By H. N. Burdett
Human ingenuity and modern technology, astounding as they are, can never hope to do anything more than play catch-up with the fearsome bitch goddess, Mother Nature, who routinely plays with a deck full of trump cards.
The familiar din of the "Drill, Baby, Drill" chorus that once greeted on cue the public appearances of that prime wholesaler of right wing red meat, Sarah Palin, has faded into what her faithful followers might wish to become the faintest of memories.
Nor is the prodigious power of nature recently evident solely in the massive Gulf of Mexico oil leak, though that in itself should be reason enough to lower to a whisper the mindless clamor for plowing the ocean's depths for black gold.
It may seem much longer ago, but it was only in April that volcanic ash rising into the atmosphere grounded airliners throughout northern Europe. Despite the inconvenience to countless air travellers, this was relatively tame stuff compared with the Gulf of Mexico disaster. Still, it provided impressive evidence of Mother Nature's propensity for orchestrating paralyzing mischief at her capricious whim and will.
The BP Deepwater Horizon rig explosion has made the grounding of those planes quite literally yesterday's news. The latest estimates are that the flow of oil will amount to 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day.
Today's Tea Partiers don their tricorns, flip back the pages and misread American history to support their ongoing crusade for downsizing government and lowering taxes. By adopting that same revolutionary spirit, anti-drilling advocates, written off as knee-jerk upstarts and alarmist quacks, courtesy of the tireless oil company publicity machines, could recast themselves as Paul Reveres of the environment -- only with far more justification for their claim.
The shrillness of the drilling dunces succeeded in all but drowning out the strongest legitimate argument against seeking oil at the bottom of the sea: we know next to nothing about that into which we are drilling. Scientists have far more knowledge about Mars and Venus than they do about the ocean's depths, an annoying fact easily brushed aside by politicians eager for campaign petro-bucks and their constituents with voracious appetites for more and cheaper oil.
In a 2005 presentation reprinted in a publication of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists, David Eyton, then BP's vice president for Gulf of Mexico deepwater development who now heads up the company's research and technology component, expressed confidence in the firm's risk management capabilities. He felt that BP had the expertise and the technology to overcome nature's daunting obstacles to offshore drilling.
At the same time, Eyton did indeed emphasize the need for utmost caution in risk management with this telling observation: "We find ourselves designing floating systems for 10,000 feet of water depth before the lessons of working in 6,000 feet have been fully identified."
When it comes to the quest for more and less expensive energy, lessons are too often learned the hard way. It has been relatively recent, when the need for a reasonable mix of various energy sources seemed the logical path for the future, that the development of nuclear power has returned to the national conversation. The hue and cry for nuclear power plants has been on a three-decade hiatus.
But the nuclear energy cheerleaders, once as loud and witless as the drill-happy pawns of Big Oil's highly efficient propaganda machines, were effectively silenced by a nuclear reactor accident 31 years ago in Dauphin County, on the Susquehanna River near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
On March 28, 1979, there was a partial core meltdown in a pressurized water reactor at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station. Investigations determined human factors were at fault, from the flawed industrial design of the reactor control system's user interface to deficiencies in the training of the operators of the equipment.
The Three-Mile Island accident had a severe impact on the global development of nuclear power. In all but two years between 1963 and 1979, the number of reactors increased. But reactors under construction declined every year for the 18 years following the accident. Between 1980 and 1984, a total of 51 American nuclear reactors were canceled.
While the impact of the radiation released as a result of the Three Mile Island accident was heatedly disputed, the TMI plant operator and its insurers paid at least $82 million in publicly documented compensation to residents for "losing business revenue, evacuation expense and health claims." According to anti-nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman, hundreds of out-of-court settlements were reached with alleged victims of the fallout and a total of $15 million was paid to parents of children with birth defects born within close proximity to the plant.
Last week, President Obama announced at his press conference a six-month moratorium on drilling permits, all but daring Republican offshore oil advocates to turn the matter into a midterm election campaign issue. Obama further suspended exploratory drilling off the coasts of both Virginia and Sarah Palin's home state of Alaska, as well as 33 wells under way in the Gulf of Mexico.
If BP can plug the Deepwater Horizon leak and manage a miraculously thorough cleanup, American addiction to oil combined with rational concerns about our dependence on foreign oil may well shorten memories of the Gulf of Mexico environmental tragedy. With the ever willing assistance of Big Oil's propaganda apparatus, the cacaphonous fervor for offshore drilling will resound and once more trump common sense. But Mother Nature has a richly deserved reputation for having the final word and the last derisive laugh. Always.
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