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Dirty oil

13 July 2010

Over two million barrels of oil a day are spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, eleven workers have been killed, livelihoods have been destroyed and the damage to wildlife may be irreversible. UK pensions are now under threat as shares in BP have plummeted. PCS green officer Anne Elliott-Day asks where the blame for this disaster really lies.

The Deepwater explosion that took place in the Gulf of Mexico on 20 April 2010 is just one in a long line of safety breaches by BP. These include the Texas City refinery explosion in 2005 which killed 15 people and a leaking pipeline in Alaska in 2007.

A resolution was filed at BP’s AGM this year demanding the company reports on the environmental and social risks of exploration in the ‘Tar Sands’ in Canada - a method that’s reported to produce three times as much greenhouse gas emissions as conventional oil production as well as causing pollution and deforestation and having negative impacts on health, human rights and wildlife (see spring edition of the YM newsletter).

Human cost

One oil worker who survived the Deepwater explosion described is as ‘like a crematorium’. Another says he relives every day the experience of watching while fellow workers who hadn’t managed to jump off the rig in time dying. Workers have said they knew the rig was leaking weeks before it exploded. A leak was spotted on the rig’s ‘blowout preventer’ (this is supposed to shut a well down if there’s an accident) and reported to both BP and Transocean, the owners of the rig.

Yet no effective action was taken to prevent the accident from happening. BP flaunts its approach to risk taking. The company’s 2009 annual review says risk is ‘fundamental to what we do’. The truth is we are running out of oil and this is why companies such as BP are resorting to increasingly risky methods to extract it.

Although BP has been forced to set aside £20 billion dollars to compensate victims of the Deepwater explosion, no amount of money can possibly ‘make it right’ as BP suggests. Describing the explosion as creating a ‘hole in the Earth’ that can’t be plugged (The Guardian, 19 June 2010), the writer and activist Naomi Klein says corporations such as BP make blithe assumptions about risks while having have no real of idea of catastrophic impacts when things go wrong. They assume because an oil rig is miles away from the coast and deep under the ocean floor it can’t do any real and lasting damage.

Taking responsibility

But this ignores the fragility and interrelatedness of the natural world. To give just one example – once oil has coated the grasses in marshland around the coast, it cannot be removed. The marsh slowly dies and the larvae of many species of fish for which the marshes provide a breeding ground are poisoned and die resulting in no food for many species of birds that use the Gulf coast as a stopover.

If there’s a lesson to be learned from this disaster it is this: we have to reduce our reliance on oil and ever more risky ways of extracting it. We have to move away from corporate greed, from pillaging the earth, to finding ways of meeting our need for energy through methods that are sustainable, that work with the forces of nature rather than against them.

This means moving swiftly to renewable energy such as wind, wave and tidal power that can be sourced and managed for the benefit of both people and the planet.

Take action


The ethical investment charity Fairpensions is asking people to:
• write to their MP asking them to support a parliamentary early day motion (EDM) calling on the government to ensure pension funds report on their environmental and social risks
• Contact the Pensions Minister to urge him to tighten up the standards for pension funds.
 

Go to www.pcs.org.uk/green to take action.