The spill you can’t see

May 19th, 2010

If you think that

slick of oil spreading across

the Gulf of Mexico is a nasty sight …

well, it is. And so we’ll probably do something about it.

Within hours of the crude reaching the coast,

an aide to President Barack Obama said

new offshore drilling would

be put on hold.

But here’s the problem:

An even bigger slick — this one of acid —

is spreading across the entire ocean. It’s doing damage

far more profound than even the oil. But since

you can’t see it, nothing’s

happened.

The day after

the gulf rig blew out, the

National Research Council quietly issued

a report on what exactly carbon dioxide, which is warming

the atmosphere, is doing to seawater. As the oceans absorb some of

the carbon our factories and engines pour into the atmosphere, the “chemistry

of the ocean is changing at an unprecedented rate and magnitude,”

the report said. “The rate of change exceeds any known

to have occurred for at least the past

hundreds of thousands

of years.”

Already fishermen report

that oysters aren’t reproducing, and biologists

are saying that coral reefs may not survive the century.

“This increase in [ocean] acidity threatens to decimate entire

species, including those that are at the foundation

of the marine food chain,” said Sen. Frank

Lautenberg, D-N.J.

…

Pretty outrageous, sure.

But here’s the thing: Doing anything about

it would mean confronting fossil fuel. Telling BP

to put better blowout preventers on its rigs — that’s easy.

We’ll definitely do that. But facing up, really facing up to our addiction

to fossil fuel, that’s hard. British Petroleum pretended to do

it in the 1990s, when with great fanfare it changed its

name to Beyond Petroleum. But it

didn’t mean it.

Let’s say we were

serious about saving the ocean

from crude oil, and from the acidification of carbon.

We’d have to stop using oil, not to mention coal and gas. We’d have

to take the steps urgently to move the world off fossil fuel and on

to renewable energy. Those steps aren’t impossible, but

they do require a resource we’re

short on: political will.

Bill McKibben

This absurdly beautiful

video shows what 3D mapping looks like

(don’t forget to hit the biggify button).  As you watch it,

understand that its complexity is very much like what the Earth

paints in electrifying color and genetic vibrancy

on and around it’s coral reefs.  Understand

that we’re pulling the plug on that,

and know we are.

Since April 20,

when the Deepwater Horizon

offshore oil rig exploded, killing 11 workers

and starting an oil spill that continues to pollute the

Gulf of Mexico and threaten the fragile marine and coastal

environments of several southern states, the Obama

administration has quietly approved

27 new offshore drilling

projects.

Twenty-six of those

projects were approved under

the same environmental review exemption

that was used to green-light the deadly BP drilling project

that led to the current disaster. Essentially, those 26 projects received

environmental waivers or exemptions from the Minerals Management Service (MMS),

a division of the U.S. Interior Department. Incredibly, two of those approvals

were for new BP offshore drilling projects, despite BP’s

responsibility in the current disaster

and the company’s poor

safety record.

What could

create the political will

to change this?