Do you feel like your doctors and your more annoying friends are always telling you to drink more water? Well, they’re just trying to help. Water is so important for your health! Sadly, water tastes like, well, water. And since Americans eat like 100 pounds of sugar a year, the taste of water just isn’t good enough for us. Even though we are very lucky to have fresh water, we don’t get too excited about it — 20 percent of people say they just don’t like how it tastes (i.e., watery). What we do get excited about are artificially flavored, sugar-free water products.
This does not mean stuff like Vitamin Water, by the way. That has calories, which are almost as gross as water. It means new stuff, like a no-cal Vitamin Water spin-off called Fruitwater. And Mio, which is some tasty stuff you can squirt into water. (YUM.) And Dasani Drops. One of the selling points on the additives, according to the Wall Street Journal, is that they are “simpler to carry in a purse.” OK, next time I tell you I’ve purchased something because it’s “simpler to carry in a purse” please take me out back and shoot me.
Luckily, most Americans remain what the same article refers to as “water purists.” But the number of people who want water with flair is growing — hey wow, so is the likelihood of global apocalypse! Coincidence?
ShutterstockI refuse to conform to your car culture.
At Grist, we’ve been onto the trend of the youngs losing interest in driving for awhile now. And every time a new study or survey comes out to statistically corroborate the anecdotal evidence we see every day, we hear the same responses from skeptics — it’s just the economy, just a stage of life. Wait til those millennials get real jobs, get married, have families, and move to the suburbs. Then you bet they’ll start driving.
But the latest report on declining driving trends — released today by the U.S. PIRG Education Fund — argues that a rejection of car culture is here to stay. “The Driving Boom is over,” it declares. In fact, the report calculates that “If the Millennial-led decline in per-capita driving continues for another dozen years … total vehicle travel in the United States could remain well below its 2007 peak through at least 2040 — despite a 21 percent increase in population.”
The U.S. PIRG study reveals how, after six decades of steady growth, both total vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and VMT per capita have been falling since 2007. Total VMT is now at 2004 levels, while VMT per capita has fallen to 1996 levels. And once again, it’s those meddling millennials who are reimagining one of the pillars of American culture. Young people ages 16 to 34 drove an average of 23 percent fewer miles in 2009 than they did in 2001, according to the report. If you consider that more than half the people in that age group were old enough to drive in 2001, too, that suggests that even as those at the older end of this generation enter their 30s — presumably settling into more stable jobs and in some cases starting families — they’re still not switching over to a car-centric lifestyle at the same rate as generations before them.
Economic factors — high gas prices, the recession — obviously motivate people of all ages to drive less. But, as we’ve pointed out before, larger societal shifts lie behind millennials’ generation-wide “meh” attitude toward car ownership. Brian Merchant at Vice summarizes them in two words: Facebook and Brooklyn.
To expand on that slightly: Technology lets people socialize without being physically in the same place. And when they do leave the house to hang with friends IRL, kids these days would rather walk, bike, bus, train, longboard, or — if those options prove impossible — car-share to get there. That’s why millennials are flocking to communities that cater to a walkable, urban lifestyle, and why even historically unhip towns like Charlotte, N.C. — the setting for The New York Times’ coverage of the U.S. PIRG study — are now modeling themselves more in Brooklyn’s image, “filling in the urban core with new development and encouraging new construction along major transportation corridors, including an expanding rail line.” (Charlotte’s transit-happy mayor, Anthony Foxx, is Obama’s pick for transportation secretary.)
Merchant explains why Facebook and Brooklyn could solidify the decline in driving into a lasting trend:
As more folks from the affluent 18-34 demographic settle in cities, the need for cars will diminish. More parents simply won’t own them. Which means the physical barriers to socializing erected by the suburbs will thus never be put in place, and teens won’t need to overcome them to feel liberated. Meanwhile, social media will still be providing alternative channels for interaction.
The prospect of driving, after all, is only exciting if there are places you’re dying to go. Growing up in a place where all of your friends and activities are already within walking distance, and being able to bridge the rest of the gaps online—gaming, gossiping, etc—may hopelessly antiquate that four-cylinder headrush.
I knew a few folks in college who, having grown up in Manhattan or San Francisco, simply never learned to drive — there was no reason to. I found this exceedingly strange at the time, but Merchant’s point is that as millennials lead a larger cultural shift in our lifestyle values, and more cities adapt to their preferences, those license-less kids will become more the rule than the exception.
Which means, as the report points out, “The time has come for America to hit the ‘reset’ button on transportation policy” — repair existing roads and bridges instead of build new ones; focus resources on mass transit and bike infrastructure, as Charlotte is doing; and support the development of walkable neighborhoods.
The consequences of a transportation policy “stuck in the past,” as the report puts it, are not only costly, but tragic. Texting while driving has replaced drunk driving as the No. 1 cause of teenage death on the road, which no doubt has something to do with the smartphone replacing the car as the most important vehicle for teenage freedom. Just as improved transit options reduce the temptation to drive drunk, so too do they eliminate the temptation to text behind the wheel.
About a year ago, during a cross-faded conversation that felt profound but probably sounded more like this, a friend told me about Strauss-Howe generational theory, a scholarly take on the somewhat narcissistic assumption that each generation has a signature personality that leaves a unique mark on world culture and history. Strauss and Howe identify four archetypes — prophets, nomads, heroes, or artists — that can define an entire generation based on the societal conditions they grew up in.
Humblebrag alert: Millennials comprise a Hero Generation. This means we were born “during a time of individual pragmatism, self-reliance, and laissez faire” (in other words, the Reagan/Bush Sr./Clinton years) and are coming of age “as team-oriented young optimists during a Crisis.” If that all sounds too conveniently perfect, remember that Strauss and Howe came up with this back in 1991, when Barack Obama was still fresh out of law school and millennials were just psyched to be able to watch The Little Mermaid over and over on VHS.
The Geography of YouthPortraits of millennials from the Geography of Youth project. Click to embiggen.
I was born in 1989, which puts me about in the middle of the millennials (the generation loosely includes today’s 18- to 32-year-olds, but the parameters aren’t set in stone). I’ve always enjoyed waxing philosophical about the effects of shared cultural experiences, geeking out on everything from the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq to the age-perfect timing of each Harry Potter book release (the final volume came out the summer I graduated from high school, and the two occasions were almost equally momentous). I liked to ask my baby boomer parents about their childhoods in the ’60s and ’70s, and hearing their memories made me eager to speculate on what my generation’s place in history would be.
Jordan SteadCrowds took to the streets on election night 2012 in Seattle to celebrate Obama’s reelection and Washington state’s legalization of gay marriage and marijuana. Click to embiggen. Susie Cagle
So what are millennials known for, so far? Well, to start with the obvious, we’re fucked financially. Anecdotes abound of millennials slaving away as unpaid interns and underpaid assistants, or slacking off as overqualified retail reps and baristas. “Generation Screwed,” Joel Kotkin called us in a thoroughly depressing July 2012 Newsweek feature that laid out the various headwinds holding us back: staggering levels of student debt (at least $25,000 on average, according to the latest reports); a 13.1 percent unemployment rate for 18- to 29-year-olds, compared to 7.9 percent nationally; and “a mountain of boomer- and senior-incurred debt … a toxic legacy handed over to offspring who will have to pay it off in at least three ways: through higher taxes, less infrastructure and social spending, and, fatefully, the prospect of painfully slow growth for the foreseeable future.”
Research shows that entering the workforce during a deep recession can have lasting effects [PDF] on future wages, even if the economy eventually bounces back. That lag is already visible for Generations X and Y: In 2010, Americans under 40 had accumulated 7 percent less wealth than 20- and 30-somethings in 1983 had, according to an Urban Institute study [PDF].
The Geography of YouthKelly, 20, of Lubbock, Texas, says her biggest concern is money. “My parents have next to nothing so I am constantly worried about what I can do to have enough to buy food alone.”
We’re off to a rocky start, and the path ahead only looks to get steeper and more slippery. Which led a recent article by Annie Lowrey in The New York Times — one of the latest entries in the popular Millennial Misfortunes genre — to ask, in its headline, “Do Millennials Stand a Chance in the Real World?” Ouch.
Even before the recession hit, my cohort’s ambivalent slouch toward adulthood inspired our title as the Boomerang or Peter Pan Generation; our widespread inability to fully flee the nest even led psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett to famously raise the prospect of recognizing a new stage of life, Emerging Adulthood, the same way psychologists a century ago successfully made a case for adolescence as a phase distinct from childhood. After crunching the numbers and looking at our long-term prospects for financial maturity, the establishment is understandably starting to freak out a little bit: It looks like the country’s got about 80 million Buster Bluths on its hands. How can we be counted on to tackle looming global challenges like climate change if we can’t even take care of ourselves?
But what’s clear now — and maybe wasn’t when the Gen Y “failure to launch” theme first emerged — is that millennials’ seemingly aimless, noncommittal approach to life doesn’t necessarily signify laziness or apathy or an inability to take anything seriously. We’re not a slacker generation, nor are we politically naïve: We were born into the fast-paced optimism of the money-happy ’80s and ’90s, only to come of age as a drawn-out, indefensible war and crippling financial crisis exposed our leaders as self-serving, untrustworthy fuckups. In this world they’ve left us with, we’re not sharing shabby apartments and living on coffee-shop tips out of some blithe desire to experiment. Experimentation is when you’re 15 and you skip history class to get high, knowing how little this forbidden risk-taking really matters for your future, provided it recurs just infrequently enough to allow you to achieve everything you’re told you’re capable of. What we’re experiencing now isn’t rebellion, it’s reality — just not the reality we thought we’d be rewarded with for playing by the rules.
The Geography of YouthReggina and Gary, both 20, of New Orleans. Ten years from now, Reggina sees herself with her own practice in creative arts therapy. Gary says, “I will always be searching.”
Which makes The New York Times’ question — can we miserable millennials make it in the Real World? — sort of moot. Rather, it begs a new question: Just what is the “real world” anymore? Maybe my generation’s collective struggle to emerge as adults hints that the very experience of living and working in this country is ripe and ready for some fundamental changes. Or as Signe-Mary McKernan, one of the authors of the Urban Institute study on wealth, says, “Maybe this generation won’t have a worse life, but just a different life.”
We’re already the harbingers of a profound demographic shift in this country; our children will be the ones who fully flesh out this new, diverse, interconnected America (in 2011, for the first time, children born to people of color made up more than half of U.S. births). Included in our necessarily more pluralistic, progressive, tolerant worldview is an acute awareness of sustainability and the need to find a place for it in a political system that increasingly does not reflect our changing values.
The Geography of YouthTina, 29, of Ontario, says her biggest concern in life right now is “Trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.”
“I don’t know if I buy a lot of the stuff that’s been written about millennials,” says Morrigan McCarthy, age 30 and co-creator of the Geography of Youth, a project that documents the experiences of millennials worldwide. She and collaborator Alan Winslow, almost 29, have spent nearly two years traveling the world, photographing millennials and asking them a few simple questions about their current circumstances and expectations for the future. From these hundreds of encounters emerges a sort of character sketch of a generation, unexpectedly poignant both in its quiet respect for individual lives and in the common threads of longing that show through.
“A lot of older people we talk to about the project will tell us that they’re completely stumped at how optimistic our generation is,” McCarthy continues. “Regardless of life circumstances, that optimism theme really does carry through. People we’ve met who are in situations that just seem absolutely hopeless are still saying they’re pretty sure they’re going to get what they want out of life.”
The Geography of YouthKristin, 24, of Galveston, Texas, felt like an adult “until the moment I learned I was pregnant. That made me realize how young and unprepared I feel.”
You could dismiss this as youthful naïveté, but I think it’s also a sign of how our reality has influenced our expectations. Our confidence only sounds delusional under the assumption that what we want out of life is a four-bedroom house in a nice suburb, two or three cars, and kids with private-school educations. Instead, McCarthy says, “In general we’re much more interested in experience over material good. That’s something that’s much easier to achieve in this economy, in this world we live in. Subconsciously we know we’re not going to be able to do what our parents’ generation did.” Or, as Neil Howe (of Strauss-Howe generational theory fame), put it in Lowrey’s article: “They look at the house their parents live in and say, ‘I could work for 100 years and I couldn’t afford this place.’”
We know the financial odds are stacked against us, and instead of trying to beat them, we’d rather give the finger to the whole rigged system. What millennials seem to be striving for, McCarthy observes, is “getting some sort of satisfaction from work, whatever that means to you. You’ve got to love what you do or love the people you work with. We don’t get many people who say what they’re looking for in life is money.”
The Geography of YouthLavonte, 18, of Waller, Texas, has felt like an adult for three years, since his Grandma passed. “I been on my own ever since.”
Indeed, it seems that millennials are ahead of the curve in our embrace of what Grist’s David Roberts calls the medium chill, or the decision to forgo the rat race — where “there will always be a More and Better just beyond our reach, no matter how high we climb” — in pursuit of more authentic and lasting happiness. From our perspective, a traditional career path looks like an endless ladder constantly sprouting new steps, while we’re all still on the ground, jumping for the first rung. So we’re looking for ways to avoid that ladder altogether — maybe by climbing a tree instead.
As achieving success in the traditional sense requires ever more exhausting amounts of ambition, it makes sense that millennials would see the pursuit of meaningful relationships as a better investment of energy. Just look at hipster enclaves like Brooklyn or Portland, with its reputation as “where 20-somethings go to retire.” There aren’t a lot of corporate career opportunities in Portland, but its concentration of similar-aged and -minded people offers the chance to build a strong social support system whose loyalty will endure longer than the next dead-end job. Just a few years out of college, my friends and I already talk of feeling torn between pressure to pursue the “next step” (or any step) in our careers, and reluctance to leave the places where we’ve started to settle into our adult lives, gradually coming to see ourselves as part of a community.
The Geography of YouthThomas, 30, of Montgomery, Ala., says he already has what he wants out of life: “A woman who loves me, and a conviction that there is something to be learned everywhere, in every moment.”
That’s why millennials have an interest, Winslow says, in “providing different approaches to that traditional work model.” The mark we leave on the world is more important to us than the money we make doing it, and after lifelong encouragement from our helicopter parents and touchy-feely teachers to follow our passions, we’re full of creative energy that we dream of pouring into a vocation, not relegating to hobby status. Our blurring of work-life boundaries is already spurring companies to rethink the traditional work day, and we’re more likely to want to work for a company that gives back to the community, according to a 2011 Deloitte Volunteer Impact Survey.
McCarthy sees us as “a generation of problem solvers” who are generally “interested in contributing in a positive way to the world that we live in, whether that’s on a small local level or on a conceptual, global level.” Combine that with our unprecedented ability to access and share information, and “it’s really exciting for the future. We won’t be the richest generation ever, but I think we will have a lot of great ideas that [will] change the way things are done.”
But while millennials may be sold on the medium chill, we’re pushing against a system that assumes the big chill is still everyone’s end goal. That’s why it looks like we’re flailing (and make no mistake: We are flailing, when it comes to achieving any semblance of financial security). We have huge potential and desire to innovate, but we also recognize that we can’t fulfill that potential without same basic safety nets. Things like health insurance. Some level of student debt forgiveness. Infrastructure that supports the kind of smaller-footprint, sustainable lifestyles we’re already creating for ourselves: compact housing in vibrant, walkable communities; functioning public transportation; streetscapes that prioritize cyclists and pedestrians over cars; urban gardens and farmers markets; regulatory room for sharing economies to thrive.
As is often the case, the market is way ahead of policy in responding to millennials’ changing consumption patterns — witness the explosion of car sharing to fill the void created by our lack of interest in car ownership, or the various brouhahas over microhousing. But startups and savvy developers can’t fill every need created by the erosion of middle-class stability in America.
I don’t think my generation’s interest in this kind of sustainable, small-scale living is a phase. We’re not all going to rush out and buy cars and houses as soon as we turn 30, not only because we still won’t be able to afford them, but because we recognize that these fundamental shifts are good for society as a whole, that they represent a rejection of the mindset that got us into this mess. That’s the good news. The bad news is that we still have very little power in this country, and until those in charge stop seeing us as shiftless rogues, we’re going to be on our own in creating the life we want.
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U.S. Air ForceA C-130 Hercules sprays Corexit onto the Gulf of Mexico.
“It’s as safe as Dawn dishwashing liquid.” That’s what Jamie Griffin says the BP man told her about the smelly, rainbow-streaked gunk coating the floor of the “floating hotel” where Griffin was feeding hundreds of cleanup workers during the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Apparently, the workers were tracking the gunk inside on their boots. Griffin, as chief cook and maid, was trying to clean it. But even boiling water didn’t work.
“The BP representative said, ‘Jamie, just mop it like you’d mop any other dirty floor,’” Griffin recalls in her Louisiana drawl.
It was the opening weeks of what everyone, echoing President Barack Obama, was calling “the worst environmental disaster in American history.” At 9:45 p.m. local time on April 20, 2010, a fiery explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig had killed 11 workers and injured 17. One mile underwater, the Macondo well had blown apart, unleashing a gusher of oil into the gulf. At risk were fishing areas that supplied one-third of the seafood consumed in the U.S., beaches from Texas to Florida that drew billions of dollars’ worth of tourism to local economies, and Obama’s chances of reelection. Republicans were blaming him for mishandling the disaster, his poll numbers were falling, even his 11-year-old daughter was demanding, “Daddy, did you plug the hole yet?”
Griffin did as she was told: “I tried Pine-Sol, bleach, I even tried Dawn on those floors.” As she scrubbed, the mix of cleanser and gunk occasionally splashed onto her arms and face.
Within days, the 32-year-old single mother was coughing up blood and suffering constant headaches. She lost her voice. “My throat felt like I’d swallowed razor blades,” she says.
Then things got much worse.
Like hundreds, possibly thousands, of workers on the cleanup, Griffin soon fell ill with a cluster of excruciating, bizarre, grotesque ailments. By July, unstoppable muscle spasms were twisting her hands into immovable claws. In August, she began losing her short-term memory. After cooking professionally for 10 years, she couldn’t remember the recipe for vegetable soup; one morning, she got in the car to go to work, only to discover she hadn’t put on pants. The right side, but only the right side, of her body “started acting crazy. It felt like the nerves were coming out of my skin. It was so painful. My right leg swelled — my ankle would get as wide as my calf — and my skin got incredibly itchy.”
“These are the same symptoms experienced by soldiers who returned from the Persian Gulf War with Gulf War syndrome,” says Michael Robichaux, a Louisiana physician and former state senator, who treated Griffin and 113 other patients with similar complaints. As a general practitioner, Robichaux says he had “never seen this grouping of symptoms together: skin problems, neurological impairments, plus pulmonary problems.” Only months later, after Kaye H. Kilburn, a former professor of medicine at the University of Southern California and one of the nation’s leading environmental health experts, came to Louisiana and tested 14 of Robichaux’s patients did the two physicians make the connection with Gulf War syndrome, the malady that afflicted an estimated 250,000 veterans of that war with a mysterious combination of fatigue, skin inflammation, and cognitive problems.
Meanwhile, the well kept hemorrhaging oil. The world watched with bated breath as BP failed in one attempt after another to stop the leak. An agonizing 87 days passed before the well was finally plugged on July 15. By then, 210 million gallons of Louisiana sweet crude had escaped into the Gulf of Mexico, according to government estimates, making the BP disaster the largest accidental oil leak in world history.
Yet three years later, the BP disaster has been largely forgotten, both overseas and in the U.S. Popular anger has cooled. The media have moved on. Today, only the business press offers serious coverage of what the Financial Times calls “the trial of the century” — the trial now underway in New Orleans, where BP faces tens of billions of dollars in potential penalties for the disaster. As for Obama, the same president who early in the BP crisis blasted the “scandalously close relationship” between oil companies and government regulators two years later ran for reelection boasting about how much new oil and gas development his administration had approved.
Such collective amnesia may seem surprising, but there may be a good explanation for it: BP mounted a cover-up that concealed the full extent of its crimes from public view. This cover-up prevented the media and therefore the public from knowing — and above all, seeing — just how much oil was gushing into the gulf. The disaster appeared much less extensive and destructive than it actually was. BP declined to comment for this article.
That BP lied about the amount of oil it discharged into the gulf is already established. Lying to Congress about that was one of 14 felonies to which BP pleaded guilty last year in a legal settlement with the Justice Department that included a $4.5 billion fine, the largest fine ever levied against a corporation in the U.S.
What has not been revealed until now is how BP hid that massive amount of oil from TV cameras and the price that this “disappearing act” imposed on cleanup workers, coastal residents, and the ecosystem of the gulf. That story can now be told because an anonymous whistleblower has provided evidence that BP was warned in advance about the safety risks of attempting to cover up its leaking oil. Nevertheless, BP proceeded. Furthermore, BP appears to have withheld these safety warnings, as well as protective measures, both from the thousands of workers hired for the cleanup and from the millions of Gulf Coast residents who stood to be affected.
The financial implications are enormous. The trial now under way in New Orleans is wrestling with whether BP was guilty of “negligence” or “gross negligence” for the Deepwater Horizon disaster. If found guilty of “negligence,” BP would be fined, under the Clean Water Act, $1,100 for each barrel of oil that leaked. But if found guilty of “gross negligence”–which a cover-up would seem to imply — BP would be fined $4,300 per barrel, almost four times as much, for a total of $17.5 billion. That large a fine, combined with an additional $34 billion that the states of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida are seeking, could have a powerful effect on BP’s economic health.
Yet the most astonishing thing about BP’s cover-up? It was carried out in plain sight, right in front of the world’s uncomprehending news media (including, I regret to say, this reporter).
The chief instrument of BP’s cover-up was the same substance that apparently sickened Jamie Griffin and countless other cleanup workers and local residents. Its brand name is Corexit, but most news reports at the time referred to it simply as a “dispersant.” Its function was to attach itself to leaked oil, break it into droplets, and disperse them into the vast reaches of the gulf, thereby keeping the oil from reaching Gulf Coast shorelines. And the Corexit did largely achieve this goal.
But the 1.84 million gallons of Corexit that BP applied during the cleanup also served a public-relations purpose: They made the oil spill all but disappear, at least from TV screens. By late July 2010, the Associated Press and The New York Times were questioning whether the spill had been such a big deal after all. Time went so far as to assert that right-wing talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh “has a point” when he accused journalists and environmentalists of exaggerating the crisis.
But BP had a problem: It had lied about how safe Corexit is, and proof of its dishonesty would eventually fall into the hands of the Government Accountability Project, the premiere whistleblower-protection group in the U.S. The proof? A technical manual BP had received from NALCO, the firm that supplied the Corexit that BP used in the gulf.
An electronic copy of that manual is included in a new report GAP has issued, “Deadly Dispersants in the Gulf.” On the basis of interviews with dozens of cleanup workers, scientists, and Gulf Coast residents, GAP concludes that the health impacts endured by Griffin were visited upon many other locals as well. What’s more, the combination of Corexit and crude oil also caused terrible damage to gulf wildlife and ecosystems, including an unprecedented number of seafood mutations; declines of up to 80 percent in seafood catch; and massive die-offs of the microscopic life-forms at the base of the marine food chain. GAP warns that BP and the U.S. government nevertheless appear poised to repeat the exercise after the next major oil spill: “As a result of Corexit’s perceived success, Corexit … has become the dispersant of choice in the U.S. to ‘clean up’ oil spills.”
BP’s cover-up was not planned in advance but devised in the heat of the moment as the oil giant scrambled to limit the PR and other damages of the disaster. Indeed, one of the chief scandals of the disaster is just how unprepared both BP and federal and state authorities were for an oil leak of this magnitude. U.S. law required that a response plan be in place before drilling began, but the plan was embarrassingly flawed.
“We weren’t managing for actual risk; we were checking a box,” says Mark Davis, director of the Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy at Tulane University. “That’s how we ended up with a response plan that included provisions for dealing with the impacts to walruses: because [BP] copied word for word the response plans that had been developed after the Exxon-Valdez oil spill [in Alaska, in 1989] instead of a plan tailored to the conditions in the gulf.”
As days turned into weeks and it became obvious that no one knew how to plug the gushing well, BP began insisting that Corexit be used to disperse the leaking oil. This triggered alarms from scientists and from a leading environmental NGO in Louisiana, the Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN).
The group’s scientific adviser, Wilma Subra, a chemist whose work on environmental pollution had won her a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, told state and federal authorities that she was especially concerned about how dangerous the mixture of crude and Corexit was: “The short-term health symptoms include acute respiratory problems, skin rashes, cardiovascular impacts, gastrointestinal impacts, and short-term loss of memory,” she told GAP investigators. “Long-term impacts include cancer, decreased lung function, liver damage, and kidney damage.”
(Nineteen months after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, a scientific study published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Pollution found that crude oil becomes 52 times more toxic when combined with Corexit.)
BP even rebuffed a direct request from the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, who wrote BP a letter on May 19, asking the company to deploy a less toxic dispersant in the cleanup. Jackson could only ask BP to do this; she could not legally require it. Why? Because use of Corexit had been authorized years before under the federal Oil Pollution Act.
In a recent interview, Jackson explains that she and other officials “had to determine, with less-than-perfect scientific testing and data, whether use of dispersants would, despite potential side effects, improve the overall situation in the gulf and coastal ecosystems. The tradeoff, as I have said many times, was potential damage in the deep water versus the potential for larger amounts of undispersed oil in the ecologically rich coastal shallows and estuaries.” She adds that the presidential commission that later studied the BP oil disaster did not fault the decision to use dispersants.
Knowing that EPA lacked the authority to stop it, BP wrote back to Jackson on May 20, declaring that Corexit was safe. What’s more, BP wrote, there was a ready supply of Corexit, which was not the case with alternative dispersants. (A NALCO plant was located just 30 miles west of New Orleans.)
But Corexit was decidedly not safe without taking proper precautions, as the manual BP got from NALCO spelled out in black and white. The “Vessel Captains Hazard Communication” resource manual, which GAP shared with me, looks innocuous enough. A three-ring binder with a black plastic cover, the manual contained 61 sheets, each wrapped in plastic, that detailed the scientific properties of the two types of Corexit that BP was buying, as well as their health hazards and recommended measures against those hazards.
BP applied two types of Corexit in the gulf. The first, Corexit 9527, was considerably more toxic. According to the NALCO manual, Corexit 9527 is an “eye and skin irritant. Repeated or excessive exposure … may cause injury to red blood cells (hemolysis), kidney or the liver.” The manual adds: “Excessive exposure may cause central nervous system effects, nausea, vomiting, anesthetic or narcotic effects.” It advises, “Do not get in eyes, on skin, on clothing,” and “Wear suitable protective clothing.”
When available supplies of Corexit 9527 were exhausted early in the cleanup, BP switched to the second type of dispersant, Corexit 9500. In its recommendations for dealing with Corexit 9500, the NALCO manual advised, “Do not get in eyes, on skin, on clothing,” “Avoid breathing vapor,” and “Wear suitable protective clothing.”
It’s standard procedure — and required by U.S. law — for companies to distribute this kind of information to any work site where hazardous materials are present so workers can know about the dangers they face and how to protect themselves. But interviews with numerous cleanup workers suggest that this legally required precaution was rarely if ever followed during the BP cleanup. Instead, it appears that BP told NALCO to stop including the manuals with the Corexit that NALCO was delivering to cleanup work sites.
“It’s my understanding that some manuals were sent out with the shipments of Corexit in the beginning [of the cleanup],” the anonymous source tells me. “Then, BP told NALCO to stop sending them. So NALCO was left with a roomful of unused binders.”
Roman Blahoski, NALCO’s director of global communications, says: “NALCO responded to requests for its pre-approved dispersants from those charged with protecting the gulf and mitigating the environmental, health, and economic impact of this event. NALCO was never involved in decisions relating to the use, volume, and application of its dispersant.”
Misrepresenting the safety of Corexit went hand in hand with BP’s previously noted lie about how much oil was leaking from the Macondo well. As reported by John Rudolf in The Huffington Post, internal BP emails show that BP privately estimated that “the runaway well could be leaking from 62,000 barrels a day to 146,000 barrels a day.” Meanwhile, BP officials were telling the government and the media that only 5,000 barrels a day were leaking.
In short, applying Corexit enabled BP to mask the fact that a much larger amount of oil was actually leaking into the gulf. “Like any good magician, the oil industry has learned that if you can’t see something that was there, it must have ‘disappeared,’” Scott Porter, a scientist and deep-sea diver who consults for oil companies and oystermen, says in the GAP report. “Oil companies have also learned that, in the public mind, ‘out of sight equals out of mind.’ Therefore, they have chosen crude oil dispersants as the primary tool for handling large marine oil spills.”
BP also had a more direct financial interest in using Corexit, argues Clint Guidry, president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, whose members include not only shrimpers but fishermen of all sorts. As it happens, local fishermen constituted a significant portion of BP’s cleanup force (which numbered as many as 47,000 workers at the height of the cleanup). Because the spill caused the closure of their fishing grounds, BP and state and federal authorities established the Vessels of Opportunity (VoO) program, in which BP paid fishermen to take their boats out and skim, burn, and otherwise get rid of leaked oil. Applying dispersants, Guidry points out, reduced the total volume of oil that could be traced back to BP.
“The next phase of this trial [against BP] is going to turn on how much oil was leaked,” Guidry tells me. [If found guilty, BP will be fined a certain amount for each barrel of oil judged to have leaked.] “So hiding the oil with Corexit worked not only to hide the size of the spill but also to lower the amount of oil that BP may get charged for releasing.”
DVIDSHUBA contractor cleans up oily waste on Elmer’s Island, just west of Grand Isle, La., May 21, 2010.
Not only did BP fail to inform workers of the potential hazards of Corexit and to provide them with safety training and protective gear, according to interviews with dozens of cleanup workers, the company also allegedly threatened to fire workers who complained about the lack of respirators and protective clothing.
“I worked with probably a couple hundred different fishermen on the [cleanup],” Acy Cooper, Guidry’s second in command, tells me in Venice, the coastal town from which many VoO vessels departed. “Not one of them got any safety information or training concerning the toxic materials they encountered.” Cooper says that BP did provide workers with body suits and gloves designed for handling hazardous materials. “But when I’d talk with [the BP representative] about getting my guys respirators and air monitors, I’d never get any response.”
Roughly 58 percent of the 1.84 million gallons of Corexit used in the cleanup was sprayed onto the gulf from C-130 airplanes. The spray sometimes ended up hitting cleanup workers in the face.
“Our boat was sprayed four times,” says Jorey Danos, a 32-year-old father of three who suffered racking coughing fits, severe fatigue, and memory loss after working on the BP cleanup. “I could see the stuff coming out of the plane — like a shower of mist, a smoky color. I could see [it] coming at me, but there was nothing I could do.”
“The next day,” Danos continues, “when the BP rep came around on his speed boat, I asked, ‘Hey, what’s the deal with that stuff that was coming out of those planes yesterday?’ He told me, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ I said, ‘Man, that s–t was burning my face — it ain’t right.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ I said, ‘Well, could we get some respirators or something, because that s–t is bad.’ He said, ‘No, that wouldn’t look good to the media. You got two choices: You can either be relieved of your duties or you can deal with it.’”
Perhaps the single most hazardous chemical compound found in Corexit 9527 is 2-Butoxyethanol, a substance that had been linked to cancers and other health impacts among cleanup workers on the 1989 Exxon-Valdez oil spill in Alaska. According to BP’s own data, 20 percent of offshore workers in the gulf had levels of 2-Butoxyethanol two times higher than the level certified as safe by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Cleanup workers were not the only victims; coastal residents also suffered. “My 2-year-old grandson and I would play out in the yard,” says Shirley Tillman of the Mississippi coastal town Pass Christian. “You could smell oil and stuff in the air, but on the news they were saying it’s fine, don’t worry. Well, by October, he was one sick little fellow. All of a sudden, this very active little 2-year-old was constantly sick. He was having headaches, upper respiratory infections, earaches. The night of his birthday party, his parents had to rush him to the emergency room. He went to nine different doctors, but they treated just the symptoms; they’re not toxicologists.”
“It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.” Ever since the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, that’s been the mantra. Cover-ups don’t work, goes the argument. They only dig a deeper hole, because the truth eventually comes out.
But does it?
GAP investigators were hopeful that obtaining the NALCO manual might persuade BP to meet with them, and it did. On July 10, 2012, BP hosted a private meeting at its Houston offices. Presiding over the meeting, which is described here publicly for the first time, was BP’s public ombudsman, Stanley Sporkin, joining by telephone from Washington. Ironically, Sporkin had made his professional reputation during the Watergate scandal. As a lawyer with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Sporkin investigated illegal corporate payments to the slush fund that President Nixon used to buy the silence of the Watergate burglars.
Also attending the meeting were two senior BP attorneys; BP Vice President Luke Keller; other BP officials; Thomas Devine, GAP’s senior attorney on the BP case; Shanna Devine, GAP’s investigator on the case; Michael Robichaux; Wilma Subra; and Marylee Orr, the executive director of LEAN. The following account is based on my interviews with Thomas Devine, Robichaux, Subra, and Orr. BP declined to comment.
BP officials had previously confirmed the authenticity of the NALCO manual, says Thomas Devine, but now they refused to discuss it, even though this had been one of the stated purposes for the meeting. Nor would BP address the allegation, made by the whistleblower who had given the manual to GAP, that BP had ordered the manual withheld from cleanup work sites, perhaps to maintain the fiction that Corexit was safe.
“They opened the meeting with this upbeat presentation about how seriously they took their responsibilities for the spill and all the wonderful things they were doing to make things right,” says Devine. “When it was my turn to speak, I said that the manual our whistleblower had provided contradicted what they just said. I asked whether they had ordered the manual withdrawn from work sites. Their attorneys said that was a matter they would not discuss because of the pending litigation on the spill.” [Disclosure: Thomas Devine is a friend of this reporter.]
The visitors’ top priority was to get BP to agree not to use Corexit in the future. Keller said that Corexit was still authorized for use by the U.S. government and BP would indeed feel free to use it against any future oil spills.
A second priority was to get BP to provide medical treatment for Jamie Griffin and the many other apparent victims of Corexit-and-crude poisoning. This request too was refused by BP.
Robichaux doubts his patients will receive proper compensation from the $7.8 billion settlement BP reached in 2012 with the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee, 19 court-appointed attorneys who represent the hundreds of individuals and entities that have sued BP for damages related to the gulf disaster. “Nine of the most common symptoms of my patients do not appear on the list of illnesses that settlement says can be compensated, including memory loss, fatigue, and joint and muscular pain,” says Robichaux. “So how are the attorneys going to file suits on behalf of those victims?”
At one level, BP’s cover-up of the gulf oil disaster speaks to the enormous power that giant corporations exercise in modern society, and how unable, or unwilling, governments are to limit that power. To be sure, BP has not entirely escaped censure for its actions; depending on the outcome of the trial now under way in New Orleans, the company could end up paying tens of billions of dollars in fines and damages over and above the $4.5 billion imposed by the Justice Department in the settlement last year. But BP’s reputation appears to have survived: Its market value as this article went to press was a tidy $132 billion, and few, if any, BP officials appear likely to face any legal repercussions. “If I would have killed 11 people, I’d be hanging from a noose,” says Jorey Danos. “Not BP. It’s the golden rule: The man with the gold makes the rules.”
As unchastened as anyone at BP is Bob Dudley, the American who was catapulted into the CEO job a few weeks into the gulf disaster to replace Tony Hayward, whose propensity for imprudent comments — “I want my life back,” the multimillionaire had pouted while thousands of gulf workers and residents were suffering — had made him a globally derided figure. Dudley told the annual BP shareholders meeting in London last week that Corexit “is effectively … dishwashing soap,” no more toxic than that, as all scientific studies supposedly showed. What’s more, Dudley added, he himself had grown up in Mississippi and knows that the Gulf of Mexico is “an ecosystem that is used to oil.”
Nor has the BP oil disaster triggered the kind of changes in law and public priorities one might have expected. “Not much has actually changed,” says Mark Davis of Tulane. “It reflects just how wedded our country is to keeping the Gulf of Mexico producing oil and bringing it to our shores as cheaply as possible. Going forward, no one should assume that just because something really bad happened we’re going to manage oil and gas production with greater sensitivity and wisdom. That will only happen if people get involved and compel both the industry and the government to be more diligent.”
And so the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history has been whitewashed — its true dimensions obscured, its victims forgotten, its lessons ignored. Who says cover-ups never work?
U.S. Air ForceA C-130 Hercules sprays Corexit onto the Gulf of Mexico.
“It’s as safe as Dawn dishwashing liquid.” That’s what Jamie Griffin says the BP man told her about the smelly, rainbow-streaked gunk coating the floor of the “floating hotel” where Griffin was feeding hundreds of cleanup workers during the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Apparently, the workers were tracking the gunk inside on their boots. Griffin, as chief cook and maid, was trying to clean it. But even boiling water didn’t work.
“The BP representative said, ‘Jamie, just mop it like you’d mop any other dirty floor,’” Griffin recalls in her Louisiana drawl.
It was the opening weeks of what everyone, echoing President Barack Obama, was calling “the worst environmental disaster in American history.” At 9:45 p.m. local time on April 20, 2010, a fiery explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig had killed 11 workers and injured 17. One mile underwater, the Macondo well had blown apart, unleashing a gusher of oil into the gulf. At risk were fishing areas that supplied one-third of the seafood consumed in the U.S., beaches from Texas to Florida that drew billions of dollars’ worth of tourism to local economies, and Obama’s chances of reelection. Republicans were blaming him for mishandling the disaster, his poll numbers were falling, even his 11-year-old daughter was demanding, “Daddy, did you plug the hole yet?”
Griffin did as she was told: “I tried Pine-Sol, bleach, I even tried Dawn on those floors.” As she scrubbed, the mix of cleanser and gunk occasionally splashed onto her arms and face.
Within days, the 32-year-old single mother was coughing up blood and suffering constant headaches. She lost her voice. “My throat felt like I’d swallowed razor blades,” she says.
Then things got much worse.
Like hundreds, possibly thousands, of workers on the cleanup, Griffin soon fell ill with a cluster of excruciating, bizarre, grotesque ailments. By July, unstoppable muscle spasms were twisting her hands into immovable claws. In August, she began losing her short-term memory. After cooking professionally for 10 years, she couldn’t remember the recipe for vegetable soup; one morning, she got in the car to go to work, only to discover she hadn’t put on pants. The right side, but only the right side, of her body “started acting crazy. It felt like the nerves were coming out of my skin. It was so painful. My right leg swelled — my ankle would get as wide as my calf — and my skin got incredibly itchy.”
“These are the same symptoms experienced by soldiers who returned from the Persian Gulf War with Gulf War syndrome,” says Michael Robichaux, a Louisiana physician and former state senator, who treated Griffin and 113 other patients with similar complaints. As a general practitioner, Robichaux says he had “never seen this grouping of symptoms together: skin problems, neurological impairments, plus pulmonary problems.” Only months later, after Kaye H. Kilburn, a former professor of medicine at the University of Southern California and one of the nation’s leading environmental health experts, came to Louisiana and tested 14 of Robichaux’s patients did the two physicians make the connection with Gulf War syndrome, the malady that afflicted an estimated 250,000 veterans of that war with a mysterious combination of fatigue, skin inflammation, and cognitive problems.
Meanwhile, the well kept hemorrhaging oil. The world watched with bated breath as BP failed in one attempt after another to stop the leak. An agonizing 87 days passed before the well was finally plugged on July 15. By then, 210 million gallons of Louisiana sweet crude had escaped into the Gulf of Mexico, according to government estimates, making the BP disaster the largest accidental oil leak in world history.
Yet three years later, the BP disaster has been largely forgotten, both overseas and in the U.S. Popular anger has cooled. The media have moved on. Today, only the business press offers serious coverage of what the Financial Times calls “the trial of the century” — the trial now underway in New Orleans, where BP faces tens of billions of dollars in potential penalties for the disaster. As for Obama, the same president who early in the BP crisis blasted the “scandalously close relationship” between oil companies and government regulators two years later ran for reelection boasting about how much new oil and gas development his administration had approved.
Such collective amnesia may seem surprising, but there may be a good explanation for it: BP mounted a cover-up that concealed the full extent of its crimes from public view. This cover-up prevented the media and therefore the public from knowing — and above all, seeing — just how much oil was gushing into the gulf. The disaster appeared much less extensive and destructive than it actually was. BP declined to comment for this article.
That BP lied about the amount of oil it discharged into the gulf is already established. Lying to Congress about that was one of 14 felonies to which BP pleaded guilty last year in a legal settlement with the Justice Department that included a $4.5 billion fine, the largest fine ever levied against a corporation in the U.S.
What has not been revealed until now is how BP hid that massive amount of oil from TV cameras and the price that this “disappearing act” imposed on cleanup workers, coastal residents, and the ecosystem of the gulf. That story can now be told because an anonymous whistleblower has provided evidence that BP was warned in advance about the safety risks of attempting to cover up its leaking oil. Nevertheless, BP proceeded. Furthermore, BP appears to have withheld these safety warnings, as well as protective measures, both from the thousands of workers hired for the cleanup and from the millions of Gulf Coast residents who stood to be affected.
The financial implications are enormous. The trial now under way in New Orleans is wrestling with whether BP was guilty of “negligence” or “gross negligence” for the Deepwater Horizon disaster. If found guilty of “negligence,” BP would be fined, under the Clean Water Act, $1,100 for each barrel of oil that leaked. But if found guilty of “gross negligence”–which a cover-up would seem to imply — BP would be fined $4,300 per barrel, almost four times as much, for a total of $17.5 billion. That large a fine, combined with an additional $34 billion that the states of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida are seeking, could have a powerful effect on BP’s economic health.
Yet the most astonishing thing about BP’s cover-up? It was carried out in plain sight, right in front of the world’s uncomprehending news media (including, I regret to say, this reporter).
The chief instrument of BP’s cover-up was the same substance that apparently sickened Jamie Griffin and countless other cleanup workers and local residents. Its brand name is Corexit, but most news reports at the time referred to it simply as a “dispersant.” Its function was to attach itself to leaked oil, break it into droplets, and disperse them into the vast reaches of the gulf, thereby keeping the oil from reaching Gulf Coast shorelines. And the Corexit did largely achieve this goal.
But the 1.84 million gallons of Corexit that BP applied during the cleanup also served a public-relations purpose: They made the oil spill all but disappear, at least from TV screens. By late July 2010, the Associated Press and The New York Times were questioning whether the spill had been such a big deal after all. Time went so far as to assert that right-wing talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh “has a point” when he accused journalists and environmentalists of exaggerating the crisis.
But BP had a problem: It had lied about how safe Corexit is, and proof of its dishonesty would eventually fall into the hands of the Government Accountability Project, the premiere whistleblower-protection group in the U.S. The proof? A technical manual BP had received from NALCO, the firm that supplied the Corexit that BP used in the gulf.
An electronic copy of that manual is included in a new report GAP has issued, “Deadly Dispersants in the Gulf.” On the basis of interviews with dozens of cleanup workers, scientists, and Gulf Coast residents, GAP concludes that the health impacts endured by Griffin were visited upon many other locals as well. What’s more, the combination of Corexit and crude oil also caused terrible damage to gulf wildlife and ecosystems, including an unprecedented number of seafood mutations; declines of up to 80 percent in seafood catch; and massive die-offs of the microscopic life-forms at the base of the marine food chain. GAP warns that BP and the U.S. government nevertheless appear poised to repeat the exercise after the next major oil spill: “As a result of Corexit’s perceived success, Corexit … has become the dispersant of choice in the U.S. to ‘clean up’ oil spills.”
BP’s cover-up was not planned in advance but devised in the heat of the moment as the oil giant scrambled to limit the PR and other damages of the disaster. Indeed, one of the chief scandals of the disaster is just how unprepared both BP and federal and state authorities were for an oil leak of this magnitude. U.S. law required that a response plan be in place before drilling began, but the plan was embarrassingly flawed.
“We weren’t managing for actual risk; we were checking a box,” says Mark Davis, director of the Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy at Tulane University. “That’s how we ended up with a response plan that included provisions for dealing with the impacts to walruses: because [BP] copied word for word the response plans that had been developed after the Exxon-Valdez oil spill [in Alaska, in 1989] instead of a plan tailored to the conditions in the gulf.”
As days turned into weeks and it became obvious that no one knew how to plug the gushing well, BP began insisting that Corexit be used to disperse the leaking oil. This triggered alarms from scientists and from a leading environmental NGO in Louisiana, the Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN).
The group’s scientific adviser, Wilma Subra, a chemist whose work on environmental pollution had won her a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, told state and federal authorities that she was especially concerned about how dangerous the mixture of crude and Corexit was: “The short-term health symptoms include acute respiratory problems, skin rashes, cardiovascular impacts, gastrointestinal impacts, and short-term loss of memory,” she told GAP investigators. “Long-term impacts include cancer, decreased lung function, liver damage, and kidney damage.”
(Nineteen months after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, a scientific study published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Pollution found that crude oil becomes 52 times more toxic when combined with Corexit.)
BP even rebuffed a direct request from the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, who wrote BP a letter on May 19, asking the company to deploy a less toxic dispersant in the cleanup. Jackson could only ask BP to do this; she could not legally require it. Why? Because use of Corexit had been authorized years before under the federal Oil Pollution Act.
In a recent interview, Jackson explains that she and other officials “had to determine, with less-than-perfect scientific testing and data, whether use of dispersants would, despite potential side effects, improve the overall situation in the gulf and coastal ecosystems. The tradeoff, as I have said many times, was potential damage in the deep water versus the potential for larger amounts of undispersed oil in the ecologically rich coastal shallows and estuaries.” She adds that the presidential commission that later studied the BP oil disaster did not fault the decision to use dispersants.
Knowing that EPA lacked the authority to stop it, BP wrote back to Jackson on May 20, declaring that Corexit was safe. What’s more, BP wrote, there was a ready supply of Corexit, which was not the case with alternative dispersants. (A NALCO plant was located just 30 miles west of New Orleans.)
But Corexit was decidedly not safe without taking proper precautions, as the manual BP got from NALCO spelled out in black and white. The “Vessel Captains Hazard Communication” resource manual, which GAP shared with me, looks innocuous enough. A three-ring binder with a black plastic cover, the manual contained 61 sheets, each wrapped in plastic, that detailed the scientific properties of the two types of Corexit that BP was buying, as well as their health hazards and recommended measures against those hazards.
BP applied two types of Corexit in the gulf. The first, Corexit 9527, was considerably more toxic. According to the NALCO manual, Corexit 9527 is an “eye and skin irritant. Repeated or excessive exposure … may cause injury to red blood cells (hemolysis), kidney or the liver.” The manual adds: “Excessive exposure may cause central nervous system effects, nausea, vomiting, anesthetic or narcotic effects.” It advises, “Do not get in eyes, on skin, on clothing,” and “Wear suitable protective clothing.”
When available supplies of Corexit 9527 were exhausted early in the cleanup, BP switched to the second type of dispersant, Corexit 9500. In its recommendations for dealing with Corexit 9500, the NALCO manual advised, “Do not get in eyes, on skin, on clothing,” “Avoid breathing vapor,” and “Wear suitable protective clothing.”
It’s standard procedure — and required by U.S. law — for companies to distribute this kind of information to any work site where hazardous materials are present so workers can know about the dangers they face and how to protect themselves. But interviews with numerous cleanup workers suggest that this legally required precaution was rarely if ever followed during the BP cleanup. Instead, it appears that BP told NALCO to stop including the manuals with the Corexit that NALCO was delivering to cleanup work sites.
“It’s my understanding that some manuals were sent out with the shipments of Corexit in the beginning [of the cleanup],” the anonymous source tells me. “Then, BP told NALCO to stop sending them. So NALCO was left with a roomful of unused binders.”
Roman Blahoski, NALCO’s director of global communications, says: “NALCO responded to requests for its pre-approved dispersants from those charged with protecting the gulf and mitigating the environmental, health, and economic impact of this event. NALCO was never involved in decisions relating to the use, volume, and application of its dispersant.”
Misrepresenting the safety of Corexit went hand in hand with BP’s previously noted lie about how much oil was leaking from the Macondo well. As reported by John Rudolf in The Huffington Post, internal BP emails show that BP privately estimated that “the runaway well could be leaking from 62,000 barrels a day to 146,000 barrels a day.” Meanwhile, BP officials were telling the government and the media that only 5,000 barrels a day were leaking.
In short, applying Corexit enabled BP to mask the fact that a much larger amount of oil was actually leaking into the gulf. “Like any good magician, the oil industry has learned that if you can’t see something that was there, it must have ‘disappeared,’” Scott Porter, a scientist and deep-sea diver who consults for oil companies and oystermen, says in the GAP report. “Oil companies have also learned that, in the public mind, ‘out of sight equals out of mind.’ Therefore, they have chosen crude oil dispersants as the primary tool for handling large marine oil spills.”
BP also had a more direct financial interest in using Corexit, argues Clint Guidry, president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, whose members include not only shrimpers but fishermen of all sorts. As it happens, local fishermen constituted a significant portion of BP’s cleanup force (which numbered as many as 47,000 workers at the height of the cleanup). Because the spill caused the closure of their fishing grounds, BP and state and federal authorities established the Vessels of Opportunity (VoO) program, in which BP paid fishermen to take their boats out and skim, burn, and otherwise get rid of leaked oil. Applying dispersants, Guidry points out, reduced the total volume of oil that could be traced back to BP.
“The next phase of this trial [against BP] is going to turn on how much oil was leaked,” Guidry tells me. [If found guilty, BP will be fined a certain amount for each barrel of oil judged to have leaked.] “So hiding the oil with Corexit worked not only to hide the size of the spill but also to lower the amount of oil that BP may get charged for releasing.”
DVIDSHUBA contractor cleans up oily waste on Elmer’s Island, just west of Grand Isle, La., May 21, 2010.
Not only did BP fail to inform workers of the potential hazards of Corexit and to provide them with safety training and protective gear, according to interviews with dozens of cleanup workers, the company also allegedly threatened to fire workers who complained about the lack of respirators and protective clothing.
“I worked with probably a couple hundred different fishermen on the [cleanup],” Acy Cooper, Guidry’s second in command, tells me in Venice, the coastal town from which many VoO vessels departed. “Not one of them got any safety information or training concerning the toxic materials they encountered.” Cooper says that BP did provide workers with body suits and gloves designed for handling hazardous materials. “But when I’d talk with [the BP representative] about getting my guys respirators and air monitors, I’d never get any response.”
Roughly 58 percent of the 1.84 million gallons of Corexit used in the cleanup was sprayed onto the gulf from C-130 airplanes. The spray sometimes ended up hitting cleanup workers in the face.
“Our boat was sprayed four times,” says Jorey Danos, a 32-year-old father of three who suffered racking coughing fits, severe fatigue, and memory loss after working on the BP cleanup. “I could see the stuff coming out of the plane — like a shower of mist, a smoky color. I could see [it] coming at me, but there was nothing I could do.”
“The next day,” Danos continues, “when the BP rep came around on his speed boat, I asked, ‘Hey, what’s the deal with that stuff that was coming out of those planes yesterday?’ He told me, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ I said, ‘Man, that s–t was burning my face — it ain’t right.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ I said, ‘Well, could we get some respirators or something, because that s–t is bad.’ He said, ‘No, that wouldn’t look good to the media. You got two choices: You can either be relieved of your duties or you can deal with it.’”
Perhaps the single most hazardous chemical compound found in Corexit 9527 is 2-Butoxyethanol, a substance that had been linked to cancers and other health impacts among cleanup workers on the 1989 Exxon-Valdez oil spill in Alaska. According to BP’s own data, 20 percent of offshore workers in the gulf had levels of 2-Butoxyethanol two times higher than the level certified as safe by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Cleanup workers were not the only victims; coastal residents also suffered. “My 2-year-old grandson and I would play out in the yard,” says Shirley Tillman of the Mississippi coastal town Pass Christian. “You could smell oil and stuff in the air, but on the news they were saying it’s fine, don’t worry. Well, by October, he was one sick little fellow. All of a sudden, this very active little 2-year-old was constantly sick. He was having headaches, upper respiratory infections, earaches. The night of his birthday party, his parents had to rush him to the emergency room. He went to nine different doctors, but they treated just the symptoms; they’re not toxicologists.”
“It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.” Ever since the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, that’s been the mantra. Cover-ups don’t work, goes the argument. They only dig a deeper hole, because the truth eventually comes out.
But does it?
GAP investigators were hopeful that obtaining the NALCO manual might persuade BP to meet with them, and it did. On July 10, 2012, BP hosted a private meeting at its Houston offices. Presiding over the meeting, which is described here publicly for the first time, was BP’s public ombudsman, Stanley Sporkin, joining by telephone from Washington. Ironically, Sporkin had made his professional reputation during the Watergate scandal. As a lawyer with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Sporkin investigated illegal corporate payments to the slush fund that President Nixon used to buy the silence of the Watergate burglars.
Also attending the meeting were two senior BP attorneys; BP Vice President Luke Keller; other BP officials; Thomas Devine, GAP’s senior attorney on the BP case; Shanna Devine, GAP’s investigator on the case; Michael Robichaux; Wilma Subra; and Marylee Orr, the executive director of LEAN. The following account is based on my interviews with Thomas Devine, Robichaux, Subra, and Orr. BP declined to comment.
BP officials had previously confirmed the authenticity of the NALCO manual, says Thomas Devine, but now they refused to discuss it, even though this had been one of the stated purposes for the meeting. Nor would BP address the allegation, made by the whistleblower who had given the manual to GAP, that BP had ordered the manual withheld from cleanup work sites, perhaps to maintain the fiction that Corexit was safe.
“They opened the meeting with this upbeat presentation about how seriously they took their responsibilities for the spill and all the wonderful things they were doing to make things right,” says Devine. “When it was my turn to speak, I said that the manual our whistleblower had provided contradicted what they just said. I asked whether they had ordered the manual withdrawn from work sites. Their attorneys said that was a matter they would not discuss because of the pending litigation on the spill.” [Disclosure: Thomas Devine is a friend of this reporter.]
The visitors’ top priority was to get BP to agree not to use Corexit in the future. Keller said that Corexit was still authorized for use by the U.S. government and BP would indeed feel free to use it against any future oil spills.
A second priority was to get BP to provide medical treatment for Jamie Griffin and the many other apparent victims of Corexit-and-crude poisoning. This request too was refused by BP.
Robichaux doubts his patients will receive proper compensation from the $7.8 billion settlement BP reached in 2012 with the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee, 19 court-appointed attorneys who represent the hundreds of individuals and entities that have sued BP for damages related to the gulf disaster. “Nine of the most common symptoms of my patients do not appear on the list of illnesses that settlement says can be compensated, including memory loss, fatigue, and joint and muscular pain,” says Robichaux. “So how are the attorneys going to file suits on behalf of those victims?”
At one level, BP’s cover-up of the gulf oil disaster speaks to the enormous power that giant corporations exercise in modern society, and how unable, or unwilling, governments are to limit that power. To be sure, BP has not entirely escaped censure for its actions; depending on the outcome of the trial now under way in New Orleans, the company could end up paying tens of billions of dollars in fines and damages over and above the $4.5 billion imposed by the Justice Department in the settlement last year. But BP’s reputation appears to have survived: Its market value as this article went to press was a tidy $132 billion, and few, if any, BP officials appear likely to face any legal repercussions. “If I would have killed 11 people, I’d be hanging from a noose,” says Jorey Danos. “Not BP. It’s the golden rule: The man with the gold makes the rules.”
As unchastened as anyone at BP is Bob Dudley, the American who was catapulted into the CEO job a few weeks into the gulf disaster to replace Tony Hayward, whose propensity for imprudent comments — “I want my life back,” the multimillionaire had pouted while thousands of gulf workers and residents were suffering — had made him a globally derided figure. Dudley told the annual BP shareholders meeting in London last week that Corexit “is effectively … dishwashing soap,” no more toxic than that, as all scientific studies supposedly showed. What’s more, Dudley added, he himself had grown up in Mississippi and knows that the Gulf of Mexico is “an ecosystem that is used to oil.”
Nor has the BP oil disaster triggered the kind of changes in law and public priorities one might have expected. “Not much has actually changed,” says Mark Davis of Tulane. “It reflects just how wedded our country is to keeping the Gulf of Mexico producing oil and bringing it to our shores as cheaply as possible. Going forward, no one should assume that just because something really bad happened we’re going to manage oil and gas production with greater sensitivity and wisdom. That will only happen if people get involved and compel both the industry and the government to be more diligent.”
And so the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history has been whitewashed — its true dimensions obscured, its victims forgotten, its lessons ignored. Who says cover-ups never work?
Earlier this month, when a burst pipe spilled thousands of gallons of heavy oil into an Arkansas suburb, the message from the White House went something like: “Everybody chill, the EPA has it under control.” But reporters on the scene found the cleanup orchestrated by the same company, ExxonMobil, that allowed the spill, and heard only crickets when they asked the EPA about its involvement.
Turns out, on some of the nation’s most pressing environmental health issues, the EPA’s transparency record isn’t exactly crystal-clear.
So with a vote on President Obama’s new pick to head the EPA, Gina McCarthy, coming up as soon as next week, it perhaps isn’t a surprise that congressional scrutiny of her nomination has centered more on the agency’s secret-keeping habits than on its environmental enforcement goals. At a hearing last Thursday before the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, McCarthy got grilled on EPA’s transparency record by Republican members, led by Louisiana’s David Vitter. On Tuesday, the committee’s Republicans sent a memo demanding details on her plans to open up the agency’s inner workings.
But for all their zeal, Vitter and his GOP colleagues (including climate change denier-in-chief James Inhofe [R-Okla.]) might be barking up the wrong tree: A major thrust of their complaint against McCarthy, a feisty Bostonian currently overseeing EPA’s air quality division, hinges on the use of email aliases by top EPA officials and the possibility that they’ve used personal email accounts for official business, an issue currently under investigation by the EPA inspector general.
Outgoing EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and Bush-era EPA head Christie Whitman both created official email addresses under fake names (Jackson’s was “Richard Windsor,” after a pet dog), apparently to circumvent a chronic deluge of spam. McCarthy says she doesn’t have an alias email and told the Senate committee she found only one instance of using her personal email for work — which didn’t stop Vitter, in the memo, from demanding a full audit of her personal emails.
And while the use of unofficial email addresses beyond the reach of federal public records laws clearly raises the specter of important information being kept in the dark, few in the transparency or environmental journalism communities think it should be the focus of complaints about the agency’s openness.
“The concerns over fake emails are totally bogus,” says Joe Davis, a veteran environmental journalist and a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists’ freedom of information taskforce. “This wasn’t some made-up thing by Lisa Jackson to fool us all. They’re simply efforts to politically damage McCarthy and Lisa Jackson and EPA by people with an anti-regulatory agenda.”
Indeed, a review of a cache of “secret” emails from Jackson uncovered such pressing matters as whether “turducken” is a real thing (it is), and lyrics for a Santa-themed jingle about coal-ash regulation.
The problem, Davis said, is that focusing on the emails distracts from more legitimate transparency concerns, like whether McCarthy mislead Congress about greenhouse gas regulations, lawsuits alleging the EPA deliberately destroyed official instant messaging threads, and what Davis describes as a longstanding agency-wide pattern of rebuffing the news media — a pattern that has only gotten worse during the Obama administration. And if Senate Republicans are asking the wrong questions, Davis says, they’re at least doing better than Democrats, who haven’t raised any questions in the nomination process about the EPA’s openness with the media.
There’s plenty that could use a good airing: Back in 2010, the EPA asked the natural gas industry to cough up details on the ingredients in fracking fluid after companies were caught pumping toxic chemicals like benzene and toluene into the ground. It was a chance to shine a light on a practice that had been notoriously murky since being exempted from Safe Drinking Water Act disclosure rules five years before. There was only one problem: Under industry pressure, the EPA agreed to keep the ingredient lists a secret from the public, and by last year was still scrambling just to get the lists for themselves.
Meanwhile, a rule to crack down on toxic coal ash disposal that EPA boss Lisa Jackson hoped would be one of her flagship achievements was watered down during closed-door meetings with industry groups and then mysteriously delayed; with Jackson on her way out, it has yet to be finalized.
President Obama’s broader campaign promises to bring more transparency across the federal government have fallen short, and environmental watchdogs have calledfoul on the EPA in particular for shutting out journalists, controlling messages for political gain, obfuscating public comments on proposed policies, and a host of other transparency issues. A 2008 Union of Concerned Scientists study found that hundreds of EPA scientists had their work interfered with by officials for political reasons.
Transparency is “a chronic, burning issue at EPA,” says the SEJ’s Joe Davis. “It’s a way of insulating themselves from PR disasters and political and public accountability.”
An EPA spokesperson declined to comment for this story, instead forwarding an April 8 letter from McCarthy to Vitter saying that “the Agency should strive for excellence with respect to transparency and accountability.” And there are already indications that McCarthy has a different view from many environmental journalists of what “excellence” would look like. At a panel last September hosted by the Union of Concerned Scientists, McCarthy defended the agency’s practice of keeping their staff scientists under lock and key — and away from journalists: “It is the job of the agency to make sure that personalities don’t get in the way of really discussing the science in a way that maintains the agency’s credibility,” she said then.
The EPA is the environmental agency perhaps most often besieged by private industry and Republicans, and its transparency record makes it a sitting turducken for this kind of criticism, said Nancy Watzman, a consultant with the Sunlight Foundation, which monitors government openness.
Still, Watzman said, given the preponderance of transparency problems at the EPA, it’s critical for lawmakers to choose their battles wisely: “Transparency is kind of a feel-good word,” she said, but one that can too easily be wielded as a cudgel. “We believe in it, but it’s often used in a political way.”
It’s a lovely day to be flying across the Atlantic. Cruising at a tidy 40,000 feet, the Heathrow-bound jet pilots kick their feet up at the sight of clear, cloudless skies.
But then — WHOOOSH! — the plane hits a renegade, invisible patch of mad turbulence, plummeting 100 feet in seconds. Glasses of Merlot splatter red on $2,000 bespoke suits. Plastic cups of Diet Cokes soak Macbook Airs and Earl Grey scalds shrieking grandmothers trapped in their chairs. Babies fly from their mothers’ arms, while passengers unfortunate enough to be out of their seats go careening into strangers’ laps. Screams fill the cabin. Vomiting ensues.
Welcome to the Plane Ride From Hell, coming more often to an airline near you thanks to — you guessed it — climate change. While this imagined scenario might be an ever-so-slight exaggeration, new research published today in Nature Climate Change points to increased turbulence frequency and strength due to our ongoing greenhouse gas bonanza.
According to the paper, clear-air turbulence — that is, the kind that satellites and on-board radar don’t pick up — will likely double by the mid-2050s. The average strength of turbulence will also increase by about 10 to 40 percent. “Flights will be less comfortable and there will be more drinks spilled,” says Paul Williams, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Reading and lead author of the paper.
Atmospheric turbulence causes most weather-related aircraft incidents, yet before now no one thought to look at how it might change as climactic processes become more erratic. “When I looked through the literature, I was astonished to find that no one had done it before,” Williams said.
Williams and co-author Manoj Joshi decided to investigate this question for themselves. The researchers homed in on clear-air turbulence, or patches of vertical airflow linked to the atmospheric jet stream, in the busy transatlantic flight corridor, where around 600 flights criss-cross between Europe and North America daily. They used climate models to simulate how the jet stream will change when carbon dioxide levels double, and how that, in turn, will translate into turbulence. (When, exactly, that doubling will occur depends upon the levels of greenhouse gas emissions we continue to pump into the atmosphere, but the authors went with the middle-ground projection, falling somewhere in the 2050s.)
The jet stream makes its way around the entire northern hemisphere, by the way, not just between Europe and North America. The authors expect the same increase in turbulence to apply to pretty much all airline routes that come into contact with the jet stream wherever this natural phenomenon speeds up.
Flights currently encounter clear-air turbulence about 1 percent of the time. Besides causing butterflies in the stomach and morbid thoughts of a watery death in the Atlantic, turbulence injures hundreds of passengers per year, occasionally leading to fatalities, and costs the airlines around $150 million annually in delays and damages. How those misfortunes will fluctuate isn’t certain, but more patches of unsteady air probably means more time spent either bumping through or else navigating around those trouble spots. “This is where we get onto more speculations and plausible possibilities rather than things demonstrated by hard science,” Williams points out.
Either way, we’re getting what we paid for. The airline industry accounts for around 2 to 3 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, but because those emissions are pumped into the upper atmosphere, they have an outsized impact on the climate. And flight numbers are only set to grow in the future with increasing populations, personal affluence, and globalization.
“You could see it as the atmosphere getting its own back by taking revenge on planes and causing more trouble,” Williams says. “It’s absolutely poetic justice.”
This weekend marked the 40th annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which brings together a broad array of attendees from across the right-leaning spectrum, from older white people to younger white people, hyper-conservatives to severe conservatives.
Needless to say, climate change was not a big topic of conversation. So Mike Stark of FossilAgenda.com brought his camera along and asked a few of the younger CPACers what they thought of it. Here’s what they said:
On Friday afternoon, The New York Timesdiscontinued the Green blog, the paper’s one-stop shop for environment-related news. Then on Monday, the Washington Post announced it was pulling its star climate reporter, Juliet Eilperin, off of the beat and putting her on an “online strike force” covering the White House.
The Times decision in particular has people’s heads spinning. Curtis Brainard at Columbia Journalism Review called the paper’s recent pledge to continue its robust environment coverage “an outright lie.” Paul Raeburn captured the sentiment in a post on the Knight science journalism blog Tracker: “The editors of the Times have perhaps forgotten that they work on an island, and that the entrance to their building is not too far above sea level — current sea level, that is.” Slate served up a sampling of “the 65-odd other Times blogs that did not get the axe,” which include The Carpetbagger, about awards shows, The Rail, on horse racing, and six blogs on style, fashion, and leisure.
A few optimists argued that it was a positive sign that the Times was moving its best and greenest out of their “ghetto” and pushing them out into the broader organization. Bora Zivkovic made the most eloquent case in Scientific American’s A Blog Around the Clock: “Instead of the environmental vertical, The New York Times will now have an environmental horizontal — environmental angle permeating a lot of other stories, as environmental reporters talk to and influence their new office neighbors.”
Ah yes, we’ll send the greenies out like little viruses, and pretty soon the business and style sections will be positively infected with great stories about climate change and mass extinction!
It’s a quaint notion, but the reality of life in a newsroom — whether it’s the Times or a small nonprofit like Grist — is that unless a topic is built into a reporter’s job description, and unless there are editors and colleagues holding reporters to account for covering that topic, it inevitably gets pushed to the bottom of the ever-growing pile of priorities. The world and, lord knows, a journalist’s inbox, Twitter feed, RSS reader, etc., are just too full of distractions.
Beyond that, the Green blog played an important role at the Times, picking up important stories that the print edition missed. Here’s Media Matters:
Several mainstream media outlets — including the New York Times print edition — ignored an October 2012 report on the rapid decline of the Great Barrier Reef, but the Green blog covered it. In November, a World Bank report warning of the calamitous effects of climate change went unnoticed by the NewYork Times print edition, but not by the Green blog. Since the closure of the environment desk, the Green blog has accounted for 64 percent of the paper’s climate change reporting. And since January 2012, the Green blog has devoted nearly twice as much coverage to the threat of ocean acidification.
I spoke with Tom Zeller, who was hired by the Times in 2008 to start the Green blog’s predecessor, Green Inc., which lived in the Business section. Not long thereafter, it lost the “Inc.” and moved out on its own, under the new environment team, where it “flourished,” according to Zeller, who left the Times for a job at Huffington Post in 2011.
Zeller said he was sad to see the blog go, not so much because he thinks the paper’s environment coverage will suffer, but because readers will no longer have a convenient place to go to find it. He pointed out the Business section’s Energy & Environment page and the Science section’s Environment page, which both aggregate Times environment coverage, but added, “Dismantling the green blog does make it harder for readers with a deep interest in this subject area [to keep] gathering in one place and commenting on stories, interacting with reporters and each other in the comments section, etc.”
Zeller also pointed out that the Green blog was the one place where “reporters could unload their notebooks — write about the stuff that didn’t make its way into the newspaper.” The blog also served as an incubator of up-and-coming freelance reporters, who don’t appear to have another outlet for these stories at the restructured newsroom. According to the Times editors, environment coverage will be shunted to the Bits and Caucus blogs, which cover technology and politics, respectively, and Andrew Revkin will continue with his Dot Earth blog, but the Green blog is obviously more of a loss than they’ll candidly admit.
As for the Washington Post, the paper tells CJR it will replace Eilperin, and that it has no plans to significantly change its environment coverage. The move has raised hackles among climate hawks nonetheless. “No point in keeping one of the country’s leading reporters on the story of the century,” quipped Joe Romm at Climate Progress. “She had a good run, but that climate story is so five minutes ago.”
And at the Times, shifts are already underway. The two former environment team editors have already been assigned to different beats, and at least one reporter, Mireya Navarro, who covered the environment in the New York metro area, has been assigned to a different beat entirely. She now covers housing.
“There was a time when this paper covered every ship that came into New York harbor,” explained one Times insider, who asked not to be named. “The paper is to some extent plastic. It reorganizes itself to meet the requirements of the world around us.”
It’s hard to look at these latest moves and see a publication reorganizing itself to better mirror what’s happening in the world. With the environment team disbanded and the Green blog discontinued, we will inevitably see less reporting on these topics, even as they become ever more urgent. But then, that’s probably a sign of the (ahem) times, as the old newspaper model continues to wither and digital media and the blogosphere fill the void:
“The paper as a whole is getting slightly smaller,” said my Times source. “We may be doing a little less of everything.”
ShutterstockFact: All pencils in Canada look like this.
Dear America,
How are you? We are fine. It’s been a bit warmer than usual up our way. But not too bad, considering.
I wanted to check in with you about the Keystone XL pipeline proposal that many of you seem to be rather upset about, and actually ping you for a bit of neighborly advice. While some of us on this side of the border really want Secretary Kerry to give Keystone the thumbs-up, many of us are pretty cool on the idea.
The truth is, just beneath our mild-mannered veneer, we Canadians are a tormented people. Here’s why.
Unlike you — with your Netflix, and Apple, and Facebook, and Boeing, and General Electric and so on — we have a resource economy. Since our early days as the global leader in the beaver-pelt industry, we’ve cut down trees, and dug up rocks, and pumped stuff out of the ground, and sold it to you — and others — so you could turn it into more useful things like furniture, appliances, houses, suburbia, and so on.
Today, thanks to our oil sands, our fossil fuel sector is going gangbusters. In 2010, energy accounted for 6.8 percent of Canada’s GDP, with oil and gas contributing roughly half of that amount. This is in large part thanks to you. Even without Keystone XL, we are already your No. 2 supplier of imported petroleum — just behind Saudi Arabia.
Fossil fuels literally keep the lights on in these parts, put bread on the table for hundreds of thousands of us, and provide critical government revenue that we have come to depend on for hospitals, schools, and other social services. But we’re just starting to realize the growing risk and uncertainty associated with this economic model.
Which is why we’re so … conflicted.
After all, we are a civilized and caring people, who want to do the right thing. We legislated marriage equity, pioneered universal health care, invented Greenpeace, and hosted the Montreal Protocol conference that led to the eventual banning of CFCs and other ozone-depleting chemicals.
More recently, Canadians introduced North America’s first economy-wide carbon tax in British Columbia (The Economist called it “a winner”), and the continent’s first true feed-in-tariff program, in Ontario. As a result of the latter policy, by the end of this year Ontario will unplug from coal power forever. We also have cleantech sectors that have spurred cool innovations, like CO2-sequestering concrete.
It’s getting tougher for many of us to square these accomplishments, and our national character, with the vision of those who insist, in this age of accelerating climate change, that it is our destiny to become the world’s gas pump — with Keystone XL serving as one of the hoses.
Deep down, many of us would secretly like our country to become a truly 21st century clean energy economy. We want to grow up to become a clean energy economy leader. A country where our prime minister actually speaks frankly about the imperative to urgently address climate change, as your president does. One where our leaders in business and government talk up the trillion-dollar clean energy opportunity, as many of yours do.
You know from the Detroit experience how tough it is to reinvent an economy. We know we need to change; polling suggests our hearts are certainly there, and that Canadians are keen to move to a clean-energy future. But while we have made a good start in some respects, we don’t yet have a plan in place to move forward.
We know we aren’t going to transform our economy overnight, but there is strong public support to take the wealth being generated by our fossil fuel resources and use it to accelerate our transition to a better, more sustainable economy, one where Canadians both sell and consume clean-energy technologies and services. A transition that would serve both of our countries and build on our existing energy relationship.
What’s the way out? The truth is, Canada needs to have a bigger conversation. How do we transition our economy to get off the resource-economy roller-coaster, reduce our fossil fuel dependence, and lead in the global low-carbon economy? How can we help create a broad movement around solutions and economic transformation — one that our government can’t ignore?
So what could you do to help us tackle these questions? It seems that we need some kind of slap in the face or wake-up call that clearly signals the perils of our fixation on pumping out more and more fossil fuels. Something to incentivize Canada to sit down and put our heads together with yours to come up with a shared plan to ramp up cleantech, renewable energy, and other innovations that will power the low-carbon transition.
After all, we have way more renewable energy potential than we can use, and you have a whole bunch of coal-fired power you need to replace.
We’d like to help bring the right people together, and muster the resources to help make it happen. You have your big gnarly challenges. This is ours. But we’d like to think that there are winning solutions for us both. Whaddya say?
