The Gulf of Mexico: Life in Black

Too deep, too audacious, too voracious: The drilling of Deepwater Horizon, the dreary platform in the Gulf of Mexico, is an illustration of the petroleum frenzy of the planet. When petroleum is cheap, its consumption increases and we must continue to siphon it from the ground, but when crude prices explode, we edge near the end of its deposits, and suddenly it’s profitable. We have an unrelenting hold on petroleum, even to the point of exhausting fossil fuels, and so the oil rig resides as the semaphore of the present.

Certainly, this “Black Gold” offers us modern times, but its costs trickle pain like a seagull covered in fuel oil. The list of calamities linked to petroleum, from the present to the far off future, for a long time, has been like the wake from a petroleum refinery. It’s the fuel from the unpredictable boiler of the Orient, where its explosive vapors are mixed with religious tensions in this hot spot. In the case of Iraq, the United States is less worried about reestablishing democracy than of controlling its strategic powers, even if attaining the second objective could help it achieve the first objective. In the Caucasus and in Africa, some questionable regimes still endure, because they keep watch on a vital pipeline. And when it’s not oil that heats up the cannons, its gas, as is the case in Russia, Ukraine and Georgia. A border disagreement? No, an oil disagreement. A linguistic minority? No, oil. An ancient conflict? No, it’s oil, oil, oil!

Since its industrial exploitation began and since the West nourished it to assure its growth, oil infiltrates the most tortuous conflicts as it currently does today the mangroves of Mississippi. Nothing can stop it and nothing can erase it: It is the permanent ink with which we write the novel of modern times, it is the blood of the world — a black and poisoned blood that we can’t escape and is killing us slowly. The most serious of our economic crises, not rooted in speculation, is the making of our oil-producing fields. Otherwise, if oil was the principal energy source, would there be any speculative bubble without the industrial frenzy? Our world is and has been an “oil addict” for a long time.

If after this disaster in the Gulf of Mexico we decide to shut down the oil platforms too close to the coast, it would intensify the current economic crisis. The bottom line is we don’t even have the means to be virtuous. It’s our technical arrogance, with its infallible valves and solid advice, that have sunk with Deepwater Horizon. Like an apprentice witch, humankind wanted to install an umbilical cord from the bottom of the sea to the oil tanks of their cars, becoming a noose that hangs us a little more each time a car takes off.