BP's oil spill is the energy story that keeps going and going. But where? Wallet-shock and the future of carbon pricing. Oil spill science. Looking for that Hollywood ending.
THE GULF OIL SPILL, 24-7. Does it seem to you that it's all BP oil spill all the time? Well, you're right. It is all BP oil spill all the time — or at least 38% of the time, Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism reports. The Gulf of Mexico oil spill occupied way more than a than a third of the news hole last week.
That's by far the largest amount of time and space the MSM have spent on fallout from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion to date, even though this story has now been around for six weeks. Not unprecedented for an old story to get bigger rather than, as is more typical, fade gently into invisibility, but it's certainly infrequent.
The excellent journalism folks say continuing coverage of the BP oil spill far outclassed other topics: election results, immigration arguments, and even the economy. Broadcast networks were particularly entranced, devoting half their airtime to plumes of oil, top kill, and failure after failure to stem the flow of oil into the ocean, onto Gulf shores and wetlands, and after that, who knows where.
Seems to me TV may be overdoing reporting on the pain of the Gulf Coast seafood industry. On PBS's News Hour the plight of shrimpers is taking on the odor of nightly filler material. Surely the economic effects are more widespsread, and I'd like to know more about what they are. If you have oil-spill questions too, post them at The Columbia Journalism Review's Observatory, which wants to know what journos want to know.
BLOGGERS ARE POURING TROUBLED WATERS ON THE OIL, WHICH MAY TROUBLE THE SUMMERING POWERFUL WHILE THEY ARE TAKING THE WATERS. Nobody can — or should — count blog posts, but there were a lot of them. Herewith, a severely limited selection.
On the topic of who knows where the oil is going, for example, Andrew Revkin reports at Dot Earth that simulations done by ocean and climate researchers suggest that if the leak remains unstanched, it's likely oil will spill much farther, wending its way around Florida and up the Atlantic coast.
That's what nearly all the simulations show, and the spill might even lap up onto Old World shores. Take a look at the moderately hair-raising 34 seconds worth of Mandelbrotean video Revkin has posted.
Revkin has thought about the political potential of this possibility:
If some of the gulf oil starts coating beaches in the Hamptons while media and political power players relax there this summer, will President Obama's call for a new American energy revolution get more momentum?
But he really thinks oil on Long Island beaches is unlikely to turn the oily lemon into regulatory lemonade by spilling onto the playgrounds of the powerful:
I doubt it, given that the coastal states are already relatively engaged on the issue. Overall, it still seems to take a shock to the wallet to have a deeper impact.
WALLET-SHOCK AND THE PRICE OF CARBON. The Washington Post's Ezra Klein quotes at length from Obama's wallet-shocking talk to Carnegie Mellon grads on Tuesday, where he insisted he was really really really serious about harrying Congress into finally pricing carbon pollution. But Klein is not optimistic either:
Good stuff. The problem is that he waited so long to make this pivot that he's now doing it from a place of relative weakness rather than strength.
As one would expect, there is lots of spillage from the New York Times blog factory. At Green, John Collins Rudolf dips into how the spill has spoiled researchers' plans for a return study of one of the largest coral reefs in the Gulf. Their lemonade is the opportunity for studying instead how a massive release of oil and chemicals a mile underwater affects deep-sea life.
Rudolf also rounds up links to other spillage, notably a BP employee charging that animal deaths are being downplayed. Soon to be an ex-employee?
Not that BP is such a great place to work these days. The US Justice Department has launched a formal criminal investigation into the spill and its causes. Partly as a result, BP shares continue downward, and the Great Beyond reports speculation that the company may not survive. This would be very bad news for retirees as well as BP employees, since BP dividends reportedly account for nearly 17% of Brit pension income. That's wallet-shock, all right, but it's hard to see how it's a shock that would favor environmental causes.
THE OIL SPILL IN SPACE AND TIME. The scale of the thing grows more and more incomprehensible, but you can make it less so by going to (invalid link) software developer Andy Lintner's free site, which will automagically plop the graphic depicting the daily extent of the spill into your own backyard. Very unnerving, guaranteed. Also unnerving is this reminder that Google Maps knows exactly where I am. You, too. Google also knows the whereabouts of Aimee Whitcroft at the New Zealand data blog Visibly Shaken and Sarah Wheaton at Green, both of whom steered me to the site. Also the >quarter-million other folks that Wheaton says have visited. Also, presumably, all other 'Netizens. Brrrr.
You can pretty much count on fresh oil spillage, and often blood spillage too, every time you visit Joe Romm's Climate Progress. Also lots of comments. Romm has a strong political point of view (left/progressive/tree-hugging}, but he backs up his polemics with data, often culled from obscure academic and government reports and investigations by other progressive sources. Like this one, based on work by Rebecca Lefton at the Center for American Progress, countering the claim that the BP disaster is Obama's Katrina. Wrong villain, both Romm and Lefton say. The BP disaster is Dick Cheney's Katrina. Their argument is that the oil spill is the product of under-the-radar maneuverings to loosen regulatory controls over the oil industry during Cheney's two terms as vice-president. A detailed chronology begins in 2001 and runs through 2008.
ROUNDING UP THE SCIENCE OF THE OIL SPILL. ScienceInsider is pulling together a growing package on the science of the oil spill with new stuff pretty much every day. It's organized around topics like the fate of the oil, life on the sea floor, marine life, and coastal ecosystems, and there's plenty of policy too.
As I write comes the report that ("At Last") the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is planning a web site that will gather up data and other information collected by all the federal agencies working on the spill. That would be a useful tool for us. Not at all clear when it will actually happen, however, because an interagency task force has been formed to coordinate and do quality control. Not that coordination and quality control aren't essential, but the term "interagency task force" does not connote celerity.
Speaking of celerity, the National Science Foundation is handing out "rapid response" grants to scientists studying the spill. One has gone to the gorgeously named marine scientist Samantha Joye. She and colleagues from the University of Georgia have taken their research vessel near the spill site to study its effects on microbes. They will be returning this weekend, but in the meantime you can read about their work at Joye's sedately titled Gulf Oil Blog. They seem to have resisted any urge to call it The Joye of Oil Spills.
AND WE'LL ALL LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER. Now for two items that will strike you, I hope, as outlandish, horrifying, or both.
First we turn to the most extreme proposals for dealing with BP's continuing failure to plug the leak: Just give up and bomb the damn thing. And if we really want to show the leak who's boss, do the bombing with nuclear weapons.
The Administration quickly ruled the nuclear option out (whew!) for a variety of reasons. Not least of which, I imagine, was public relations.
One of Discover's always provocative bloggers, Sheril Kirshenbaum at The Intersection, posted briefly that nukes didn't strike her as so far-fetched, thus successfully stimulating a string of comments. [I can't wait until the NASW site accepts comments. Then I can just toss off a few carelessly controversial sentences and get you guys to do most of the work.]
Revkin reports that BP has also ruled out an alternative to the nuclear option, conventional explosives. Although he (and I) wonder if its unbroken string of failures and its increasingly precarious financial position (to say nothing of what is doubtless near-insupportable frustration) mightn't drive the company to reconsider.
But our second item may be even more tragic than bombing the oil leak back to the Stone Age (or, rather, the Dino Age) from whence it came. At the Wall Steet Journal's Speakeasy blog, Gabriel Kahn reports that movie director James Cameron has volunteered to pull together all the deep-sea experts he knows from his years of making "Titanic" to solve the problem that has stymied BP's engineers.
But that's not the tragic part. The tragic part is that, in its desperation, the Environmental Protection Agency took Cameron up on his offer. EPA set up his requested meeting and even included other government agencies.
According to Matthew Daly at the Huffington Post:
More than 20 scientists, engineers and technical experts attended the meeting, which also included representatives of the Energy Department, Coast Guard and National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Other organizations represented at the gathering included the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute; Oceanographic Institute at Harbor Branch, Florida Atlantic University; University of California at Santa Barbara; Nuytco Research Limited; World Wildlife Fund; and the University of California at Berkeley.
I assume nothing will come of this. Except, of course, a bonanza for The Daily Show.
Let's hope I don't have to eat my words. Consider that a movie star became one of our most popular Presidents. Could it be that this is another example of real life imitating the Hollywood version? (Or perhaps real life imitating Restoration Comedy? One of the heroines of this tale is, after all, named Samantha Joye.) Maybe a movie director really can rewrite the script and fix this environmental disaster?
Why not? They've tried pretty much everything else. Except nukes.
So far.
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