In Too Deep

Welcome to the first blog of Radically Green. If you stay with me, the first topic has to be the Gulf of Mexico oil mega crime.

On September 3 2009 Trans Ocean and BP announced they had drilled the deepest oil and gas well ever in the Gulf of Mexico. The rig that did it was called the Deepwater Horizon. With the record drill they announced a new Bonanza for the oil industry. The Deepwater Horizon floating in 4ooo feet of water used almost a million pounds of well casing, to penetrate 31,000 feet below the sea floor. That is more than six miles below the bottom of the ocean. The sea is icy cold at nearly a mile deep but the temperature of the oil in the well miles below was 250 degrees.

It’s a crazy business.

This was the absolute limit that the Deepwater Horizon had been designed to drill. Incredible though the technology is, there is no such thing as safety from catastrophe in this ultra deep-sea oil play. To the environmentally perverse free market economy and particularly the fossil-fuel industry there’s no such thing as a catastrophe to Nature.

But first a little introduction on the nature of this blog .I had a nasty and radicalizing thought recently. I realized (on my birthday), that ever since I was born into this wonderful and miraculous planet Earth, all life had been undergoing a constant increasing and deadly assault. I realized that for the past 30 years at least we have known (and in fact it has been formally acknowledged) that this all out assault on every system of the biosphere had escalated towards the total destruction of all that we recognize and cherish as life on Earth. It’s insane. This came as a shock - a real downer for my birthday. Then I remembered my personal motto as a medic doing in a lot of emergency work- ‘Never give up on life’. It had served me well.

I figured this old dog could learn how to blog.

There are some obvious immediate solutions to British Petroleum’s enormous criminal pollution of the Gulf of Mexico. BP must get out of the Gulf. All ultra deep sea oil drilling must stop. Stop it now and stop it worldwide. There have been other disasters deep under the sea.

The trouble is, in this criminalized civilization, there is no such thing as a crime against Nature – even crimes against Humanity generally get rewarded rather than punished. We have to reinvent justice.

The Deepwater Horizon was an ultra deep sea oil rig that was carrying out a desperate and reckless ultra deep experiment with the Gulf of Mexico. I sensed this to be true from what BP's PR peopl.e said every time the company tried something to stop the haemorrhaging of oil into the Gulf. Each time BP said it didn’t know if the idea at the time would work - because the procedure had never been done at such a depth before. It dawned on me that BP was conducting a huge experiment.

There were next to no safety procedures done because BP knew nothing could be relied on to work at this depth if there were a blow out.

It’s always been like this – since the industrial revolution that is. It’s called economic and industrial development. It’s the American way, now the world way. Nothing is too big to take on and to fix when things go wrong. That’s called progress these days.

We have to redefine progress and reinvent development. We have to think big and think far. That’s big as Earth and far as seven generations.The Deep Horizon truth was finally, inadvertently, told by the head of BP.

As a supporting act, how’s this for a business response? “I think we forgot just how dangerous drilling for oil in the deepwater really is.” That was Jeff Rubin, a former chief economist at CIBC World Markets. Indeed ultra deep sea drilling is catastrophically dangerous. The forgetting was intentional. That does not matter to our uncivil civilization because planetary damages count for nothing in our corrupt economy of financial wealth.

Appearing before the US House Energy Committee BP’s chief executive Tony Hayward made it clear as oily water. ‘I want to acknowledge the questions that you and the public are rightly asking. How could this happen? How damaging is the spill to the environment? Why is it taking so long to stop the flow of oil and gas into The Gulf? Can we as a society explore for oil and gas in safer and more reliable ways? What is the appropriate regulatory framework for the industry? We don't yet have answers to all these important questions.

’‘We don't yet have answers to all these important questions.’!! What he said is there were no answers to the deplorable catastrophic risks of ultra deep sea drilling. It is a crazy idea that should never have been permitted in the first place. He is saying that he and his gang have decided there will be no answers. It is a calculated statement exerting corporate power over the world.

Hayward gets paid an annual salary of £998,000 and in 2008 his bonus was £1,496,000. What could make one man worth all that money? Nothing of course. It is a statement of world power.

Here is further proof in the Hayward statement of the mad deep sea experiment. ‘As the scope of the unfolding disaster became more apparent, we reached out to additional scientists and engineers from our partners and competitors in the energy industry, as well as engineering firms, academia, government and the military.’

None of them had any answers. There were, are and there will be none. It’s way way too deep and dangerous a mile under water and more miles below the ocean floor.It was and is planned to continue to be an experiment. If all the life in the Gulf were to die so much the better for the oil industry, not to mention people’s pension funds.

Murdering Nature in this civilization is good for business. We have to reinvent business.

A good start is to start to put BP out of business.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Boycott-BP/119101198107726#!

A saga at sea to be continued.

My thanks to Wikipedia and the Wall Street Journal for the information.