As many of us watch with horror at what is happening in the Gulf, a call has gone out to stop our offshore drilling. While it seems like a logical response, Lisa Margonelli sounds a warning in her Saturday op-ed in the New York Times.
Lisa Margonelli is the director of the New America Foundation's energy program and author of “Oil On the Brain: Petroleum's Long Strange Trip to Your Tank.” Here's what she wrote about an offshore drilling moratorium in her column titled "A Spill of Our Own."
Oil, however, is too complicated for simple solutions. Whether this spill turns out to be the result of a freakish accident or a cascade of negligence, the likely political outcome will be a moratorium on offshore drilling. Emotionally, I love this idea. Who wants an oil drill in his park or on his coastline? Who doesn’t want to punish Big Oil on behalf of the birds?
Moratoriums have a moral problem, though. All oil comes from someone’s backyard, and when we don’t reduce the amount of oil we consume, and refuse to drill at home, we end up getting people to drill for us in Kazakhstan, Angola and Nigeria — places without America’s strong environmental safeguards or the resources to enforce them.
Kazakhstan, for one, had no comprehensive environmental laws until 2007, and Nigeria has suffered spills equivalent to that of the Exxon Valdez every year since 1969. (As of last year, Nigeria had 2,000 active spills.)
That last line in parenthesis stopped me cold...2,000 active oil spills in Nigeria. I have to wonder where our outrage is about that.
Margonelli reminds us that Earth Day is at least in part a reaction to the 1969 blowout of an oil platform off Santa Barbara, CA. And she goes on to say this:
Since the Santa Barbara spill of 1969, and the more than 40 Earth Days that have followed, Americans have increased by two-thirds the amount of petroleum we consume in our cars, while nearly quadrupling the quantity we import. Effectively, we’ve been importing oil and exporting spills to villages and waterways all over the world.
So if we're really serious about our concerns with what is going on in the Gulf these days, I'd suggest that we do something more than call for a moratorium and send our offshore drilling offshore. We've got to get serious about or addiction to oil.
These spills concentrate the mind, at least for a while. They tell us that our addiction to oil is madness, that our short-term thinking is madness, that our reckless approach to containment — oil at any price — is madness. Treasure this spill: it is a rare occasion on which we can see this essential truth of the way we run our lives with absolute clarity.
We crave oil as the junkie craves his fix, and like the junkie, we will put up with anything to get it. But even for an addict, there come moments of searing clarity. A sudden revelation that this is actually a stupid way to live life. Well, the spill tells us that this is a stupid way to run our planet.