A CACHE of newly uncovered documents from the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico – including gruesome photographs of a dead whale – are raising questions about the environmental cost of the disaster and the compensation the oil company will have to pay to set it right.
Documents obtained by Greenpeace under freedom of information provisions show Obama administration officials tightly controlling information about whales and other wildlife caught up in the disaster.
Their plight, especially endangered species such as sea turtles and sperm whales, has enormous financial implications for BP. The oil company asked a judge in New Orleans this week to finalise its $US7.8 billion ($A7.5 billion) settlement for economic damages arising from the spill. But BP still faces claims from the US federal government for environmental damage.
That looming legal struggle was apparently already on the minds of officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration when crew aboard the research vessel Pisces spotted a dead sperm whale in mid-June 2010. The discovery was the first confirmed sighting of a dead whale since the blowout on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that April.
Observers on another vessel at the well site in June spotted five whales, including a juvenile, covered in oil.
The discovery of the whale carcass set off a flurry of emails – with repeated instructions from officials to crew aboard the Pisces not to release information or photographs.
The NOAA did put out a press release about the dead whale. But it was edited in a way which appeared to minimise the effects of oil on whales.
Did the government suppress photos and information about the BP oil spill? Here.
Gulf Coast Oilfield Wife, Mother of 6, Cherri Foytlin Chains Self to Keystone XL Pipeyard Gate: here.
On a hot summer day in June, representatives from some of the world’s richest oil companies gathered at the Superdome in New Orleans, where Interior Secretary Ken Salazar declared, “[The] Gulf of Mexico is back in business,” as he kicked off a federal auction of 39 million acres of offshore drilling leases.
The auction was the Obama administration’s second big sale of Gulf of Mexico leases since the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster claimed the lives of 11 workers and released more than 200 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf. BP bid nearly $240 million that day, just two years after the catastrophic blowout, and gobbled up 43 drilling leases in the same central region of the Gulf where the company struggled for months to stop the oil gushing from the now-infamous Macondo well.
Six weeks after the auction, Hurricane Isaac spewed tar balls and large oil slicks along the Gulf shore, from Alabama to Louisiana. Lab tests confirmed the storm had churned up remnants from the massive BP spill, a grim reminder that oil continues to impact ecosystems in the Gulf of Mexico.
“The federal government is failing to learn from one of the most environmentally and economically destructive incidents in US history,” said David Pettit, a senior attorney for the NRDC. “Fresh oil from the Macondo well continues to wash ashore … and the government is being negligent by issuing leases to drill now and drill deeper without ensuring all necessary precautions.”
Pettit told Truthout that, despite reforms to deep-water drilling regulation made since the BP spill, regulators continue to issue drilling permits without the detailed analysis necessary to understand the potential environmental impacts on already damaged ecosystems. On his blog, Pettit explains that the design flaw in Cameron-style blowout preventers like those that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster “still exists today.”
And what about responding to another spill? The Macondo well spewed hundreds of millions of gallons of oil and natural gas into the Gulf while BP struggled to permanently seal it; but since the disaster, regulators and the industry have only performed one successful deep-water field test, at only one specific depth, of new well-cap technology in the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, drilling and leasing continues.
Norway to double carbon tax on oil industry. Extra funding for climate change mitigation and forestry programmes also part of oil-rich nation’s radical programme: here.
How does oil make its way from the bowels of the earth to carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere and plastic waste in the sea? Here.
The BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico 2010 could have been avoided if the experiences of earlier disasters had been put to use, researcher Charles Woolfson, Linköping university, claims. The United States government is now accusing BP of gross negligence and deliberate misconduct, and taking the company to court.
Charles Woolfson, former professor of Labour Sociology in Glasgow and currently professor of Labour Studies at REMESO, Linköping university, conducted a large study of the world’s biggest oil disaster – the Piper Alpha – in the 1990s. 167 people lost their lives when this production platform sank into the North Sea in 1988.
In a new study, he now compares the two disasters and the (inadequate) culture of safety that caused them. He finds, he writes, several depressing similarities. If the right lessons had been learned from Piper Alpha, the accident at Deepwater Horizon would never have happened, he claims. The recommendation issued at that time should have become a turning point.
Woolfson points out a fundamental contradiction between safety and profitable production. In both disasters, there are examples of cost-cutting decisions that worsened safety. In the Deepwater Horizon case, a final independent test of the fateful cement seal was cancelled. The test would have cost USD 128,000 (EUR 101,000).
Woolfson has received unexpected support – from the United States government, which recently submitted an application for a summons indictment through its Justice Department. The words and actions of the company concerning safety “should not be tolerated even in a medium-sized company producing goods for a shopping mall,” according to the 39-page document.
Two other critical factors Woolfson emphasizes are what’s known as “regulatory capture” and the fear-stricken, disunited employees.
Regulatory capture means that the independent agency inspecting an industry identifies itself more and more with the companies of that industry and their interests. This happened the Gulf of Mexico, where the number of exemptions from various environmental requirements increased from three in 1997 to 795 in 2000, all to avoid “cumbersome and unnecessary delays” in production. A program for tightened safety regulations dragged through endless consulting processes with the industry and ultimately never came to anything.
Cutbacks also affected the regulatory agency. The shrinking number of inspectors lacked sufficient training, and became more and more dependent on the expertise and information of the oil companies. This is according to the Obama-appointed independent National Commission’s own 2011 report on Deepwater Horizon. The same weakness was pointed out after Piper Alpha. The industry’s promises on self-regulation, voluntary enforcement and standards of conduct effectively torpedoed all demands for stricter supervision of safety arrangements.
The hesitation among the employees and the fear of making independent decisions also affected the catastrophic development of events in both cases, Woolfson states. On Deepwater Horizon, for example, the crew dared not make a decision about activating an emergency system that could have constrained the disaster.
In total, BP has claims for damages against it totalling almost USD 70 billion (EUR 55.1 billion). The company denies all the accusations of negligence and misconduct.
“The fundamental questions we must ask are: What went wrong, who is responsible, and how can we prevent it from happening again?” Woolfson says.
“Industrial accidents don’t just ‘happen’, they are often the result of a weak culture of safety and companies systematically failing to prioritize safety.”
Eight New Cusk-Eel Species Useful for Understanding Environment
(Sep. 10, 2012) — A study by University of Florida and University of Kansas researchers describing eight new cusk-eel species provides data for better understanding how disasters like the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill impact biodiversity and the environment.
The 60-year study appearing September 11 in the Florida Museum of Natural History Bulletin provides a comprehensive taxonomic revision of one of the least-studied groups of cusk-eels, bony fishes distantly related to cod. Although abundant and widespread in the Americas, the fishes in the genus Lepophidium have previously been poorly known to biologists.
“With the recent Gulf of Mexico disaster, one of the first things that people started asking was what impact was had and on what animals, and a lot of biologists said, ‘We don’t know all the animals that are in the Gulf of Mexico because the area hasn’t been studied enough,’” said study co-author Rob Robins, ichthyology collection manager at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. “A number of these species are from the Gulf of Mexico, including some of the new ones, and this paper brings us closer to our ultimate goal of cataloguing the diversity of life so that when we need the information, it’s available.”
In addition to describing the new species, the study includes new descriptions of all members of the genus and elevates two sub-species to species, bringing the number of Lepophidium species to 23. The research included observations of the fish in the wild, X-rays of their internal anatomy and close examination of thousands of museum specimens.
Lead author C. Richard “Dick” Robins, University of Kansas curator emeritus, completed much of the fieldwork and collected many examples of cusk-eels as a professor of marine science at the University of Miami. Miami’s fish collection was later transferred and is now part of the Florida Museum’s ichthyology collection, one of the five largest in the nation.
“I think it’s amazing that there is a group of fishes that is really common in shallow water that had so many undescribed species,” Dick Robins said. “It just shows the state of the art is really poor and unfortunately, I think it’s really typical. I’d hate to hazard a guess about how many undescribed species of fish there are in really shallow waters, but people don’t seem to work on them that much.”
The genus Lepophidium includes smaller species of cusk-eels that live on the Continental Shelf, from shallow coastal water to about 600 feet deep.
“Since these are soft-bottom fishes and some of these occur in shallow waters, you’re dealing with man’s effect on the environment, what pollution does to some of these environments and how it affects the animals that live there,” said California Academy of Sciences research associate Robert Lea, a marine biologist who specializes in another genus of cusk-eels. “Some of these are going to be Gulf of Mexico species and probably many of these are going to be indicators of environmental quality also.”
Because they are benthic, meaning they live near the bottom, and burrow in sand, cusk-eels are particularly difficult to collect, Lea said.
“This is a group that we’ve needed additional knowledge on, and this study provides a tremendous amount of information for people studying soft-bottom fishes in the Americas,” Lea said. “This is a milestone work because it’s a lifelong study and it answers a lot of questions. It’s the end of a chapter for that group of animals.”
Cusk-eels are plainly colored, typically with a beige body and some degree of black pigment in the fins. They also have a rostral spine, a sharp point found on their snout. Major differences in the cusk-eels include features of their internal anatomy, such as number of vertebrae or gut color. Fin ray counts are also important for distinguishing the various species.
“This is not a case of just working with specimens in a museum — it’s important to know these animals and where they live,” Dick Robins said. “I think it’s important that we know about the animals that we share this planet with.”
Cusk-eels may reach 6.5 feet in South America, where they are an important food source in some regions, but the Lepophidium species, which do not exceed 1 foot, are generally too small for human consumption, researchers said. Dick Robins became interested in studying cusk-eels in the early 1960s because he encountered so many undescribed species, he said.
“This was a group of fish that turned me on at some point and nobody else was working on them,” Dick Robins said. “The more I worked, the more undescribed species I found. So I just got more and more involved with it. I’m very happy to have this opportunity to bring it all together in this paper.”
Florida Museum volunteer Mary Brown is also a study co-author.
Caribbean coral reefs in danger of collapse: here.
That is not by any means Atos’ only public relations trick, associating itself with positive and beautiful things to hide their negative, ugly activities.
In Atos’ logo, one sees a beautiful coral reef fish. Which has nothing to do with Atos, but never mind
Hurricane Isaac was expected to make landfall early this morning as a Category 1 storm, threatening major flooding. States of emergency were declared in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi, as the region braced for the storm to hit exactly seven years after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the region on August 29, 2005.
The storm left at least 24 dead in the Dominican Republic and Haiti as it moved through the Caribbean and caused soaking rains in Florida, where 80,000 were without power as of Monday evening. The Republican Party delayed the start of its national convention as pounding rains hit Tampa, but caused minimal damage in the surrounding area.
Politicians, Democratic and Republican alike, are fearful of anything approaching a repeat of Katrina. More than 1,800 people were killed—with many more never accounted for—as a result of the storm and the criminal lack of response by authorities at both the federal and local level. Over 1 million people were displaced. The indifference of the Bush administration and the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) to the suffering provoked widespread revulsion, both in the US and internationally.
Five years after Katrina, Gulf Coast residents and small businesses are still reeling from another disaster—the April 20, 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which crippled fishing and tourism and caused widespread ecological damage. Official unemployment in the Gulf region still stands above 8 percent, and nearly one in four residents relies on government assistance.
In the aftermath of Katrina, a $14.5 billion hurricane protection system has been constructed, ringing the greater New Orleans, Louisiana area with 350 miles of levees, floodwalls and floodgates. However, the system has yet to be tested, and several sections remain uncompleted. As the storm took dead aim at New Orleans on Tuesday, engineers closed 127 floodgates around the city, hoping to keep water from the Gulf from surging into the area.
While attention focused on New Orleans, the storm’s winds were expected to be felt more than 200 miles from the storm’s center. The effects of water were expected to be worse than wind, as the slow-moving storm picked up moisture from the Gulf. Isaac was predicted to bring 7 to 14 inches of rain to southeast Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, with some regions expecting up to 20 inches of rain. The storm could push walls of water, dumping rain and flooding the low-lying coastal areas of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida Panhandle.
In low-lying areas and areas outside the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority East system, levees were expected to be breached. In Cocodrie, Louisiana, two major floodgates intended to protect this coastal community are still under construction, and one of them will not be completed until next hurricane season. Residents in the area are under a mandatory evacuation order.
Isaac, upgraded from tropical storm to Category 1 hurricane earlier Tuesday, touched land in Plaquemines Parish, about 90 miles southeast of New Orleans Tuesday evening before heading back over the Gulf of Mexico. By 3 a.m. EST, the storm remained stationary about 70 miles south of New Orleans, according to the National Hurricane Center.
BREAKING: Forecasters say Isaac begins to move inland in southeast Louisiana, top winds still at 80 mph.
It’s already one of the world’s most endangered animals, but the very survival of the Kemp’s Ridley turtle was dealt a massive blow by the BP oil spill in 2010.
At the time, scientists had been moving eggs in a desperate bid to save the species.
Now, as part of our “What happened Next?” series, Rachel Levin travels back to Tamaulipas reserve to see how the turtles are doing.
Al Jazeera’s Rachel Levine reports from La Pesca, Mexico.
A recent decision by the Alabama state legislature to allocate funds from an early settlement with British Petroleum (BP) to build a convention center has aroused anger from Gulf Coast environmental groups. The project is part of a $594 million plan announced last week by BP and the five Gulf Coast states affected by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster: here.
August 2012. After a leak of seawater from a pipe, 300 Green turtles have died at a turtle farm on the Cayman Islands. The turtle farm is a controversial turtle breeding centre that also sells turtle products to raise money. Not everyone agrees with this style of conservation, and although much good has been done in boosting local populations of turtles, there is much disquiet in some quarters about their methods: here.
Endangered Sea Turtles Face Increased Threats: here.
On April 23rd 2012 – Shakespeare’s birthday and the launch of the World Shakespeare Festival – a group of merry players known as the “Reclaim Shakespeare Company” took unexpectedly to the stage in Stratford-upon-Avon, just before a Royal Shakespeare Company performance of The Tempest. This piece of guerilla Shakespeare aimed to challenge the RSC over its decision to accept sponsorship from BP in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon drilling disaster and the oil company’s decision to start extracting highly polluting and destructive tar sands in Canada. Find out more here.
Filmed by Zoe Broughton
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Here’s the script in full:
At a time when the world should fear much more the heat of the sun and the furious winter’s rages, BP is conspiring to distract us from the naked truth of climate change, and by pursuing a future powered by more and more extreme fossil fuels, like tar sands, deepwater drilling and Arctic exploitation, with its daring folly burn the world.
Something is rotten in the state of Stratford
The Royal Shakespeare Company have chosen to put BP’s money in their purse. Yet he’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf. BP is doing everything in its power to let not the public see its deep and dark desires – fossil fuel expansion and ecological devastation. BP is the harlot’s cheek, beautied with sponsoring art. It is the greenwash monster, which doth mock the meat it feeds on, and the RSC have made themselves complicit in its crimes. If this were play’d upon a stage now, we could condemn it as an improbable fiction!
Enough! No more!
Times are tough. Ay, there’s the rub. But all that glisters is not gold. And whilst comparisons are odorous, we do well remember the dropping of tobacco companies as sponsors by a host of cultural institutions. The arts continued, and so shall the RSC, freed from the grasp of this smiling damned villain. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!
We believe that action is eloquence
We say to the RSC: to thine own self be true. Be nothing if not critical and forgo your damaging relationship with BP.
Author Jeanette Winterson told the Arts Council sponsored forum that art has a “moral” purpose. “I’m not one of these people who thinks it’s just idleness and entertainment. It’s there to change things, to make things better,” she said.
Eloquent words, but her resolute commitment has been met only with the reality of significant cuts to the cultural sector, a legacy of Tony Blair‘s Third Way project which encourages a “hand-up rather than a handout” to the arts.
That continues the political shift from state to market which defined Thatcherite Britain, with new Labour adopting the policy language of “investment” not public spending and “indicators” rather than intrinsic value.
The consequence is that last year, under the new coalition government, 206 arts organisations were informed they would no longer receive regular Arts Council funding. Around the same time “philanthrocapitalism” quickly became the Con-Dem buzz word when speaking about the arts.
But for those 206 arts organisations great art became secondary to the search for support and survival.
The Poetry Book Society, stunned by a 100 per cent cut, turned to investment firm Aurum Funds to carry forward the annual presentation of the TS Eliot Award.
But following the announcement of that sponsorship in December last year, two poets withdrew their collections from the shortlist, not wanting to align themselves with profit over morals. “My instinct, at a time when people are crying out for change,” poet Alice Oswald wrote, “is to position myself with them rather than with Aurum.”
The £350,000 slashed from London’s Tricycle Theatre resulted in the loss of the theatre’s artistic director Nicolas Kent after 28 years in which the Kilburn-based arts complex was at the forefront of politically and socially engaged theatre.
Kent expressed anger at cuts made to local arts organisations. Larger establishments “have enormous clout with both commercial sponsors and philanthropic givers who want to be associated with big national institutions,” he charged.
While the effects of cuts on artists and organisations are clear, the deepest consequences are felt by the public themselves. The arts in Britain have, for the most part, always depended on patronage in one form or another through individual donors, private institutions or state funding.
The Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, the earliest incarnation of the Arts Council which existed throughout the second world war, was funded by the Ministry of Education to provide cultural access for all in times of war and austerity.
From 1946, the Arts Council of Great Britain reported directly to the Treasury and subsequently chose to favour “high arts,” with the Royal Opera House and Sadler’s Wells accounting for more than half its grant expenditure in 1960.
Under the Conservative government from 1979 to 1997, the arts suffered a loss of government subsidy, forcing organisations to seek private sponsorship or to aim for greater box-office success.
The cuts were positively framed as combating complacency, diversifying income streams and maintaining autonomy.
But the reality is that excellence and freedom of expression is compromised by a need to pander to markets and mass appeal.
As the Bristol Old Vic theatre’s artistic director Tom Morris recently commented: “I work in a subsidised theatre because subsidy enables me to escape the strictures of the marketplace.”
Ways in which state funding is so essential include investment in experimental work, preserving cultural memory and national heritage and, most vital of all, arts subsidy “so that those members of our society whom the marketplace has failed can have access to them.”
His words are echoed by Max Stafford Clark of the critically acclaimed touring theatre company Out Of Joint who had their grant slashed by nearly a third. “We are commended for excellence, yet condemned to mediocrity by removing the structure that makes excellence possible,” he said.
All this is in sharp contrast to the announcement of the 18 recipients of the Arts Council Catalyst Fund endowments.
The fund is Jeremy Hunt’s “hand-up” to the arts, a new £100 million private-giving investment programme aimed at helping cultural organisations attract – although the word used is “access” – more private funding.
In an Arts Quarterly survey on private giving to the arts over 80 per cent of theatre respondents questioned whether the Catalyst Fund would encourage philanthropic giving.
That’s borne out by the list of successful endowment applicants who received £55 million between them – Royal Shakespeare Company, English National Opera and London Symphony Orchestra. You would be forgiven for assuming that these were funds restricted to such organisations, who already have the “brand” and capacity to attract funding.
These are safe bets – they are well-established, unlikely to fund art that offends or threatens their major donors and will continue to turn out blockbuster events.
Nationally, the picture is equally bleak, with 81 per cent of all individual giving concentrated in London, leaving little hope for regional organisations.
More telling is that during the designated “year of corporate philanthropy” business investment in the arts dipped for the fourth year in a row and now stands at £134.2m. “It is significant how many more “development staff” arts organisations now have,” Out of Joint’s education manager Panda Cox observes. “Work is not just being sold to an audience but to sponsors.”
What is the future for arts organisations who want to “change things, to make things better”?
For those not offered endowments, long-term funding remains ambiguous at best. Studies show that there is virtually no evidence of pure altruism in corporate philanthropy. Businesses adopt the arts as an instrument of marketing and/or legitimation. When the arts no longer serve a purpose that suits, they will be dropped.
Without public funding for arts practitioners, only an elite with private funds will be able to participate.
And the shift from government to “governance,” with the state taking a back seat, sacrifices a deeper social engagement with arts producers and audiences. As playwright David told the launch of the Lost Arts campaign last year, companies benefiting from endowments “could ignore national policy on outreach, education and diversity.”
The campaign is a consortium of eight unions whose members are directly affected by cuts to the arts – Bectu, Equity, the Musicians Union, the NUJ, Prospect, PCS, the Writers Guild of Great Britain and Unite.
One of the aims of Lost Arts is to catalogue the cuts to come and their impact in the lead-up to the 2015 spending review.
But it seems at present some arts organisations are too preoccupied with finding pennies to replace the pounds to do very much more. Out Of Joint are not in a position to refuse whatever funding comes their way. “A determination to survive means that the early question that organisations face is how do we get it, not should we,” Out of Joint’s Panda Cox says.
That’s an understandably realistic approach but restoring outreach, education, diversity and access to the arts will require more than pragmatism.
The Top Five Most Hypocritical Corporate Sponsors. Alyssa Figueroa, AlterNet in the USA: “Many non-profits and other charities rely on corporate sponsorships to keep them afloat – and some of those partnerships seem as counterproductive as KFC’s and Komen’s ‘pink bucket’ campaign”: here.
The quote that opens this remembrance of Mr. [Robert] Hughes came from his 2008 documentary film for Britain’s Channel 4 television, The Mona Lisa Curse. The film explored, in the words of Hughes, how “the entanglement of big money with art has become a curse on how art is made, controlled, and above all – in the way that it’s experienced”: here.
Art collective Liberate Tate (liberatetate.org) has installed a massive 16.5 metre (40 foot), one and a half tonne wind turbine blade in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall Saturday (7 July 2012) submitting the artwork to be part of Tate’s permanent collection.
The artwork, called ‘The Gift’, was installed in an unofficial performance involving over 100 members of the group that has become internationally renowned for artworks aimed at ending the relationship of Tate and other national cultural institutions with oil companies.
Production by Felix Goncalez & Stephanie Thieullent
2nd Camera : Alison Bartly
Offline edit : Sasha Johns
Support and script : Cleo Johns
Music by Ithaca Audio ithacaaudio.com – soundcloud.com/ithaca-audio/sunrise-in-dark-skies
Video Service by linkupfilms.com
An art collective installed a 12-metre, one-and-a-half tonne wind turbine blade in Tate Modern‘s Turbine Hall on Saturday, submitting it to be part of the Tate’s permanent collection.
The artwork, called The Gift, was installed in an unofficial performance involving over 100 members of the Liberate Tate group, which calls for an end to the relationship between Tate and other national cultural institutions with oil companies such as BP.
Liberate Tate member Sharon Palmer said the group created the artwork using an “icon of renewable energy with an express wish that Tate will have the courage to take leadership in addressing the threat of catastrophic climate change and end its relationship with BP.”
BP Oil Spill: Two Years Later, Dispersants’ Effects Still a Mystery: here.
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.
