Hullabaloo

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

 
If You Can't See it, It Isn't Happening

by digby

I had been wondering about this. It's seemed as though the Gulf spill wasn't getting the kind of coverage it merits, but I didn't know if it was just me. Apparently not:

A few comments. The Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 obviously got an enormous amount of coverage, but it's striking that even incidents like the 1978 Amoco Cadiz accident off the coast of France got far more coverage than the current BP spill. (Brulle focused on nightly network coverage because, he points out, that's still the biggest driver of public opinion in the country—after all, only a very small subset of people read the Times.)

The reporter,Brad Plumer, notes that some of this is because the pictures aren't there -- not enough dead birds and fish to make people understand how huge this is. I'm sure that's part of it. And it isn't an accident:

Now, part of the explanation here is that BP has been quite deft at managing appearances. For one, they're using hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemical dispersants to break up the oil before it can reach the beaches, causing it to sink down to the sea floor. In some cases, these dispersants could be more harmful, ecologically speaking, then letting the oil wash ashore. We don't know what's in these chemicals and there's a very high potential that they could do a lot of damage to the food chain in the Gulf. Indeed, that's why Exxon was constrained from using dispersants in Prince William Sound back in 1989. But, from BP's perspective (and the Obama administration's), avoiding the sort of graphic imagery that Exxon had to deal with in Alaska seems appealing.

Right. That was undoubtedly their main concern. Unfortunately:

The chemical dispersants being used to break up the oil leaking into the gulf following the explosion of British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig have the potential to cause just as much, if not more, harm to the environment and the humans coming into contact with it than the oil possibly would if left untreated.

That is the warning of toxicology experts, led by Dr. William Sawyer, addressing the Gulf Oil Disaster Recovery Group, a group of lawyers working to protect the rights and interests of environmental groups and persons affected by the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The group represents the United Fishermen's Association and the Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN), among others.

Various publications from the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council show that baseline data on the environmental and ecologic fate of petroleum spills and their effects in the marine environment is substantially deficient, said Dr. Sawyer. The lack of substantial research in these areas makes many of the decision-making processes pertaining to successful major spill containment and remediation rife with speculation.

The ongoing discharge of petroleum from the BP site, with a concurrent substantial use of surface and deep-water dispersants, demonstrates an environmental release of toxicants into the marine, marsh and beach environments in an unprecedented way, said Lead Counsel Stuart Smith for Gulf Oil Disaster Recovery Group. Mr. Smith was the first to challenge British Petroleum on the failure of its cofferdam cap on the DEEPWATER HORIZON and has won two successful injunctions requiring British Petroleum to respect fishermen's legal rights and protect their health in all areas impacted by the Gulf oil spill.

These dispersants are the environmental equivalent of tasers. They may be killers, but the don't leave marks and that's all that matters.

We are a nation of cover-up artists. And most people are good with that because the scope of the disasters we are confronting are overwhelming. But you can't hide from this level of failure anymore. It's building and building on itself, which is why there is a growing sense of social unrest. Leadership is required to help people understand what's happening and it isn't happening.

Update: And then there's this.



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digby 5/11/2010 05:00:00 PM |