In April (through July), it was BP's Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico. Last week, Enbridge's pipeline failed releasing one million gallons of crude into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. And in his blog at Solveclimate.com, David Sassoon provides a photolog of the Chinese oil spill at the Yellow Sea port-city of Dalian (see Bare Hands Clean-Up of a Horrible Oil Spill, July 29th).
These are certainly spills that have captured the horror of press and public across much of the world. However, a recent report by the Wildlife Federation of America makes the case that as devastating as this small number of spills might be, they are only the tip of the ice-berg. Bradford Plumer writing in the Vine Blog (The New Republic) (see Oil Spills Everywhere, July 29th) identified the report - Assault on America: A Decade of Petroleum Company Disaster, Pollution and Profit in which the National Wildlife Federation takes a strong stand. In fact stronger than I would have expected from this type of NGO.
Major oil spills are really only a small part of the real story. From 2000 to 2010, the oil and gas industry accounted for hundreds of deaths, explosions, fires, seeps, and spills as well as habitat and wildlife destruction in the United States. These disasters demonstrate a pattern of feeding the addiction to oil leaving in their wake sacrifice zones that affect communities, local economies, and our landscapes.
The report provides a Map detailing thousands of petroleum company accidents, spills and other incidents (explosions, fires, etc.) in the U.S. between 2000 and 2010. The report also highlights five or six of the more significant incidents each year.
Finally, NWF provides a list of recommendations for ending the industry's history of spills, including:
- eliminate the cap on liability for damages caused by oil and gas disasters
- remove exemptions from the Clean Water and Safe Drinking Water Acts for oil and gas development
- implement new monitoring measures
- reform royalty structures for oil and gas leases on federal land
- pass comprehensive climate legislation in the U.S.
(In all NWF provides 13 recommendations.)
Working in the oil and gas industry obviously leaves me somewhat conflicted when I look at a report like this. On the one hand there is no question that the incidents are unacceptable - in this regard, NWF does a good job of bringing them all together in a way that helps the industry to begin looking at the systemic causes.
On the other hand, an industry as all encompassing as the oil and gas sector and working as it does in some of the most inhospitable environments on earth will have incidents. We and our economy are dependent on petroleum products; these incidents are the price of such dependency. (To be fair to the NWF, many of their recommendations relate to decreasing the addiction.)
No doubt the long term answer is to reduce use of petroleum.
However, in the the short term there are several answers:
- Effective regulation that recognizes and acts on the key risks facing the industry.
- Better identification of the risks by the companies developing petroleum.
- Much better design and implementation of risk management systems to ensure that qualified people work safely to develop a volatile resource.
- Real senior management oversight of how their companies are managing the social, safety and environmental risks associated with their activities.
My understanding of NWF is that it is a relative moderate among the NGO's calling for the oil and gas sector to change. And if they are concerned enough to use the language that appears in this report, its well worth paying attention to what they are saying and what they are trying to say. So to close, over to NWF:
The total cost of the status quo —– in lives lost and health risks as well as social and environmental degradation —– is far too high. The sooner we move in the direction of meeting our energy needs through cleaner, safer sources.
The negative consequences for our health, our land, our climate and our children’s future are too great to continue to depend on oil to power our economy. Now is the time to put enact laws that favor and encourage safe and clean energy development and remove federal subsidies and tax advantages for oil and gas development. Now is the time to increase mitigation fees. Now is the time to create an oil and gas disaster fund paid for by industry. Now is the time to draw lines around environmentally sensitive areas that are made permanently off limits to oil and gas development.
And now is the time to cap global warming pollution from all oil and gas production —– including every aspect of the uncontrolled extraction and refining processes where methane, carbon dioxide, and other global warming gases are released into the air every day.
The BP Deepwater Horizon spill is truly a tragedy of our time. It should be used to take a closer and more comprehensive look at the full and continuing costs that the oil and gas industry continues to impose on society with its pollution, environmental degradation, habitat destruction, wildlife loss, worker and community endangerment, health effects consequences, and loss of life.
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