Columns

Well, looks like the Gulf of Mexico is fucked. Oopsy daisy. Not surprising, though – it’s just business as usual.

Last month an explosion savaged the Deepwater Horizon rig and opened up the ocean basin to thousands after thousands after thousands of tonnes of toxic ooze. BP, you suck.
As you would expect of US champions of deregulation, they have the best and most sophisticated analysis of the spill. One person tried to come to BP’s defence by claiming it could have been an act of God. Another idiot downplayed the gravity of the situation, saying it wasn’t as bad as he expected. He likened the spill to a chocolate milkshake and with his amazing skills of inference, concluded that it would safely break up all by itself. I loved this exchange: Rush Limbaugh: “The ocean will take care of this.” Bill Maher: “That’s right, a petrochemical stew is very natural to wetlands. You know what, you dipshit? Mercury’s natural too – you don’t put it in your Cheerios.”
The thing about oil is that we have a thing for oil. It’s like cocaine. A naturally-occurring substance is, with a little technical expertise, turned into something awesome. We use oil for everything. Energy, plastic, paint, medicine ... lube ... New Zealand consumes somewhere in the area of 150 000 barrels of oil a day. In historical terms, we are living a globalised party.
Big oil is also a literal party. Oil regulators and big oil representatives have been known to get it the fuck on. Wild parties, man. US Government officials from the Minerals Management Service have been caught getting on the booze, coke, weed, and hooking up with oil reps. Shell had to put up regulators in a hotel for the night because they were so off their faces that they couldn’t get home. This isn’t law school any more, guys, you’ve got serious jobs to do.
Big oil is also a little like crack. It’s amazingly addictive, a non-sustainable habit, cheap, nasty, sells itself, has horrible consequences, and dodgy things go down in its production. But in some ways this is an unfair analogy. Crack isn’t responsible for filling up landfills with plastic bags that kill wildlife. It doesn’t make for epic environmental devastation in the form of burn-offs and spills.
So, is oil like crack or coke? Which is the better analogy? I have to admit, it’s difficult to discern, having never tried crack.