Off the Deep End

The Department of the Interior, which regulates the use of publicly owned land and resources, is handing out new licenses to drill in deep water in the Gulf of Mexico. You remember last year, when an oil rig exploded and killed 11 people, and for months millions upon millions of barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf?  Yeah, they’re starting that up again. In fact, they are going even deeper.

Now, why would the government decide that oil companies are cool to start doing the same work that killed 11 people and created a huge environmental disaster (kinda like the nuclear disaster happening in Japan, but in the ocean) just about a year ago? It can only be in response to an investigation into the very safety of deeper-water drilling as an industry, where the Dept. of the Interior decides that all the necessary steps have been (and are being) taken to assure that a repeat of the Deepwater Horizon disaster won’t occur. Right?

Of course not. For one thing, the nuclear disaster in Japan has made it clear that no amount of safety preparation guarantees protection from disaster. Planes still crash. Nuclear meltdowns can happen. Mother Nature is a bitch and we cannot control her.  “That’s why there’s AllState” that handsome black guy from 24 would say. There are, however, ways to decrease the likelihood of a disaster, or at least to mitigate the horrors that follow. That means we take precautions until the point at which we assume an appropriate level of risk.

The Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill wasn’t “supposed to happen.” There was a piece of equipment called a “blowout preventer” that completely failed to prevent a blowout. Now, after investigating the matter, the Department of the Interior reveals that blowout preventers themselves have an inherent design flaw that makes them unreliable. So, in an emergency, when blow-out preventers are supposed to seal off the well, they won’t. It’s like having a fire break out in your house, grabbing the extinguisher, and having confetti come shooting out. It made you feel safe knowing it was there when there was no emergency, but you’re screwed once the shit hits the fan.

We now know that the Deepwater Horizon event was not a single incident, but an industry-wide safety deficiency. So why are we handing out drilling permits again and, even more strangely, requiring the use of blowout preventers we know don’t work? Isn’t it irresponsible to return oil rig workers to platforms that run the exact same risk of exploding the way the Deepwater Horizon did? It seems ridiculous, but there actually is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this.

In any number of endeavors, a certain level of danger is acceptable so long as the job gets done. Drilling for oil isn’t something we do for sport. We need oil. Our civilization runs on it. So what if blowout preventers don’t work, it’s symbolic anyway, because let’s be honest: There is a certain amount of tragedy we as a society choose to live with every day. Most of our energy comes from coal-powered plants and coal miners die all the time. We like to think not so often here in the United States, but it happens just the same. At the very least, breathing in all that coal dust for years is terrible for you, but people do it for their whole lives. There are lots of dirty, dangerous jobs out there, the most obvious one serving in the military.

Also keep in mind; people die all the time whether by murder, car accident, gun violence, drone strike, malaria, cancer, or just plain bad luck. We can’t stop it, although we sure do try to stave off the inevitable for as long as possible.  It’s a little nihilist, to be sure, but we’re talking about how this stuff works now, not how we’d like it to.

Requiring that blowout preventers actually do the thing their very name indicates they are supposed to would ultimately mean one thing: no more deep-water drilling. It is inherently unsafe to dig holes into pressurized chemical-reserves deep inside the earth’s crust. The industry can (and will) always fall back on the excuse that it is impossible to prepare for every worst-case-scenario and that doing so would make drilling cost-prohibitive. And, boy, we sure do want that oil. Humans don’t quit doing what we have to to get what we think we need just because bad things happen as a direct result. Hell, we don’t “need” to go into space but we find it worthwhile enough and aren’t deterred when a space shuttle or two disintegrates. We won’t stop exploring space, and we won’t stop exploring the oceans for oil because the society we’ve created demands it.

The government is going to do what it has to in order to keep us filling our tanks and driving along apathetically in our day-to-day lives, because it assumes (rightly or wrongly) that is what we want. It sounds effectively psychopathic to suggest that regulators are willing to just write off human life, but the prospect of aggressively rising oil prices (and the economic impact that results) scares government officials into doing crazy things. If preserving our economic model means allowing oil companies to gamble on the chance of another disaster, so be it. It’s just a matter of how many people are impacted by the fallout (in some cases literally) when things go wrong. More than likely, another well will blow out and more oil rig workers will die. There could be another deluge of crude oil mucking up our habitat. As long as it’s out of sight, the status quo abides.

Drill, baby. Drill.