totally from left-field, unforseeable; things that couldn't be anticipated before hand. Evil dues-ex-machina, if you will. One of the things that unites anthropogenic 'disasters' is that most of them can be (and were) anticipated. If we cut down most of the trees, there will have few trees left. If we take water out of an aquifer faster than its recharge rate, it will become drawn down. If we build hundreds of big, complex, oil-locating metal machines and staff them with under-trained, exhausted people, one of them will eventually break down. To me, the BP spill is in no sense a disaster, it is the result of a series of bad decisions without proper contingency plans and a small smudge of bad luck. The spill is the end result of an economic system that rewards greed, cutting corners, specialization of labor, at the same time as demanding an ever-increasing energy supply. We are quite literally getting what we (America) asked for, and seeing first hand what the end of the oil age looks like.

And of course the Earth itself has gone through a whole bunch of actual disasters, meteorites--actually being from the stars in the sense the ancients who coined 'disaster' understood--primarily springing to mynd. Chicxulub finishing off the dinos being the most well-known of these. The bigger Permian-Jurassic extinction event was also possibly caused by a meteorite, and so on. Earth has gone through warmings, coolings, stoppings-and-startings of oceanic circulation, major volcanic activity, and on and on.

So to actually answer the question, i think that the P/Jr extinction event was the worst environmental disaster in Earth history, because 90% of species alive at that time died, but i also think there is a huge difference between disasters and forseeable consequences of our actions.  ¶ 20:08