Pretty incredible NYT review of ‘A Sea in Flames’, Carl Safina’s book on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. I’ve read the Times book review long enough to know that it doesn’t review books that don’t fit its editorial agenda. Sure enough, Safina is described by Gregg Easterbrook as a renowned marine biologist, he’s also environmental advocate who “asserts that true market pricing of gasoline to reflect its cost in atmospheric harm — that is, a carbon tax — would be a better response to the gulf spill than cleaning birds.”
Sarfina rages against BP, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin and the “Frick and and Frack of the Gulf follies,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (If Safina criticized President Obama’s ineptness in the wake of the spill, Easterbrook doesn’t mention it.)
But after all that, Safina apparently comes to an interesting conclusion:
As “A Sea in Flames” progresses, its author undergoes several conversions. Expecting to find evidence of terrible harm to the gulf biosphere, instead he finds only mild problems. Expecting to discover that the dispersants caused widespread marine death, instead he discovers that by breaking up crude, these chemicals speeded the oil’s natural decomposition. After Allen and Lubchenco grant him an interview, Safina switches ground and decides they are not as bad as he thought.
By the end, Safina is nearly a contrarian. Fertilizer runoff from the Mississippi, he concludes, causes the gulf more harm than did BP, while the fishing ban that went into force just after the spill might have helped marine wildlife more than the oil hurt it. Is gasoline always bad? “A whale might think, ‘Thank God for petroleum,’ ” Safina writes; the end of demand for whale oil saved some whale species. Government officials may have sugarcoated the situation, the author supposes, but the Deepwater Horizon spill just did not do much environmental harm.
Despite that conclusion, Safina is ready to move onto the next cause:
What “normal accident” is next? Safina notes there is almost no regulation of the new technique by which drillers fracture geologic formations to reach natural gas, then inject large volumes of toxic “proppants” to hold fractures open. Surely the proppants won’t seep into groundwater. Surely the artificial fractures won’t play a role in seismic activity. After all, deepwater drilling was perfectly safe.
Nothing is perfectly safe, but by the same token some things aren’t nearly as bad as people say they are, either. Yet we continue to handcuff ourselves when it comes to energy policy.
