by Jonathan Hiskes
The Gulf of Mexico oil spill.Photo: NASA’s Earth ObservatoryThe oil and coal
industries have been making themselves look so bad lately, it’s almost as if
they want to help out their
clean-energy competitors. It’s time for another damage report:
About 42,000
gallons of oil a day are leaking into the Gulf of Mexico after an explosion
sunk the oil rig Deepwater Horizon and left 11 workers missing (the rescue search for them has been
called off) and three others critically injured. Responders are trying three
methods to stop the flow—one that would take hours, one that would take months,
and one that would not plug the leak but would capture the oil. Officials are
watching the 600-square-mile surface sheen to see if it will strike the coast
of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, or Florida (map).
In the wake of the coal-mine
explosion that killed 29 workers, West Virginia’s Massey Energy shows it
cares about its workers by … hiring a top-dollar PR firm to protect its image.
It’s using the Austin, Texas, firm Public Strategies, which is run by senior
communications specialists from the Bush White House and campaigns. The West
Virginia Gazette‘s Ken Ward Jr. details Massey’s PR game plan, which includes an argument that the Upper Big
Branch mine had “about an average number of violations in 2009-2010,” though it also concedes it had “a very large number”
of more serious enforcement violations.
At another West Virginia coal mine, a 28-year-old
worker died after being pinned against a mine wall last Thursday.
The full tally
for recent fossil-fuel accidents also includes:
The crash
of a coal freighter into the fragile Great Barrier Reef as it tried to take
a shortcut from Australian mines to Chinese furnaces.
The Tesoro oil refinery
explosion that killed five workers in Washington state.
The spillage
of 18,000 gallons of crude oil from a Chevron pipline into a canal in the Delta
National Wildlife Refuge in Louisiana.
Of course, these
are only the most dramatic costs of fossil-fuel burning. The health effects
wrought by climate change and mercury and soot pollution have a much larger
cumulative effect, reaching people who don’t have family members working in energy
industries.
There’s an odd parallel here to the national
struggle over immigration policy. Arizona’s depraved new immigration law has
the effect of showing the country just how broken our immigration system has
become. The string of fossil-fuel industry disasters should be making clear just how broken
our energy system has become.
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