Oil Problem? What Oil Problem?

So far, we’ve managed to learn something from every environmental catastrophe. Not this time.

The outrage over the environmental catastrophe has no limits. There are protest actions against oil companies across the nation; citizens in California cut up the credit cards they use to get rebates. Congress acts, and the president signs several radical new environmental protection statutes.

Barack Obama in 2010? No, Richard Nixon in 1970.

That time it was also about an oil catastrophe (and about contaminated rivers). Television networks broadcast pictures of dead sea birds, idle fishing fleets and oil-smeared beaches — in this case they were in California. But the political times were obviously different. The ecological shock caused 40 years ago by the thirst for energy was followed up by political action meant to correct exactly these same consequences. And it also gave impetus to the rise of the American ecology movement.

First comes the catastrophe, then the learning process, then the policies. Up to now, this rule of three has always shaped the history of environmental protection. Up to now. Given the disaster in the Gulf caused by the BP drilling rig Deepwater Horizon, we now see that the government is just as helpless as the oyster fishermen in Louisiana. The political impetus in the United States apparently lies not with those who want new conditions designed to protect nature and the climate, but with their opponents.

This is largely due to the decades-long frontal attacks by the American right wing on this mighty nation. Today, a Richard Nixon would be tarred and feathered by most Republicans for being a socialist.

Additionally, the de-politicization of catastrophes is also to blame. For years, we’ve seen how policies are enacted. There are no shadowy propaganda masters behind the scenes; on the contrary, it’s all about the everyday perception of wars and disasters presented as dramatized infotainment. There are the villains, in this case BP and CEO Tony Hayward, and then there are the innocent victims, in this case the Louisiana fishermen. Then we also have the angry but helpless — the senators and the president. And in the last scene, we get compensation. Not a happy ending, to be sure, but better than nothing at all — and in the view of a majority of Americans, better than a moratorium on deep-water oil drilling.

Barack Obama’s attempt at a temporary stop to underwater drilling was scuttled by the U.S. courts, as well as the court of public opinion. His appeal to the nation to take on the mission of enacting a permanent new energy policy in the face of the catastrophe failed.

The paradox in all this is that we — and this isn’t just about the Americans — are in the meantime awash in reports about such catastrophes, including information ranging from the absurd to the horrifying about our own self-destructive potential. We now know how a shutoff valve can fail; we know that BP CEO Tony Hayward earns over 3 million pounds a year and loves to sail, even if he no longer prefers the Gulf of Mexico. We know that over 500 miles of American coastline have been polluted, that they can try to plug leaking wells with, among other things, golf balls, and that the ecological healing of the region may take decades — provided the containment cap holds, something BP guarantees but the government doubts. We also know that more than 700 million liters of crude oil has spilled into the Gulf over the past few weeks, which just about equals one-fifth of the amount the United States uses every single day.

Along the way, we’ve also learned that oil spills have been part of the everyday life in other locations for decades. In Nigeria, crude oil has been flowing — not through the pipelines, but into the Niger River delta — since the mid-1960s. There are no exact figures, but quite possibly the total is up to 2 billion liters. That’s the equivalent of one Exxon Valdez tanker catastrophe every year.

But the learning process, i.e., the transformation of this information into political action, doesn’t work so well today — neither in the United States, nor in the rest of the world. Drilling has begun in the Arctic, as well as off the coast of Africa. Brazil is already dreaming of its future as an oil power and of drilling thousands of meters beneath the sea near its own shores.

The days of easy oil, of quickly and safely attainable oil, are gone. The days of tough oil have arrived. That’s the term American conflict researcher Michael Klare uses for oil that can only be gotten under highly risky, expensive conditions because it lies in the deepest ocean locations or in hurricane-prone areas. Or it’s controlled by politically fragile regimes and dictatorships — as in Kazakhstan, where Chancellor Angela Merkel just declared the German-Kazakh petro alliance.

The greater our greed for tough oil, the less our willingness to think in context. Whoever regulates the race for tough oil (without increasing the use of coal) will possibly prevent the next ecological disaster and improve the terribly damaged prospects for climate protection. Whoever makes energy efficiency a national policy goal not only protects the environment, but also minimizes the political influence of the oil cartels. Whoever plugs the holes in maritime law will prevent the oil companies from subverting safety standards.

None of these insights is new or original, and none is a magic bullet because, as a rule, for every problem solved, two new ones pop up. There have been stacks of studies done and countless conferences held on the subject — but nothing has yet tarnished the demand for cheap gasoline.

Perhaps the salutary effects of the shock over Deepwater Horizon are yet to come. Perhaps there will someday be a long-overdue convention, a discussion about a deep-water drilling moratorium held and the debate about climate protection revived from the cellar.

But as of now, there’s no one in sight who can or will make a start in that direction — least of all Barack Obama, who already has to count on suffering deep losses in the coming congressional elections.