"The BP spill should have inspired Congress and the Obama administration to more rapidly enact the strictest offshore drilling regulations in the world, and to freeze new exploration until new technologies came online," Stuart Smith, a New Orleans-based environmental lawyer recently wrote in an op-ed for the LA Times. "Instead, five years later, the Gulf of Mexico is as vulnerable to accident as ever."The damage was under the surface. For most non-shrimping Americans, the disruption was both literally and figuratively far away
"Congress has done bupkis," says David Pettit, an environmental attorney with the Natural Resource Defense Council. "I think there's still a lot of vulnerability. There will be another oil spill, that's inevitable." And yet no laws have been made or changed to reflect the new realities of offshore drilling. The reason BP was exploring such deep waters in the first place is that heavy demand for oil, and its lack of availability in conventional, easy-to-extract locations, had forced the oil companies to drill in increasingly risky places.That, of course, is why Shell is headed to Alaska, again risking serious financial and public relations disaster to explore for oil in the frigid, unforgiving Chukchi Sea."A spill would be catastrophic," Steiner says. "The worst-case discharge is two million barrels over 60 days. If anything like that were to come out, it's game over for the Chukchi Sea ecosystem, which is already on the edge from climate change."Catastrophic is right. But we're still underestimating how deeply destructive offshore oil disasters can be.***I was on the far southern tip of Louisiana, in the bayou beach town of Venice (nickname: "the end of the world"), when BP's oil first started washing ashore. Along with a German TV crew, a couple Greenpeace activists, and Steiner—we first met aboard a sloshing outboard in search of errant oil—I took a motorboat out to the barrier islands, where we waded through reedy marshland, our eyes plastered on the ground. Soon enough, we found—well, something.A "shockingly large" amount of oil fell to the seafloor—an area the size of the state of Connecticut, congealing together into massive "tar mats" that weigh up to 25,000 pounds
Unlike the Valdez, I noted at the time, the worst impacts of the Gulf spill were hard to see with the naked eye. It was true then, and it's true now. There were, eventually, a few photo spreads of oiled pelicans, but the 5 million barrels of oil that would eventually escape from the deepwater well mostly stayed out of sight. The damage was done under the surface; to deep water ecosystems, to coastal economies dependent on seafood and tourism. For most non-shrimping Americans who weren't well versed in the breeding cycle of endangered Bluefin Tuna (which were put seriously at risk by the spill), the disruption was both literally and figuratively far away.The attitude that oil spills are to be treated as rare, unavoidable events has thus been institutionalized into our political culture, it seems
Pettit takes another issue with the settlement—that it was constructed in private, and there's no breakdown of how the natural resource allotments were awarded. There's no real sense of why the fines have been awarded, and where they're being allocated to—and that those impacted will therefore have little say over whether the breakdown is ultimately fair.The biggest, most expensive oil accident in history has passed with a whimper—those explosion-addled scenes of tragedy remain stuck in limbo, b-roll for the occasional news update