What the oil spill in the Gulf says about our energy future
When I lived in Alaska, one of my drearier assignments involved covering the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the long years of clean-up and recovery.
In those years, it became clear that oil industry executives followed a very simple calculus when it came to environmental protections: profits trumped safeguards.
As recently as last November, a British Petroleum executive declared bluntly that off-shore oil drilling has been going on for decades “in a way that is both safe and protective of the environment.”
Now the oil slick is pushing ashore in Louisiana and President Barack Obama is warning of a “potentially unprecedented environmental disaster.”
The crisis in the Gulf raises so many questions about America’s clumsy effort to deal with energy issues that it’s difficult to know where to begin.
But one place where we need to pause and rethink is the rush to re-embrace nuclear energy. America’s nuclear power industry was essentially derailed in 1979 by the Three Mile Island incident.
A power plant in Pennsylvania came dangerously close (according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) to a “worst-case accident” in which “massive quantities of radiation” could have been released into the environment.
In the decades since, the Chernobyl disaster offered another glimpse of the potential risks of nuclear power.
But more troubling perhaps is the fact that so many questions about nuclear power remain unanswered.
At facilities like Vermont Yankee (in Vermont) and Indian Point (on the Hudson River in New York), maintenance problems, small-scale leaks, the lack of disposal sites for spent fuel, and other environmental concerns have been chronic.
This from a New York Times editorial published last month:
Though Entergy has tried hard to market Indian Point as safe, clean and reliable, its public-relations efforts have been hurt by years of news about tritium leaks, faulty warning sirens, an unrealistic emergency evacuation plan and that disastrous cooling system, whose technology became obsolete decades ago.
Some advocates — including many environmentalists — say that it’s time to embrace nuclear power again, despite the fact that so many questions remain unanswered.
But as we go forward, it’s clear that our national conversation about energy has to be far more honest and thoughtful.
We need to accelerate development of alternative energy sources, including projects like the Cape Wind development approved last week off the eastern seaboard.
Energy conservation has to be a bigger part of the mix, so that our reliance on risky energy sources can be reduced. We should accelerate plans to tap Canada’s massive hydro-electric potential.
We should step up the kind of environmental and safety oversight that might have saved lives in the drilling rig explosion, and the recent coal mine disaster in West Virginia.
When industry leaders assure us that their practices are safe, we should have independent agencies standing ready to ask tough questions.
Above all else, we should look with profound suspicion on anyone who offers easy fixes or “drill baby drill” slogans.
That kind of cavalier attitude has already wasted decades, which could have been spent weaning us off of foreign and environmentally risky sources of energy.
We should have been developing better transportation systems, leaner industries and more energy-efficient housing.
Instead, we were indulging in a cultural love-fest with SUVs, Humvees, and 4,000 square foot homes.
I suspect that the cost of our dithering will be painfully obvious in the days ahead, as some of the nation’s richest fisheries and most profoundly beautiful marshlands are devastated.
But the crisis in the Gulf may be a reasonable price to pay if it spurs us to accelerate our transformation into a smarter, more energy efficient society.
PHOTO SOURCE: Wikipedia
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I agree with most everything you say Brian. The problem is how? Every time someone offers an answer there are 100 reasons we “can’t do that”. You can’t use nukes because of safety, you can’t use offshore wind because it ruins the seascape and kills birds and the vibrations bother whales, you can’t use tidal generators because it affects other lifeforms and might be ugly, you can’t cover the west in giant solar collectors because it cools the desert (isn’t that good?), you cannot under any circumstances damn a river, anywhere, anytime. You can’t use geo thermal because it’ll cause earth quakes and pollute the ground water, you can’t use biomass because you’re killing trees (mother natures lungs according to my kids), you can’t use oil because it’s drying up, you darn sure can’t use coal, the Canadians can get the gas from under Lake Ontario but we can’t (why???), the Chinese can get the gas in the Gulf of Mexico but we won’t. In the end our only choice appears to be people powered generators. You can;t use animals because you’re exploiting animals.
Yeah, that’s simplistic, but that’s the crux of the situation. Just the other day someone here was saying we shouldn’t be drilling, we should “caulk baby, caulk!). What do you think caulk is made of? Oil by products. I suppose we could go back to oakum, but where do we get industrial quantities of hemp? (Oooh! Cool, we can grow pot!). Anyway, the problem is no one wants to give up their lifestyle- and that goes for all the environmental zealots living in their condos and flying from rally to rally. The number of people in America actually willing to give up what oil provides is so infinitesimally small it’s not even worth considering.
So the question is- How do we move from oil to another energy source without losing what we have now? Electric cars sound great, but all you’re doing is using another form of oil/coal/gas when you plug in. Returning to moving mass items by rail instead of truck sounds great, but our rail infrastructure is gone and so is the support system and no one today will wait a month for something to come in by rail.
I’m open to ideas, but this talk of SUV’s and McMansions is dwarfed by the fact an unbelievable amount of what we use daily is an oil by product or otherwise fossil fuel based. Fertilizers, plastics, paper goods, gases and chemicals…the list is endless.
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In answer to your question investigate all of the above. Try out all technology and find a suitable one instead of being hooked on cheap, polluting, atmospheric heating, fossil fuels. And the sooner the better, but that would take politicians of real vision and we don’t seem to have them. Whole political process is short cycle stuff.
It is said that the enemy of the good is the perfect. We need to stop frustrating energy sources that are better than oil. The dams etc. should be allowed and promoted untill something better is possible.
I think you have the solution Steve. The problem is “good enough” won’t satisfy the media or the extremists. It makes sense to me. Small hydro dams like those that used to exist in towns on water courses, wind, solar and geo thermal where appropriate, switch grass, biomass, methane digesters, algae, nukes, hydrogen, wood gas, animal power, coal, natural gas, shale oil and whatever else will get us to tomorrow.
The more I think on it the more returning, or going ahead to, rail and barge traffic for bulk material makes sense. The problem is infrastructure- the warehouses and spurs are gone, same for the loading docks and the canals that existed pre-cheap oil. Look at Ogdensburgs Port. it used to run over a mile along the river and was served by two rail lines into the 70’s. Now it’s one chintzy spot with a bare bones rail line serving it. We truck everything at great expense because cheap oil made it possible.
Ah! I could go on griping about it for hours. Short story- we can do it, but gov’t either got to help or get out of the way. I doubt they’ll do wither.
I used to work at nuclear power plants. People are scared of them. This Three Mile Island thing was a big deal. It’s hard to remember the dead of Three Mile Island now. That’s because there wasn’t any.
A lot of work was done on nuclear power plants after Three Mile Island. Nuclear power has become about the safest form of power around. People still don’t want it because of Chernobyl, which was sort of a different technology than what we have. Our plants aren’t made with graphite. We use water. Water doesn’t burn like graphite. People also worry about the waste. You have to get rid of the relatively small amount of waste that is produced. You know, it is possible to just bury it in a big cave in the desert and it will never hurt anybody for 10,000 years. However, 10,000 years isn’t good enough for the scared people.
Now I work at hydro plants. I’ve been surprised to learn that people want to get rid of those too. They value the fish more than the clean energy and the additional recreation facilities that are offered by the dams.
So folks get stuck with dirty old coal plants that pump mercury into the air, give miners black lung and die of other industrial accidents related to coal. Beautiful mountains are tore down for the coal and, of course, the climate is changed.
Now folks will have this big dirty slick which will give the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico an awful bathtub ring.
Yeh, Steve is right. Someday we’ll hear the big pop when folks will pull their heads from their lower backsides. Then some practical solutions will go forward.
Mr. Da-Yooper, kindly stop interjecting common sense and facts into an emotional/political discussion! (Picture a smiley face here)
Da-yooper, there is a difference between people who make common sense arguments about nuclear power and scared people. We have caused enough problems creating toxic materials that last only dozens of years without needing to create more that lasts eons. !0,000 years ago there were glaciers over this area, we cant predict well enough what will happen in that time frame. Several years ago France ran into a problem when they had to start shutting down reactors during a heat wave because river water used to cool the reactors was getting too hot. Vermont Yankee has some serious problems with leaks…. Certainly nuclear power should be pursued as an option and research should be done in methods of dealing with waste but nuclear power is very expensive to put on line and there are many other options that are safer and could be developed more quickly. PV solar, solar hot water, small scale hydro, small windmills all are excellent options. And the best, fastest, cheapest thing to do is conserve!
Energy vs. the environmental problems will never be solved as long as religions, businesses and governments want more and more people to purchase their products.
I’m more than a little interested to see how this plays out since BP gave huge sums to Obama.
http://oilprice.com/Environment/Oil-Spills/The-Cover-up-BP-s-Crude-Politics-and-the-Looming-Environmental-Mega-Disaster.html
I suppose it’s possible there’ll be no collusion, but……