Ante Up or Shut Up

I am tired of smug environmentalists. I am tired of self-pitying business owners. And I am tired of self-righteous, Teflon politicians. Yes, the spill in the Gulf is horrific. Yes, it was caused by one of the three companies. And yes, there should have been worst-case scenario spill plan that was slightly more comprehensive than running around crying,“oh crap, oh crap” with arms flailing.

Maybe MMS was too tight with the oil industry. Maybe the EPA should be the one permitting offshore drilling. Maybe this is the result of gross negligence, or a corporate culture of safety second (which, in all honesty, is not what I have experienced working for that company in Alaska in the last three years…the millions that the company spends to make things like walking from the bus to the building safer, and the fact that everyone has to put out a kiddie pool under their vehicle to prevent spills, have convinced me that at least BPXA is all about the safety, even if it’s only for reputational reasons ).

There is one truth here, however, that all the finger pointers in the tourism industry, and in the fishing industry, and in the environmental lobby, and at the coffee shops, water coolers, and Congress keep trying to deny: we are all complicit.

If you drive a car in this country, you are complicit in this spill. If you run a fishing boat on gasoline, you are complicit in this spill. If tourists fly to your state on airliners and you ferry them around in buses, you are complicit. If your legislator—your elected official—approves of or advocates for or even doesn’t actively fight against offshore drilling, you are complicit. If you thought domestic production would solve our terrorism worries, you are complicit. If you live in a community that receives funding from oil or gas royalties, or that is still afloat because of jobs in the oil and gas industry or its supporting industries, you are complicit. If you have rubber on your bike tires, use Vaseline for chapped lips, like plastic to-go containers, or don’t live a life completely free of petroleum and its byproducts, which are almost as ubiquitous as corn syrup, you support the oil industry and YOU ARE COMPLICIT IN THIS SPILL.

There is no piece of equipment on this earth that can guarantee this kind of spill won’t happen, because all equipment, however genius, is designed and operated by fallible human beings. There is no prevention or cleanup plan that will have a designated response to every catastrophe because there isn’t enough paper or digital space to store a plan so comprehensive that it addresses each potential change in line pressure, current, wind speed, or combination thereof. There is no way to engineer or plan for every single possible risk, because we can’t think of them all. Just when we think we have, something else will happen that we never saw coming, because we are neither—despite our best attempts to prove otherwise—omniscient nor omnipotent. The only way to avoid a similar catastrophe is to ban offshore drilling. Stop the rigs drilling now, keep all fields closed to development in the future, and compensate the oil companies for reneging on the profits we deny them by shutting down the leases that they purchased.

Are we willing to do that?

If we Americans, through our greed and reliance on petroleum, its jobs, and its tax revenues, allow offshore drilling, then we are all complicit in these environmental tragedies when they occur. If it weren’t profitable, Big Oil wouldn’t exist. So we have two choices: give up the oil, or give up the façade of innocence. For once, America, cowboy up and admit that part of this is our fault, too. Then we can decide whether we like that feeling, or whether it’s time to try something different.