The oil spill is a mirror
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| Chris Reid | Special to the Times |
The oil spill crossed the Rubicon on Friday.
At sundown Thursday, families hung out in the crashing surf at Pensacola Beach. A few surfers attempted to discover a wave. The beach bar troubadours played Neil Young and Eagles tunes as university children knocked lower back beers. A thin man with a metal detector shuffled along searching out treasure.
All turned into because it have to be, the traditional chamber of trade photo of Florida seashore lifestyles.
On Friday everything became exceptional. The households had been nevertheless there, splashing round. The seashore bars nonetheless offered brewskis to thirsty university kids. But in the surf line, mingled with the damaged sand bucks and the calico shells, lay an navy of invaders directly out of a science-fiction movie:
Thousands of shiny, reddish-brown globs, glistening in the sun ? Signs that the Deepwater Horizon disaster had at final stained Florida's sugar-white beaches.
Tar balls washed ashore alongside extra than forty miles of the Panhandle coast, from Perdido Key State Park at the western give up of Escambia County to Navarre Beach in Santa Rosa County. Boats snared big tar mats floating in Pensacola Pass, and a dozen extra mats had been spotted past due Friday in the gulf approximately 6 miles south of the Navarre Beach pier, in step with the kingdom Department of Environmental Protection.
The St. Petersburg Times, five June 2010
The oil reached Florida and so the ready's over inside the Panhandle. Now the waiting takes on extra urgency to those people farther down the coast. It's not a matter of will it get here, now it is a be counted of whilst.
This spill didn't have to happen of course, but the unholy union of our culture, our government, our society and our economy made it an inevitability. As a Gulf Coast resident, this effects me personally and I want to blame someone. I want to blame BP of course. I want to blame Ronald Reagan for birthing a bankrupt school of governance that says that industries should be free to write their own regulations. I want to blame Haliburton. I want to blame globalization. I want to blame who ever it's politically expedient to blame.
But if I want to degree blame with any diploma of integrity, I need in charge myself for purchasing a tank of fuel the day prior to this. I paid around $2.65 a gallon once I crammed up my tank, a fragment of the actual cost to deliver it to me. Despite its bargain price, I nonetheless groaned after I noticed the total charge pass over $30.
According to a 1998 paper written by the International Center for Technology Assessment , the actual cost of that gallon was somewhere between $5.60 and $15.37. Mind you, that was based on a retail price of $1.25 and before the costs of invading and occupying Iraq are figured in. Part of me doesn't want to know what that number is now. Gasoline and petroleum prices are kept artificially low by the oil companies' practice of externalizing their costs. Most of these externalized costs are absorbed by federal, state and local governments. The costs to find the oil, drill for the oil, ship the oil, keep the shipping lanes secure for the safe passage of the oil, refine the oil, transport the refined oil, market the refined oil, discover new uses for the refined oil, etc. are either paid by governments directly, or indirectly through a series of subsidies and paybacks.
It's not just gasoline either. Crude oil gets made into the stuff that makes up life in 2010. Look around you, if you need a reminder of oil's omnipresence, here's a partial list: nylon zippers, ballet tights, plastic hangers, pantyhose, flip flops, fake fur, polyester, ball point pens, ink, computers, copiers, magic markers, telephones, microfilm, cameras, earphones, footballs, knitting needles, tennis racquets, golf balls, baby aspirin, stuffed animals, Band aids, Vaseline, Pepto-Bismol, hair coloring, soap, cough syrup, hair spray, lipstick and on and on. Oil subsidies and externalized costs keep these things and the raw materials that make them artificially cheap.
This isn't always some darkish conspiracy or nefarious plan. My spending habits and my need for pace and convenience created the whole mess. Every time I purchase a dollar bottle of shampoo or a $four T-shirt I supply my consent to the complete machine. I vote with my cash and so does all people else. Calling for the top of Tony Hayward, BP's Chief Executive, might not stop any of this. It might not easy up the Gulf and it may not prevent the world's dependence on (artificially) cheap oil. Boycotting BP may not assist both. The Deepwater Horizon disaster is their fault and their problem, of that there can be absolute confidence. But this disaster ought to have took place at any offshore platform anywhere inside the global.
Exxon Valdez groundings and Deepwater Horizon explosions will maintain to take place in a world where consumerism reigns supreme. All of the speak about strength independence and opportunity strength sources don't amount to a hill of beans whilst maximum of what I contact, buy, own and use begins out in an oil properly and is sold to me at an artificially low price.
Oil disasters and oil-related world instability will continue so long as oil subsidies continue. Deep water oil drilling Russian roulette will continue without back up safety plans so long as the oil industry continues to call the shots. But oil subsidies won't go away and a functioning regulatory environment will never come to be in a world where you and I demand $2.65 a gallon gasoline and $4 T-shirts.
Thinking approximately this stuff is of 0 consolation as I wait for the tar balls to arrive on the beach down the road or in my liked Pass-a-Grille. This monster's conscious and I don't assume whatever can prevent it at this factor. The oiled flora and fauna will suffer and die, the fishing fleets will stay in port and our already shaky economy will go through a blow this summer season that hurts to consider an excessive amount of.
The road out of this can't stop with addressing the Deepwater Horizon disaster. We have a lesson to learn here, as a society. The newly fouled Gulf is a mirror and in its iridescent sheen anybody can see the gruesome reflection of a world gone mad. The oiled pelicans in the news this week are the result of a society that will go to any length to keep energy and consumer goods as cheap as possible. When you look at those birds, think about your role in how they got that way. Then vote with your dollars or pounds or euros or pesos. How you spend your money will determine what's next. Let's face it, at this stage of the game, it's the only meaningful vote you have.