Rig Explosion Ignites Concerns Over Drilling

Photo <a href="http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=43768">courtesy of NASA</a>.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Last week’s explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig likely claimed the lives of 11 workers, and what’s left of the rig is currently hemorrhaging oil into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of 42,000 gallons per day—two painful reminders that our fossil fuel reliance is neither safe nor clean.

The massive spill, just 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana, already covers more than 1,800 square miles. It is expected to hit land by Saturday. The leak from a pipe about 5,000 feet underwater may take up to two weeks to fix. Meanwhile, clean-up crews are dropping chemical dispersants into the water to try to prevent the spill from reaching land, where it would wreak environmental havoc on coastal ecosystsems (both the Delta National Wildlife Refuge and Breton National Wildlife Refuge are not far from the spill site). But as the New York Times reports, those dispersants can also be toxic to sea life; the United States Fish and Wildlife Service reported sighting three sperm whales near of the spill, so crews were instructed to “steer clear” when dropping the chemicals.

This marks the worst oil rig disaster in decades, and it comes just weeks after the Obama administration announced plans to expand offshore drilling. Despite the fact that the oil industry and its government supporters claim that new technologies have made the sector “environmentally responsible”, the blast makes it clear that oil extraction still has potentially catastrophic effects. And as Marcus Baram reports today, the oil industry, including including Deepwater Horizon rig owner Transocean Ltd. and operator BP, has fought against new safety rules that might have prevented this disaster.

The episode has prompted new concerns in Congress about the prospects for expanded drilling. Three Senate opponents of offshore drilling, Democrats Bill Nelson of Florida and Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez of New Jersey, on Monday called for a congressional investigation into the blast, calling it “a sobering reminder of the real risk from oil drilling.” The explosion and subsequent leak, the senators wrote in a letter to relevant committee chairs, raise “serious concerns about the industry’s claims that their operations and technology are safe enough to put rigs in areas that are environmentally sensitive or are critical to tourism or fishing industries.” All three have vowed to vote against climate and energy legislation if it includes an expansion of oil drilling.

It’s not just Democrats. Charlie Crist, Florida’s Republican governor and prospective Senate candidate, also criticized the incident as evidence that even more technologically advanced rigs don’t guarantee safety:

“If this doesn’t give somebody pause, there’s something wrong,” Crist said. “This is, as I understand it, a pretty new rig with modern technology. As I’ve always said it would need to be far enough, clean enough and safe enough. I’m not sure this was far enough. I’m pretty sure it was not clean enough. And it doesn’t sound like it was safe enough. It’s not a great situation.”

Obama’s announcement of his offshore expansion plan last month called for drilling “in ways that protect communities and protect coastlines.” This recent spill makes it clear that may be an empty pledge.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate