I Am Responsible for the BP Oil Disaster

The last two months has been little but news-clogged media around the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. We are immersed in apologies, ladled with blame, and are tuned in to 24/7 HD coverage of the leak 5000 feet below the surface (watched online by literally tens of thousands of people around the clock). CEOs are dismissed, politicians posture, and families lose their livelihoods. The environmental impact is overwhelming: coastal wetlands perhaps damaged beyond repair, the cost to sea life and waterfowl still inestimable, and even the clean-up chemicals used have questions about their long-term impact. Stocks fall, jobs are lost in moratoria, and idealists scream to “Boycott BP Oil!” Deception and subterfuge shift blame between BP, Transocean, and—should we be surprised?—Halliburton.

But it’s all my fault.

I did it. End the Congressional inquiries; let Obama direct his “anger and frustration” to Waterford, Michigan. I confess I’ve been working on ruining the Gulf for several decades, and at last the inevitability of my plan has come to pass. And I offer my apologies to former BP CEO Tony Hayward who became our international scapegoat. Tony Hayward may have been at fault for misrepresenting the extent of the damage and a number of symbolic mistakes—his sailing trip, for instance, is the equivalent of the auto execs flying private planes to DC to ask for bail-outs. But he is not to blame for the (not accident but) disaster.

Hayward was not aboard the Deepwater Horizon when it exploded, and while the cause of the leak has yet to be finally determined, it’s unlikely that he was aware of the circumstances that led to the explosion. Similarly, he and his cohort CEOs are likely not informed about the daily progress in sealing the Taylor Energy wells in the Gulf that have been leaking since Hurricane Ivan in 2004. Certainly no one is talking as fervidly about the Jebel al-Zayt spill which is impacting the Red Sea shoreline for just about two weeks as of this writing. I did that, too.

No one has come after me, yet, about the freighter Odyssey‘s spill off the coast of Nova Scotia which was about four times as great as the Exxon Valdez. And the Ixtoc oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico only hit Mexican beaches in 1979-1980, but was fully ten times the size of Valdez. And the Gulf War oil spills of 1991 largely initiated on Saddam Hussein’s orders were estimated at more than twenty times Valdez. Of course, I provoked him to do it, but to focus on these spills would only distract you from my responsibility for the dozens of others in my lifetime of complicity.

And nothing should ever excuse my dedication to the disaster which is Shell Oil in Nigeria. For the past 50 years, the disempowered Nigerians have dealt with spills, burn-offs, lost crops and drinking water, and ravaging health issues. Clean-up efforts are nothing like what we see in the Gulf today, but in 2009 alone, Shell admitted to 14,000 tons of crude spillage. Nigerian officials estimate over 7000 spills in Nigeria alone. It’s true that many of these disasters are the works of Nigerian resistance movements, but I have encouraged them. And to tell you more about Nigeria would distract you from my responsibility for the dozens of other countries that extract oil under various free market banners to sustain my oil-rich lifestyle. Oil disasters are simply not uncommon.

I drive to work each day and fly to countries far from the United States. I take antihistamines when I have a cold and aspirin for a headache. I watch the Royal Oak Ravens helmets play football on artificial turf. I decorate with balloons and use ballpoint pens to write Post-It notes. I take photographs with cameras and pull plastic credit cards out of my wallet to buy gas. I use deodorants, toothpaste, and shampoos, and I wear glasses. I don’t use cosmetics, but my father has a hearing aid and my mother has a pacemaker. I use cologne on occasion and keep rubbing alcohol in my medicine cabinet. I put my garbage in plastic bags, run my water through PVC pipes, and I wear shoes. My retirement investments include oil stocks.

The saddest part is that the only noun in the previous paragraph that does not explicitly employ oil is “water.”

We can read this a number of ways. We can say, “Look at all the wonderful things that oil does for us that we take for granted!” Or we can ask how we’ve come to this place where we have so long taken for granted that which bears such costs. I am a US citizen who has access to an unprecedented level of information; I am literate; I live in a democracy where my dissent is not only tolerated but—at least in principle—encouraged. Truly, what excuse do I have for allowing myself to take anything for granted? Can I possibly try to argue that oil has never been all that relevant until this one spill?

The truth is, I’ve known. Unlike former-CEO Hayward, I’ve known all along. I’ve known it each day that I’ve lived a modern lifestyle which consumes such quantities of oil and in a country that gears so much of its politics toward securing more. Had Representative Waxman of Congress asked me, I would have nodded my head and said yes, I was completely sure that my casual use of oil would and had inevitably led to environmental and economic disaster. I even wrote about it in 2008.

What’s more, I would tell Congress that this cataclysmic blow-out in the Gulf is not a tragedy. Tragedy occurs when its victims are ironically unaware of the misfortune before them. I am not Romeo or Caesar, Hamlet or Hercules. Perhaps I am Faust. Or perhaps we are Frankenstein:

Great God! If for one instant I had thought what might be the hellish intention of my fiendish adversary, I would rather have banished myself forever from my native country and wandered a friendless outcast over the earth than have consented to this miserable marriage. But, as if possessed of magic powers, the monster had blinded me to his real intentions; and when I thought that I had prepared only my own death, I hastened that of a far dearer victim.

We have been possessed, and we must bear the consequences of our choices. Or make new ones.