BLUE NOTES #73 – Another oil catastrophe, vote for BFC Explorers, inspirational books and more
By David Helvarg
May 4, 2010
Apocalypse Again
It’s happened before but you wouldn’t know it reading the New York Times. On April 28 the Times wrote a “Gulf Spill” editorial defending continued offshore oil and gas exploration. Without questioning its source it wrote, “the federal Minerals Management Service says there have been no major spills — defined as 1,000 barrels or more — in the last 15 years, a period that includes Hurricane Katrina. In that context, the blowout — while tragic and destructive — can be seen as a freak occurrence.”
But when I was down in the Gulf covering Hurricane Katrina less than five years ago the Coast Guard reported that over eight million gallons of oil spilled in and around the Gulf, more than two thirds of an Exxon Valdez. Of course that wasn’t from the 180 rigs damaged, destroyed or set adrift like the Jack Up rig Ocean Warwick that I saw grounded in the surf on Dauphin Island Alabama. The MMS, parsing things very finely indeed, was only counting spills from active offshore rigs, not the pipelines, onshore tank farms, refineries and other infrastructure essential to offshore operations.
energy system based on offshore drilling, nuclear power and clean coal. Unfortunately that’s like advocating a healthy diet based on fast-food snacking, amphetamines and low-tar cigarettes.
New reports from the University of Alaska and elsewhere published in the journal Science now suggest warming has also unlocked vast frozen methane banks long trapped in Arctic permafrost and ocean bottom formations including the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (just west of the Bering Sea). These have started leaching off methane into the atmosphere. European scientists reported similar plumes of methane rising from the Arctic seabed north of Scandinavia last year (see Blue Notes # 53). This off-gassing of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more powerful (in terms of trapping heat in the atmosphere) then carbon dioxide could be the beginning of a long-feared ‘positive feedback loop’ in which human generated warming sets off other climate triggers that will keep overheating the planet in ways we will be unable to control even if we quickly stop burning fossil fuels and tropical forests.
