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Bearing out their claim to fame as "America's Finest News Source", The Onion recently reported on the latest US environmental catastrophe. It's hard to believe that the mainstream news players like Fox and CNN failed to pick this one up. According to the article, the supertanker TI Oceania docked in Louisiana last week, unloading 3.1 million barrels of dangerous crude oil into the unsuspecting country.

Experts are saying the oil tanker safely reaching port could lead to dire ecological consequences on multiple levels, including rising temperatures, disappearing shorelines, the eradication of countless species, extreme weather events, complete economic collapse, droughts that surpass the Dust Bowl, disease, wildfires, widespread human starvation, and endless, bloody wars fought over increasingly scarce resources.

Check out the whole story here - it's well worth the read!

More perspectives on the Gulf oil spill from Dmitry Orlov, author of Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects. In this post from his blog, Club Orlov, Dmitry Orlov compares the Gulf oil disaster to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion in 1986. "Translate "industrial accident" into Russian and back into English, and what you get is "technogenic catastrophe". An apt term indeed!

The drawing of parallels between industrial accidents is a dubious armchair sport, but here the parallels are just piling up and are becoming too hard to ignore:

* An explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 spewed radioactive waste across Europe

* A recent explosion and sinking of BP's Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform is spewing heavy oil into the Gulf of Mexico

These accidents were both quite spectacular. At Chernobyl, the force of the explosion, caused by superheated steam inside the reactor, tossed the 2500-tonne reactor lid 10-14 meters into the air where it twirled like a tossed penny and came to rest back on the wrecked reactor. The cloud of superheated vapor then separated into a large volume of hydrogen gas, which detonated, demolishing the reactor building and adjoining structures. At Deepwater Horizon, a blowout of a recently completed oil well sent an uncontrolled burst of oil and gas, pressurized to over 10,000 psi by the 25000-foot depth of the well, up to the drilling platform, where it detonated, causing a fire. The rig then sank, and came to rest in a heap of wreckage on top of the oil well, which continues to spew at least 200,000 gallons of oil a day. Left unchecked, this would amount to 1.7 million barrels of oil per year, for an indefinite duration. This amount of oil may be enough to kill off or contaminate all marine life within the Gulf of Mexico, to foul the coastline throughout the Gulf and, thanks to the Gulf Stream, through much of the Eastern Seaboard, at least to Cape Hatteras in North Carolina and possibly beyond. A few tarballs will probably wash up as far north as Greenland.

The Chernobyl disaster was caused more or less directly by political appointeesm: the people in charge of the reactor control room had no background in nuclear reactor operations or nuclear chemistry, having got their jobs through the Communist Party. They attempted a dangerous experiment, executed it incompetently, and the result was an explosion and a meltdown. The Deepwater Horizon disaster will perhaps be found to have similar causes. BP, which leased and operated Deepwater Horizon, is chaired by one Carl-Henric Svanberg—a man with no experience in the oil industry. The people who serve on the boards of directors of large companies tend to see management as a sort of free-floating skill, unrelated to any specific field or industry, rather similarly to how the Soviet Communist party thought of and tried to use the talents of its cadres. Allegations are already circulating that BP drilled to a depth of 25000 feet while being licensed to drill up to 18000 feet, that safety reviews of technical documents had been bypassed, and that key pieces of safety equipment were not installed in order to contain costs. It will be interesting to see whether the Deepwater Horizon disaster, like the Chernobyl disaster before it, turns out to be the direct result of management decisions made by technical incompetents.

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This just in from Richard Heinberg, author of Blackout, Peak Everything, The Oil Depletion Protocol, The Party's Over and Powerdown. Richard shares his invaluable Peak Oil perspective on the situation in the Gulf. Thanks Richard!

Deepwater Horizon: This Is What the End of the Oil Age Looks Like

Lately I’ve been reading the excellent coverage of the Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil spill at The Oil Drum, a site frequented by veteran oil geologists and engineers. A couple of adages from the old-timers are worth quoting: “Cut corners all you want, but never downhole,” and, “There’s fast, there’s cheap, and there’s right, and you get to pick two.”

There will be plenty of blame to go around, as events leading up to the fatal rig explosion are sorted out. Even if efforts to plug the gushing leak succeed sooner rather than later, the damage to the Gulf environment and to the economy of the region will be incalculable and will linger for years if not decades. The deadly stench from oil-soaked marshes — as spring turns to hot, fetid summer — will by itself ruin tens or hundreds of thousands of lives and livelihoods. Then there’s the loss of the seafood industry: we’re talking about more than the crippling of the economic backbone of the region; anyone who’s spent time in New Orleans (my wife’s family all live there) knows that the people and culture of southern Louisiana are literally as well as figuratively composed of digested crawfish, shrimp, and speckled trout. Given the historic political support from this part of the country for offshore drilling, and for the petroleum industry in general, this really amounts to sacrificing the faithful on the altar of oil.

But the following should be an even clearer conclusion from all that has happened, and that is still unfolding: This is what the end of the oil age looks like. The cheap, easy petroleum is gone; from now on, we will pay steadily more and more for what we put in our gas tanks — more not just in dollars, but in lives and health, in a failed foreign policy that spawns foreign wars and military occupations, and in the lost integrity of the biological systems that sustain life on this planet.

The only solution is to do proactively, and sooner, what we will end up doing anyway as a result of resource depletion and economic, environmental, and military ruin: end our dependence on the stuff. Everybody knows we must do this. Even a recent American president (an oil man, it should be noted) admitted that “America is addicted to oil.” Will we let this addiction destroy us, or will we overcome it? Good intentions are not enough. Now is the moment for the President, other elected officials at all levels of government, and ordinary citizens to make this our central priority as a nation. We have hard choices to make, and an enormous amount of work to do.

The oil is washing ashore now in Louisiana - for some heartbreaking images of the end of the age of oil, check out the Boston Globe's The Big Picture.

     

     

Geri Hall and Gavin Crawford from CBC's wonderful This Hour Has 22 Minutes give you some great greenwashing tips for how to distract yourself from thinking about the recent gulf oil disaster. Surprisingly, or perhaps, sadly, not surprisingly, this video was made months ago.

Or, if you prefer your analysis a little more in-depth and less tongue in cheek, check out the Post Caron Institutes' 12 Fresh Angles on the Gulf Coast Oil Splll, Neatly Packaged. Post Carbon has called on the expertise and insight of its fellows, including New Society Publishers' authors Richard Heinberg, Stephanie Mills and Anthony Perl, to provide some alternative thoughts about what is going on in the Gulf of Mexico.

     

The Post Carbon Institute launched the first of a series of interviews they will be hosting on their media library entitled the “Post Carbon Exchange”. Post Carbon Institute Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg talks with Lester Brown, Founder of the Earth Policy Institute, about hopeful developments in alternative energy, as well as the importance of Brown's updated path toward a sustainable future, "Plan B 4.0". Lester Brown gives several examples of developments on the renewable energy front that we could not have imagined even a year or two ago. Large scale renewable energy developments are being undertaken world wide stimulated by the private sector, not governments. You can listen to entire interview at the Post Carbon Institute.

Richard Heinberg has written several books on Peak Oil, including Peak Everything: Waking up to the Century of Declines and most recently, Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis.