| BLOWOUT Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth Rachel Maddow New York: Crown Books, October 2019 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-525-57547-4 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-525-57547-2 | 406pp. | HC/GSI | $30.00 | |
On 28 August 1859, men drove a cast-iron pipe into the earth in western Pennsylvania. Down & down it went, until at a depth of 69.5 feet it released a torrent of dark, viscous fluid: rock oil; black gold; Texas tea.1
Col. Edwin Drake's well in Titusville, PA produced under 100 barrels on a good day. Now, oil wells all over the world produce 90 million barrels per day on average to slake the world's thirst for go juice, heating oil, and all the other products made from that bubblin' crude. It adds up to the most profitable business going, and that gives the oil companies tremendous clout.
Here's the crux of the matter. Oil and gas companies do the kind of risky, capital-intensive work that the average Joe, the average mom-and-pop business, even the average country, doesn't do for itself. In so doing, they can make a spectacular pile of money, but they can also make a tremendous amount of mess. And ruin. And even catastrophic, polluting apocalypse, when they really put their shoulder into it. But they are also big enough and hold enough sway that even big powerful governments tend to defer to them when it comes to how to best police their behavior. What could you, in Congress, possibly know about oil that Rex Tillerson doesn't? How could you, with your lily-livered environmental worry beads, think to weigh in on what might go wrong when pumping oil up through five thousand feet of one of the richest fisheries on earth? The oil industry is fairly capable when it comes to extracting resources; it's very capable when it comes to lobbying against any and all bothersome rules that might constrain it; but it's not that capable of anything else. It's ridiculously incapable of cleaning up after itself, for example. – Page 87 |
It is indeed the crux. In 1896, a Representative from Nebraska gave what is considered one of the greatest political speeches in U.S. history. William Jennings Bryan ended his speech by declaring, "You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."2 Where is the politician who today will declare, "You shall not drown human civilization in a lake of oil"? The more pertinent question is, "Who will listen?" For we have such politicians warning us about the impending harm our incessant use of fossil fuels is bringing. Bernie Sanders is one. Bob Inglis is another, though he lost his position for doing so. Governors like Jay Inslee of Washington State know the score; and there are numerous scientists and writers who publish academic papers, books, and editorials telling us the truth.3 But the people who need to heed their messages are not listening, or not understanding.4
It was the best of fuels. It is the worst of fuels.
First exploited in the late nineteenth century, it soon gave rise to a variety of substances that proved ideal for powering vehicles, heating buildings, and lighting cities as well as for lubrication. It also freed those cities from horses and relieved pressure on whales.
However, as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, the crowds of horse-drawn cabs and wagons gave way to crowds of horseless carriages that brought their own sort of noxious effluents. Later that century it became clear that using petroleum was changing Earth's atmosphere in ways that portended future trouble. And the tremendous profits earned from fossil fuels lubricated corruption in several ways.
"Between 1993 and 2007," the Global Witness report read, "annual government oil revenues shot up from $2.1 million to $3.9 billion. Equitorial Guinea now enjoys per capita income of about $37,200, one of the highest in the world. Yet 77 percent of the population lives in poverty, 35 percent die before the age of 40, and 57 percent lack access to safe water. Between 1990 and 2007 the infant mortality rate actually rose from 10 percent to 12 percent. – Pages 98-99 |
Revenue from oil extracted off their coast sustains the Obiang family ruling Equatorial Guinea in luxurious paranoia. As the author notes, the president's son Teodorin is the poster child for heedless decadence. I'll leave you to read about his mind-boggling excesses. This is the Resource Curse at work. The U.S. can do little about it so long as the oil & gas industry holds Congress in thrall.
Rachel Maddow gives us a measure of the clout the oil industry has today when she shows us Rex Tillerson's testimony before Congress on ???.
Even when one of the Democrats on the subcommittee lambasted him for other walrus and dead-scientist embarrasments in ExxonMobil's disaster response plan, like devoting forty pages to media strategy and only nine pages on contingencies for oil removal, Rex Tillerson kept up his merit-badge level of calm. "We are not well equipped to handle [major spills]," Tillerson explained. "And we've never represented anything different from that. That's why the emphasis is always on preventing these things from occurring, because when they happen we're not very well equipped to deal with them. And that's just a fact of the enormity of what we're dealing with." We're not very well equipped to deal with major spills. But no one else is either. How can your industry be the only entity on earth capable of causing a giant tanker spill or a blown-out deep-sea oil rig or a pipeline leak or a bomb-train oil railcar explosion, and not also be the entity responsible for coming up with ways to respond to that kind of problem? If not you, who? After more than four hours of back-and-forth with this Democrat-run committee, after taking a few direct shots particularly from Chairman Markey, Tillerson must still have felt as though he'd dodged one particular bullet: nobody said a thing about Africa. Just ten days after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, an aging ExxonMobil pipeline in the Gulf of Guinea, near a series of coastal villages in Nigeria, had ruptured. The breach was not discovered right away and not halted for a full week, according to The Guardian. The newspaper's man on the scene had just reported that almost a million gallons of oil (or twenty-five thousand barrels) leaked into the delta in those seven days. ExxonMobil insisted the spillage was only a small fraction of that figure, but this did little to placate the people who depended on those waters for their livelihood. "We can't see where to fish," one local man told a reporter. "Oil is in the sea." And this was not an uncommon experience in Nigeria. A 2006 study found that an average of 11 million gallons of oil per year, or 546 million gallons over the preceding fifty years, had leaked into the Niger delta. That's one Exxon Valdez-sized disaster every year, and the government there didn't even require the oil producers to have paper towels on hand. But this being in far-off Nigeria, the news had not yet washed up on U.S. shores. At least not to the extent that anyone in Congress was ready to bug Exxon about it. – Pages 92-93 |
This clout, Maddow writes, allowed Tillerson to expound about how his company was "dedicated to being good corporate citizens wherever we operate." And ExxonMobil is a comparatively good corporate citizen when it comes to preventing oil spills. It attends to preventive maintenance and keeps cleanup equipment standing by. This is the legacy of its tanker Exxon Valdez running aground in Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989. Wikipedia lists 273 confirmed spills from 1903 to 2022, and admits its list is incomplete.
Here are some of the largest oil spills.
| Designation of Spill | Location | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
Sources:
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| Torrey Canyon Oil Spill | Scily Isles, UK | 18 March 1967 | The Torrey Canyon is one of the first supertankers. On 18 March, it hits a reef off the coast of Cornwall. The release of 25 to 36 million gallons of crude oil over 12 days creates a slick 270 square miles in extent. Shoips of the Royal Navy attack it with toxic dispersants, but this does not work. Finally, bombs are used to set fire to the slick. In the end, enormous numbers of birds and animals die and 180 miles of coastline are contaminated. |
| Sea Star Oil Spill | Gulf of Oman | 19 December 1972 | The South Korean supertanker Sea Star collides with the Brazilian tanker Horta Barbosa. Both tankers burn and their crews abandon ship. The Horta Barbosa fire is extinguished a day later, but the Sea Star burns until it sinks on 24 December following several explosions. Oil release is 35.3 million gallons. No cleanup is attempted, and the impact on wildlife is unknown. |
| Amoco Cadiz Oil Spill | Brittany, France | 16 March 1978 | Rough seas damage the rudder of tanker Amoco Cadiz in the English Channel. Rescue tugs attempt to tow it, but it runs aground and releases 69 million gallons of light crude oil. |
| Atlantic Empress Oil Spill | Offshore of Trinidad & Tobago | 19 July 1979 | The tanker Atlantic Empress collides with Aegean Captain, another tanker, during a troical storm. Both ships catch fire. The Atlantic Empress is towed away from land, but burns for two weeks before it sinks. The fire aboard the Aegean Captain is put out and the vessel is towed to port in Trinidad. The incident releases 90 million gallons of oil, but little environmental damage results. However, 27 sailors are killed. |
| Ixtoc 1 Oil Spill | Bay of Campeche, Mexico | June 1979 to March 1980 | The Ixtoc 1 platform is drilling exploration wells when drilling mud fails to circulate. Workers try to remove the drill, allowing the mud to cap the well, but the blowout preventer fails and oil and gas rush up the pipe, elading to an explosion. Between 126 and 140 million gallons of oil enter the Gulf of Mexico before the well can be capped. Commercial fishing suffers for at least five years, and hundreds of million of dollars of tourism business are lost. |
| Nowruz Oil Field incidents | Northern Persian Gulf | 10 February 1983 | An Iranian oil platform is struck by a tanker. The platform lists 45 degrees, eventually collapsing and leaking 63,000 gallons of oil per day until the wellhead is capped in September 1983. A second platform is attacked by Iraqi helicopters, releasing 31 million gallons. Two-thirds of the oil from both incidents remains on the floor of the Gulf. |
| Castillo de Bellver Oil Spill | South Atlantic Ocean | 6 August 1983 | The tanker Castillo de Bellver catches fire and capsizes about 70 miles off Cape Town, South Africa. The tanker breaks in two. One piece sinks about 24 miles off the coast; the other is towed farther offshore and sunk with explosives. Most sources say the tanker contained 79 million gallons of crude oil. |
| Persian Gulf War Oil Spill | Persian Gulf | 1991 | Iraqi forces release hundreds of millions of gallons of oil from Kuwait's Sea Island terminal into the northern Persian Gulf. |
| Odyssey Oil Spill | Off Nova Scotia, Canada | 10 November 1988 | The Liberian-registry tanker Odyssey explodes about 700 nautical miles off Nova Scotia during a storm. The ship splits in rwo and releases 40 million gallons of oil. No cleanup is done because the slick is so far from shore, but it is thought to affect the food chain for years. |
| MT Heven Oil Spill | Genoa, Italy | 11 April 1991 | Hit by a missile during the Iran-Iraq war, the tanker MT Heven was reported scrapped by instread returned to seervice. It exploded near Genoa. Authorities attempt to tow it farther offshore, but it breaks apart and sinks on 14 April. It releases its cargos of 44 million gallons of crude oil over the next 14 years, fouling the coasts of France and Italy for decades. |
| ABT tanker Oil Spill | Off the coast of Angola | 28 May 1991 | The tanker explodes for unknown reasons. It burns until sinking on 1 June 1991. Five of its 32 crew are killed. Release of 79 million gallons causes a large oil slick, but this dissipates well offshore. |
| Mingbulak (or Fergana Valley) Oil Spill | Uzbekistan | 2 March 1992 | An oil well blows outand cathes fire. |
| Kolva River (Komi Republic) Oil Spill | Persian Gulf | 1994 | A corroded pipeline ruptures in Russia's Arctic. Oil pools inside a dike for eight months. Finally the dike breaks, releasing 84 millions of gallons of oil into the Kolva River. |
| Erika Oil Spill | Bay of Biscay | 11 December 1999 | The Maltese-registered tanker Erika breaks up in a storm, releasing around 31,000 tons of heavy fuel oil. |
| Rama 2 Oil Spill | Arabian Sea | 26 June 2017 | The Merchant tanker Rama 2 sinks, releasing an unreported amount of oil. |
| Rena fuel Spill | New Zeland | 11 December 1999 | The Liberian-registered Container ship Rena runs aground on Astrolabe Reef due to navigation errors and sinks, releasing 200 tons of heavy fuel oil. |
| Sanchi Oil Spill | Off Shanghai, China | 06 January 2018 | The Panama-registered tanker Sanchi collides with the Chinese bulk carrier CF Crystal. The Sanchi burned and sank on 14 January, releasing its carbo of 111,000 tons (810,000 barrels) of condensate oil — "an ultra-light, highly flammable crude oil, most of which evaporated after the fire" and an estimated 1,941 tons of heavy fuel oil. |
| BP Deepwater Horizon | Gulf of Mexico | April 2010 | Offshore oil well blows out, releasing five million barrels of oil and dispersants. |
Rachel Maddow's book provides a thorough examination of the harms that flow from our continued reliance on fossil fuels for so much of our economy. These harms include not only vast releases of carbon dioxide and methane (the latter worth billions in potential profit), but the carelessless about maintenance and cleanup she alludes to in the quote above, the long-lasting effects of spills, and the sheer power to corrupt that fossil fuel revenues engender. If you doubt the latter, look to the amounts the U.S. and the world spend on fossil-fuel subsidies, and the way political discussions about reducing them vanish like smoke.
Rachel Maddow has done an admirable job here of portraying the oil industry in all its bizarrenesss. Her well-researched book includes extensive notes and an excellent index. It's a must read, a keeper, and worthy of full marks.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.