Most of the United States coastal areas are banned from offshore drilling (drilling in the ocean for oil and natural gas). Last month, President Obama proposed legislation to reverse that ban on parts of the east coast and on the northern Alaskan coast. In total, over 297 million acres of the ocean will be fair game for oil exploration. Drilling for oil in these parts of the ocean would allow the U.S. to lessen their dependence on foreign oil without affecting current levels of oil consumption. In addition, the U.S. government would be able to generate a profit from the offshore leases that would be negotiated with oil exploration companies like BP and Transocean. The reversal could also lead to the creation of thousands of jobs for Americans – something the American people could really use during this bad economic climate.
While politically it may make sense to lessen our dependence on other countries and their oil supply, and economically we need more jobs for Americans, expanding offshore drilling is a terrible idea because of the environmental risks that are involved. The ban on offshore drilling was put into place over twenty years ago because of the environmental risks that would threaten our oceanic ecosystems if drilling were to occur. If an accident were to happen on an offshore oil rig, it could affect marine life in that area, as well as jeopardize the beaches. As Dr. Jill Stein says in an article about offshore drilling, “There is no way to guarantee complete safety from spills. If part of the east coast of the US suffered a spill comparable to the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989, the result would be a catastrophe for public health and valuable natural habitats.” And many other people agree with her. Greenpeace members have been quoted in a number of their blogs saying, “It’s not a matter of if a spill will occur, but when — and where.”
And as it turns out, those Greenpeace members were right. Last Thursday, an oil rig exploded, and then sank just 21 miles off the Gulf Coast (see full story here). Besides the safety issues for the workers on the rig – currently eleven workers are officially missing and presumed dead – the impact this event will have on the environment may be detrimental. Oil and natural gas from the rig burned for over 36 hours causing thick black clouds of smoke to rise away from the scene heavily contributing to air pollution in that area. But even worse, the amount of oil that spilled – and continues to leak from the deep-water well – will pollute the surrounding oceanic and coastal habitats, harming many organisms that live there. There are two different wildlife preserves located only a few miles from the explosion and the impact on those preserves is still unknown. Marine biology professor, Chris Frid was quoted on forests.org saying, "That part of the gulf's coastline consists of a sedimentary shore with lots of muddy inlets. The oil will penetrate into the mud, and because it contains no oxygen the oil will not biodegrade. For generations, any disturbance of the sediment will bring oil back to the surface and that will happen over a very large area."
With an estimated 8,000 barrels of crude oil leaking each day, it is reported that officials are doing their best to clean up the spill as fast as they can. But so far, they have been unsuccessful in their attempts to both stop the oil leak, which is leaking from the sunken rig and the deep-water well in three different spots, and clean up the spill. Instead, the ocean currents are spreading the spill making the clean up area larger and more difficult to deal with. We have let the technology that allows us to drill for oil surpass the technology we currently have to clean up any resulting accidents. Experts say that at the current rate of oil leakage, in 40 days the spill will surpass the 260,000 barrels spilled by Exxon Mobil when the Valdez tanker hit a reef off the Alaska coast in 1989. That spill caused the death of hundreds of marine animals and cost millions of dollars in environmental work to try to reverse harms caused to thousands of other animals. This week, dead sea turtles, catfish, horseshoe crabs and marine birds have begun to wash up on the shore in Mississippi. They are not coated in oil, and cannot yet be directly linked to the spill, but the number of animals found dead makes marine biologists believe that their deaths are linked to the pollution from the oil spill.
While this oil rig explosion has been, and will continue to be a huge problem, a more common problem with offshore drilling the is minor leaks and spills from oil tankers that transport oil from the rig to land, as well as minor leaks from rig platforms themselves. Each incident does not do that much damage on its own and therefore does not really receive as much press as huge explosions do. But the frequency of these spills makes them just as big of a problem. Offshore drilling is filling our pristine oceans with oil and harming innocent marine animals as well as running delicate ecosystems that we depend on for food.
What can be done to prevent future oil spills? Really nothing can be done except to stop offshore drilling. No one is even sure of the cause of this most recent explosion, and obviously the problems that can occur because of offshore drilling are unpredictable. If the U.S. needs to lessen their dependence on foreign oil, it might be a better idea to heavily invest in other forms of energy – ones that are cleaner and better for the environment than oil – which is not a renewable resource anyway. These new forms of energy could also create thousands of new jobs for Americans, and they would be jobs that would be able to last longer than jobs associated with offshore drilling since they would be environmentally friendly and the resources would not be finite. An even better solution would be to cut down energy consumption in the U.S. overall reducing our general need for oil and other polluting sources of energy. But that is just an environmental pipe dream. I am sure that is not going to happen until something really drastic forces Americans to reduce their consumption.
