Oil Threatens Marine Life – ABC News
I’ve just met Dr. Guggenheim on Twitter. As we suspected the amount of Methane in the spill was being underestimated. Thank you Matt Simmons for being right on the ball. This is not going to go away.
If you’re interested in a great source for Ocean information go to 1-Planet 1-Ocean.
Oil Threatens Marine Life – ABC News, posted with vodpod
Matt Simmons on Bloomberg
I was talking about the Matt Simmons story in BP and the Giant Blender. This is his Bloomberg interview. The Bonnie storm is bad, but if this story is true, a hurricane in the gulf is the least of BP’s problems, not to mention the US Administration. What if they knew? What if this is the Oil Industry’s Lehman Brother’s moment? Just imagine if it turned out that the largest of BP’s US shareholders, a little operation called BlackRock, had close connections to members of the Obama administration. When I say “little operation” I mean about $3.15 trillion under management, which is nearly a $trillion bigger than the Federal Reserve. But what’s spooky, in a Jason Bourne kind of way, is the friendship between BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and Timothy Geithner, the current Secretary of the Treasury. It would be weird if Larry Fink, who was the person who pioneered the Mortgage Backed Securities Market while he was at First Boston, and to whom Mr Geithner turned in his hour of need when Bear Stearns went into meltdown in March 2008, was mixed up in some sort of Oil Industry meltdown as well. I mean, that’s just a terrible run of bad luck. You invent a completely clever way to sell Mortages as a kind of faux investment, and you accidentally bring the global economy to its knees. Then, just when you think things are getting straightened out, you buy into a firm that is drilling for oil in the Gulf, for energy security. Makes sense. It’s really energy patriotism, in a way. But then that stupid bunch at Transocean go and blow the thing up. Just bad luck Larry.
I thought the profile of Larry Fink in Vanity Fair was, well, fair…
BP and the Storm of Idiots
Is this possible? The Communications people at probably the most beleaguered large corporation on earth thought it would be okay to (badly) Photoshop an image of the control room. Make the boys at the screens look busier while they’re stopping the oil spill. And then say that it was just some kid showing off. Yeah, that’s reassuring. We are handling the greatest environmental disaster in America’s history, but we thought it would be okay to let someone play with Photoshop. Not really. First you will look like (even worse) idiots, and second, there’s a tropical storm developing in the Gulf.
But when you look at this Jon Stewart video it all becomes clear, in a terrifying sort of way…
BP and the Syncrude Tailings Dam – an apology
In my post “Nature is not a Machine”, since I was essentially writing humour I didn’t think to include references. I apologize unreservedly. I got a comment from a person who disagreed with me that it was a large area and an ecological blight on the landscape. This is a picture of the Syncrude Tailings Dam. You are free to make up your own minds if this a) attractive, or b) an easily fixed piece of geo-engineering. You are looking at 540,000,000 cubic meters of toxic sludge. My original point was a comparison with the “catastrophe” in the Gulf, while this is business as usual in Alberta. Of course I realize that it’s the absolute right of the good people of Alberta to do this to their landscape if they wish. 
Note to Tony BP
You went sailing? You were racing your boat, Bob, in the JP Morgan Asset Management Round the Island race? I can understand the stress you’ve been under, but if that’s your level of insight into the public mood you need to make an appointment with your therapist for Monday. And while you’re at it, fire your publicist.
Nature is not a Machine
Nature is not a machine. I’ve noticed a growing hubris in the way in which people are talking about the BP catastrophe, not least Mr. Obama, who although he’s a lawyer, should know better. We are listening to these people talking about ‘putting it right’ in the same way that one would fix a broken watch. Replace broken parts and all is well. This drive for the metaphorical arises from the way our cognitive systems seek pattern, which is mostly an evolutionary good, but it has its limits. The wrong metaphor can lead us to desperately wrong analysis.
Nature is not a machine. There are no spare parts. There is no fix. Rather, it’s a cohesive biological system of unimaginable complexity. What has happened in the Gulf of Mexico has changed the environment – forever. The system state has been radically altered and the expectation that it can be put back the way it was is scientifically naïve. I’m sure there will be remediation efforts, but that will not, ever, put that coast back the way it was. This conceit of nature as our pet machine is clearly of machine age origin, but now that we have so much better metaphors for the way the world works, why do we insist on continuing with the same old nonsense? In the last 30 years, with the advent of genetics, the language of modern biology provides us with far more useful metaphors – and modes of analysis. We have nudged a complex ecosystem out of equilibrium. It will eventually find a new equilibrium, but that may not include the existence of blue fin tuna. You were tired of sushi anyway, right?
This is a map of what the Gulf looks like. Notice that it looks a lot more like a nervous system than a machine. It is. It is the nervous system of the beast we’ve made.
(Image thanks to Matthew Baker at ESRI Educational Services)
If we look at this as a biological system whose health we have compromised we can start thinking in terms of the way in which biological systems recover – they heal. And that healing process leaves scars. Life continues, but not with the same vigour as before. And sometimes recovery is impossible and life ceases. The Southeast coast of America may partially recover, but some of the more fragile populations will not. The complex web of life that makes up that ecosystem has been diminished, and pretending that it’s all just going to get taken to the mechanics and put right is offensive. Pretending that it’s just a matter of the BP executive writing impressive cheques makes it worse.
While we’re at it, why is the Gulf of Mexico a catastrophe and Alberta is a business opportunity? Every single peak oil geologist and ecologist I know has been on about what the downside of the oil production curve will look like since Colin Campbell started the Association for the Study of Peak Oil. No mystery. No magic. They have been saying for at least a decade that it will make parts of earth look like bad science fiction. Irrevocably damaged/destroyed ecosystems – which are not easily isolated from the larger planet wide ecology – will inevitably leak their toxins. What cancerous horrors await the good people of Alberta we can only imagine. Massive bird casualties are routine. But no one seems to think of it as a catastrophe.
Let’s put it in context. The largest dam in the world is China’s three gorges project. The second largest is in Alberta. It’s called the Syncrude Tailings dam. It contains 540,000,000 cubic metres of toxic sludge. That is one tailing pond. It total Alberta has 840,000,000 cubic metres in tailing ponds, covering 170 sq. km. This is an Edward Burtynsky photo of what that looks like…
And you thought Mordor was scary? So while I’m not in any way trying to diminish the scale of what is happening in the Gulf, I think it’s good to remember that it’s business as usual in Alberta. Maybe we’re at a turning point. Maybe the BP spill is the thing that finally makes us think about what we’re up to. Oil is killing us, because we are part of the same biology. We are not a machine.
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