The Mixed Curse of Deepwater Horizon

Now, as oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill continues its insuperable gouting from the Gulf floor, and as everyone—engineers, scientists, and politicians—sits by powerlessly while this slow-motion tragedy unfolds day by excruciating day, it seems necessary to revisit the tragically obsolescent foundations of American energy; that is, oil and coal. Oil is the viscous lifeblood, coal the bituminous sustenance of this country. Without them, our economy grinds and catches, staggers, keels, collapses. Absent these fossil fuels, our homes go dark and cold, we shiver, consort by candlelight, grunt softly in the sundown of our suzerainty on earth. No one disputes this; no one denies that should the derrick cough raspy and hollow tomorrow, and the seam echo with emptiness and exhaustion, we are sunk. But two distinct responses attend this knowledge: 1. Dear God, for the sake of our future well-being and prosperity, we’ve got to find alternatives and fast!; and 2. More oil! More coal! To the last drop! To the last lump! Once more unto the breach!

I could spin elegant and acerbic paragraphs in comprehensively refuting this last chorus, the Drill, Baby, Drillers. I could. But Lord what a waste of words, what a waste of breath! Shall we bore holes in every last mile of earth, of seabed, of permafrost tundra? Shall we burn and pollute, burn and pollute, as the atmosphere around us fires like so much tinder, and we’re boiled in our own pudding? While the waters rise, shall we bury our heads in the Alberta tar sands, sucking the ground, sifting the grit in our gullets, hoping dismally for the faint emetic tang of oil in the back of our throats so as to put off the day of reckoning a few seconds longer?

Yet of all the arguments in favor of rapidly accelerating the research and development of alternative energy sources, which is sufficiently compelling to convince the foolhardy of the necessity? Because if global warming is a myth and we’ve got oil and coal for another half-century or more, why worry? What’s the harm and wherefore the urgency? Two months ago our sitting President, a flaming pinko socialist Antichrist in the right wing’s gentle formulation, announced he was opening up previously unspoiled coastal areas to offshore oil drilling as part of a “broader strategy” for energy independence. If the Pied Piper of Progressives whistles the oil anthem, how is the argument for the urgency of alternative energy even heard?

So let us now hymn to the hubris and incompetence of the fossil fuel oligarchs, and most especially to BP America and its fatuous CEO, Tony Hayward. It will take some colossal blundering on the part of Big Oil and Big Coal to convince cynical and complacent politicians, not to mention an inert American public, of the dangers of our abject reliance on oil and coal. Catastrophes like the Deepwater Horizon spill render our abjectness manifest in ways that arguments on behalf of global warming—even slick and well-informed ones like An Inconvenient Truth—cannot.

But it’s simply not enough that Obama suspend new offshore drilling in the wake of Deepwater Horizon; when will he commit himself to shepherding the nation toward an economy that generates one-quarter of its energy from renewable sources? If the federal government invested in renewables with the same fervor, the same zealotry, with which it approaches military research and development, this goal—one-quarter renewable energy by, say, 2020—would seem modest. Could the Race for Renewables become the Space Race, the Arms Race, of the early 21st Century? It seems unlikely mostly because the Space Race and the Arms Race were founded on fear—fear not only of Soviet superiority, but of Soviet domination and American extinction. That is, they were founded on a perceived existential threat, and Americans today, taking a cue from the most alarmist figures in their government, view international terrorism, the federal deficit, and gay marriage as far greater existential threats than global warming, environmental catastrophe, or the end of fossil fuels. It seems unlikely that we will wake up on our own to the danger—both overt and insidious—posed by our reliance on coal and oil.

Quite simply, we are an infantile people, one who doesn’t believe in, much less comprehend, what it can’t see, and one who forgets what it has seen as soon as it disappears from sight. As depressing as the prospect sounds, it may very well take more Deepwater Horizons for Americans to countenance a nation built on renewable energy. And given the shift away from conventional fossil fuel sources, which disappear daily, toward so-called unconventional sources—those dirtier and more dangerous to extract—more Deepwater Horizon-like calamities appear to be inevitable. It is a terrible curse for this country to bear, but one that paradoxically may be, in the end, necessary for its future well-being.