Lisa Margonelli, author of the 2007 book Oil on the Brain and currently the director of Energy Policy Initiative at the New America Foundation where she explores the promise and possibility of a post-oil world.

Severin Bornstein, an economist and professor of Business Administration and Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies renewable energy, economic policies around reducing greenhouse gases, and equity in the pricing of electricity.

And Geoffery Styles, a chemical engineer, MBA, and former longtime Texaco executive, who is now the Managing Director of his own consulting firm — GSW Strategy Group – which specializes in energy and environmental strategy.

Welcome to all of you and thank you for joining us.

We’re going to be talking today about — you guessed it — oil. Specifically, about the status of our transition away from this powerful, efficient, valuable and, let’s face it, addictive source of energy. The world has been running on oil for about 150 years now. It’s the source for nearly 40 percent of America’s power. But oil is also a finite resource and it comes with some pretty sobering downsides: environmentally devastating leaks in the Gulf of Mexico and in Michigan’s Kalamazoo River, greenhouse gas emissions that are altering the Earth’s climate and, now and again, wars fought to secure oil fields around the world. So, let’s start with Lisa Margonelli.

Mary Bruno: Lisa, fossil fuel critics talk about oil as a dwindling resource found only in ever harder to get at places, hence deepwater drilling rigs and tar sands. But where are we really in the lifespan, if you will, of oil? Is it a middle-aged resource, or a doddering senior resource?

Lisa Margonelli: We’re probably in the late middle age of oil, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have a very extended senior moment coming. I’m just going to back up and say where I think we are.

For many years, the oil price was very predictable. Up through the early ’70s, gas prices were literally rusted to the signs at gas stations in the U.S. That’s how rarely the price changed.

Then we went through a period — during the 1980s, ’90s, and early 2000s — where the oil market basically fluctuated in long waves over a long period of time. In the early ’80s, we paid around $70 a barrel, in the equivalent of today’s dollars. By 1998-99, it went all the way down to $9 a barrel. Then it slowly crawled back up.

Now, prices are a lot more volatile. Price can go very high very quickly, because a Nigerian warlord made a phone call.

We’re also in a time of political volatility. Reserves in non-OPEC countries — countries that have not nationalized their oil resources — have peaked, which means the balance of power has shifted to countries that have oil resources which they control. You have more countries thinking in terms of maximizing revenue for themselves. And this behavior is not particularly predictable.

So we are in a time where oil is going to cost us more environmentally, politically, strategically and, of course, economically.

As the price gets higher, or fluctuates more frequently and wildly, we will start to feel that we are going through a transition to less predictable oil, regardless of how much actual oil there is on earth. And I think we are in the midst of that transition now.

MB: Severin, where are we in oil’s lifespan?

Severin Bornstein: I am an economist. I don’t do geology. I’m not a supporter or proponent of the peak oil folks. I do know history. There’s been lots of discussion over the years about running out of oil, and it hasn’t born out. Yes, we’re running out of conventional oil. But the technology is getting better at reaching oil. When people ask me [whether we're running out of oil], I look at history and at the oil futures market, and they both say “no.”

MB: But we take more risks to get that oil, don’t we?

SB: We are tilting more and more towards the Middle East and towards unstable governments for oil supplies. That creates real geo-political and macro-economic problems for the United States, because we’re producing less and less of our own oil. Realistically, we’ll never be able to produce enough oil to come close to the level of demand we’re at right now.

As long as we’re using oil as a primary transportation resource, we’re going to have to rely on imports from economies that are quite separate from ours. So when the price of oil goes up, a lot of wealth flows out of our economy. And then of course, there is an environmental impact.

I don’t think finding oil is going to be the constraint that moves us away from oil; I think it’s going to be all of these other factors that are going to make us face up to the fact that we need to find a different resource to power our economy. That’s not going to happen overnight. It’s going to happen over many decades. We’re starting to move in that direction. But it’s going to be a very long change.

There’s been a lot of talk about oil this summer. Most of it bad. Devastating, record-setting leaks in the Gulf of Mexico and in Michigan’s Kalamazoo River underscored, once again, the danger of our dependence on crude. Seductively efficient and still relatively cheap, oil provides nearly 40 percent of America’s power. But it’s also a finite resource that presents a very real threat to our environment, economy, security, and health. Given the growing risks and the shrinking reserves, there must be loads of people out there — experts from government, corporations, academia, and the like — hatching plans for a cleaner, safer, post-oil world, right? We asked our expert panel to explain where we are in oil’s troubled lifespan, and whether and how we’ll ever wean the world off its current fossil fuel of choice.

Listen to audio from the panel discussion. Or click here to read the edited transcript.

Lisa Margonelli
Director of Energy Policy Initiative at the New America Foundation
“The problem with the oil policy process is we expect price to change demand and then we artificially protect price. We have made a non-responsive market, and we can’t develop the political willpower as a result.”

Severin Bornstein
Professor of Business Administration and Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley
“I wouldn’t be on board with the idea that oil is in its decline. In reality, if we don’t care about environmental factors or energy security issues we can continue to consume oil or something equivalent to oil for hundreds of years.”

Geoffery Styles
Former Texaco executive and now Managing Director of GSW Strategy Group
“Oil is simultaneously a huge source of energy and the best energy storage medium we have — and it’s relatively cheap. We can’t beat that. We can, with alternatives, only hope to match it.”

Get Off Your Ass Alert: If you want to reduce your oil footprint, try taking the Take Back the Tap pledge, and buy a reusable water bottle; every year, the production of disposable plastic bottles uses enough oil to fuel a million cars.

Andy Willner, activist and advocate of the Passaic.Photo courtesy of al-ICE g via FlickrOn Jan. 2, 1990, a leaking pipeline at Bayonne, New Jersey’s Exxon Bayway oil refinery sent 567,000 gallons of heating fuel into the surrounding waterways and marsh. Andy Willner volunteered to help the affected wildlife. He wound up collecting a truckload of dead Canvasback ducks and driving them straight to the refinery. When a worker there tried to shoo him away, Willner threatened to drive the oily carcasses across the Hudson to the door of The New York Times. The worker acquiesced. An activist was born.

Not long after the Bayway spill Willner became the Executive Director of the N.Y./N.J. Baykeeper organization, the so-called “citizen guardian of Hudson-Raritan estuary … the most urban estuary on Earth.” The Passaic River is part of that estuarine system, and Willner has been one of the Passaic’s most vocal advocates. Willner retired in 2009. But in 20-plus years as head of Baykeeper, he spent countless hours patrolling and pleading for the Lower Passaic. The final 17-mile stretch, from the Dundee Dam in Garfield, N.J. to the river’s mouth in Newark, is home to the Diamond Alkali Superfund site, the oldest unresolved superfund site in the country. This last reach of river cuts through the most crowded and heavily industrialized part of the country, and the river has the scars to prove it. Willner has done more than anyone to call attention to those scars and to the people most responsible for inflicting them.

Q. How did you first get involved with the Passaic River?

A. The Passaic is one of the tributaries to New York Harbor. So when I first started the N.Y./N.J. Baykeeper organization back in the early 1990s, we took a hard look at the Passaic. It didn’t seem like there were people either paying attention to the Lower Passaic or doing anything on the water. For a long time neither the federal Environmental Protection Agency — which is in charge of Superfund and the Passaic, unfortunately, is a Superfund area — nor the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection was really doing very much about cleaning up the river. So the Passaic became a priority very early on.

Q. What did Baykeeper actually do about the Passaic?

A. Seeing as there was no one looking after the Passaic we took the challenge. And it became a very unique challenge. Here was a river that most people had forgotten. We had to build a river advocacy organization from scratch.

We formed a unique partnership with the Hackensack Riverkeeper and started having Passaic River patrols and canoe trips, all as a way to get people more aware, and to bring the river into focus for the institutions, for government agencies, for organizations that advocated for other rivers but not the Passaic, and for the citizens who lived along the river’s banks. 

We also had to get the government agencies aware that there was a huge problem and a big constituency that wanted to see the problem fixed. So we started taking government officials out on the river.

And very early on we became advocates for making the polluter — which has evolved into a company called Occidental Chemical — be the one who pays for both the cleanup and for the natural resource restoration of the Passaic.

Q. What did these Passaic River patrols do?

A. Let me start by saying that Baykeeper and other water keepers around the world are unique in that part of their mission is to be advocates for a particular water body. Our Baykeeper organization is an advocate for the bays and tributaries to New York Harbor.

So a patrol is a way of observing from the water and making note of anomalies, taking photographs, recording the latitude and longitude of a pipe that something smelly is coming out of, looking for nefarious activities, and also documenting the inherent beauty. It’s a way to familiarize the organization’s staff and members with a place. It’s also a way to either assist government in prosecuting polluters by gathering evidence for that prosecution, or if the government is unwilling or unable to do that prosecution ourselves.

Q. How did river conditions change — for better or worse — in your 20 years with Baykeeper?

A. We see somewhat less debris floating in the river than we did when we first started patrolling. But I don’t think things have changed significantly in terms of the legacy pollutants, the dioxin, and heavy metals. I’d say the biggest change has been the attitude of the people who live along the river. There are, all of a sudden, boating advocacy groups on the Passaic, people canoeing and kayaking regularly, even in the most industrial part of the river. There have always been competitive rowing groups and high schools with rowing programs — and now they’ve become more popular. What’s happened is the river hasn’t changed very much but peoples’ attitudes towards it have started to change and that’s driving the government agencies to begin to make a change at the responsible party’s — Occidental Chemical’s — expense.

Q. I’ve heard you mention Moby Dick in the context of the Passaic. I wonder if you could explain why that classic novel about the hunt for a white whale is relevant?

A. It’s relevant for anybody who lives anywhere near the water. I won’t be able to quote this. But the first chapter is all about Manhattan. It talks about how people who live, particularly in port cities, move inevitably towards the water. Some go there to fish, some to look at the ships, some to just be in the salt air, but sometimes for no particularly obvious reason other than they’re drawn to the water. And that’s probably as true about the Passaic as it is about any tidal river in the world.

The Passaic River, one of the most polluted rivers in the nation and a Superfund area.

Q. Even despite its present condition?

A. Yeah, you know, it’s not the river’s fault. It’s certainly not the fault of the people who are compelled to be near it. It’s really the fault of the polluters and the government agencies that have failed to fix the problems.

Q. Let’s talk about that, particularly in light of the failure of BP and of federal oversight that led to the massive Gulf oil spill. I realize that you’ve been retired for more than a year, but can you talk about the current status of the Passaic River cleanup?

A. There is now just the inkling of the beginning of a process that will have some pilot projects removing [dioxin-contaminated] sediments from the hottest spots in the river and monitoring whether there’s any re-suspension of contaminants as a result of that removal. At the same time – and this is one of the things that Baykeeper has advocated for for close to 20 years — the natural resource damages that occurred as a result of this pollution will be assessed and restoration projects will occur at the same time the cleanup is occurring. Whether that’s marsh restoration or shoreline restoration or public walkways and boat launches, all that stuff will start happening, and has already started to happen, along with the cleanup.

It became obvious that you can’t just keep people away from that river for another generation. That you had to do the remediation and the restoration and the restoration of public access all at the same time. It’s an innovative approach.

I’m not sure you can compare the kind of legacy pollutants we have from a stubborn polluter [Occidental Chemical] to the extraordinary disaster that’s happening in the Gulf, but I think there are some parallels:

One of the things that all major corporations who pollute do is try to diminish their individual liability. BP lied about how much oil was being discharged into the Gulf; Occidental tried to distance itself from the dioxin in the river.

When BP was shone for sure that there was more oil than they said there was, they said, well, it’s a big ocean. When Occidental was confronted with irrevocable proof that [the dioxin in the Passaic] was their dioxin, they said, well, it’s like a teaspoonful in a swimming pool. And so on, and so forth.

And the more time corporations can spend, and the more money they can spend on lawyers and public relations firms, the longer it will take. It took [Exxon] 25 years and five times in the Supreme Court, but they got the original $5 billion [Exxon Valdez] liability case against them reduced to $500 million dollars. That’s really what big companies do best, they stall and stall and stall until some government agency with guts or an organization like Baykeeper just stands up to them and says you’ve got to start cleaning up now and if you don’t we’ll do everything within our power to make sure you do.

Q. What advice would you give someone who’s concerned about their local urban river?

A. Don’t give up. Be aware that if you take on a project to bring an urban river back you’re not talking about six months or a year or even two years. You should be willing to spend a decade or two.

And you have to be at it all the time, and you have to engage people who live along the river’s banks, and you have to tell the truth, and you have to expose the inability or unwillingness of government to do anything, and you have to go right after the entity that polluted, and name names, and continue to do that over and over and over again until people start to say, “Oh yeah, it is them and they’re the ones who have to pay to clean it up”

And you have to get to love that river, as tough as some of these rivers are to love. You really have to get to love it, have it in your being, or else you won’t be an effective advocate.

Dr. J. Steven Picou is Professor of Sociology at the University of South Alabama. He is currently working on human response to the BP oil spill.Photo courtesy of stevenpicou.com

Steven Picou doesn’t have the happiest of jobs. He specializes in the human toll of disasters. As a sociology professor at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, he has studied the social fallout from Hurricane Katrina, the nation’s worst “natural” disaster, and from the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska’s Prince William Sound which, until BP’s unstoppable leak, was America’s largest and most destructive “technological” disaster. Picou draws a sharp distinction between natural and technological events. The drawn out recovery period and the uncertainly that comes with it make technological disasters much more threatening to the health and welfare of the affected people and communities.

Not surprisingly, Picou has spent the last several weeks traveling throughout the Gulf — his home region — speaking to communities, agencies, and relief workers about what they can do to help themselves and their communities cope with the unfolding tragedy. I reached him by phone from the Gulf.

Q. You have documented the effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill on the mental health of Alaskan communities for more than 20 years. What did you find?

A. We found impacts at three important levels, and all are interrelated:

There’s the community level. Technological disasters result in a principal responsible party, so there’s someone to blame. That leads to a lot of anger and a lot of uncertainty as to how the ecosystem will respond to the poison. This uncertainty tends to maintain itself over time.

After a natural disaster, people quit blaming God after a week or so and they pull together and pool resources and tend to form a therapeutic community. After a technological disaster, our research shows that a corrosive community ensues. There is social conflict. People tend to marginalize other groups, and people tend to self-isolate.

So the differences relate to whether or not a community can maintain its social capital, and by that I mean, trust in one another, in the local community institutions, maintain their social networks, both kinship and friendship, and have a sense of agency like they want to participate in the community and its activities.

At the second level, the family level, we saw increases in divorce, in domestic violence. With that, you have impacts on children and on the family stability, which is very important.

At the individual level, the mental health level, all of these cascade into one another. We documented severe depression, anxiety, long term anger, symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), as well as feelings of helplessness. It’s not just a person suffering from depression and living in a typical normal American community. It’s a person suffering from depression because their quality of life in the community has changed, their family relations have changed, and they really see no end to the situation.

Q. Are you seeing parallels now in the Gulf?

A. Definitely. In terms of BP representatives and agency representatives meeting with angry citizens in high school gyms, and saying, ‘we will make you whole again; we will pay all legitimate claims.’ Well, that was exactly the script that Exxon used. The same words. So you see angry, frustrated people.

However, we had a suicide in Orange Beach, Alabama on the 65th day [after the leak]. It was four years before the first suicide occurred up in Prince William Sound. So we’re on a fast forward in terms of impact. I certainly was not expecting such extreme social pathology this soon.

We’ve also gotten word from the little community of Bayou La Batre that their police calls have doubled in the last month. That’s an indication that those problems with domestic violence and alcohol abuse are filtering down through these tiny communities.

Q. Can we expect more news like this?

A. It’s just the beginning of a marathon.

Q. You designed workshops for the Exxon Valdez communities. Is it too soon to start something similar in the Gulf?

A. We’re actually doing it. We’re doing peer listener training workshops where you teach people to be good listeners, and how to have effective communication. You teach people what not to say to someone in distress. Then you provide some training on the signs of mental health problems. Once you do that, you expand the network of people who can help. This is not a silver bullet. But it’s a very flexible program shown to be highly effective in Alaska from 1995-1997.

Oil now covers much of the Gulf coastPhoto courtesy of Greenpeace via flickr

Q. What helps communities recover from these disasters?

A. We try to change the role of people in the community from isolated victim to responsible participating helper. When you get people helping one another, that’s the first step.

Then you let people know you’re not the only community that has gone through this. Education is powerful. Research from numerous contaminated communities — Three Mile Island, Love Canal, Chernobyl, Bhopal — all show the drastic differences between technological and natural disasters.

And then you give them information on the symptoms of depression, PTSD, feelings of helplessness, and how to cope with uncertainties and also with anomalous loss. When you say, ‘I’ve lost my way of life,’ that’s not very tangible. You have to bring people together so they know that, yes, there is a consensus about what we have lost and how we need to restore it.

The programs have to be based on outreach and developing resources. We need to get resources not only to mental health centers, but to extension agents, and sea grant agents, people who have been out in these communities for 20 years. They’re trusted. They know people. They can start positive movement with legitimacy. To have someone come down from some major psychiatric center and tell people what to do is just not going to work.

Q. You’ve been making the distinction between technological and natural disasters. Can you expand on that a bit?

A. In natural disasters, you essentially have stages: warning, threat, impact, rescue, inventory, restoration, and recovery.

A technological disaster — a human-caused contamination of the ecosystem — is not a typical part of the geographical area you live in. I live in Orange Beach, Alabama. We have hurricanes. We know what to do, how to evacuate. We have places to go. Because they’re going to come every year.

An oil spill like this should have never happened. It was guaranteed to be virtually impossible, and then guaranteed that, if it did happen, we had the resources to clean it up in a timely fashion. Well, none of that was true.

So you have people who received a warning, they see the threat, they’re feeling the impact, and now they’re blaming. There’s no all clear [end] signal after a technological disaster. People become trapped in that cycle of warning, threat, impact, blame.

Q. How long does it take (if ever) for life to get back to “normal” for people who have experienced this kind of disaster?

A. We collected data in 2009 in Alaska and found what I would call a significant minority of people still distressed (35-40%). And those who have recovered, or had no problems with the oil spill or the litigation were people who didn’t live there at the time of the spill. Not everyone runs amok. Some people have good coping skills, some people have alternatives, some some make good decisions. Others are caught in this trap and can’t get out. People who were most stressed in [Alaska] 20 years after were the litigants. The litigation became a source of stress.

Q. Is there anything about the Gulf that gives you hope that these people might be able to bounce back faster?

A. We’re going to have to monitor it. I don’t think there’s anything unique about any community that faces massive contamination of the environment that gives you any sense of when it’s going to be over. Ecosystem impacts will be revealed over time and that will perpetuate worry, concern, and affect people’s livelihoods.

In June 1983, Newark’s close knit Ironbound community was overrun by investigators in Hazmat suits after EPA officials found dioxin at the Diamond Alkali chemical plant site.Photo: wirednewyork.comOn the morning of June 2, 1983, the governor of New Jersey declared a state of emergency. Speaking at a press conference in his Trenton office, then Governor Thomas Kean told reporters that the state’s Department of Environmental Protection had detected disturbingly high levels of dioxin at the former Diamond Alkali chemical plant at 80 Lister Avenue in Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood. With a three-page executive order, he shut down the Newark Farmer’s Market, a major food distribution center about a block from the Diamond site; stopped all train traffic around 80 Lister Avenue; and expanded an already existing ban against eating fish or shellfish from the Passaic River. Governor Kean stopped short of evacuation, but he offered temporary housing in Newark’s YMCA to those residents who lived closest to the plant site, and advised everyone to stay indoors during the cleanup operation.

The next morning, June 3, a dozen or so federal Environmental Protection Agency investigators, dressed in Hazmat gear, fanned out across the Ironbound. They searched the Diamond Alkali plant site, the adjacent banks of the Passaic River and the surrounding streets, homes, schools, and businesses for any signs of stray dioxin. Press photos from the next few days show white-suited EPA workers literally vacuuming the streets of the Ironbound.

“It was like an invasion,” recalls Nancy Zak, a longtime neighborhood resident, who works for the Ironbound Community Corporation, a local nonprofit. “All these guys in these moon suits were walking around. We’re wearing our regular clothes. Nobody’s telling us we should dress or do anything differently. It was a shocking day for people.”

In the weeks following Governor Kean’s announcement, the men in the moon suits went house by house, street by street, factory by factory in the vicinity of 80 Lister Avenue. They collected dirt and weeds and street grit and the dust from vacuum cleaner bags and industrial air filters — 532 samples in total — and analyzed it all for the presence of dioxin. When the EPA released the final results of its cleanup operation, investigators reported “massive” amounts of dioxin on Diamond’s 80 Lister Avenue property, including a 51,000 ppb reading in the ground beneath an old storage tank. EPA workers also recorded high levels of dioxin off-site — in an air duct at the abandoned waste treatment facility next door to the Diamond plant, and in dust from the vacuum cleaner bag of Carol De Francis, who lived nearby at 13 Esther Street. In total, the off-site samples contained levels of dioxin ranging from zero to 15 parts per billion. At the time, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control considered concentrations above one ppb to present “an unacceptable risk to human health.”

For the first 18 years of my life I lived along the final 17-mile stretch of the Passaic River. That’s the dirty, ugly part of the river that passes through the most crowded, industrialized part of the United States.

The Passaic forms the western border of my home town: North Arlington, New Jersey, a tiny borough just a few miles north of the river’s mouth in Newark. Our house sat on a steep slope above the river. In the winter, when the oak and maple trees were all bare, I could see the water from our front porch. Sometimes in summer, when a flood tide overwhelmed the river’s sluggish current, the Passaic would smell faintly of the sea.

The Passaic was my home town river, but I didn’t have much to do with it as a kid. I crossed over it often enough, every time we visited my mother’s family, who lived on the other side. But I rarely played by the Passaic. I never fished it or took a boat out on it. I certainly didn’t swim in it. I didn’t really know the river. I just knew that it gave me the creeps.

The lower Passaic flows through the most densely populated, heavily industrialized area in the country.Photo: Mary Bruno

Like the state it flows through, the river has a serious image problem. The Passaic is as historic as New York’s storied Hudson, and in some places — the 77-foot-high cascade in Paterson, for one — it is just as majestic. But most people, even some New Jerseyites, have never heard of the river. Those who have know it only as one of America’s most polluted waterways. It’s hard to bond with a river like that.

The Passaic is a poster child for rivers — for nature — everywhere. The river had been the lifeblood of the region, the source of food and power, the playground of the rich, the avenue of transportation, communication and commerce. The first white settlers sailed up the Passaic in 1662 and founded Newark, the nation’s third oldest city, on its banks. The river’s abundant charms fueled an explosion of growth and industry that transformed the fledgling United States into a global manufacturing powerhouse. But in time the industrial revolution it spawned would poison and betray the Passaic. By 1952, the year I was born, the river’s beauty and majesty were dim and distant memories. Its lower stretch was a toxic canal. The Passaic wasn’t a source of wonder and delight, or even interest anymore. For a whole generation, my generation, it inspired fear, revulsion, and denial instead.

The river wasn’t fearsome in any traditional sense. It didn’t rage or thunder. It didn’t loll along and then suddenly turn into a boil or hurl itself over a cliff — not this far downstream anyway. It wasn’t icy cold or booby trapped with eddies. It wasn’t even that wide; a dog paddler like me could make it all the way across. But the river scared us just the same. It scared us in a deep down creepy kind of way.

We were afraid of its impenetrable darkness. We were afraid of its industrial smell. We were afraid of the things that lived beneath its surface and the things that had died there. We were afraid of spotting a hand or a head bobbing in the rafts of garbage that floated by. We were afraid of submerged intake valves that sucked water into the factories along the banks. We were afraid of the river’s filth. It wasn’t the kind of filth that came from playing football with your friends. It was grownup filth. The kind that scared the blue out of water and coated the riverbank with oily black goo. It was the kind of filth you could taste; the kind that could make you sick, maybe even kill you. We were afraid of getting splashed with river water or of touching river rocks. We were afraid of falling in or of — God forbid — going under. We were afraid of the river’s anger at being so befouled, and afraid, most of all, of the revenge we felt certain the river would exact.

Surely, I thought, there must be more to my home town river than the oily, garbage-strewn slough that I remembered.

Lee Clarke.

“Fantasy documents” is how author and sociologist Lee Clarke describes most corporate contingency plans in his book Mission Impossible: Using Fantasy Documents to Tame Disaster. Clarke is a professor at Rutgers University who studies (how perfect?) disasters and organizational failure. He is also the author of six books on breezy topics such as risk, catastrophes, terrorism, and worst-case scenarios.

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Q. It seems as though beyond the “blowout preventer,” BP didn’t really have any other contingency plans. Don’t oil companies model worst-case scenarios and make plans for how to handle them?

A. They do it when they’re required to do it, but the Department of the Interior acquiesced to BP’s claim that they were covered, they were ready.

Part of the problem here is that there really is no such thing as an effective response to a large oil spill on the open seas. That’s where we get into this idea of fantasy documents. These documents let everybody get through the day. They provide comfort that risks are under control. The plans are based on assumptions that you can control the uncontrollable, and the truth is there’s nothing much that can be done. But [oil companies] can’t say that. If you create a real worst-case scenario in this situation, you’d have to come right out and say there’s not a whole lot to be done. That creates a big political opportunity for somebody.

[Oil companies] are very sensitive to the possibility of a big one ever since the Exxon Valdez. That was the Three Mile Island for the oil industry. I was at a conference once talking about these contingency plans as fantasy documents. The conference was full of regulators and industry people, and needless to say I went over like a lead balloon. I was standing waiting for a cab afterwards and a guy came up beside me like he was a spy, and he said, sotto voce, “I think what you said was probably right, but we kind of have to pretend that we can do something about it.”

Q. Why don’t federal and state regulators require legitimate contingency plans?

A. Best explanation is that we need energy, so we are all involved in an elaborate charade to pretend that the risks are controllable. There are success stories with fairly small spills on enclosed waterways. The oil stays still and you can get a lot of it out of the water. But on the open ocean, there are no success stories. What oil executive or government regulator could go on TV or stand in front of a press conference and say, “The truth is, this is the risk of doing business, and we’ll do our level best to make sure it doesn’t happen again. We’ll have an investigation, there’ll be fines, we’ll invest more. But life is full of risks so there you go.”?

Q. Does anybody make real contingency plans?

A. The chemical industry does a pretty good job generally. You have to think that the airlines are first rate at this. Pilots and people in the industry can alert the FAA to potentially risky situations without fear of reprisals; they can report things anonymously and do. There are limits to this too, but the regulators are pretty on top of it. Big air carriers are just incredibly safe. [Perhaps because], as [author and accident expert] Charles Perrow likes to say, the elites fly on airplanes all the time.

Q. If you were in charge of regulating the oil industry or running a big oil company, what would you do?

A. I’d like to see open, honest discussions about the risk of these activities. After that kind of political discussion, we may very well decide that we want to take the risks. I get on airplanes and fly. Or we might, as a society, say, “Yeah, we’re going to take that risk, but you, oil industry, are going to have to pay more up front for our letting you take this risk.” More fees to, say, Louisiana, or the places where [their activities] are posing a hazard. After all, the well belongs to the American people. We rent it to BP. And it’s not a bad system. It’s capitalism. It does what it does.  But I’d like to see more honest discussion of the risks.

Q. Oil is often cast as a villain, but it’s also critical to the economy, especially in the Gulf Coast states. Can we strike a better balance between oil and its promise of energy, jobs, and money, and conservation?

A. I’m not sure if balance is even the right word. We should be talking about much greater conservation, about how this [event] is another risk of depending on hydrocarbons. [The Gulf spill] should throw into much sharper relief the urgency to deal with climate change. But we don’t have much political leadership pushing in that direction. Who’s beating the conservation drum? It’s very discouraging.

Q. You’re bumming me out.

A. My third book is called Worst Cases. What do you expect?

Q. Are we capable of facing worst-case scenarios and dealing with them? Or are we just creatures of denial?

A. Denial happens, and this is an instance of it. But when I give popular talks about [worst-case scenarios], I ask how many people in the audience have teenagers. People raise their hands. Then I ask, “You know that feeling you get when you hear your teenager getting into the car and you hear the door slam?” And they all know. It’s a feeling of impending doom: “I may never see him again.” That’s worst-case thinking. So it happens.

Q. Except at oil companies.

A. If oil companies are doing it, it’s not very public.

Charles Perrow

Q. When it comes to operating safety, how would you rate the oil industry? 

A. There are two aspects to that question. There’s an enormous amount of damage done by small spills — loading, offloading of tankers, etc. — and small accidents that are not sufficiently recorded. In terms of oil rigs, there’s always a danger. It’s a sloppy job. The seas are rough. They’ve got to move fast. There have been big blowouts before. I wouldn’t say they’re rare, but they’re not very frequent, and they could be reduced substantially with tighter safety requirements. Norway and Brazil, for example, require a remote control shut off called an ‘acoustic switch.’ They are expensive, about half a million dollars on a rig of this size.

Q. Oil companies have been known to point out that given all the challenges of the drilling business, we should be thankful there aren’t more spills. Do you agree?

A. That’s a have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife kind of question. The challenge is great. The technology is generally terrific. But we could have many fewer spills. The companies, and especially BP, do not try as hard as they should to prevent them.

BP’s record is fairly alarming. They were responsible for not having the oil removal equipment available during the Exxon Valdez spill. They had actually laid off the trained cleanup crew members and replaced them with untrained crew. The ship that was supposed to take the equipment [skimmers, floating booms, etc.] and crews out to the spill was in dry dock, and no replacement ship was available. [BP] had to fly the booms in from places like Louisiana, because they just didn’t have the stockpile on hand.

Then there’s the Canadian pipeline neglect (March 2006), and the Texas City disaster in March 2005.

Our landscape is punctuated by these kinds of events, because we run higher risks (than Europe for example), and we have insufficient regulatory protection. We’re really still a cowboy economy.

A year or two ago, the European Union passed a wonderful bill that instead of the victims of a wrongdoing having to prove their case in court that the company was not playing safe, the company has to prove that it was playing safe. That’s a very big change. It has scared U.S. companies.

Q. So, is more regulation the answer?

A. Yes. This is capitalism and it has to be heavily regulated where there are chances of large catastrophes. Because otherwise profit concerns will push managers to take risks that we should not be willing to take. Whenever there can be a large catastrophe — 100 or more of what they call ‘prompt’ deaths, 1,000 ‘soon’ deaths, or irretrievable environmental damage — then you need regulations.

Q. Is safety really possible in high-risk endeavors like offshore drilling?

A. It is possible. You can make things quite safe. If you look at the differences between countries that do offshore drilling, Brazil and Norway have very exemplary records, [while] the U.S. and Australia are pretty bad. You always run some risk, but we are always running too many risks.

Q. What about contingency plans? With the Gulf oil spill it seems that beyond the “blowout preventer,” there really weren’t any other contingency plans. Don’t oil companies model worst-case scenarios and make plans for how to handle them?

A. Lee Clarke, [Rutgers University sociology professor and author of Mission Impossible: Using Fantasy Documents to Tame Disaster], calls the contingency plans ‘fantasy documents.’ People want to believe in them, so even people in the firms or the government get kind of spooked into thinking that these fantasy plans can work and that everything will come together correctly. You need redundancies, backups. [BP] should have had that big dome sitting there, because they have a lot of deep drilling rigs in the Gulf, and because this is not the first blow out.

Q. Assuming that offshore drilling will never be 100 percent accident-free, how can we avoid or mitigate the consequences of failure?

A. Raise the liability limit enormously. It will raise the cost of gas, and that might eat into [oil company] profits, but it would give more power to federal regulators. Still, that’s still preventive. You want to know about recovering, about resiliency. If cost is raised, companies will have to invest in resiliency — they’ll have to invest in more booms, etc. But the long-range, ultimate solution is that we stop pumping oil and turn to renewables. We put in a carbon tax and within 10 years we could have solar, wind and geothermal running everything. That’s tricky politically, almost impossible. There’s no push [to act].

Coal and oil are big, politically powerful industries. The [renewable industry] is dispersed. It’s thousands of little industries. We have to empower those thousands.

Q. Can a renewable industry, even an organized, empowered one, really compete against the big coal and big oil lobbies?

A. I’ve looked into carbon capture and storage and this is the main bridge to renewable. The technology is there for stripping out CO2. Norway has been successfully storing [CO2] in the ocean. We can buy out the coal and electric power industries by subsidizing carbon capture and storage. You’ve got to buy them out.

Paul RobertsPaul Roberts

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What do we know with any certainty about the cause of this spill?

At this point, we still don’t know exactly why the well blew out, so any intensive postmorteming is going to be premature and possibly off base. This may turn out to be gross negligence, or it may turn out to be one of the fluke accidents that happen in complex industrial systems. The offshore oil system is massive and complex with thousands of wells and miles and miles of underwater pipeline, so from a simple statistical standpoint, accidents are going to happen. I think the real question is, what can you do to make that less likely?

So, certainly, you have to look at the issue of contingency plans and preparedness. The same goes for the question of corporate culture. BP has long championed itself as the “green” oil company, and has often contrasted itself to Exxon, which is wildly reviled as the bad hat environmentally, due in large part to the Exxon Valdez spill. But the fact is that Exxon, due to changes made after the Valdez spill, has a much better spill record than BP, which has suffered a series of safety and environmental lapses even before this latest mess.

What if investigators conclude that the cause of the spill was equipment failure, or human error, or just bum luck? Will anything actually change?

What’s really tough here is that even if we find that it was operator error, and we impose fines and pass new laws and make that particular error less likely to recur, we’re still faced with a system in which there is a strong probability for error or breakdown. Humans make mistakes. Machinery wears down. A lot of environmentalists say these kinds of risks simply aren’t acceptable, and at the end of the day, that may be true. Certainly, this spill is going to bolster the argument that the risks inherent in the modern offshore oil system simply aren’t tolerable risks and, more fundamentally, that we need to move away from oil. Already, you hear that argument from a lot of greens.

The problem is, even if we decide that the risks are too great, what’s our plan B? At present, our economy is completely dependent on oil. And the truth is, we don’t really have a plan B. We have a lot of great ideas, and some really good first steps in terms of developing and commercializing alternative fuels and technologies. But we are nowhere near the scale necessary to replace oil, or even to reduce oil use enough to rapidly reduce the need for wells in places like the Gulf of Mexico. We can reduce, substantially, but it takes time.

I know people get tired of hearing this, but the facts are facts. The world is a big place, with a lot of people and a lot of oil-based infrastructure; it took us a century to build [the infrastructure], and it won’t be replaced over night. Even if Al Gore were president of the world, you’re still looking at a transition from oil to some other fuel source of 20 to 30 years. That’s something you just can’t wish away. Even if you had technology that was ready to go to replace oil — let’s say a car that burned air — and it was ready today, and in fact it was the only kind of car you could buy, we’d still need 12 to 15 years to swap out the existing oil-powered fleet. People can’t afford to buy new cars any faster than that, and factories can’t pump them out faster than that.

Certainly, the government could goose the transition by financing a faster roll out, but then it becomes a political question, and in the context of the debt we’re already looking at from the financial crisis, I wouldn’t hold your breath. So we’re looking at 15 years — and realistically, because we don’t have an air car or another ready alternative, 30 to 40 years. We’re basically arguing over the slope of the transition curve. And here’s the crucial bit: During that transition, however long it takes, you need an ocean of oil just to fuel the transition. So you have to work with companies like BP and actors like Iran.

What would be an appropriate, productive response to a disaster like this?

The environmental movement is really going to need to come up with a more pragmatic set of gestures than “let’s stop all offshore drilling.” Well, OK. What do you replace that oil with? And how much will it cost? And who will bear the costs? And who’s in charge of the transition — government or the private sector? Of course, once you start asking those questions, you sound like an oil industry flak, but until you answer those questions, or at least ask them, you’re not much better.

So, yes, we need to understand why the spill happened and whether it was avoidable and what needs to change in terms of technology and regulations. But it doesn’t change the [importance] of oil in the economic equation. If the Gulf spill helps spur a more aggressive approach to creating alternatives to oil, that’s great. But people are jumping on this as an opportunity to push their cause, and people need to be really careful about that unless they have, in the other hand, a workable, practical alternative.

You have to remain impassioned about the need for change, but you can’t lose sight of the realities, of what’s possible within the context of this economic paradigm we’ve created. It requires a kind of grown-up pragmatism. That said, you just don’t want to take that same pragmatism and use it to drive the planet right off a cliff.

Also read a review of Paul Roberts’ book The End of Food.

Where to begin? The 5,000-foot-long pipe that links the oil well to Transocean’s now submerged rig has sprung a third leak, which could explain why scientists at NOAA just upped their estimate for the amount of oil gushing into the Gulf from 1,000 to 5,000 barrels a day. (British Petroleum officials dispute the new figures.) The slick is about 16 miles off the Louisiana coast and closing in. Forecasters expect a landfall sometime on Friday, but strong winds could send a rogue oil patch into Louisiana’s Pass-A-Loutre Wildlife Management Area even sooner. Governor Bobby Jindal has asked the feds for help.

Emergency crews set a small section of the spill ablaze on Wednesday in what they say was a “successful” burn. But attempts to use a remote vehicle to cap the belching well have proven unsuccessful so far, and the proposed solution for actually capturing the oil (with a submerged dome) is weeks out at best, untested at the 5,000-foot depth of the leak, and a little pie-in-the-sky, don’t you think? In a sign that BP may be in over its head in the cleanup department, Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary E. Landry hinted that the Defense Department may be scrambled to provide techno assistance to the effort.

Meanwhile, Louisiana’s shrimping fleet is mobilizing to help deploy more than 20 miles of booms that may or may not protect the state’s fragile coastal wetlands from the encroaching slick, and the state’s fishing industry has filed a class action suit against BP, Transocean and others, charging negligence and seeking millions.

On the bright side, I guess, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs assured us that President Obama, a fan of offshore drilling, is closely tracking the situation in the Gulf. In fact, the president started his day with a special 20-minute briefing on the matter and pledged “all available resources,” including the U.S. military, to try and prevent what looks to be an ever more likely environmental disaster.

As the oil spreads, and the Gulf burns, we are reminded once again that the risks inherent in offshore drilling are simply not worth taking.