As I write this post, oil continues to gush, unabated, from a broken well-head in the Gulf of Mexico. For the fifth week in a row. The spill, the string of failed attempts at fixes from British Petroleum, and the worsening ecological news coming from the Louisiana coast are all reminders that we’re dealing with a fuel source that is phenomenally costly — to the atmosphere, to the ocean, to coastlines, and — as supply peaks and climate change heats up — to economies everywhere.
Today, the always lively and astute Grist columnist, Dave Roberts, posted a piece asking a question that’s almost too scary to think about: “What if the oil spill just can’t be fixed?” What if, given the deep-ocean location of the broken well, there’s nothing BP can do? Nothing anyone can do? What if we — and everyone who calls the Gulf coast home — have to watch helplessly as oil slick gums the place up permanently?
Here’s an excerpt:
“Once we know that accidents can be catastrophic and irreversible, it becomes clear that there is no margin of error. We’re operating a brittle system, unable to contain failure and unable to recover from it. Consider how deepwater drilling will look in that new light… We’re doing damage as big as the Gulf oil spill every day, and there’s no fixing it. Humanity has grown in power, wealth, and appetite to the point that there is no more margin of error anywhere. We’re on a knife’s edge, facing the very real possibility that for our children, all the world may be one big Gulf of Mexico, inexorably and irreversibly deteriorating.”
As if the oil spill isn’t bad enough, Dave puts a finger on a bigger, more systemic issue: We’re on a knife’s edge.
The scale at which we’re operating our economic systems (and the systems that fuel those systems, like deep ocean oil wells) — is bumping against ecological limits. As we put increasing pressure on the biosphere, it’s likely that the blow-back in ecological and economic terms — the bumping — will get faster, worse, and increasingly irreversible.
Will a never-ending oil spill be the disruptive event that gets us to pull back a bit, to do something? What will happen to BP? Will they be able to operate at the scale that they do if the slick, dark costs of the old economy continue to gush onto our shores for years to come?
It should be glaringly obvious, now, to nearly everyone — both liberal and conservative — that fossil fuels are a dead end. Just look at the photos (when’s the last time a windmill did that?). And that’s a good thing, too, because oil and coal are the blood of an economy that’s bred for big. Big oil spills included. Could leaving it in the ground lead naturally to an economy that actually fits the planet?
Image credit: Boston.com/TheBigPicture
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This post was written by Scott Gast
Scott walks, bikes, reads, and lives in rural western Massachusetts. His day jobs have included stints at YES! Magazine, the City of Chicago's Waste to Profit Network, and The Nature Conservancy. He is a graduate of the Environmental Science program at Allegheny College, and Special Projects Assistant at Orion Magazine.
Scott has written 16 posts on Post Growth Institute. Contact Scott
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News of the oil spill is hardly, well, news at this point — but Andy Revkin is doing some great reporting on the ongoing effort to cap the well and manage the spill here: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/
And here’s a live-feed of BP’s attempt to inject a high-pressure mud into the open well-head: http://bit.ly/b4nZjv This effort began May 26. As of this morning, May 27, everyone seems to be holding their breath for results.
Here’s another original take on the spill and what it means, from Elizabeth Kolbert of The New Yorker: http://jm.ly/9odUEq
She makes a great point re: the increasingly large effort we’re putting in to extracting new oil: “Having consumed most of the world’s readily accessible oil, we are now compelled to look for fuel in ever more remote places, and to extract it in ever riskier and more damaging ways. The Deepwater Horizon well was being drilled in five thousand feet of water, to a total depth of eighteen thousand feet.”
Increasing effort, increasing risk, increasing sensitivity to shock. Knife’s edge, anyone?
Roberts is right about the knifes edge: a brittle system with slim error margin. His observations are in line with the ever growing school of resilience thinking’s emphasis on preserving options for adaptation.
Ironic then that he’s a cheerleader for APA climate bill. In my view, this watered down corporate giveaway assumes a huge margin of error regarding what needs to be done now to avert climate catastrophe.
It’s past time to get real about global warming, IMHO.
JackInTheGreen:
Well said. I like your wording: “a brittle system with slim error margin.” That does a great job of capturing the effect of growing an economy past the point of “economic,” where increasing marginal costs outpace marginal benefit. It leaves us vulnerable, overextended, at risk, slow to react — like an overweight boxer facing a guy who’s in shape. If we’d had a more intelligent system of separating actual progress from just more stuff, we’d likely not be in this position.
In terms of the Gulf, clearly drilling at 5,000 ft. was past that point of what’s economic: It was too risky. No one would argue that the oil gathered by that well before the break was worth the costs of the spill.
Re: Dave Roberts: Yeah, I suppose it is ironic. I appreciate his pragmatism, though, and I think that’s a tough debate to engage in. Do you go with what’s politically possible and hope you can squeeze a bill through and improve from there, or wait for what’s ecologically necessary and build a movement powerful enough to change the politics? I honestly don’t know the answer. What are your thoughts?
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