British Petroleum (BP) Saves the Planet?

The entire world population needed a wake-up call! Liberals, Conservatives, "tree-huggers", the "drill baby drill" crowd, and others alike: everyone that uses energy needs to feel some personal "ownership" in the Gulf-Coast oil spill disaster that puts British Petroleum (BP) on center stage in the ongoing story of human consumption and the resulting waste we produce. BP, Haliburton, Transocean, Anadarko Petroleum, the blowout-valve manufacturer, etc. are all just small players in the real story of our addiction to fossil-fuel energy, but perhaps we can thank them for all contributing to the alarm that rang a month ago and continues to ring loud and clear every day since.

Magnitude Matters

History has repeatedly shown that we humans can not engage in large-scale change without a nearly catastrophic event to bring us together. And, even then, we resist change due to politics and financial interests, even when a particular course of action seems so incredibly logical and beneficial.

Some examples of recent:

• 9/11/2001 : nearly a decade later, and we still have completely porous borders and remain essentially clueless about who or what enters our country (illegally, especially). Calls to secure the border after 9/11 still go mostly unanswered and have predictably evolved into a contentious debate that marginalizes the fundamental issue of National security.
  
• The banking meltdown. Although it appears some type of "financial reforms" will be implemented soon to address underlying causes of the meltdown, you can count on any regulations to be watered down and allow for plenty of loopholes and future financial "innovations" capable of circumventing regulatory intention and bringing about another crisis.
• Dare I say it?: Global Warming. The crisis -- both the environmental reality and the poorly chosen moniker to represent the changes occurring to the worldwide environment -- is real and substantially threatens our future. Yet, it is of course "debatable" because financial and political interests have made it so.
  

We Need to Compress Time
to Make Logical Decisions
and Avoid Other Pending Catastrophes
What do I mean by this? Simply put: what seems "OK" to each of us over a long period of time would seem catastrophic if compressed into a short period of time. Here are some examples:

• Fossil-Fuel emissions in general: why are we all "OK" with breathing the exhaust fumes of cars, trucks, buses, factories, chemical plants, mills, etc? Simply put: because the concentrations do not cause *immediate* problems for us in general (aside from the fact that ANY exposure to pollutants raises the risk of heart disease and death). If we stored up fossil-fuel emissions for even a month or two around any major city, and then instantly released them over a period of just minutes, the concentrations would likely kill everyone in the vicinity. Yet, we all accept our own emissions as "OK" or a "necessary evil", whether sourced at the tailpipe or at a coal-powered recharging station. And yes, it is OUR demand for petroleum products that makes drilling for oil a requirement: so, we are all to blame for what happens in the Gulf.
  
• Garbage: what may be considered an "acceptable" per-household average weekly waste-stream of a few garbage-bags per week turns into mountains of trash per year for even a small neighborhood. Again, compressing time and demonstrating to everyone, by way of a giant pile in their driveway, how much their waste adds up to in a year (or two or ten) needs to happen or we will never address the issue. Recycling helps, but needs to become a near-100% solution or we are going to bury the world in garbage. Much of what you dispose of every week is petroleum-based (plastics, etc) that again drove demand for oil and drilling -- take ownership of the matter.
  
• Depletion of our aquifers and water supplies: what seems like a gradual decline in fresh-water supplies would seem astonishingly scary if compressed into a period of just days or weeks. Again, we accept the demise of our water supply because it happens slowly by our individual standards). Clean-water shortages will very likely lead to the great dust-bowls of the 21st century. Much of this depletion has to do with farming, and that farming uses petroleum-based fertilizers to ensure fast crop-growth: we all enjoy the harvested foods, and again we are all to blame for further oil demands.
  
• Degradation and depletion of arable lands throughout the world. An explosion in human population coupled with the ravaging effects of human development, are quickly causing soil erosion and a mass reduction in cropland. But, again, it happens "slowly" from our individual perspectives. Even time-lapse pictures of such things do not convince us to make substantial changes.
• Acidification and de-oxygenation of the oceans (aka "dead-zones"): these are things that, long before the recent massive oil spill in the gulf, are jeopardizing sea-life on a mass scale in the Gulf and throughout world oceans. We have depleted stocks of larger fish everywhere with species like Blue-Fin tuna and others being pushed to the brink of extinction, but yet we do little about it because is it happening "slowly" (it is happening VERY fast in reality, but again, people need to see it happen in minutes in order to grasp it... especially in this modern attention-deficit sound-byte multi-tasking world we live in). And, if you think that you do not contribute to these ocean dead-zones, think again: see above about fertilizers for farming... and, if you use the petroleum-based fertilizers and/or chemicals on your own yard, you have not only increased demand for oil, but have also contributed to the ocean dead-zones long before the Gulf oil spill. Are restaurant owners going to sue all of us for a lack of cheap seafood supply due to dead-zones in the ocean? (and if so, does each owner not use fertilizers themselves and/or not consume foods grown with dead-zone causing fertilizers?)
  
• The list goes on...
  

Avoid Redirection and Distraction
Beware of opportunists selling "solutions" that will lead to other obvious disasters in the future... ones that we will not address until an event of substantial magnitude - like the Gulf oil spill disaster - occur respective to each. One that greatly concerns me is the "Clean Coal" industry and its push to exploit this moment of oil-industry failure to press forward with its own agenda for fossil-fuel sales.

What will it take to derail "clean coal"? I can not help thinking that the industry will succeed in selling its wares thanks to opportunism, marketing and lobbying, further pushing the atmospheric CO2 density higher and/or until the headlines read: "Massive CO2 leak from carbon-sequestration storage kills thousands". You will be able to thank the "clean coal" (great label; absolute falsehood) initiatives for this one when it occurs. Carbon-sequestration (also non-existent in production currently), should it ever be employed as a "solution", will require pumping enormous concentrations of CO2 underground into old oil wells or other sub-surface repositories. They will leak. Period. We will be told it is a safe method of storing CO2, just like the oil-wells and their long-term general record of being "safe". But, when one suddenly expels a giant plume of CO2 that settles in over a populated area, killing tens of thousands, maybe then the notion of "clean coal" will finally be dismissed.

But for now, the opportunists in the coal industry see the BP/Transocean/Haliburton event as a great way to sell their version of an energy "solution" to the masses. Never mind the piles of coal-ash already stacked up around the country waiting to destroy towns (oh wait: that did happen already when a toxic coal ash pond burst and flooded a town; I guess we are to forget that one quickly since the magnitude was not great enough to force substantial change!)

We need to stop our self-destructive behavior and learn from the lessons that have occurred.

BP Can Help Save the Planet
IF WE LET THEM
So, how is BP going to help us all? First of all, the magnitude of the disaster that just happened to befall them (and Haliburton, Anadarko, Transocean, etc) first (Exxon Valdez aside) is perhaps large enough and widespread enough to really start to swing public opinion to the point that the "drill baby drill" crowd realizes that although there are merits to drilling and oil production, substantial risk also accompanies those activities (just like the piles of coal-ash around the country that sit poised for more disasters). Those risks can, and will, affect nearly everyone in the country when a large enough disaster happens - without regard to whether people were for or against drilling. Plenty of "pro drilling" families are certainly going to see their own livelihoods impacted from this event, just as the "anti drilling" families are. Perhaps this fact alone is enough to start building consensus regarding a shift toward much safer and sustainable alternative energy avenues.

The "green" energy people also need to acknowledge that their plight was nearly hopeless without an event of the likes we are witnessing now. Public sentiment, sad to say, can only be shifted en masse through events of this magnitude. The ecological destruction in the short term may pale in comparison to the destruction that could take place on a non-time-compressed scale over the next century or more if we do not all wake up and start making serious moves toward wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and the like (and ween ourselves off fossil-fuels).

One thing that many people may find somewhat ironic is how BP plc (ADR) is one of the largest Solar players worldwide (see the BP Solar Web site) and has a substantial presence in Wind Energy as well (see BP Wind Power web page). As a company, BP has grown its alternative energy business rapidly over the past decade. For some time, they were heavily promoting themselves as "Beyond Petroleum", though their core business certainly remains oil (and oil produces the bulk of their operating profits). Perhaps this event will push BP even further into alternative energy (once their cash-flow can be redirected from cleanup efforts); but, even after all of what has transpired in the Gulf, we need to all push our elected officials to make the transition to solar/wind as enticing and viable as possible (through continued and/or additional targeted and massive tax-credits and incentives : both personal and business taxes). Let's reward companies for moving aggressively into cleaner energy technologies, even if we have to fund such rewards by disincentivising oil consumption through further taxes on petroleum products.

BP has immense resources and experience that will undoubtedly be further focused on improving safety and developing new emergency-response techniques and technologies. The methods they come up with to address this current crisis will certainly benefit other oil companies over the long-run, since oil is not going away any time soon, and another crisis will probably emerge over the coming decades while we still rely on oil. BP has been forced into a position of learning-on-the-fly, and will also probably need to evolve oil-removal and mitigation methods during the cleanup phase of this catastrophe too. The demand for breakthroughs in oil-cleanup technology may actually speed the arrival of what would otherwise never happen (i.e., demand drives supply; exceptional demand drives innovation and supply at a faster pace). Talk of biological and bacteriological methods for cleanup are already ramping up. We (all) need these type of advancements not just for the near-term cleanup, but to ensure we have some type of insurance-policy against future spills (which will happen somewhere, as long as well all rely on oil).

The magnitude of the Gulf oil spill will force some level of change throughout the industry, but even with the scale of this event, I fully expect that our reliance on petroleum and fossil-fuels will only continue to grow. We are addicted to "cheap" energy as a population, as we ignore the immense costs (especially deferred and indirect costs - like cleanup and health implications) associated with this otherwise "cheap" energy in order to justify its use over much cleaner and safer sources of energy: solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, and others.

The fact is: we all needed a severe reason to consider the ramifications of consuming oil, gasoline, and petroleum products in general. BP and the other companies involved in this Gulf disaster gave us all more than enough reason to really think hard about what our current national (and worldwide) energy strategy is exposing us to. Let's take this opportunity to avert long-term disaster and make the shift to clean alternatives sooner rather than later -- we have the resources, the workforce, the technology... what are we waiting for? If we do not change our ways now, we cannot blame BP (British Petroleum), we can only blame ourselves.