The blowout of a floating, deep-water oil production platform in the Gulf of Mexico this week is a human, ecological and corporate image disaster. Initially, eleven workers on the burning rig were missing and presumed dead; some forty others escaped with injuries. As the Coast Guard and BP rescues continue, so does the up to 200,000 gallons per day of crude oil spew for submerged well heads where BP’s “Deepwater Horizon” once was anchored 50 miles off the Louisiana coast. This BP oil production rig was a state-of-the-art floating platform operating in mile-deep Gulf waters at a cost of about one-half million dollars per day.
I spent the first ten years of my environmental sciences career with industrial operations along the Gulf Coast, including on- and off-shore petroleum operations. This oil disaster will never be forgotten for the lost workers who toiled those long and dangerous hours to supply our essential energy needs. Nor, will the environmental and commercial fisheries impacts of eventual coastal oil pollution be soon remedied or forgotten. Several seasons of vital commercial fisheries production may be lost along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The Gulf Coast wetlands are America’s largest ecological nursery for one of the most productive and bio-diverse aquatic environments on Earth. These estuarine wetlands are, however, resilient to small, intermittent oil releases that have occurred naturally for millions of years -- petroleum is a naturally-occurring substance with naturally-evolved biodegraders. And, about half of the oil spill volume will simply evaporate from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Also, never to be forgotten will be the damage done to the necessary and largely.jpg)
safe industry of offshore oil production. This BP oil disaster will soon replace the 1989, 10 million-gallon Exxon Valdez spill as the seminal rallying cry of environmentalists against corporate oil interests. Obama has already called the BP oil spill a “national emergency, “ and has reversed his recent policy to allow expansion of U.S. offshore drilling in a political move to attract compromise from opposition to his pending climate legislation.
safe industry of offshore oil production. This BP oil disaster will soon replace the 1989, 10 million-gallon Exxon Valdez spill as the seminal rallying cry of environmentalists against corporate oil interests. Obama has already called the BP oil spill a “national emergency, “ and has reversed his recent policy to allow expansion of U.S. offshore drilling in a political move to attract compromise from opposition to his pending climate legislation.There has been a massive global expansion in green marketeering. BP, a.k.a.,“British Petroleum,” has spent tens of millions of dollars to develop and sell its green street cred. Green marketers have developed slick schemes to sell an avalanche of eco-friendly, green products and practices. These marketing tactics try to sell an immediate and emotionally-compelling environmental benefit -- often when the claimed benefit is unproven. They also deploy ad messages through highly-leveraged partnerships with other products, institutions and media that are already a part of the consumer’s media world.
Green groups and corporate interests play out an intense and often perverse power game of ecopolitics. BP has now lost that game through operational incompetence, and has damaged the oil energy business for years to come. BP may never be able to claim (or reclaim) its environmental credibility after the “BP spill of 2010.”
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