Oil is a four-letter word

Friday December 7th, 2007 – An oil tanker has ruptured off the coast of South Korea, leaking 10,000 metric tones of crude oil into the yellow sea. It was struck by a passing barge during ideal weather conditions; the ensuing slick presently covers over 20 kilometers of water. An emergency ecological operation was launched earlier in the day yet any efforts to avert this complete disaster will be purely symbolic.

Maritime oil transportation, in my opinion, is no safer today than it was 50 years ago. In fact, the increasing enormity of ships, the rising traffic in main commercial straits and the rising price of the barrel all contribute to the construction of money-saving mega-tankers bumping up against each other as they slowly make their way to a Western refinery. Presently, the straits in the Persian Gulf, Red sea, Yellow and South China seas are the most congested commercial paths on the planet. Areas that can’t exactly afford the effects of an oil spill. If these oil tankers can be sunk by a simple barge on a sunny day, perhaps we should rethink this method of transportation. Don’t get me wrong, I am not offering a solution; no current method of transportation would be able to even come close to the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the tanker. On the other hand, we have to be willing to deal with these disasters of epic proportions until will develop a solution.

At this point, some of my regular readers will be screaming out ``hypocrite!`` at the top of their lungs for I am not an environmentalist and even have a profound conviction that ecological concerns have slowed down the development of our civilization by impeding on it with frivolous preoccupations (and guilt). I am simply stating the social and economic implications of these much-too-frequent oil spills. Firstly, the national resources that will be rerouted to clean the water, sanitize the coastline, save the marine life and go on a massive ecological media blitz will amount to an extraordinary sum of capital in a region riddled with poverty, famine and disease. Secondly, the massive amount of coastline and marine life affected by the spill will render destitute the hundreds, even thousands, of workers that depend on fishing for basic subsistence and/or small exporting businesses. Being a peninsula with a population density of close to 500 people per square kilometer, the seas around it provide the only agrarian outlet for the majority of the South Koreans.

All media (that is, all media that isn’t hell bent on showing us that the mall killer from Omaha was justified in killing people for media recognition), will assign the epithet of ‘ecological disaster’ to this ‘Hebei Spirit’ oil tanker spill yet, as I have shown above and affirmed through my beliefs, the ‘green’ factor is a detracting element that prevents us and international organizations from focusing on the real social end economic facets of the disaster. This has also been the case in the past.

On March 24, 1989, an Exxon oil tanker struck a reef and excreted 11 million metric tones of oil off of Valdez, Alaska. To a much more marginal degree, the inhabitants of Alaska’s southern coast were, and still are, heavily affected by the economic implications of a ruined coastline and wasted marine resources. I say to a lesser degree because the standard of living in Alaska permits a diversified economy that could cushion this loss of resources. Nevertheless, all media coverage was about the limping baby seals and blackened rocks. Brigitte Bardot can save all the baby seals she wants but I think, once again, famous people missed the point and prevented the focus to be directed on the real problems of the region.

All in all, environmentalism is at the very top of Maslow’s pyramid of human wants and needs. People will always have to eat, drink and procreate before they can worry about the health of shrimp and the colour of rocks.
.
(Pictured: The Exxon tanker in Alaskan waters - the Hebei Spirit off of Taean, South Korea)

End.