--- title: The Far-Ranging Costs of the Mess in the Gulf description: A blown oil well in the Gulf of Mexico creates an environmental catastrophe — but the accident could at last provide the impetus to craft an energy policy that is smart, pragmatic and green canonical: https://time.com/archive/6597019/the-far-ranging-costs-of-the-mess-in-the-gulf/ author: Bryan Walsh article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2010-05-06T04:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-25T06:29:59.672Z article:section: Science og:title: The Far-Ranging Costs of the Mess in the Gulf og:description: A blown oil well in the Gulf of Mexico creates an environmental catastrophe — but the accident could at last provide the impetus to craft an energy policy that is smart, pragmatic and green og:url: https://time.com/archive/6597019/the-far-ranging-costs-of-the-mess-in-the-gulf/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Far-Ranging Costs of the Mess in the Gulf twitter:description: A blown oil well in the Gulf of Mexico creates an environmental catastrophe — but the accident could at last provide the impetus to craft an energy policy that is smart, pragmatic and green twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [Science](/section/science/) # The Far-Ranging Costs of the Mess in the Gulf by [Bryan Walsh](https://time.com/author/bryan-walsh/) May 6, 2010 4:00 AM UTC by [Bryan Walsh](https://time.com/author/bryan-walsh/) May 6, 2010 4:00 AM UTC The crew of the Deepwater Horizon was ready to hit pay dirt. The massive rig — owned by the drilling company Transocean and leased to the energy giant BP — was finishing up preparations to drill an oil well deep beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, about 50 miles (80 km) south of the Louisiana coast. It was familiar, dangerous work, and the rig had been there before: less than a year earlier, it had drilled the deepest oil and gas well ever, more than 35,000 ft. (10,700 m) beneath water and rock. Late on the evening of April 20, however, something went terribly wrong. An explosion rocked the rig, igniting a massive fire. Eleven workers were killed in the inferno, and 17 more were injured. Within two days, while Coast Guard ships were still searching fruitlessly for survivors, the ruined Horizon sank, dragging its equipment and pipes to the bottom of the ocean, 5,000 ft. (1,500 m) below. Terrible as the loss of life and property were, they were just the beginning. An accident this severe could easily cause a rupture in the pipes that carry oil to the surface, but there were fail-safe devices in place to seal the well before that could happen. Those devices, however, did fail, and officials soon realized that thousands of barrels of petroleum — and perhaps far more — were spilling into the Gulf. Every effort by BP — which is financially responsible for the spill — to stanch the flow of crude from the fractured well failed. An oil slick formed on the surface and grew by the day, drifting inexorably toward the coast of Louisiana, home to vulnerable marshes and wetlands, and the most productive fishery in the lower 48 states. [(See pictures of the spill)](http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1985277,00.html) More than two weeks after the accident, no easy way to close off the well has been found, and it has become clear that what started as an oil spill has become an uncontrolled gusher with economic, political and social consequences as far as the eye can see. The slick — a morphing mass of at least 2,000 sq. mi. (5,200 sq km) as of May 3 and changing every day — threatens to kill wildlife and wreck the fishing industry along nearly 1,300 miles (2,100 km) of coastline. Scientists worry that ocean currents could carry the oil around the tip of Florida to the beaches of the East Coast. President Obama, not given to overstatement, called the scene unfolding in the Gulf a “massive and potentially unprecedented environmental disaster.” The damage won’t be measured just in environmental and economic costs; there could be political blowback for Obama — and not just because his Administration will surely be judged on its response to a Louisiana disaster, just as the last one was. Less than a month before the explosion, the President announced support for expanded offshore drilling as part of his energy policy. But even before any newly spilled oil has hit the shoreline, environmental groups and some coastal Democrats have seized on the accident as a reason to block any new drilling. The extent of the Horizon catastrophe — in a worst-case scenario, it would easily surpass the nearly 11 million gal. of oil spilled by the _Exxon Valdez_ in 1989 — is proof, critics say, that offshore drilling is inherently risky. [(See pictures of the _Exxon Valdez_ spill.)](http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1887217,00.html) “This will kill any plan to expand offshore drilling for the next decade,” Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, declared flatly. Brune may be right. On May 4, Florida Senator Bill Nelson threatened to filibuster any climate and energy bill that expands offshore drilling. But if that’s the legacy of the Horizon spill, it will be a wasted opportunity. Too often the U.S. has let its energy policy be driven by the emotion of disasters, rather than by smart, long-term and realistic decisionmaking. “Drill here, drill now” was a simpleminded slogan. But “Drill nowhere, drill never” isn’t much better. [See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.](http://www.time.com/time/picturesoftheweek) [See the Cartoons of the Week.](http://www.time.com/time/cartoonsoftheweek) The facts are much more complex than bumper-sticker slogans admit. The U.S. needs energy — lots and lots of energy — and 37.1% of it is currently supplied by oil. As the population expands and the policy decisions and technological innovations needed to make the switch to green, renewable energy sources lag, thirst for the stuff is only going to grow. Critics have long lamented that when it comes to energy policy, 9/11 was an opportunity for the country to have an honest debate about the choices it needs to make if it’s ever going to break its addiction to oil. “We need to address the underlying issue,” says Lisa Margonelli, director of the New America Foundation’s Energy Policy Initiative, “and that’s our dependence on oil.” Having a national conversation now — an adult one — is the only way forward. **What Went Wrong** When David Rainey, BP’s vice president of exploration for the Gulf of Mexico, appeared before the Senate last November, he had a simple message: Offshore drilling is safe and reliable. New rules proposed by the Interior Department that would have tightened regulations on offshore exploration were unnecessary. “I think we need to remember that \[offshore drilling\] has been going on for the last 50 years, and it has been going on in a way that is both safe and protective of the environment,” Rainey said at the time. [(See the TIME 100 list of the world’s most influential people.)](http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/0,28757,1984685,00.html) Not quite, as it turns out. Investigators are still exploring exactly what went wrong on the Deepwater Horizon, but the catastrophe seems to have been the result of a cascading series of failures — and too little oversight. Rigs are equipped with blowout preventers, 40-ft.-high (12 m) stacks of machinery with multiple hydraulic valves that are designed to seal a well should anything go wrong. Crew members on the Horizon couldn’t activate the blowout preventer, and a deadman’s switch that should have kicked in when control of the rig was lost failed as well. One safety feature the Horizon did not have is an acoustic switch, an additional backup that can activate the blowout preventer remotely. Regulators don’t mandate them in the U.S., though they are effectively required in nations like Brazil and Norway. When the rig sank, the riser — the pipe that runs from the wellhead to the surface — fell as well, kinking as it did and causing three breaks, from which thousands of barrels of oil are leaking each day. “There were multiple chances to stop this,” says Malcolm Spaulding, a professor of ocean engineering at the University of Rhode Island. “And they all failed.” [(See pictures of the spill’s potential effect on wildlife.)](http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1985277,00.html) It will take time to figure out if that failure resulted from some negligence on the part of BP, one of the other companies involved with the construction of the rig or, frankly, something closer to what Texas Governor Rick Perry suggested: an “act of God.” For now, BP and the government have more pressing concerns. Until they figure out a way to seal the blown well, the oil will keep gushing. And the location of the drill site — a mile (1.6 km) below the surface, where the pressure is more than a ton per square inch — means that all the work needs to be done remotely. It’s like performing “open-heart surgery at 5,000 feet \[1,500 m\] in the dark with robot-controlled submarines,” as BP America head Lamar McKay told ABC News on May 2\. [See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.](http://www.time.com/time/picturesoftheweek) [See the Cartoons of the Week.](http://www.time.com/time/cartoonsoftheweek) So far, all the robots’ efforts to activate the blowout preventer and shut the well have failed, leaving BP with two options: one fast but unproven and one slow but sure. The company will try to place 70-ton “domes” — shedlike structures, really — over each of the leaks in the broken riser. These should catch the rising oil, allowing it to be pumped to a waiting drill ship on the surface. If the strategy works, the spill could be stopped in a week or so. The problem: this technique has never been tried at such depths. For that reason, the company will also begin drilling a relief well that will allow the leaking well to be sealed with dense liquid. That’s a proven way to curtail a blowout, but it’s likely to take at least three months — by which time millions of barrels of oil would have escaped. “The first thing is to stop this thing at the source,” Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the top official for spill response, told reporters on May 1\. “The continued leakage of anything for that period of time is going to cause an extraordinary amount of problems for us.” **The Oil’s Toll** The leak will give the government untold headaches, of course, and it will most likely cost BP billions. But it’s people like Charles Robin III, a fifth-generation shrimper on the Louisiana coast, who will really suffer. Robin’s livelihood — like that of thousands of Gulf Coast fishermen — could be ruined by the spill. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has banned fishing in much of the Gulf in response to the accident, and by May 2 the oil had made its way to within miles of Robin’s home on the Mississippi Delta. “Katrina dug a hole for us,” he said, sipping a glass of sweet tea on his 52-ft. (16 m) boat _Ellie Margaret_. “We’re laying in this grave, trying to get out, and this spill comes along.” [(See the world’s top 10 environmental disasters.)](http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1986457%5F1986501%5F1986443,00.html) Fishermen are not the only ones threatened: the very coastline of the Gulf and the rich variety of wildlife that depends on it are also endangered. The bayous and beaches of Louisiana — home to about 40% of the coastal wetlands in the continental U.S. — are uniquely vulnerable to an oil spill, especially during the spring breeding season. Oil would be toxic to fish, shrimp and oysters, while shorebirds that come into contact with the crude can end up smothered. If the spill makes its way into the Mississippi Delta, it could soak deeply into the spongelike marshes, and cleaning those wetlands would be far more difficult than the work on the rocky beaches of Alaska’s Prince William Sound, where the _Exxon Valdez_ ran aground in 1989\. Even the methods used to battle the spill could end up backfiring: the dispersants being sprayed on the oil slick break up the crude, speeding evaporation, but the chemicals can be toxic to some marine life. “On an index of 1 to 10 for vulnerability, it’s a definite 10,” says Wes Tunnell, a marine biologist at Texas A&M University. If the oil drifts into the aptly named Loop Current, a surge of warm water that circulates in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, it could begin a much feared trip around the southern tip of Florida and northward, where the Keys, the Everglades and the beaches of the East Coast of the U.S. lie exposed. The only sure way to prevent all that from happening will be to bandage the bleeding well before the oil chokes the Gulf and to defend the coast in the meantime. Thousands of personnel — many of them volunteers — have been mobilized as part of the response, and more than 500,000 ft. (152,000 m) of boom has been deployed to shield the coastline. BP is also trying what’s known as an in situ burn, corralling the slick with booms and setting it on fire. So far the weather has been the sole piece of good luck the workers have enjoyed, as winds and currents have kept the oil from making landfall, giving authorities time to bolster their preparations, like an army fortifying against an invasion. “We’ve been really lucky in many ways,” says Nancy Kinner, co-director of the Coastal Response Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. “But people need to understand — once there is oil released, there will be damage eventually.” [See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.](http://www.time.com/time/picturesoftheweek) [See the Cartoons of the Week.](http://www.time.com/time/cartoonsoftheweek) Indeed, as long as the oil keeps leaking, fighting the spill on the surface will be a holding action at best. For environmentalists horrified by the sight of the damage — which is occurring despite BP’s reassurances to the government in 2009 that “no significant adverse impacts \[would be\] expected” from a spill even if it happened — this is the last straw. Hence the MoveOn.org commercial released on May 3 that called on Obama to ban new offshore drilling and the sympathetic ear such demands are getting from some Democrats in Congress. “I will make it short and to the point,” said Senator Nelson at a May 4 press conference. “The President’s proposal for offshore drilling is dead on arrival.” **Outsourcing Offshore** Reactions like this are where political argument usually begins in the U.S. — and, increasingly, where it stops. Already, greens and industry, Democrats and Republicans appear to be digging in for the usual siege. Offshore drilling was meant to be a bridge to conservatives, to get them on board with climate and energy legislation. A new moratorium could end that possibility. “A major oil spill could put in jeopardy our best chance to get off oil,” says Steve Cochran, director of the Environmental Defense Fund’s National Climate Campaign. “That’d be ironic.” Environmentalists’ arguments that the U.S. needs to get off oil fast are right — to a point. No one pretends that relying on an energy source that fouls the planet, enriches petro-dictators, routinely destabilizes economies and, oh yes, is running out is a smart business model. The International Energy Agency expects global oil demand to grow 24% between now and 2030, which means that the race to drink up petroleum will only accelerate — driving prices up accordingly. But if not oil, what? The 37.1% share of American energy that is supplied by petroleum dwarfs the 7.3% generated by renewable sources — and most of that is hydroelectric and biomass, including ethanol, not wind or solar. (Coal, natural gas and nuclear make up the rest.) It will take years — perhaps decades — until renewables represent more than a tiny share of the energy mix, and in the meantime America needs to keep the lights on and the factories humming. Even if the analysts are underestimating the growth of green energy by orders of magnitude — not impossible, given their shaky track record — it doesn’t change the essential supremacy of oil. Green advocates were ecstatic to see the approval of the 170-megawatt Cape Wind offshore wind-power project in Massachusetts last month, but it would take 3,000 offshore wind projects of that size to meet projected U.S. electricity demand by 2030 — almost one plant every two days. “People really do not have a grip on the size and scale of our existing energy system and our dependence on hydrocarbons,” says John Hofmeister, a former Shell executive and the author of the new book _Why We Hate the Oil Companies_. One answer to the problem has been to try to split the difference between energy needs and environmental needs. In terms of offshore drilling, that means going where the oil is, as long as it’s off the coast of other countries, not our own — effectively making NIMBYism (not in my backyard) part of U.S. energy policy. The practice began in 1969, when a blowout on a well 6 miles (10 km) off the coast of Southern California spilled about 100,000 bbl. of oil into the Pacific, fouling the beaches of Santa Barbara. The accident occurred just as the nascent environmental movement was taking off, and the public and political reaction was powerful. No new rigs were permitted off the Pacific and Atlantic coasts after that, but existing ones were grandfathered in. That’s led to subtle energy hypocrisy. New Jersey’s Senators, for example, may use their influence to keep offshore drilling away from the Garden State’s beaches, but no one presses the state’s residents to give up the 230 million bbl. of oil they burned in 2008 alone. It’s only in the Gulf of Mexico, whose waters yield nearly a third of U.S.-produced oil, and resource-rich Alaska that a moratorium on offshore drilling has never been considered. The result has been an outsourcing of America’s offshoring to countries like Kazakhstan and Angola, which are rapidly becoming the world’s new oil powers. Their fields may hold billions of barrels of petroleum, but their environmental standards are nonexistent. Nigeria — a petro-state that produces more than 2 million bbl. of oil a day (a little more than 10% of U.S. daily consumption) — has spills equal to that of the _Exxon Valdez_ about every year. “We offshore all the negative aspects of oil extraction,” says New America’s Margonelli. “There’s a huge mass of consumers in the U.S. who just want oil to be cheap and don’t want to think about the externalities.” And who don’t care about oil spills off the west coast of Africa. **What Obama Should Do** If a President who prides himself on his ability to recognize teachable moments wants to seize this one, he needs to begin the lesson by explaining the folly of NIMBY to America’s greens and then to follow that with another reminder to the “Drill, baby, drill” chorus of why opening up every inch of the country and coastline to rigs is equally foolish. It would fail not only as environmental policy but as economic policy too, since petroleum is a commodity traded on a global market, which means that all the world’s extracted oil is essentially poured into a single pot from which everyone draws. Even a greatly expanded offshore program would thus reduce the price of gasoline by only a few cents over the long term. The next step is to put in place truly comprehensive energy and climate legislation, laws that could slap a price of some sort on fossil fuels while channeling serious funds toward clean-energy research and deployment. Whether in the form of a tax, cap-and-trade or some other mechanism, pricing carbon has long been a nonstarter in Washington, but that needs to change. And if you think the U.S. is already investing real money in green tech, think again. It spends a little more than $18 billion on research and investment in clean energy, while China spends more than $34 billion. Additional offshore drilling would have to be a part of the new policy mix too. Since the Gulf disaster, the White House has backed away from its earlier openness to the idea, waiting on the Interior Department’s investigation before deciding how to proceed. One approach would be to authorize some new drilling but with toughened regulation and a lot of new strings. Right now, for example, there’s a tiny 8 cents-a-barrel tax on oil companies that goes into a cleanup reserve. What if that tax could be raised significantly, with the stipulation that it go toward clean-energy research and development? A tax of $2 per barrel on all the oil produced and imported into the U.S. could provide around $15 billion a year of independent funding for alternative power and environmental causes — and it would be done on the back of the wealthy industry responsible for disasters like Deepwater Horizon. “Environmentalists might be willing to take that risk \[on new offshore drilling\] if it can become a viable source of alternative revenue,” says Matthew Kotchen, an environmental economist at Yale University. “It’s what you do with that money that matters.” On the flip side, the U.S. needs to fast-track the development of alternative-energy projects and do so ruthlessly. Cape Wind in Massachusetts is a good example, but it came after nine years of legal battles, partly from local environmentalists who don’t want their view spoiled — a shortsighted position if ever there was one. The lesson New Englanders and the rest of the country need to learn is that given the scale of the coming energy demand — coupled with the need to reduce carbon emissions — NIMBY is dead. Americans have to get used to the idea of some energy production, both conventional and renewable, in their real and metaphorical backyards. And energy efficiency and conservation — much of which can be accomplished with nimble regulatory action like the increase in auto-mileage standards put in place this year — can reduce the need for new power, whether it comes from oil rigs or wind turbines. Congestion pricing — a policy already used successfully in cities like London — could help reduce traffic in crowded cities and provide money for public-transit systems now starved of funds. There are signs that the President is already thinking this way. “Oil is going to be a part of it,” says Carol Browner, the White House czar for climate and energy, speaking about Administration policies going forward. “But it doesn’t change the fact we need a comprehensive energy plan that can lessen our dependence on oil and help invest in clean energy.” That’s trademark Obama — policies that are both pragmatic and potentially visionary, and guaranteed to annoy both sides a bit. It won’t be easy. Energy policy, like so much else in the country, has been set to drift for too long. But the moment is there for the taking, a chance for something worthwhile to rise out of the muck still bubbling up from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. _— With reporting by Steven Gray / Venice, La._ [See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.](http://www.time.com/time/picturesoftheweek) [See the Cartoons of the Week.](http://www.time.com/time/cartoonsoftheweek) The Far-Ranging Costs of the Mess in the Gulf ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6597019/the-far-ranging-costs-of-the-mess-in-the-gulf/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6597019/the-far-ranging-costs-of-the-mess-in-the-gulf/"},"headline":"The Far-Ranging Costs of the Mess in the Gulf","datePublished":"2010-05-06T04:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-25T06:29:59.672Z","description":"A blown oil well in the Gulf of Mexico creates an environmental catastrophe — but the accident could at last provide the impetus to craft an energy policy that is smart, pragmatic and green","url":"https://time.com/archive/6597019/the-far-ranging-costs-of-the-mess-in-the-gulf/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Bryan Walsh","url":"https://time.com/author/bryan-walsh/"}],"articleSection":"Science","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/science/","name":"Science"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/archive/6597019/the-far-ranging-costs-of-the-mess-in-the-gulf/","name":"The Far-Ranging Costs of the Mess in the Gulf"}}]}] ```