BP oil spill: A teachable moment?

“I want to really challenge the idea that we can’t move into renewable energy sources a lot faster. We put a man on the moon pretty fast…What is really sad now is that Obama is not using this moment as a teachable moment to bring the country together.” – Arianna Huffington (on KCRW’s Left, Right, and Center).


The challenge President Obama faces, if this is indeed a teachable moment, is what to teach.

I took the liberty of drafting a speech for President Obama a while ago. He chose not to use mine, but you can see what might have been.

Draft: “Our Energy Future”


My fellow Americans, I know there’s a Boston-L.A. playoff game on tonight and you want to see it and not me on the screen so I will be brief.

I have heard the talk about America’s need to use this moment to decrease our dependence on the burning of fossil fuels. That we if can put a man on the moon, certainly we can put science to work to develop ways to put oil, coal, and other fossil fuels into the dustbin of history.

The BP (BP stands for “Bad Planning”) disaster has quite literally placed a black mark on our environmental record for offshore drilling. Oil continues to spew from a pipe a mile underwater. Birds and turtles are already washing ashore covered in oil. Fish die by the score. Shrimpers, oystermen, and fishermen  can’t work. In all, it will cost billions in lost revenue and cleanup. This is the second largest spill into the Gulf of Mexico. It’s a big mucking deal.

Therefore, I am declaring the affected coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida disaster areas and as such they are entitled to federal funds for help. I’ll be sending BP the bill to reimburse the costs.

Offshore oil drilling carries risks, but risk also comes with other forms of energy. Ever since humans climbed out of the trees and used fire to cook their food, warm themselves and ward off animals they’ve recognized the dual nature of energy: using it carried risks and rewards. Over time we learned to use other forms of energy. Through the ages, humankind has worked toward more getting more power from smaller packages until we succeeded in harnessing the power of the atom.

Let me be clear: getting free of petroleum by 2050 using renewable energy sources like wind and solar ain’t going to happen. Expecting renewable energy to grab a greater share of production over the next 30 to 40 years when it has declined over the past 60 years, despite tens of billions in subsidies, is wishful thinking.

Let’s consider wind turbines popping up on hillsides like toadstools. Every state and every country that has tried wind turbines has learned they do not lower carbon dioxide emissions while also being poor investments that hurt their economies. Wind requires massive subsidies and erases more than two jobs for every one wind power job created. That is a recipe for failure.

My fellow Americans, math, chemistry and the laws of physics are stubbornly non-partisan. They care not a whit whether you are conservative or liberal, right or left, green or tutti-frutti. The Energy Information Administration released projections on the Waxman-Markey “American Clean Energy and Security Act” that passed in the House of Representatives last June; if our nation adopts the bill’s 25 percent renewable power electricity standard, the EIA estimated carbon dioxide reduction of a paltry 4.9 percent. This does not cut the mustard.

Natural gas and nuclear power plants are magnitudes more efficient than wind or solar, while emitting far less carbon than coal. So, in the future, we’re going to move toward natural gas and nuking the renewables. Nuclear energy is safe, reliable, and proven technology that works now, not a century from now. Let us invoke the ancient prophecy of Isaiah and “turn our swords into plowshares” and use nuclear energy for the good of our nation and our planet.

Thank you, God bless America, and Go Celtics!

The speech is a pipedream on my part; obviously the low power density approaches of wind, solar, and ethanol will reap huge subsidies in the wake of Blunder Petroleum’s accident. Robert Bryce, managing editor for the Energy Tribune sums up the choice this way: “(Political leaders) want to replace high power density sources that are dispatchable, reliable, and relatively low cost with low power density sources that are not dispatchable, highly variable, and high cost. This makes no sense. I’d call it insane but it’d be an insult to crazy people.”

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Reference and Source material:


Bentek Energy, “HOW LESS BECAME MORE…Wind, Power and Unintended Consequences in the Colorado Energy Market (http://ipams.org/wp-content/uploads/BENTEKStudy_How_Less_Became_More.pdf)
Congressional Budget Office. “How Policies to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions Could Affect Employment “


David L. Greene and Paul N. Leiby, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, “Oil Independence: Realistic Goal or Empty Slogan?” (http://lugar.senate.gov/energy/links/commentary/08_greene_full.cfm)

Carl Mortishead and Angela Jameson, Times online, “Green energy levy would add £20 to bills”

C. le Pair & K. de Groot, “The impact of wind generated electricity on fossil fuel consumption” (http://www.clepair.net/windefficiency.html)

Hugh Sharman and Henrik Meyer, CEPOS: Center for Politiske Studier. “Wind Energy – The Case of Denmark.” (http://www.cepos.dk/fileadmin/user_upload/Arkiv/PDF/Wind_energy_-_the_case_of_Denmark.pdf)

US Energy Information Administration, “Energy Market and Economic Impacts of H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009” (http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/hr2454/execsummary.html)

US Energy Information Administration, “International Energy Statistics.” (http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/iedindex3.cfm?tid=5&pid=54&aid=2&cid=&syid=1989&eyid=2009&unit=TBPD)

Matt Ridley – A Rational Optimist

Last April I posted about how the earth had improved since the first Earth Day. At the end of the post is a poll about whether, after reading the post, the reader was optimistic, pessimistic, or ambivalent about the future. Overwhelmingly, people were (and apparently, are) pessimistic about the future of the earth. Matt Ridley, a former science writer for the Economist, has written a book, The Rational Optimist, saying that this overwrought litany of doom is misplaced because our ideas “have sex.”

BP – Beyond Perspective

Since man discovered fire, we have learned that any form of energy production holds risk. Fire cooked our food, lit the night so the wild animals stayed away, kept us warm, removed old vegetation at the end of the hunting season so that new growth would attract game in the coming spring. Fire also burned our skin and destroyed our homes. Every form of energy–wind, solar, hydro, nuclear and others–carries its unique downsides. Drilling carries the risk of oil spills. In BP’s case, oil spews from a pipe a mile underwater. Waterfowl and turtles wash ashore. Fish die by the score. Fishermen can’t work. In all, it is a mess that will cost billions in lost revenue and cleanup of catastrophic proportion.

Things look bad in the Gulf of Mexico. You might summarize editorials about British Petroleum’s (BP) Deepwater Horizon accident and spill: The gulf is dying! The gulf is dying!

No, it’s not. There have been bigger spills in the last 40 years. Oil has spilled into the ocean before: naturally, accidentally, and on purpose.

BP’s rig was still afire when the inevitable question about drilling on the continental shelf surfaced: Is it worth the risk? The short answer is yes.

The BP spill fiasco is a big gooey deal, yet if this spill behaves as all the other spills have, the setback will be temporary and not the end of the vegetation, wildlife, tourism, seafood, or anything else in the gulf. The states along the gulf coast should be back to normal within a year after experts plug the leak.

Consider the biggest spill in history: The 1991 Persian Gulf oil spill. Saddam Hussein ordered the destruction of the Kuwaiti oil fields and had the valves opened at the oil terminal near Kuwait City, dumping between six and eight million barrels of oil into the Persian Gulf. Greenpeace and others predicted “unprecedented” destruction of fragile ecological services and possibly large-scale extinctions. Similar fears are being voiced now. “We may well be living with the consequences of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill for the rest of the 21st century,” wrote James Gibson in a recent Press-Democrat editorial. Professor Gibson, who teaches sociology at Cal State Long Beach, may be right about the social consequences. Yet if history holds he should miss the mark for the environmental consequences by 89 years. The effects shouldn’t last two years, let alone until 2100.

Just one year after the largest marine oil spill in human history, a team of researchers from the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission at Unesco found little lasting damage to the coral and fisheries in the affected area. The area’s animal life was in better shape than even the most optimistic pundits had predicted. The oil had evaporated, broken up and had been digested by microbes, or formed annoying bits of tar.

One year is a long time and damage is occurring, but the harm is not as lasting as the current frenzy would lead us to believe. In the meantime, President Obama has appointed a commission to investigate the cause of the spill and recommend fixes. The “National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling” will do what commissions always do: Convene, look solemn, hear testimony, write a report that no one will read because the effects will have already passed.

We’ve seen this drama before but, like my father who had dementia, have forgotten the ending. So we worry about the future. The answer to the question of whether we should drill or not drill is only nominally political. It’s primarily economics: Follow the money. We vote with our wallets. Now we might not allow the drilling in our backyard, but that hardly is the point. We need our energy fix. Get it from the North Sea or Nigeria, but get it. In the meantime, as we watch endless loops of oily birds, remember this: the gooey mess is not permanent.

Weekend Postcard from Puerto Rico

This is from the Christmas season, 2002. We wanted someplace exotic that we wouldn’t need to have passports and visas for. So for Americans that’s Hawai’i and Peurto Rico (I assume Guam too, but that was too far). Since it was Christmas time, San Juan International Airport plays some of the cheesiest holiday music on earth. Los Angeles International is runner-up.

Science Isn’t Enough: A Forester’s Search for Truth

 

A presentation on 10 February 2010, by William W. Keye (of the California Licensed Foresters Association) given at the UC/USFS Pre- and Post Wildfire Conference.
You may get the PDF version (with the visuals) of his talk here: http://ucanr.org/sites/Prepostwildfire/files/3765.pdf

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In looking over the agenda preparing for this talk I must tell you that I have little confidence in science to put us on the right path as far as what to do about our public forests and whether they should be managed or not. This is not a criticism of science, or academia: please don’t take it that way.

But there are plenty of people with agendas that can conjure science to say what they believe. It’s not supposed to be like that, but neither is there supposed to be superstition, repression and genocide, or demagoguery.

As a young forester I had more confidence in science to settle things. But I’m an older forester now. I have witnessed great upheaval in federal forest management, including a sort of mass hysteria or lesser holocaust. It has been driven to some extent by science, yes, but from my perspective to a much larger degree by perception, values, trust and the lack thereof. So that’s what I think is most important to talk about today. I think we need to be honest about where we are at, and why. I beg you to consider these thoughts.

The Forest Service used to have a clear mission, which included getting the wood out. My profession of forestry was resistant to change in the 1960s and 1970s. After all, the greatest generation came back victorious from World War II, hit the books under the GI Bill, graduated from forestry school and knew how to manage our national forests very well, thank you very much. Even age management on public lands was taken too far, and then it was too late to go back.

Gifford Pinchot
Gifford Pinchot (Image via Wikipedia)

A new force had seized control of the land, animated by a different sort of zeal, demanding purity. Given the revolutionary dynamics it was no longer acceptable to simply reduce forest management intensity. The timber beast needed to be declawed, an industry dismantled, people in timber dependent communities would have to find something else to do, thank YOU very much.

That was the 1990s.

And here we are 20 years after the pivotal and socially cathartic listing of the northern spotted owl as threatened. We don’t do even age management anymore on public lands, or even selection. We do some thinning projects, sometimes including a little bit of commercial timber Mostly we burn down our public forests and then let them go to brush. That’s our default forest management program, although no agency or elected body has ever promulgated it. It has taken shape over the last generation, mostly due to court rulings. Each individual court ruling a star, connecting them a constellation of no, don’t touch that, no it’s just too scary.

If the forest burns down, it is the will of Gaia. If it goes to brush, it is the will of Gaia. If you need science, we can get that for you.

I favor some degree of salvage logging on public lands, on a site-specific basis under the auspices of highly trained natural resource professionals, including foresters. We can use the dead trees to build or power things with, and employ lots of people. We can plant new trees and control competing brush so that the deforested site doesn’t have to wait for decades or potentially centuries for trees to come back. We don’t need to do this on every acre, nor should we (given competing management objectives), but we can do it on many if not most. I also support pre-fire fuel treatments and green timber sales to meet any number of social, ecological and economic objectives.

With management, we can engineer ecosystem resilience and diversity, high levels of carbon sequestration, bountiful recreation and wildlife habitat. We can revitalize rural communities, build schools and hospitals, support literacy and the arts.

We can celebrate the good land with dirt under our fingernails. I believe we can do all these things with our grandchildren, and theirs, in mind.

In some circles this is blasphemy, I know. Unacceptable hubris from a discredited profession.

Sustainable forestry is a non-starter for some, because it inevitably involves some amount of timber extraction, some component of touching and turning, some degree of commercial enterprise. That doesn’t sit well with Gaia, and it feels very threatening.

We can’t trust those people anyway. They just want to cut down all the trees. Let’s stick with the precautionary principle. Let’s do nothing; that feels safer.

Part of the reason the forestry pendulum has swung so far is because America has so rapidly transitioned into an urban civilization. That wasn’t the case in 1905 when Gifford Pinchot was crafting a new US Forest Service based on progressive ideas and utilitarian land management principles that had come to be called conservation. “The Greatest Good of the greatest number in the long run.”

In 1905, about half of us still lived on the farm. Think about that – living and working on a farm.
Entering the 21st Century, we find an America transformed. Many city dwellers a generation or two ago still had relatives “back on the farm”, so they knew something about mud and manure and growing and killing things for food and fiber.

That is much less common today, and the connection is fading.

And although with the current economy we may not be feeling it right now, another major factor influencing American attitudes is that since 1950 there has been a significant rise in per capita living standards and relative freedom from day to day want. This has freed up time and treasure to pursue more altruistic interests.

With people increasingly removed from the land, affluent and isolated in large population centers, it’s easy to appreciate the collapse we have seen in basic understanding of agriculture and forestry, where wood comes from, and so forth.

So today we burn down our public forests and then a highly dedicated cadre of our fellow citizens works diligently through political action, administrative appeals and litigation to try to ensure that none of the dead timber is recovered. They’ve been very successful.

In California, we now import 80% of our lumber – despite our own vast and perennially renewable timberlands – over half of which are held under federal ownership – mostly as national forests, but also in national parks and BLM lands.

Other states and foreign countries are eager to fill our appetite for forest products, and this way we don’t have to look at the stumps. We get to be Disneyland, or at least chase that level of abstraction.

Has anybody seen the movie Avatar? Isn’t the yearning for ecotopia something that constantly nags our subconscious, that fills many a dream?

It’s a wonderful fantasy, a recurring theme in art, literature and fairy tales. With Avatar, we can pretend that somewhere, somehow, maybe on another planet, there is a place where everybody has what they need and lives in pure harmony with each other and nature. Ecotopia.

And then the Colonel comes in and has to screw everything up. Kind of like Yahweh laying waste to the Garden of Eden.

So in the collective and now very urban imagination, highly sensitized to environmental threats by non-profit activists (the Avatar people, if you will), foresters and others who advocate quaint concepts like “multiple use” or “salvage logging”, “sustainable forestry” (or maybe even “reforestation”) may just be the diabolical Colonel trying to sound reasonable.

Are you going to trust him, or us?

So purity demands are fundamental: Nature has to be something more than it actually is; like it’s portrayed in some of the wonderfully romantic 19th Century landscape paintings by great American artists like Albert Bierschtadt and Thomas Cole. Nature as it ought to be.


And it has to be separate, an allegory without humans. At least not miserable creatures like us. We are definitely not worthy!

Nature separate and divine. Nice. But forced across the western landscape, outside of special preserves, I call the vision sterile, and ultimately phony. A constellation without a soul. America has strong roots in the so-called Puritan Ethic. It’s interesting to note that John Muir was raised by a maniacally religious father. If you think about 19th Century America, the push for expansion, Manifest Destiny and the pioneer ethos – there is also a dark undercurrent of genocide against native peoples. After the aboriginals had been killed or otherwise removed from the land, the conquerors (future conservationists as well as preservationists) deluded themselves that the forested landscape they had seized was somehow entirely “natural” and not the product of centuries of Native American management practices.

The closer you are to genocide or great social turbulence, the more psychologically invested in it you are – whether you realize it or not.

So here we are.

I invite you to Google DEFORESTED CONDITIONS to learn more about what is happening to our national forests in California. I hope that the spreading deforestation will soon be seen by the public for what it is. Not as the will of Gaia: Our creation, and something that we can begin to reverse whenever we are ready to have at it.

I have confidence, invoking Avatar as well, that people want trees, lush forests and diverse ecosystems for their grandchildren.

If you want healthy forests, I say talk to a forester, preferably a member of a professional organization like CLFA [California Licensed Foresters Association] or SAF [Society of American Foresters].

But you won’t do that until you trust him or her. I think the profession will get there. After being so thoroughly put down, some of it for good reason, our recovery is ongoing, but will take time. And it will only be complete when – and if – people of good will think forestry professionals have something of real value to offer the public, the American people, our fellow citizens and their Avatars too.

That’s something science can and will greatly assist with.

Truth has a way of getting out, of seeping through cracks and leveling false prophets.

America, and our Golden State, will find the courage to engage with our land once again. That is the hope I leave you with, the confidence in a more equitable and interesting future.

The role of science in policy

Spiked has, what to me is, a nuanced discussion with Professor Mike Hulme (professor of climate change in the school of environmental sciences at the University of East Anglia. He is author of Why We Disagree about Climate Change, published by Cambridge University Press.) on science and its role in informing policy.

Two quotes of Professor Hulme struck me. The first is what he see as the two different ways people view the world’s nature toward our role in climate change.

[S]ome see nature, and therefore the planet, as something that is fragile and easily dislocated. Others see that nature is actually quite robust and resilient.

The second quote is about having the wrong argument.

So I think that it’s the wider cultural phenomenon in which climate change sits that helps to explain why we’d rather argue about whether this is good science or bad science or whether a scientist is being influenced by oil companies or by environmental alarmists. We’d rather have those sorts of arguments because they seem more comforting and less challenging than arguments about the scandal of global poverty in a world of affluence, or the question of whether we can really secure unfettered capitalist growth at three per cent of GDP per annum for the next 300 years… And so the convenient arguments, the much more narrowly bounded ones about good and bad science, take their place.

Read the full article here: We must stop saying ‘The science demands…’

For whom the oil tolls

On April 20th around 10pm local time, a drilling vessel leased by British Petroleum (BP), the “Deepwater Horizon,” exploded, killing eleven workers. At the wellhead, 5,000 feet below the ocean surface, the fail-safe blowout preventer (BOP) did not pinch off the well as it was designed to do. The ruptured well gushes an estimated 5,000 to 100,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico. The Deepwater Horizon accident mirrors the Ixtoc I accident and spill of 1979.

Deepwater Horizon was still afire when the inevitable question about oil exploration on the continental shelf surfaced: Is offshore drilling for oil worth the risk? The short answer, environmentally and economically, is yes.

We don’t often think about risk—the harm done should an event occur and the probability of that event occurring—until something happens. As an example, I live in a risky home. My home is surrounded by large, shady oak trees. During the summer they keep my house cooler. They add monetarily to the house’s value and lower the cooling cost. They could also crush my house if any of them fell. Obviously, the only safe tree is a horizontal tree; and four tons of wood crashing through my ceiling into my bed could spoil the start to an otherwise lovely day, yet I choose to keep the oaks.

It’s fine to choose to risk your life (and your wife’s), I hear you say, but this is oilmageddon. The rupture endangered more than those people on the drilling platform; it endangers the ecological and economic underpinnings of the area. Birds and turtles are already washing ashore covered in oil. Fish will die. Shrimpers, oystermen, and fishermen can’t work. In all, it will cost billions in lost revenue and cleanup. This is a big deal. Yet, it’s not the end of the vegetation, wildlife, tourism, seafood, or anything else. The states along the gulf coast should be back to normal within a year after BP plugs the leak. Oil has spilled before into the ocean before: naturally, accidentally, and on purpose.

In 1991, Saddam Hussein wanted to ruin everything before his troops withdrew from Kuwait. He ordered destruction of the Kuwaiti oil fields, and had the valves opened at the oil terminal near Kuwait City, dumping between six and eight million barrels of oil into the Persian Gulf. At the rate the 25,000 barrels a day, it would take the BP spill eight months to equal six million barrels.

Saddam’s scorched earth policy revealed just what the earth can do. Initial reports from Greenpeace and others were of “unprecedented” destruction of fragile ecological services and possible large-scale extinctions. Similar things are being said now, “We may well be living with the consequences of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill for the rest of the 21st century,” wrote James William Gibson in an editorial printed in the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. While Professor Gibson, who teaches sociology at Cal State Long Beach, may be right about the social and political consequences, he widely misses the mark by 99 years for the environmental consequences. The effects probably won’t last two years, let alone a century.

Just one year after the largest marine oil spill in human history, a team of researchers from the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission at Unesco found little lasting damage to the coral and fisheries. The area’s animal life was in better shape than the most optimistic pundits had predicted—after only one year. Oil evaporates, breaks up, gets digested by microbes, and becomes annoying bits of tar.

BP did not intend to spill the oil, at least in part, because they are responsible for the cleanup. The costs will likely run into the billions. Yet, “The Economics of Allowing More U.S. Oil Drilling” printed by the conservative American Enterprise Institute considered the environmental costs along with benefits and found onoffshore drilling more than worth the risk. The authors, economists Robert Hahn and Peter Passell, analyzed production costs and externality costs such as clean-up costs, lost productivity due to traffic congestion, health costs, and greenhouse gas. The results indicate that even at a price of $50 per barrel the economic benefits greatly outweigh the cost. And the cost of this oil spill could rival the Exxon Valdez cleanup of $12.5 billion.

While the cleanup goes on, the question of what went wrong is already being debated. The Congress has opened hearings but I don’t expect that will tell us much because the people on both sides of the table will be posturing.

Strangely enough, the answer to the question of whether we should drill or not drill is technological and only nominally political. We have already voted with our wallets. Now we might not allow the drilling in our backyard, but that hardly matters does it? We need our fix. Get it from the North Sea or Nigeria, but get it. In the meantime, as we watch the oil slick grow in the gulf and watch endless loops of oily birds being cared for, remember this: the mess is not permanent.


The federal National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has excellent resources on this and other oil spills: