On September 19th, BP announced on its website that the gushing oil well thousands of feet below sea level in the Gulf of Mexico had finally been contained in a layer of cement, and the issue was officially laid to rest. The cleanup is still continuing and damage claims are being processed at this moment, but the words “oil spill” are slowly starting to disappear from people’s search engines. Case closed. Or is it?
While one can argue that the BP oil spill was one of the most devastating in history, in the grand scheme of things it is insignificant compared to the net total of the oil from all other spills combined. Millions of gallons of oil end up in the world’s oceans every year due to unpredictable mistakes and those mistakes add up. New York Harbor experienced a spill of its own on March 23, 2009, when two ships collided in an attempted rescue mission and one leaked approximately three hundred gallons into the waters. BP can be blamed for not conducting thorough enough safety inspections of their oil rigs, and a similar situation can be avoided in the future with further research and technological achievements. But spills like the one in the New York Harbor are unavoidable, and, although the damage they cause may seem trivial, they occur on a daily basis across the world.
We often like to think that the average oil spill is a mistake, a fluke in the system that it usually foolproof. But some of the worst oil spills in history were actually planned attacks. In the Gulf War, Iraqi forces deliberately sabotaged two American oil tankers, releasing 1.5 million tons of oil into the Persian Gulf. In July of 2006, Israel bombed a Lebanese power plant, spilling 15 thousand tons of oil. It is expected that nations at war should target the oil reserves of their enemies, and it would be irrational to say that proper security systems should always be able to protect against such attacks.
The oil spill in New York Harbor and the planned spills in Lebanon and in the Gulf point to one thing: we have no efficient way of preventing either kind of spill from happening again. One simply cannot prevent human error or international conflicts. Similarly, one cannot expect that a country will always focus on the environment during war. Symptomatic relief seems to be the only alternative.
Our addiction to oil goes hand and hand with water pollution, as well as with air pollution. It is overly optimistic to think otherwise. Why invest ourselves in a resource that is not only destined to hurt the planet in more ways than one, but is also finite, destined to simply run out?
If that doesn’t convince you, think of the issue with this in mind: our grandchildren (or, more realistically), our great grandchildren will probably look back on our generation and say, “Wow, I can’t believe they still used oil, even when they had the capability to further develop other energy sources.” The burning of crude oil is literally a century-old technology. Oil in other forms has been used since pre-history. So, just think of the embarrassment! Here we are, with our massive particle accelerators and thousands of satellites in orbit, with our iPads and gigantic computers that can approximate pi to the nearest billion decimal places, all essentially made using a technology that is old as human society itself. Yet we reserve the right to use oil to power our society, an archaic catalyst propelling a modern society…with a great amount of collateral damage.