by Avrel Seale
Every now and again, events align like planets in conjunction and seem to try to tell us something. Perhaps April 2010 will be remembered as one such time. That month, within 15 days, two disasters occurred that have much to say about our current world order of energy.
On April 5, a West Virginia coalmine exploded killing 29 workers. The Upper Big Branch Mine disaster was the worst in the United States since 1970, when 38 miners were killed in Hyden, Ky. Massey Energy’s mine, primed by coal dust and methane, exploded about 1,000 feet underground.
A mere two weeks later, on April 20, an exploratory drilling rig south of New Orleans exploded after a blowout and sank, killing 11 workers and causing the largest oil spill in U.S. history, now in its 44th day and coming ashore in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama and which is within 10 miles of the Florida Panhandle. BP, Transocean Ltd, and Halliburton, the oil producer, rig operator, and blowout preventer manufacturer, respectively, are lawyering up in the biggest way in preparation for investigations from at least seven congressional committees and untold class-action lawsuits from the public and private sectors.
Besides having dominated the headlines through the late spring of 2010, what these events also have in common, of course, is that both were accidental explosions in the pursuit of fossil fuel. As fossil fuel is sought after precisely for its explosive nature — its flammability — fatal explosions should come as no surprise.
While safety-mindedness across society has increased over the centuries, the very nature of these materials puts their miners and refiners at enormous risk. Many have forgotten that it was just March 2005 when BP’s Texas City refinery exploded killing 15, injuring 180, and forcing thousands of area residents to remain in their homes. And that 2005 disaster was but a faint echo of the apocalypse that put Texas City on the map, or, more appropriately, damn near took it off — a series of fires and explosions in 1947 that killed 580 people.
Even if there were not 100 other good reasons to switch from fossil fuel to renewable forms of energy — the carbon they put into the atmosphere, the scar they put on the land — the danger alone would be sufficient justification.
By contrast, one really has to reach to imagine a comparable catastrophe in the pursuit of wind, solar, or tidal energy: a windmill falls over. A wave turbine comes loose and smashes into a seawall. A solar panel blows off a roof and hits someone on the head. Not good, but kid stuff by comparison. Working with electrical power will always command respect, but when we’re merely converting kinetic or photovoltaic energy into electricity, whatever accidents may occur are both highly localized and simply on an order comparable to any construction project.
Of the renewables, wind energy has been scrutinized the most for its environmental impact, probably as a result of its success and growth. And there have been a fair number of incidents where turbine blades crash to the ground from shoddy engineering or manufacturing. The other enviro-knock on wind is that turbines kill birds and bats. And while this is a problem worthy of mitigation, we should know that for every 10,000 bird deaths, fewer than one is caused by a windmill, while cats account for 1,000, and buildings with their windows account for 5,500. Yet the outrage is reserved for the turbines. Every human endeavor has consequences and trade-offs. But when we look at the big picture, the choice between filthy, insidious, explosive, and climate-threatening fossil fuel and renewable energy, with whatever tweaks it might require, isn’t even close.
And there’s even more to love about non-fossil energy than its relative safety. As a car owner, I will not mourn the loss of the combustion engine, with its thousand moving parts and its requirement of constant and careful cooling to manage the friction of those parts as well as the controlled series of explosions that makes the engine run. Imagine not having to think about an engine overheating ever again? And when transportation makes a wholesale move from combustion engines to electric, imagine the quiet — cars and trucks on highways whizzing past with only the hiss of their tires audible, and not the collective roar of their combustion engines.
Picture Los Angeles, Mexico City, Beijing, or your city with a blue sky. Electric transportation, even if drawing on a fossil-powered grid, still moves pollution away from dense populations. If we can switch from combustion transportation to electric and then convert our electricity generation to renewable sources, then we’ll know the future has arrived.
Even with climate change aside, we have all the reasons we could possibly need to justify a switch from fossil to renewable energy: human safety, environmental protection both from the mining process and the burning process, quality of life.
In a statement today, Sen. John Kerry, the torchbearer of a climate change bill in the Senate, noted how the slow-motion disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is fueling the president’s desire for change: “This is the fourth time in just 12 days that the president has made it crystal clear that he’s not waiting — he’s working with us to get our bill passed this year. As he’s been saying, the catastrophe in the Gulf shows without a doubt that we need to end our oil addiction, and the Senate has to be on record this year doing something to finally tackle the challenge — no watered down, feel good measures that only postpone the day of reckoning; we’re making it happen now.”
Now, indeed. Why don’t we let April 2010 stand as the red-letter date when, as a society, we really started to see the folly of our ways?
I think BP’s days are numbered. Being partly responsible for a disatser on this scale will mean the UK will wave goodbye to it’s largest multinational.