by Jonathan Hiskes
It’s a week to remember—or better yet, forget. Who could have
imagined such a confluence of terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad events,
rounding up what has to be the most disheartening “Earth Month” ever?
In what may soon be the worst oil spill in U.S. history, crude is gushing into the Gulf of
Mexico and bleeding into Louisiana
wetlands. The situation is so dire
that our best environmental option is to set
it ablaze. Eleven workers died when
the rig blew up. Economic disaster may
follow ecological and human disaster, with the fishing, shrimping, and tourism industries likely to take a body blow. Remember when President
Obama called for a major
expansion of offshore drilling four weeks ago and said “oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills”? How comforting.
Two coal miners
were crushed to death in Kentucky while working for a company
with
a long history of endangering its workers.
This story should have shocked the nation, but coming in the wake of 29
miner deaths earlier this month and in the shadow of the oil spill, it got
barely of blip of attention.
The Chinese
coal freighter that crashed into the Great Barrier Reef a few
weeks ago remains stuck and Australian authorities say the best option may
be to sink it.
Even the week’s good news—the Obama administration’s
approval of Cape Wind, which would be the nation’s first
offshore wind farm—feels pretty bad.
While offshore oil drilling proceeds merrily along with bipartisan
support, it’s taken nine years of torturous wrangling to get this far with
Cape Wind. Environmentalists continue to
spar over it, and still more litigation and stalling will follow before a
single turbine goes online along a U.S. coastline. “I’m worried about all those
wind turbines blowing up & leaving a wind-slick on the coast of Cape Cod,” quipped one
climate reporter.
That’s just this week. Looking
back at the whole month of April, we had Massey’s Big Branch mine disaster,
another coal miner death in
West Virginia, an oil refinery explosion in Washington state that killed
five workers, an 18,000-gallon oil spill
from a Chevron pipeline into the Louisiana Delta, and, as mentioned above, a big oil spill at the world’s largest continuous coral reef.
The connection running
through every one of these disasters, of course, is dirty energy—oil and
coal. Only a fool would refuse to see the need to end our addiction.
Speaking of which, the U.S. Senate looks
likely to turn its back on the problem for the year. Plans to introduce a climate
and energy bill this week—albeit one that’s disturbingly friendly to the
fossil-fuel industry—are on the skids because
of a spat between Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Harry Reid (D-Nev.).
Leave it to a business
professor to find a “silver lining” in the week’s terrible news: “I think it may create some temporarily
spikes in employment if the companies hire some local labor to clean up the
spill,” Rajesh Narayanan, professor of finance at Louisiana State University’s business
school, told The New York Times.
The craziest part is
that our leaders continue pledging their tender loving care not to the natural world
but to the GDP.
“Think of the language
our politicians use,” author and global organizer Bill McKibben said in a
recent conversation. “‘The economy is ailing.’ ‘It’s hit a rough patch.’ Or ‘It’s
healing.’ Or ‘showing signs of healing.’ I mean, we talk about it like you
would your great aunt. But with the planet, it’s ‘natural cycles’ and ‘pay no
attention.’ ‘The Arctic melted: must be a natural cycle someplace.’”
We’re still acting as
if the economy is the thing that’s real, the thing with physical weight and
force. We’re acting as if the natural world is the abstraction, the intellectual
concept that we can adjust to better suit our needs. That confusion will be the
root of more disasters.
Related Links:
Wake up, Obama. The Gulf spill is our big chance
Obama puts offshore drilling on hold as Gulf of Mexico oil slick reaches U.S. coast
The Climate Post: Mighty winds a-blowin’