Blowout in the Gulf: The BP Oil Spill Disaster and the Future of Energy in America

1. A Question for Our Time

1 A Question for Our Time When future historians look back on the first decade of the twenty-first century, they are likely to focus much of their attention on the dramatic images provided by the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Millions of Americans watched as the tanks rolled into Baghdad, where a small crowd of happy Iraqis cheered as the tanks pulled down the hollow statue of Saddam Hussein. Soon after that, unfortunately, Americans also learned about less-happy Iraqis who were exploding homemade bombs and shooting rocket-propelled grenades at some of those very same tanks. Far less visible or dramatic is likely to be the fact that the year of the invasion of Iraq, 2003, marked the fiftieth anniversary of three other developments, all of which had a closer relationship to the invasion than might at first be apparent. The first two of those events involved beginnings—the passing of two pieces of legislation in the early days of the Eisenhower administration that established the legal framework for offshore oil drilling. The third involved an ending—the end of nearly a century when one dominant oil-producing nation single-handedly provided more than half of the petroleum in the world. That nation was the United States of America. Half a world away from Iraq, just a few months before the start of the invasion, a headline in the New York Times had 2 Chapter 1 referred to a different kind of battle, and a different kind of risk from petroleum. This second and less dramatic “Gulf war” took place in a different Gulf—the Gulf of Mexico—and it had more to do with tankers than with tanks. In this second set of Gulf battles, a much smaller army was working comparably hard, pitting its wits and investment capital against the elements and the odds. The front lines for this army were located hundreds of miles from the United States, off the southern edge of the continent, searching for weapons of mass consumption, in the form of oil. Despite the fact that this search was taking place far from land, the oil deposits were technically “domestic ,” because the United States had claimed the sea bottoms as part of its “Exclusive Economic Zone.” As the Times headline noted, however, while this oil was domestic, it was also “Deep and Risky.” It was more than a half-mile deep, to be more precise —and that was just the depth of the water. The drill bits would need to drill through additional miles of muck and rock before—if all went well—the effort would finally hit petroleum paydirt.The BP blowout, to note the obvious, would later show what could happen if things did not go so well.1 A continent away from the Gulf of Mexico, and another world away from the battles going on in both Gulfs, still another battle was taking place beyond the northern edge of the most remote outpost of the United States—along the Arctic Ocean, north of Alaska. On March 19, 2003, when the second President Bush announced that American and coalition forces were “in the early stages of military operations” in Iraq, few if any television cameras were focused on this third battle. The action taking place in this forbidding region would have been difficult for television audiences to see, in any event—given that it was taking place so close to the north pole, much of the action was going on, literally, in the dark. When Secretary of State Colin Powell made his case for the Iraq war at the United A Question for Our Time 3 Nations, on February 5, 2003, he did so only about two weeks after the first sunrise to have squeezed its way above the horizon in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska—the starting point for the TransAlaska Pipeline—in the previous two months. Even more than was the case in the sands of Middle Eastern Gulf or the swells of the Gulf of Mexico, the troops that were at work above the Arctic circle were engaged in a battle with the elements, braving even“daytime”temperatures that were about as far below zero as most Americans would have been able to imagine. Other risks in this region included the fact that any television crews actually present almost certainly would have been outnumbered by the polar bears. Save for the Inupiat who have...