Sunday July 18, 2010
“Never” is an ugly word
By Jim Taylor
Suppose BP had never managed to plug its well in the Gulf of Mexico.
As I write this column, BP claims success for the newly installed cap on its undersea volcano, to contain the oil spewing into the ocean since April.
Testing was delayed while the U.S. government tried to ascertain if the well bore itself was damaged, hundreds of metres underground.
Industry insiders had raised that possibility.
Over a month ago, an article in The OilDrum.com, an oil industry website, suggested that BP’s failure to seal the well by injecting mud and concrete suggested a fractured well casing. Oil was escaping through the sea floor.
A team of Russian scientists called in by BP – the only humans to have descended into the ocean to view the damage directly – claimed to have seen leakage from at least 18 other sites, with the largest leak 11 km away.
Research vessel Thomas Jefferson also reported rifts in the ocean floor haemorrhaging oil and methane gas.
Bloomberg, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post all cited BP officials – anonymously, of course – who admitted that the well casing might have ruptured.
If so, a successful capping at the wellhead would have made matters worse.
Too long to think about
George W. Bush’s former energy advisor Matt Simmons estimated the oil to be under 100,000 pounds per square inch pressure. With the main bore sealed, it would have erupted through the ocean floor wherever it could find a crack or cranny.
Admittedly, Simmons had his own agenda to promote. He was lobbying for a nuclear blast to seal the well. The alternative, he said, was to wait for the oil field to bleed dry. In about 30 years.
That’s a long time.
“Never” is even longer.
We don’t like thinking about never. But we all have to deal with it. The parent, child, or sibling who dies will never come back. A harsh word cannot be recalled. A moment’s carelessness at the wheel that flattens a pedestrian can’t be undone.
Real life has no “undo” button.
BP, Deepwater Horizon, and Halliburton chose to save a few days – and perhaps a few million dollars – by cutting corners on accepted safety standards.
Even if this well is now under control – not yet a certainty — does anyone seriously believe that future drillers will never take short cuts?
Only the next time it happens, it will be in even more difficult circumstances.
Petroleum addiction
What the Mexican Gulf disaster shows us – or should show us – is how desperate our civilization is becoming for oil. We may or may not have passed what’s called “peak oil,” the moment when our ever-increasing demand for oil surpasses our ability to produce it.
But what’s beyond question is that there is no easy oil left. In the Gulf of Mexico, drilling starts under 1.5 km of water. Off Newfoundland, 2.5 km. Off Brazil, 2 km of ocean, plus another 5 km below the seabed.
Yet even Brazil’s eight-billion-barrel Tupi field, hailed as the biggest discovery of the last decade, would be enough to feed the world’s present energy addiction for only about four weeks.
The on-going wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have little to do with catching terrorists, a lot to do with protecting oil supplies and potential pipeline routes.
So there will be another accident, another blowout, simply because future wells will occur in even more risky situations.
Misplaced faith
Syndicated columnist Linda McQuaig calls this attitude our “blind faith in technology and the human ability to solve any problem.”
For example, the two relief wells BP is drilling to intercept the present well more than two km underground, in mid-August. The solution sounds simple. In fact, it’s equivalent to threading a very long drinking straw into the opening of a pop can 100 metres away.
Indeed, applying our technology can make things worse. BP poured some 1.4 million gallons of chemical dispersants into the sea to break up oil slicks.
Dispersant maker Nalco lists possible symptoms of exposure – headaches, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, dizziness, chest pain, lung irritation… to say nothing of longer term effects like cancer, liver and kidney damage, genetic mutations…
The exposure is already happening. Independent journalist Dahr Jamail visited Barataria, about an hour south of New Orleans. In the shallow water of the bay, the sun’s warmth causes dispersants and volatile petrochemicals to evaporate into the air.
“Within minutes of arriving, we begin to feel dizzy from airborne chemicals,” Jamail wrote. After only two hours, Jamail’s photographer developed a skin rash.
“I was shocked by the rapidity of the onset of symptoms,” Jamail concluded. “My eyes still burn and my chest is tight, long after we exited the toxic soup of air and water south of New Orleans.”
Even if this particular runaway gusher is capped and controlled, damage to the environment and the people will never be undone.
Never is an ugly word. But given the potential consequences of technological mistakes, we need to start thinking seriously about the implications of “never.”
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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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Your Turn
Several people simply said thanks for informing them about cystic fibrosis, and for providing a heart-warming story. Audrey Jane LaFerriere’s comment was typical: “Thank you for educating me about CF. I never really understood it…”
Similar comments from Grace Cawley, Audrey Leonard, and Allen Polen.
Barry Durie said a little more: “Thank you not only for the content of your reflections on your son and on Mike, but the intimate and personal way you wrote. Perhaps it is our aging process that allows a deeper vulnerability, that allows others to both learn from your writing and share the profound struggle and the good news joys of triumph.”
Nancy Kerr recalled meeting Mike Schwartzentruber previously: “Mike was the third [CF] person I’d met, and the oldest at 26. When I came to B.C. in 1989, I became acquainted almost immediately with Woodlake Books and there saw Mike’s book listed and ordered it. I was delighted to read that he’d had a lung transplant and was [still] the oldest person I’d ever known who had CF. What an especially big miracle!”
Nancy then went on to describe her own miracle. She had been suffering from macular degeneration: “I went to the door to pick up the newspaper, and discovered I could not read it. I could read the 36 pt headline; that was all. I sat there realizing that I must give up reading and driving. I, who had read four books a week and 27 magazines and journals a month, was blind. I, who had put 50 to 60,000 kms a year, could no longer see well enough to drive. It took a lot of adjusting and attempting to compensate with talking books and news on T.V. CNIB was a wonderful help and support.
“On January, 2010, the opthomologist removed the cataract on my right eye and sent me home to come back in a week, which I did. I was delighted to see more than the "E" on the eyechart. A week later, I realized that I was seeing better with my peripheral vision; I’d been trying to train my eye to decode letters with peripheral vision, but hadn’t made much progress. In hope I picked up the book a friend had been reading to me. Under bright light, I COULD READ! Amazing grace; I was blind but now could SEE!”
A few letters have come in about my paraphrase (or rather my editing) of Revelation (more below).
Vern Ratzlaff wrote, “Thanks for the great stuff on CF. Another way to read the Apocalypse is to see it as John’s attempt to encourage his listeners to combat the rampant globalism of the Roman Empire by building counter cultural and counter economic communities — the New Jerusalem is the attempt to see alternative forms of living together. Could say more — and the temptation is there — but it’s about the third or fourth hermeneutical shift on the apocalypse I’ve taken in my life (starting with a dispensationalistic format that used charts and anti-christ affinities and all)”
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NEW PARAPHRASE AVAILABLE
I write paraphrases so that I can understand the Bible. And one of the most bewildering books, for me, has been Revelation.
Then one day my minister suggested that I was reading it wrong. I was concentrating on the prophecies, the interpretations of the visions, the explanations of the symbols. I should be reading it as a verbal painting.
Without most of the speeches and proclamations, Revelation turns into a massive visual tapestry, an epic narrative. In most of my paraphrases, I have tried to replace archaic metaphors and images with more modern ones, and to replace desert based illustrations with some that we who live in more northern climes might find more familiar. I have not done that this time. I have simply excised the blather that gets in the way of John’s magnificent panorama of rebellion and victory.
I’m offering this paraphrase of Revelation on the honour system, the same way as my other paraphrases (except for Psalms, which you have to order through the publisher). If you want to examine my paraphrase of Revelation, just write me. I will send it to you as a Microsoft Word file. If you decide you want to keep the paraphrase, you send me a cheque for $5 Canadian; if you decide it’s not worth that much, just delete the file and send nothing.
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
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For other web links worth pursuing, try
- Charlene Fairchild’s United Online site,
- David Keating’s “SeemslikeGod” page
- The Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity home page
- Alan Reynold’s weekly musings, punningly titled “Reynolds Rap,”
- Wayne Irwin’s Model T Websites, a simple (and cheap) seven-page website for congregations who want to develop a web presence.
- Alva Wood’s satiric stories about incompetent bureaucrats and prejudiced attitudes in a small town are not terribly religious, but they are fun; write alvawood@gmail.com to get onto her mailing list.
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