The scale of our oil problem
BP's Deepwater Horizon spill is a catastrophe. Every single day, 1.7 million gallons of crude oil is leaking out into the gulf. That's over 90 million gallons since the leak started.
The oil slick now covers an area roughly twice the size of Wales.
If that seems like a lot of pollution, just consider this: that huge amount of oil - all 90 million gallons of it - represents only about half of the volume of oil that the USA turns into gasoline and burns every single day. In fact it's worse than that - because gasoline only makes up about half of what's contained in crude oil. The rest mostly just gets burnt in different ways. So, every single day, vehicles in America burn a volume of gas equal to four BP Deepwater Horizon spills. In a year it's like a thousand spills - just in America.
We can all agree that the gulf spill is an environmental disaster on a horrific scale. But let's not forget that this is a disaster for which all of us oil-addicts bear some responsibility. Our addiction paid for that spill. Every time we fill up, every time we crank the AC, we're investing our money in developing new and more invasive ways to get oil out of the earth - wherever it may be found. We're spending our own money to pay for the lobbyists to fight against legislative restrictions on the search worldwide. Like drug dealers willing to find ever riskier and more elaborate ways to produce and ship contraband, oil companies will continue to supply us in whatever way they can, whilst we are still addicted. If we continue this existence we can be sure that, as supplies get scarcer, the places we are able and willing to go to search for and produce oil will get ever more remote, ever more dangerous. And we will have a greater and greater environmental impact on those few parts of the world where nature still exists in a semi-wilderness state.
But this is just the pollution caused by the extraction phase of our oil economy. This kind of pollution is at least visible, localised and, in theory, preventable. Refining, transporting and ultimately burning all that oil releases pollution that spreads not just all over the Gulf of Mexico, but the entire planet. That kind of pollution can't be cleaned up after the fact. It can only be avoided by not creating it in the first place.
What can we learn from this disaster? Well, a few things: Firstly - seeing a visible sign of the damage that a single leak at a single oil well can cause helps us to get a sense of the truly planetary scale of the industry we're supporting with our oil addiction. It's beyond heavy engineering now, it's practically terraforming. Every square inch of the planet is fair game. And its impact is often not just environmentally negative, but also socially and economically, as the huge amounts of money involved inevitably lead to corruption and massive inequality in more and more of the marginal, often deeply undemocratic states from which our oil now flows.
Second, it seems obvious to me that at least some of the intense focus on "British Petroleum" as the baddie right now is designed to create a convenient fall guy, whose unique (handily non-American) recklessness caused the disaster. Because let's face it, all the world's other oil companies who aren't BP, know full well that in the coming years, they'll need the rights to drill anywhere on the planet they please. Blaming BP neatly diverts the focus from the fact that many of these same companies lease similar rigs from Transocean. Transocean have form, of course, being not only owners of Deepwater Horizon, but also of Sedco, the company responsible for the second-worst ever oil spill in history, when the "Ixto" deepwater rig exploded, back in 1979, leaking 1.8 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. It seems not much has been learned in the intervening 31 years - the Ixto spill was found to be due, in part, to failure of the Blowout Preventer, the same piece of "failsafe" equipment whose failure caused the current spill. It's imperative that the industry as a whole doesn't get off the hook here.
Thirdly we need to appreciate the global consequences of our addiction to oil. They keep selling it because we keep buying it. So rest assured, there will be many, many more Deepwater Horizon-type disasters in the future. Many, many more filthy black slicks defiling our landscape and our oceans. Visualise that for a second. Sometimes it's hard to focus on climate change because it's effectively invisible. But after getting a grasp on the sheer amount of oil we consume, can anyone seriously believe that burning all this every year doesn't have any kind of effect on the atmosphere? Put it this way - if all the crude oil the USA consumes every year leaked out, it would create a slick of nearly 4 and a half million square kilometres - ironically, just about the size of the USA itself. That's a lot of oil being burnt.
Think about it.
