Placing Blame

Guest Contributor: Dr. John D. Abell is a Professor of Economics at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia. Professor Abell’s research frequently takes him to San Lucas Tolimán, an indigenous community in Guatemala. The attraction is an array of community-based projects in the following areas: education, health care, housing, land development, job apprenticeship, honey bee farming, water systems, fuel efficient stoves, reforestation, experimental farming, and coffee. Moreover, these projects have a philosophical underpinning based on E.F. Schumacher’s subsidiarity principle. By using local resources and by carrying out most stages of production right there in San Lucas, economic multiplier effects circulate locally, rather than leak away to Guatemala City or the United States.

Okay…I want to be clear about something. My brother is Stanley Abell. Yes, that Stanley Abell, one of the head dudes around The Bluevine Collective. So let me do him a favor by making the following statement: The views expressed in this article don’t necessarily reflect the views of The Bluevine Collective, blah, blah, blah… Furthermore, this open letter probably appears today in spite of him, not because of him.

With that said, in a couple of previous Bluevine entries, Stan took up the issue of who to blame for the oil spill in the Gulf—BP, the government, Ben Harper, ourselves—though, a careful reading suggests that Stan is simply using the oil spill blame-game as a metaphor for our attempts to blame others for all of life’s problems. As Stan notes, BP and the government are easy targets. In the following essay, I wish to examine in greater detail the list of those who might be blamed for the Gulf disaster.

BP, apparently, is a “serial environmental criminal” according to a former EPA official. It has cut corners when it comes to safety at every opportunity. One of the worst outcomes of BP’s disregard for safety, prior to the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, was an explosion at its Texas City refinery in 2005 that resulted in 15 deaths and 170 wounded, one of the largest industrial accidents ever in the US. An investigation later revealed that the company had “generally sloppy practices, including its use of old equipment, overworked and unsupervised employees and contractors, and management’s inattention to safety.” In 2006, there was another BP disaster; this time in Alaska. A corroded pipeline at its Prudhoe Bay field gave way, leaking thousands of barrels of oil in the worst over-land spill in the state’s history. A subsequent congressional investigation revealed that in its efforts to contain costs, BP had failed to use a sufficient volume of a “corrosion inhibitor.” As for the current disaster in the Gulf, while investigations are still underway, it would appear that BP has once again favored cost-cutting over safety. CEO Tony Hayward even admitted formally that BP lacked the “tools you would want in your tool kit” to stop a deep water oil leak. Blame BP? I’d say so. Does the fact that since I wrote the first draft of this analysis BP appears to have successfully/hopefully capped the well in any way exonerate the company from any of the aforementioned blame? I don’t think so. Do we want to trust BP with an existing oil project in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea that involves drilling—brace yourself for this—two miles under the sea, and then six to eight miles horizontally to what is thought to be a 100 million barrel reservoir of oil under federal waters, a project that is astonishingly exempted from the current moratorium on off-shore drilling? I don’t think so.

Where were the government regulators? Well, as it turns out, the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the Interior Department agency created to oversee offshore drilling, apparently has a dual mandate; in addition to overseeing the safety of the operation of offshore deep wells, it is also responsible for leasing federal territory for drilling. So think about that conflict of interest for a moment… Royalties to the government from the oil leases add up to $13 billion per year. That’s a lot of money. MMS, therefore, has an incentive, according to William Galston of the Brookings Institution, to “authorize a lot of drilling and then to do everything possible to make sure that the flow of production is robust and unimpeded.” In their zeal to generate those royalties, the bureaucrats at MMS, according to a 2008 report by the Interior Department’s inspector general, “had used drugs, accepted gifts from and had sexual relationships with energy-company representatives.” President Obama noted in May that, “the oil industry’s cozy and sometimes corrupt relationship with government regulators meant little or no regulation at all.” Blame the government? I’d say so.

So, with all that blame to throw around, why look further? Well, for every greedy, cost-cutting corporation selling oil and gas or factory-farmed food or cars or cigarettes or guns or whatever—things that are well-known to be unsafe for the environment or for our health—there are millions of customers out there eager to buy those products. And we’re certainly not about to vote into office politicians who might take steps—such as a carbon tax or greater regulation of offending industries—that would make it more difficult for us to buy those same products. For every citizen outraged over the Deepwater Horizon Gulf disaster, there is a citizen who drives a car, takes plane trips, eats factory-farmed food, etc. All of those activities require oil; lots of it.

Take factory farming, for example. A steer at slaughter will have consumed indirectly 284 gallons of oil via the complex connections of his grain-based diet and the farming and fertilizer industries that make that diet possible. According to studies by the UN and PEW Commission factory farming is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, about 40 percent more than the entire transportation sector. It is responsible for 37 percent of anthropogenic methane emissions (which have 23 times the global warming potential of CO2), and 65 percent of anthropogenic nitrous oxide emissions (which have 296 times the global warming potential of CO2). According to Jonathan Foer (Eating Animals), “omnivores contribute seven times the volume of greenhouse gasses that vegans do.” Apparently, there are a lot of ominvores out there. 50 million of us (in the US alone, and China is quickly playing catch-up) eat at a fast food restaurant every single day! Blame the humans (or at least the human omnivores)? I’d say so.

Blame Ben Harper? I’m not so sure about that. I kind of like Ben and his music.

Stan and I discussed all this a few weeks ago over our annual round of golf. We were trying to decide where all this fits into a conversation over religion and spirituality. Is the church ready to take on such issues? If not now, when? According to environmentalist Bill McKibben (Deep Economy, Eaarth), we’ve gone past the tipping point. We’re already beyond the critical threshold of 350 parts per million of atmospheric CO2. The polar ice caps and the ice sheets of Greenland are melting. The glaciers are in full retreat. You better get in your car as soon as possible and drive as fast as possible to Glacier National Park before there are no more glaciers there to see. Oops… Maybe the part about driving isn’t such a good thing—CO2 emissions and all. How about a plane? Oops… the CO2 output is nearly twice that of a car. A train might be a good solution—its CO2 output would be far less, but, darn it, we don’t have much of a passenger rail system. Our individualist lifestyle won’t support it. So… things for all of us to think about.

John Abell
Professor of Economics
Randolph College
Lynchburg, VA 24503
July 21, 2010