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."
+ More
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.
+ More
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
