In my last post I asked why Brazil is letting Chevron use
such dangerous tactics when it seems like they have put a high priority on safety.
This week’s article seems to imply that it is not just Brazil who displays this
double standard, but that it is well saturated throughout the oil drilling
regions of the world. I explore this further with the BBC’s article on the Elgin
Well gas leak in the North Sea. A British union group called Unite has called
for the three-mile exclusion zone to be extended to five miles for the safety of
neighboring workers. It is regarded much too dangerous to return to the Elgin platform
to extinguish the flare burning on the North Sea platform, yet the Elgin Well
officials claim there is no risk the flare will ignite the gas cloud below.
Obviously if there were no risk there would not be a total evacuation of the
platform, so why pretend that nothing is wrong and that your methods are still
safe? This is a clear tactic to save face, so why are we letting oil companies
get away with it?
A pertinent quote from the article comes from Greenpeace’s
John Sauven: "The industry consistently says that North Sea drilling is
particularly safe and that spills can't happen here. Yet now we can see all too
clearly that serious leaks can happen anywhere, and are extremely difficult to
deal with. This incident shows us that if the oil and gas industry can't
contain leaks in supposedly less risky places like the North Sea then there's
no way they should be allowed to drill in fragile and high risk places like the
Arctic." I tend to agree with Sauven, but this is an extreme stance. Many would
oppose such staunch restrictions to an economic staple such as oil, but is
there really any other way to ensure the health and safety of future
generations and the environment?
This article demonstrates the very long and interdisciplinary
problem with the extremes to which we are willing to discount the future for
goods today. In health care, the U.S. continually ignores plans for
preventative medicine that would show a vested interest in future health. Oil
companies continually ignore the safety of their workers and the environment in
order to get more goods now. It may not be a new problem, but it is an
important one. Why do we stand for this blatant disregard for health and
safety? Although a more philosophical question, I think it is at the heart of
many of these environmental justice issues. I don’t necessarily think there is
a clear solution to this problem, but awareness is the first step. Also, there
are unions like England’s Unite and groups like Greenpeace who stand up for
workers’ rights to safety and challenge big oil’s status quo in hazardous
methods. What do you think can be done about increasingly hazardous oil
techniques? Have I been too harsh on the oil industry, do you think there’s
another side to this story?
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ReplyDeleteI think that your philosophical questions speak to a number of important aspects of our economy, our government, and our species. I agree that this is very much an interdisciplinary problem, and that there is a spectrum of how far we’re willing to go to power our planet, with advocates on either extreme. And I think you hit on a very important theme as well: we as human beings in a fast-paced, modern world, are all about instant gratification. We have to have things now, and rarely think in the long term any more. I’m learning through class that we were not all always trying to save today’s resources for tomorrow’s prosperity (thank you, Kosek), but I feel like we at least had less of a demand for many of today’s resources. And we certainly had less technology with which to supply our now increasingly high-demand market. Today, we need to learn to manage our lust for having as much as we want, when we want, right now, or else there will be almost nothing left at all in a very short amount of time.
ReplyDeleteOil industries need to know and acknowledge this as well. What’s more, they need to use this to start investigating technologies for the future. Their awareness of this issue, as well as the awareness of all consumers, really is the first step to finding a solution to the harmful, unsafe drilling that is taking place all over the planet. However, I don’t think there is really any current methods—or solutions—that are both available, safe, sustainable, practical and possible at this time, which makes it an even stickier situation, since what we KNOW what we’re doing is wrong but we feel compelled to continue doing it due to our need to have what we want when we want all the time.