Time for a Sea Change

Can the Oilpocalypse spur lasting change, or will it just be another environmental disaster?

May 27, 2010 — I have to admit it overwhelms my feeble mind to imagine the crude oil that continues gushing, unabated, into the Gulf of Mexico. What officials still call 5,000 barrels per day, Purdue University engineer Steven Wereley independently assessed as 70,000 barrels, or nearly 3 million gallons, per day. Scientists on board the research vessel Pelican — an excursion sponsored by the NOAA-funded National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology — reported giant plumes of oil under the ocean surface, some 10 miles long, 3 miles wide, and 300 feet thick.

As we enjoyed frozen yogurt yesterday here in Houston, my boyfriend asked, “Have they stopped that oil yet?” We all go on with our daily lives — driving cars, using electricity, tossing plastic bottles and bags in the trash, and the oil continues to gush. Efforts to stop and contain the spill have mostly fizzled. The space-age containment dome failed. Robots didn’t stop the flow. And now BP has a hotline for citizens to send in ideas. Seriously?

We have emergency exit maps for buildings. Schools run tornado and fire drills. There’s an emergency broadcast system. Yet it boggles my brain that oil companies have no clear, readily implemented solution for a gushing geyser of oil, despite more than 700 rigs throughout the Gulf of Mexico and many more around the globe. It seems a no-brainer that companies should have concrete and viable solutions for such emergencies before they start drilling on the ocean floor. Perhaps I am idealistic.

A welder fabricates a pollution containment chamber. This chamber, which should have been built
and tested before the oil spill on April 20, was not ready for deployment until May 7.

And then this news: in April 2009, the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) exempted BP’s Gulf of Mexico drilling operations from completing an Environmental Impact Study (EIS), since a broader Environmental Assessment of the region in 2007 suggested that a large spill would not exceed 1,500 to 4,000 barrels — total — and a spill in deepwater would never make it to shore.

Oopsie.

And in fact, BP lobbied the Council on Environmental Quality to give such categorical exclusions more often, since it took too much time to fill out “unnecessary paperwork,” especially when “impacts associated with the proposed action are minimal or nonexistent.” I am not making this up. They want to drill, baby, drill, to hell with the fishermen, the fish, your health, the Gulf.

The Gulf oilpocalypse includes not just the millions of gallons of crude oil but also the chemical dispersants sprayed in the ocean to break up the oil slicks. It may ultimately kill hundreds of billions of individual marine critters when you count larvae, young and adults alike of such uncelebrated critters like phyto- and zooplankton, jellyfish, krill, sea pens, sea stars, shrimp and fish. A jellyfish graveyard was reported by science writer Mark Schrope, on board the Pelican. We’ll never know the true number of organisms that die, but if the critters at the bottom of the food web crash out, ecological chain reactions will occur, and eventually we may see declines in commercially important fish, sea turtles, whales or dolphins.

On May 12, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced that these oil dispersants, “are used to move us towards the lesser of two difficult environmental outcomes.” CNN reported that, “experts say dispersants, while toxic, are much less toxic than oil.” The scientific research I found argues otherwise. A study led by Queen’s University’s Peter Hodson found that the dispersant used in this very Gulf spill, Corexit 9500, actually increased uptake of the oil by fish. By breaking large swaths of crude into tiny droplets, the dispersants make the oil’s polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) more biologically available, and hence more toxic. It also keeps the oil offshore, rather than washing up on land where people can see it firsthand. People tend to not get outraged when they don’t see the immediate, direct effects. That does not mean the oil and dispersants won’t ultimately devastate the Gulf ecosystem.

A pelican swims in a make-shift pool after being cleaned of oil. More harmful effects may be
happening to the animals and ecosystem in the unseen world of the deep ocean.

“Because ‘oil and water don’t mix’ most of the components of the crude oil stay at the surface and make trouble for critters on the surface, like birds and sea otters, but fish and other things that stay below the surface are exposed to very little,” explains Rutgers University marine toxicologist Judith Weis. “When you add dispersants, you make the oil and water mix, and subject all those previously unaffected organisms to the oil.”

Not only that, adding dispersant increases oil’s toxicity. “Chemically dispersed oil is 100 to 1,000 times more toxic than undispersed oil, primarily because the dispersant distributes the oil throughout the water column so that the toxic constituents can more easily partition from tiny oil droplets to water and into fish and other species,” says Hodson. “The actual concentration of oil and PAH causing toxicity remains the same, but the bioavailability of PAH is much higher than for undispersed oil."

Marine ecologist Benjamin Pister explains it this way, “Some people make the mistake of saying dispersants make the oil go away.  It doesn’t go away, it just goes somewhere else — out of sight, out of mind, as you say.” Another grave concern for those animals that don’t die but suffer sublethal effects is bioaccumulation, which happened in the 1970s with the pesticide DDT. “The top predators are going to eat a lot of little things that maybe have a little bit of contamination in them. But the more they eat, those little bits turn into a big bit of contamination. This contamination will last for decades.”

The EPA switched their tune, and on May 20, they gave BP 24 hours to find a less toxic alternative. BP refused. Some reporters have pointed out the connection between Corexit and Goldman Sachs. Who is profiting from this spill?

So what now? All this gloom-and-doom gets depressing.

I’ve chosen to focus this new monthly blog, The Wendee Holtcamp Report, on the positive side of climate change. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing cheery about melting ice caps, species decline, disappearing habitat, desertification, global warming deniers, pollution, or companies skirting their responsibilities. But in future blogs, I will seek out and highlight shining stars: individuals, organizations, and governments around the world taking action to combat climate change in their communities. I will talk about cutting-edge research on climate change solutions, and some interesting scientific research projects covering the present and potential future impacts of warming temperatures on flora, fauna and ecosystems.

An idiom for transformation, the term ‘sea change’ hails from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Anyone concerned about climate change should realize that the Gulf disaster can yet serve as a beacon. It sends a clear message to anyone paying attention as to why finite, non-renewable — not to mention dirty — energy sources such as oil must yield to clean, sustainable, renewable energy sources — sun, wind, waves, motion if we want to leave the next generation anything remotely resembling the Planet Earth it once was. And let’s not forget our own complicity as we wastefully use plastic and drive gas guzzlers.

Middelgrunden is an offshore wind farm in the Øresund 3.5 km outside Copenhagen, Denmark.
When it was built in 2000, it was the world’s largest offshore farm, with 20 turbines and a
capacity of 40 MW. The farm delivers about 4% of the power for Copenhagen.

A sea change doesn’t happen overnight, but shame on us all if it should become just another environmental Armageddon whose lessons we forget as soon as headlines focus on other subjects. Did anyone notice the irony of the rig sinking on the 40th anniversary of Earth Day? Forgive my sentimentality for a moment, but if we forget so quickly, all those unsuspecting, helpless marine organisms that never had a chance to live, breed, pass on their genes and ultimately evolve — will simply have died in vain. And let’s not forget the eleven rig workers who lost their lives.

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Photo Credits: Deepwater Horizon Response (2) | Richard Bartz and Kim Hansen
Video Credit: Deepwater Horizon Response |