Environmental Karma
Friday, July 2, 2010 at 02:08PM 
By Tom deMers
As you read these words, oil is gushing into the ocean a mile down in the Gulf of Mexico. Although I am writing this in mid June, I can predict that with some certainty. Let’s call it what it is, murder. Oil and water don’t mix. The ocean is a living organism. Healthy molecules of water are like healthy molecules of air; they carry and support life. So as we poison their “air,” killing creatures large and small, we long for someone to blame. The need is almost visceral. But while it satisfies, blame may do more harm than good.
Tony Hayward? He’s the CEO of British Petroleum, the company “responsible” for the blowout on April 20. He wants to end the spill not to end the murder, but to “get my life back.” He will surely get it back before Louisiana shrimp and oyster fishermen get their lives back. Deep water fishing will be down too. Then there are birds and fish that will never get their lives back.
Tony is a classic example of how this circus works. BP plucks a guy from far up in the company hierarchy and essentially throws him under the bus. Of course he doesn’t have detailed knowledge of operations on the drill rig. Or if he does, he is far enough removed from the action that he can say, “I wasn’t part of the decision-making process,” and not get laughed at.
No doubt BP’s internal investigation has pinpointed the causes of the blowout quite precisely. You don’t get to be an oil company grossing $62 million a day by leaving the details fuzzy. Daily decisions on the Deepwater Horizon were made by supervisors much further down BP’s flow chart who might not stonewall as well as Tony. He earns his $5 million annual salary to stand tough in these situations, giving congressmen and the public someone to blame and to hate, while nothing is learned about what happened. The truth will emerge when the headlines are less inflamed. It’s corporate CYA (cover your ass).
Tony is to blame just as Don Blankenship was to blame for another methane blast on April 5 of this year that killed 29 miners. That occurred at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia. The problem in a nutshell: inadequate ventilation. As CEO of Massey Energy, Blankenship swore up and down that he was the archangel of safety until a reporter found a 2005 memo he’d written: “If any of you have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers, or anyone else to do anything other than run coal, you need to ignore them and run coal.” That means dig it and get it out. As any man who has worked in construction or any of the trades knows, time is money. Getting the job done quickly trumps safety every time. Asking for gloves or respirators can shorten your period of employment.
Don is the guy who implemented mountain top removal as a way of getting at the coal quickly. It put the work onto machines and eliminated miners who need wages. Massey’s profits soared as did its stock price, while the landscape continued and continues to be as terrorized as the waters of the Gulf. Michael Shnayerson wrote about this in “Coal River,” a 2008 book describing the devastation wrought by coal mining in West Virginia. In a recent article for Vanity Fair online, Shnayerson cited the memo above and called Blankenship “Appalachia’s most notorious coal baron. He reported the attitude of management at the Upper Big Branch in the words of one miner: “A man is like a tool. If it’s bent or broke, get rid of it or get you a new one.”
Don will also be spanked in front of congress. His $17.8 million annual paycheck should ease the pain.
Tony and Don—Big Oil and King Coal. Plenty of culpability there. But corporations were devised to prevent real persons from taking the blame. As legal persons, it’s the corporation that takes the hit when things go awry. That’s why it’s BP and not Tony Hayward paying into the compensation fund established by President Obama. Of course, the Republicans blame Obama for the spill and paint Tony as a victim. That darn socialism again. Blame is a game, almost another American pastime. But more than a game, it’s a diversion. All that televised finger-pointing distracts us from the problem and lets the pointer off the hook.
It’s all of us. We drive vehicles that burn oil. We leave the lights on all over America every night, using the electric produced by coal fired utilities. American lifestyles and businesses are so fossil fuel reliant that we consume 25 percent of the world’s oil production, while having less than 3 percent of the world’s oil, according to the National Resources Defense Council. Tony and Don terrorize the earth on behalf of us all. They supply our demand just as the Mexican cartels supply our market for drugs. That will change when we do, bottom up.
More important, blame diverts attention from our most dire problem, the environmental crisis, which is not just this blowout but environmental insults large and small going on worldwide. On the big stage Don and Tony are doing what humans have always done, killing stuff. We are predators. We “predate” on everything: deer, fish, timber, plants, minerals, other people, nothing off limits and much of it ingenious, as when we turn sand into glass. We’ve chopped, dug, drilled, shot and blasted our way through history, and many species have paid dearly for our “dominion.” But we are not separate from the objects we exploit; we are as related as water is to air. Life on earth arose as one living whole. The sea we poison is the sea out of which we crawled a billion plus years ago. Today human life begins in a world of water, the uterus. For weeks after conception we have gills! Our development reflects our connection. Unless we stop poisoning the earth spill by spill, we will learn about wholeness the hard way. We will be the ones on an oily beach gasping for breath.
Environmental karma. It’s not just for dinosaurs anymore. •
BP, Coal, Environment, Oil, Tom deMers, Tony Hayward in Opinion
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