Panorama
 
 
 
 
 

SWIMMING AGAINST THE TIDE - THE THINGS
PEOPLE DO TO STOP DEEPWATER DRILLING


Environmental Panorama
International
September of 2010


I've spent the last 46 hours getting in and out of a big red survival suit. It's made out of the thickest wetsuit material and makes me look like a telly-tubby. I can't really move my hands, or arms, or feet, or turn my head, or speak, but it keeps me well toasty in the chilly Atlantic ocean. Then I am put in a boat, someone squashes fins onto my feet and ten minutes later I am plopped into the sea at the bow of Chevron's drillship, which we have stopped dead in the water. As I take up a good position at the bow, where the waves meet and I don't get too pushed around, it always reminds me of the wave machines I used to love as a kid, except none of them threw me up and down 5 metres or more.

I spent yesterday dawn in the swell of the sea watching the sun come up behind the sleeping monster, Stena Carron. As I smelled the fry-up being served in the oil workers' mess, my breakfast, a Bounty Bar, was fed to me from over the side of an inflatable boat. The support team giggled, calling me 'Flipper' and demanding that I do some tricks for my food. My swim partner is Victor, he's good for a singalong, so good that we've had requests from the rig workers watching us from the bow tens of metres up, for a little Rod Stewart or Snow Patrol. We could only think of 'If you want my body and you think I'm sexy', but it seemed impossible to pull off well, what with the Telly-Tubby outfits and the circumstances. So they got The Eurythmics (cause they are sort of Scottish right?), and a little Simon and Garfunkle (who are not at all Scottish), which I quietly dedicated to my mum.

After 46 hours the impossibility of our situation is now dawning on us. "What are we doing?'", we ask ourselves daily. What are we doing? Even with every nonessential Esperanza crew member doing time in the water, there is inevitability a limit to our ability to hold this ship back from the deepsea drill spot its headed to. Its not like when we had the great Yellow Pod on the anchor chain: this direct action is requiring every last crew member to test themselves, to hold out on their fear, their fatigue, their aching limbs, their boredom of sitting in boats watching, waiting. But we have learnt one thing about each other - we are resilient!

This is true direct action, the truest form. Its our bodies in the way of a monstrous wrong. It's our hearts stretched to their limits because we love this earth, from the seas in which we are bobbing, to the Guillemots who watch us in confusion, to the far flung parts of the world from which we all come, to the people back home who are willing us on. It's our solidarity with each other at maximum tilt, and fully extended to the millions we don't know and we will never meet who are suffering as a consequence of our addiction to oil, either through direct conflicts and catastrophes caused by it, or through the climate change that is its consequence.

So what are we doing? We are doing what we have to. We are putting our bodies and souls in the way of the Stena Carron. We are stopping Chevron drilling for oil, because if we don't... they will drill for oil. And they may well find it. That would only extend the time that this world scrabbles about looking for the last drops, putting our chance of stopping climate change in jeopardy and risking another Gulf of Mexico right here on our shores.

We must, must go beyond oil. So every time I am heaved back out of the water, four more hours under my life-belt, and back to the security of the Esperanza, I am rolled from the boat into the Wet Room, to be unpeeled from my suit and I am asked - "Up for another shift in 8 hours?" I look to my buddy Victor and without hesitation we both say "Yup. Bring it on."

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Nuclear power in Canada: busy doing nothing

Regular readers are probably asking themselves how our plans for a comedy show set in a nuclear power plant are progressing. You know, the one where the security fences are guarded by janitors, the robots in the waste facility have minds of their own, the workers sleep on the job and watch Internet porn, the guards arrest pigeons and shoot radioactive seagulls, somebody’s painted the reactor building with paint mixed with heavy water, the nuclear waste storage pond is leaking into the plant’s laundry room, and the workers are told not to have children.

We were also thinking of adding a storyline where the plant is paid millions of dollars not to generate electricity. Too ridiculous? Well, head on over to Ontario in Canada where the people there ‘paid Bruce Power nearly $60 million in 2009 to not generate electricity for the province’…

A deal between the nuclear generator, a private company, and the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) sets out a guarantee for a certain amount of power to be purchased -- even if it's not needed […] In 2009, demand for electricity was down in Ontario, largely as a result of the recession. This meant Bruce's nuclear reactors weren't operating at full capacity.

It’s a lovely piece of spin, making a virtue out of one of nuclear power’s many faults and problems: it’s complete inflexibility in the face of fluctuating demand. You can’t quickly, easily or cheaply ramp up or down electricity generation levels in a nuclear reactor like you can with safer renewable alternatives. So, they have to be ‘on’ all the time. But don’t worry because…

…tIhe OPA said taxpayers actually got a bargain through the arrangement with Bruce.

Isn’t that nice? The people of Ontario got ‘a bargain’ for handing over $60 million for something they didn’t need and didn’t get. Try the same strategy with your boss today. Put your feet up on your desk and do nothing but still demand your salary. Say you’re not working today but your boss is still getting ‘a bargain’. Tell him or her you’ll write that report later when it’s really needed. Let us know what happens.

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Where's all the oil gone?

The Arctic Sunrise is currently alongside in Galveston Texas – the winches and other equipment that was used on the most recent leg have been craned off, and out on deck, a whole lot of new equipment is being welded on for the submarine work we’ll be doing in a few weeks (yeah, that’s right, submarines!)

We left Galveston 11 days ago with a four-person independent science team, led by Rainer Amon, with Cliff Nunnally, Sally Walker and Chuck Folden on a mission to track down the oil beneath the surface of the Gulf. They crew of the Arctic Sunrise worked their asses off about 24 hours a day, to get the research work carried out in the short window of time available. Kert has written in more detail about the work, but now that we’re back in port, and able to take stock, we can talk about what Rainer and Cliff found, and what it means in the grand scheme of things.

While the water samples taken from way down deep during the trip are off to the lab to get analyzed, the immediate, measurable data obtained by Rainer tells us this; that there’s a clear indication of an oxygen deficiency in the Gulf’s waters, in an area stretching from around the Deepwater Horizon disaster site to 300 miles (500km) to the west. The infamous plume still exists – perhaps not visibly, but the essence of it is still there.

This oxygen deficiency tells us that a certain amount of the oil and gas released during the disaster has been consumed by bacteria in the water; bacteria needs oxygen to metabolise the petrochemicals, so, very simply put, the lower the amount of oxygen, the higher the amount of oil has been consumed. However, and here’s the really interesting bit; Rainer’s observations, and the observations of other scientists, have indicated that there the levels of dissolved oxygen in the Gulf are not low enough to suggest that any major amount of the oil and gas from the Macando wellhead been consumed by bacteria. The government and BP would like us to believe that all the otherwise unaccounted for oil has magically disappeared, all three or four million barrels of it (remember that’s 55 gallons, or 200 litres). So where is it all gone?

Several scientists, including Rainer, have wondered if the missing oil might be on the bottom of the Gulf, and that’s where Cliff’s work comes in. Last weekend, we hauled a lot of mud on to the deck of the ship, each time, a 2ft (60cm) thick core, from 4000ft (1300m) below the Arctic Sunrise, just a few miles away from the cluster of rigs and ships that now occupy the disaster area. Kert has also written about this in more detail, so I’ll just say this – there was most definitely oil in some of the samples drawn up from the floor of the Gulf – you could see it, and smell it. While this is hardly surprising, given that we were close to the disaster site, it’s these samples, when compared to baseline samples collected from the Gulf over the years that will tell Cliff and his colleagues how the “benthos” – the ecosystem of the sediment – has been dealing with a major influx of oil.

Hopefully, all this work, and the papers that will be produced by Rainer and Cliff will not only add to the pool of knowledge on this issue, but will also help counter the claims from both BP and the government that the “oil spill is over”.

In fact, the observations of the last seem to reinforce the testimony given by biological oceanographer Dr Ian MacDonald at this week’s Oil Commission hearings in Washington DC.

While Dr MacDonald said that some of the oil was dispersed, evaporated, burned or skimmed, the "remaining fraction -- over 50 percent of the total discharge -- is a highly durable material that resists further dissipation". Dr MacDonald suggests that there’s at least 2.5 million barrels out there in the Gulf’s ecosystem, and that "much of it is now buried in marine and coastal sediments". He added there was "scant evidence for bacterial degradation of this material prior to burial."

Also, Samantha Joye, from the University of George, has been blogging about the oil she's found in the Gulf sediment.

The “oil spill” (it wasn’t really a ‘spill’, as much as a deep sea ‘release’ of oil) isn’t ‘over’. The scientific community knows this, the people of the Gulf region know this, and the clean up crews that are still out on the coast, picking up tarballs. It’s up to all of us to keep pushing for the truth, and to keep BP and the government under pressure to ‘fess up, and come clean. Oh, and while they’re at it, they should continue the moratorium on deepwater drilling too!
- Dave on the Arctic Sunrise

 
 

Source: Greenpeace International
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