Black Death, Reloaded

Consider the following, my readers. Suppose you're driving while texting, a seemingly innocuous action. In the course of your distraction, you drive over a curb into a crowd of people downtown, killing 11 of them and causing substantial damage to the downtown area. The odds are fantastic, if not 100%, that you will be spending the rest of your life (or at least a very large part of it) in prison and paying restitution to the families of those whose relatives you killed.

Now, consider the following: An enormous oil rig, mostly out of commission, lacks the modern safety equipment necessary to prevent a catastrophic leak. The company chooses not to outfit it with said equipment because it would cost an extra $500,000 (note: said company made over $4 billion in profits in the fourth quarter of 2009 alone) and the government, loaded at the time (and even now) with corporate cronies and former members of said company, makes compliance with international standards voluntary. These failures all come back to bite everyone related in the ass when a trapped methane bubble causes a massive explosion, rupturing the oil main and opening a geyser into the Gulf of Mexico.

The costs: 11 dead oil workers. Millions upon millions of dollars lost to federal cleanup efforts, which to this point have been largely unsuccessful. A devastated ecosystem the likes of which we've never seen. Entire local industries decimated. Tens of thousands of Americans facing unemployment through no fault of their own. Sounds a little bit worse than the first situation, right?

So what does the company responsible for this catastrophe stand to lose? $75 million, plus the cost of cleanup. That's it. For comparison's sake, based on their profits from the last year, BP could pay the entire cost of the cleanup, plus their meager oil pollution fine, with the money made in roughly a week. How is this possible? Are we really OK with letting this happen? Think about what's happened here: through sheer negligence, BP has wounded the Earth. It has killed, murdered if you will, eleven innocent people. It has contaminated a vibrant ecosystem beyond anything we've known (this makes the Exxon Valdez look like someone tipped over a teacup). It has compounded the problem by using chemical dispersants to ensure that the oil slick looks less serious when photographed from above, ocean life be damned. For the record, while these dispersants allow the oil to be broken down over thousands of years by microscopic bacteria, they're toxic to phytoplankton, which are the bottom rung on nearly every marine food chain. With the base of the food chain gone, there's nothing left for the next highest group to survive on. Slowly, tortuously, everything dies. No life means no fishing industry, so in turn it has obliterated a major local industry, costing the cash-strapped South billions and putting thousands out of work. It has wrecked the local tourism industries as well, with some businesses reporting enormous losses as travelers stay away from the ever-growing toxin lake. It has downplayed the ultimate impact of the disaster, even as scientists begin to warn that the oil threatens to move into strong ocean currents and pose a threat to the coasts of Florida and Texas, with some possibility it could even begin to reach the East Coast.

We cannot stand by and let them get away with this. This is no oil spill; this is a cataclysm. This is devastation on an unimagined scale. This is the end of the Gulf of Mexico; for decades, barring any sort of immediate intervention and drastic change of course, the Gulf will be a dead zone. This is an economic massacre; BP ultimately loses nothing, save maybe some public stature, while whole states face untold ruin. To watch BP, Halliburton (that's right, our good friends are also responsible for upkeep on this rig) and Transocean Limited ignore the scale of this problem while pointing fingers at one another makes me physically ill.

As you might have guessed from my anger, I've got something of a personal stake in this. I've only seen the ocean once. It was on a spring break while I was in high school, and it was the Gulf of Mexico, from the Port of New Orleans. Much as watching a city I came to love drown hurt me personally, watching these waters, teeming with unique and magnificent life, wither and die as the blackness spreads makes me ache. I'm tired of watching my country let parts of itself die. No more. The time has come to speak out. Tell your congressman that this mockery of justice cannot and must not stand. Tell your attorney general that these companies must be held accountable for their failures in criminal court, that someone must pay for these tragic, inconceivable crimes. Tell your president that the time for cowering in the face of corporate power is over. Tell your country that, in the words of Peter Finch in Network, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

My planet bleeds. I do not accept this wave of death. I do not accept this crime. Until next time, do not accept anything less than justice.