BP oil disaster, new film

This video from the USA is called The Big Fix Official Trailer.

By Jan Lundberg, Culture Change in the USA:

The Big Fix: Documentary Exposes BP, US Government on Gulf Disaster

Sunday, 20 May 2012 14:41

One of the world’s biggest environmental crimes has been more or less forgotten. This is part of our collective guilt as the world’s ecosystem continues its accelerated collapse. But the new documentary film The Big Fix takes a detailed, daring look at what happened in the Gulf of Mexico with BP‘s Macondo offshore oil drilling rig. The story and facts that emerge are more than disturbing.

The movie is soon getting its major national release in theaters and on Netflix. Viewers will be made to recall the unsettling images of oil slicks, fouled fowl, suddenly unemployed fisher folk, and empty assurances by BP and the Feds.

The partially U.S.-owned British oil company has its origins in geopolitical skullduggery in Iran, explained in the film’s narration and images. The history makes more convincing the subsequent telling of of the corporation’s and the U.S. government’s going to great pains to lie that all was being done that could be done to minimize the blowout’s damage and to clean up the mess.

But there was even more going on, undisclosed to the public, such as the extent and effects of massive application of toxic Corexit. This amounted to a double assault on the Gulf, done deliberately. Those who believe that the whole episode from start to finish was an accident, and that industry and government did their best with a bad situation, are sadly ignorant. Or, they wish to simply keep driving and consuming petroleum in other ways, because deep change is inconvenient or frightening.

Corexit, a dispersant banned in the UK, was immediately employed by BP soon after the blowout, and was ordered stopped by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But BP kept on openly using it, and then secretly so, as The Big Fix tells us.

Even more outrageous was that when the undersea oil well was capped, and scrutiny by the average news-consumer slacked off, people were soon misled by corrupt spokespersons that the oil was benignly disappearing. There were contradictory reports of remaining oil pollution that flew in the face of U.S. and industry claims that the oil was 75% gone. It certainly was not gone, and the bulk of it remains today — perhaps in part from additional ocean floor oil leaks. The oil has slowly been moving into the Atlantic, and may damage the Eastern U.S. seaboard.

What to do? The activist response

Some environmental activists during the crisis’ height did more than hand-wringing and crying out for a clean energy economy some day. We instead called for an immediate step-down in U.S. oil consumption to compensate for what the BP blowout was spewing. Our coalition, World Oil Reduction for the Gulf, was gathering steam when the blowout was capped, but everything naturally went back to business as usual.

But some activists, such as Josh and Rebecca Tickell, were just getting heated up. They could not keep their muckraking lens away from the Gulf, and be like almost everyone else who just moved on in their minds and ignored the plight of the Gulf. The BP blowout and subsequent reports of persistent damage to wildlife and human health were enough to draw the filmmakers to the New Orleans region, Josh Tickell’s boyhood home, to check out the whole situation in 2011. Along for the ride with the Tickells on their rolling headquarters-bus was Peter Fonda, friend to the sea and bait for star-struck Cajuns. The Big Fix’s first dramatic device was to show footage of Fonda in Easy Rider, synced with Steppenwolf’s Born to Be Wild hard-rock tune.

Oil Spill Residue Still Present – In Minnesota: here.

Two years on, the national spotlight seems to have turned away from the Gulf oil spill, but a massive assessment of the environmental impacts is quietly under way. As Cyrus Martin reports, several recent observations, and a study of deepwater coral communities, suggest we may not be out of the woods yet: here.

Department Of Justice Investigates BP For Faulty Oil Spill Estimates: here.

Greg Palast: BP Covered Up 2008 Caspian Sea Deepwater Blowout and Already Knew Cap Wouldn’t Work: here.

USA: It’s a Fact: Domestic Drilling Doesn’t Affect Gas Prices: here.

Britain: The bosses of the world’s biggest multinational defence and oil companies, including BAE Systems and BP, will be asked to account for why hundreds of millions of pounds of government money was used to help military dictators build up their arsenals, and facilitated environmental and human rights abuses across the world: here.

BP Demands Scientist Emails in Gulf Oil Spill Lawsuit: here.

It’s been a little over a year since Olivia Bouler came to visit the Lab and taught an arts workshop for local kids. Olivia made headlines during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, when she raised more than $200,000 for wildlife by painting pictures of birds. Since then, she hasn’t looked back, taking her art and her irrepressible personality to tours, exhibitions, schools, and festivals to talk about what’s possible if people—and kids in particular—believe in our ability to change the world: here.