thelongnews.com

Here’s a great Long News topic: we have environmental impact for sure, economic impact, and political impact — particularly in light of President Obama’s recent announcement for plans to open up the East Coast for drilling.  I have to believe that those plans are now on indefinite hold.

It has been interesting to check out the regular news coverage on this one. The official BP home page is rather, well, official, with pictures of “boom”, a few short fact papers, and a overview of their response, including the process for any claims against the spill.  Greenpeace, for contrast, has a horrifying picture of the original explosion, mentions 11 people that died (a fact which I had missed), and some insightful maps about the spread of the oil and what it would have done if it happened in other parts of the US, such as the East Coast.  In the UK, the Guardian highlights the recent set of dead sea turtles that are washing up on the shore near the spill.  Their article takes some pains to avoid jumping to conclusions, but the idea that this can just be mopped up with some big sponges or towed out to sea without harm is pretty much a dead idea.  CNN International interviewed local people in the gulf about the impact on their livelihoods, including the guy who rents ski-doos.  Oil on the beach means no tourists, and no tourists means no rental.  That’s a pretty direct impact on a guy who probably didn’t even know there was an oil platform nearby.

Louisiana is one of the few states in the US that could be considered both pro-oil and pro-natural economy, with an economic dependence on both fishing and the petroleum industry.  The combination of the two clearly can be disastrous for both.  And unfortunately for Louisiana, they seem to be at the center of  now two horrible environmental/people disasters, both involving human projects that didn’t work as planned (levees and oil platforms).

The long view on this story is, I think, the problem of how we can manage large technology projects for the overall benefit of people without these enormous consequences when the projects fail.  BP is not a “bad” company in any way that I have seen: they have huge teams of people who I believe are really trying to do the right thing here, and there’s no indication that there was any negligence or ill intentions.  Nevertheless, this is a hugely complex technology project, and we know that, regardless of intention, sometimes large projects go wrong.  In this case, the consequences are enormous.

For better or worse, there are too many people in the world and too many projects that need to be done that we can’t just abandon all projects that have risks.  The truest human challenge here is, how do we continue to pursue the technologies that we need without suffering the consequences of design and technology failures?  Or is that just a pipe dream, and we are destined to live with the fact that bad things will inevitably happen —  we should just push forward and ignore the consequences?

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