Our Fix-It Faith and the Oil Spill

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/weekinreview/30rosenthal.html

Not everything we humans do is amenable to repair.

May 28, 2010
Our Fix-It Faith and the Oil Spill
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

“IF we’ve learned anything so far about the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, it is that it contains surprises. And that means an operator needs depth — depth in terms of resources and expertise — to create the capability to respond to the unexpected. ”

These prophetic words came from a 2005 presentation by David Eyton, who was then vice president for BP’s deepwater developments in the Gulf of Mexico. Reprinted that year in a journal of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists, the speech acknowledged that oil companies “did somewhat underestimate the full nature of the challenges we were taking on in the deep waters of the gulf.”

Still, Mr. Eyton expressed buoyant optimism that BP’s risk management expertise, as well as its new technologies, would play a “critical role” in allowing the company to triumph over nature’s daunting obstacles.

As the world now knows, it did not turn out that way.

As BP struggled last week to stanch the flow of spewing oil at the Deepwater Horizon rig, it has become clear that the pressure to dig deeper and faster from what Mr. Eyton then called a “frontier province” of oil exploration has in some ways outpaced the knowledge about how to do that safely. (And there is still the question of whether BP used all the tools and safety mechanisms available.)

Americans have long had an unswerving belief that technology will save us — it is the cavalry coming over the hill, just as we are about to lose the battle. And yet, as Americans watched scientists struggle to plug the undersea well over the past month, it became apparent that our great belief in technology was perhaps misplaced.

“Americans have a lot of faith that over the long run technology will solve everything, a sense that somehow we’re going to find a way to fix it,” said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. He said Pew polling in 1999 — before the September 2001 terror attacks — found that 64 percent of Americans pessimistically believed that a terrorist attack on the United States probably or definitely would happen. But they were naïvely optimistic about the fruits of technology: 81 percent said there would be a cure for cancer, 76 percent said we would put men on Mars.

Our experience of technology has been largely wondrous and positive: The green revolution ameliorated the problem of world hunger (for a time at least) with better seeds and fertilizers to increase harvests. When childhood diseases were ravaging the world, vaccines came along and (nearly) eliminated them. There are medicines for the human immunodeficiency virus and AIDS. There is the iPad.

Many experts in the field of undersea oil exploration believe that technology can also resolve the risks of operating tens of thousands of feet under the seabed, despite BP’s current problems.

“We’re pushing the envelope, but I personally believe that the technology, in terms of equipment and processes, will be able to keep up with what we’re doing — though this experience may slow things down,” said Stefan Mrozewski, a senior staff associate at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, whose research involves projects like drilling boreholes in deep water to study chemicals under the seafloor.

He previously worked as an engineer in the oil industry on deepwater rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

He said the blowout on the rig and the apparent failure of the blowout preventer was “beyond the realm of expectation,” most likely a combination of unimaginable human and mechanical error. Noting that rigorous planning precedes deepwater drilling, yet “the risk is still not zero,” he said the accident last month would encourage designers and engineers to improve the technology and procedures, so that a disaster like the Deepwater Horizon explosion could not happen again.

Still, as he watched a live feed of drilling mud being pumped into the leaking well on the seabed, he acknowledged that the science of repair and cleanup seemed lacking. “My impression is that we were unprepared for this,” he said. “There were not a lot of good technologies and techniques ready.”

William Jackson, deputy director general of the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland, said abstract devotion was misguided: “At this time in history we have great faith in having the technological ability to solve problems, and that faith has proved incorrect in this place.”

He said that even good new ideas needed funding and testing to make sure they worked. He pointed out that pledges by the coal industry and some countries to curb future carbon dioxide emissions often assume the successful evolution of technologies that are as yet unproven or have never been tried on a large scale.

“There is this belief that an engineering solution can be found as you move along,” he said, noting that carbon capture and storage — which involves pumping CO2 emissions underground rather than releasing them to the air — may be “there” as a science, but the costs prevent it from being a practical answer.

By all accounts, the oil industry is infused with this “can do” attitude: Oil running low? “Oil wells will run dry, but advances in technologies can put off the inevitable,” said a 2006 article in a newsletter of the American Oil and Gas Historical Society. In his 2005 talk, Mr. Eyton, now BP’s group head of research and technology, was not so cavalier, discussing the need for vigilant risk management.

“We find ourselves designing floating systems for 10,000 feet of water depth before the lessons of working in 6,000 feet have been fully identified,” he said.

He sang the benefits of technology while acknowledging its danger, expressing hope that fail-safe features and computer modeling could decrease the risk: “We know the premium associated with hardware reliability is high, but at this stage, operators still have a limited failure database for forecasting the required levels of intervention in ever-deeper and more remote environments.”

Technology, he added, “becomes both an enabler, while at the same time being itself a source of risk.”

In the beginning of May, a few weeks after the rig explosion, the Pew Research Center asked 994 Americans about the oil spill: 55 percent saw it as a major environmental disaster, and 37 percent as a serious problem. But at that time, at least, 51 percent also believed that efforts to prevent the spill from spreading would be successful. Hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil later, federal officials last week released a new estimate of the spill — 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day — establishing it as the largest in American history. As Richard Feynman, the physicist, once observed, “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” Sometimes ingenuity may not help us.

Indeed, think of all the planes grounded for nearly a week in northern Europe last month, as a volcano poured ash in the atmosphere. There was no technological fix, and many passengers couldn’t believe it. Said Mr. Kohut, of Pew Research, “The reaction was: ‘Fix this. Fix this. This is outrageous.’ ”

"Wealthcare:" Reviews of two books on Ayn Rand and her impact

The current era of Democratic governance has provoked a florid response on the right, ranging from the prosaic (routine denunciations of big spending and debt) to the overheated (fears of socialism) to the lunatic (the belief that Democrats plan to put the elderly to death). Amid this cacophony of rage and dread, there has emerged one anxiety that is an actual idea, and not a mere slogan or factual misapprehension. The idea is that the United States is divided into two classes--the hard-working productive elite, and the indolent masses leeching off their labor by means of confiscatory taxes and transfer programs.

You can find iterations of this worldview and this moral judgment everywhere on the right. Consider a few samples of the rhetoric. In an op-ed piece last spring, Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute, called for conservatives to wage a "culture war" over capitalism. "Social Democrats are working to create a society where the majority are net recipients of the ‘sharing economy,'  " he wrote. "Advocates of free enterprise . . . have to declare that it is a moral issue to confiscate more income from the minority simply because the government can." Brooks identified the constituency for his beliefs as "the people who were doing the important things right--and who are now watching elected politicians reward those who did the important things wrong." Senator Jim DeMint echoed this analysis when he lamented that "there are two Americas but not the kind John Edwards was talking about. It's not so much the haves and the have-nots. It's those who are paying for government and those who are getting government. "

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The government of the United States must seize BP and freeze its assets, and place those funds in trust to begin providing immediate relief to the working people throughout the Gulf states whose jobs, communities, homes and businesses are being harmed or destroyed by the criminally negligent actions of the CEO, Board of Directors and senior management of BP.

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200,000 gallons of oil a day, or more, are gushing into the Gulf of Mexico with the flow of oil growing. The poisonous devastation to human beings, wildlife, natural habitat and fragile ecosystems will go on for decades. It constitutes an act of environmental violence, the consequences of which will be catastrophic.

BP's Unmitigated Greed

This was a manufactured disaster. It was neither an “Act of God” nor Nature that caused this devastation, but rather the unmitigated greed of Big Oil’s most powerful executives in their reckless search for ever-greater profits.

Under BP’s CEO Tony Hayward’s aggressive leadership, BP made a record $5.6 billion in pure profits just in the first three months of 2010. BP made $163 billion in profits from 2001-09. It has a long history of safety violations and slap-on-the-wrist fines.

BP's Materially False and Misleading Statements

BP filed a 52-page exploration plan and environmental impact analysis with the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service for the Deepwater Horizon well, dated February 2009, which repeatedly assured the government that it was "unlikely that an accidental surface or subsurface oil spill would occur from the proposed activities." In the filing, BP stated over and over that it was unlikely for an accident to occur that would lead to a giant crude oil spill causing serious damage to beaches, mammals and fisheries and that as such it did not require a response plan for such an event.

BP’s executives are thus either guilty of making materially false statements to the government to obtain the license, of consciously misleading a government that was all too ready to be misled, and/or they are guilty of criminal negligence. At a bare minimum, their representations constitute gross negligence. Whichever the case, BP must be held accountable for its criminal actions that have harmed so many.

Protecting BP's Super-Profits

BP executives are banking that they can ride out the storm of bad publicity and still come out far ahead in terms of the billions in profit that BP will pocket. In 1990, in response to the Exxon Valdez disaster, Congress passed and President Bush signed into law the Oil Pollution Act, which immunizes oil companies for the damages they cause beyond immediate cleanup costs.

Under the Oil Pollution Act, oil companies are responsible for oil removal and cleanup costs for massive spills, and their liability for all other forms of damages is capped at $75 million—a pittance for a company that made $5.6 billion in profits in just the last three months, and is expected to make $23 billion in pure profit this year. Some in Congress suggest the cap should be set at $10 billion, still less than the potential cost of this devastation—but why should the oil companies have any immunity from responsibility for the damage they cause?

The Oil Pollution Act is an outrage, and it will be used by BP to keep on doing business as usual.

People are up in arms because thousands of workers who have lost their jobs and livelihoods as a result of BP’s actions have to wait in line to compete for lower wage and hazardous clean-up jobs from BP. BP’s multi-millionaire executives are not asked to sacrifice one penny while working people have to plead for clean-up jobs.

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It is imperative that the government seize BP’s assets now for their criminal negligence and begin providing immediate relief for the immense suffering and harm they have caused.