It’s Sunday morning and I’m writing from Grand Isle, Louisiana on the front line of the BP oil disaster. President Obama was here Friday walking the beach, viewing the small tar balls that continue to wash up here. I’ve now seen this battered coast from the air in a small sea plane. I’ve seen the oil in the marshes from the boat of an out-of-work crab fisherman. And I’ve walked the beaches myself, smelling that smell in the air that people here say is a mix of oil and “agent orange,” their name for the toxic chemical dispersant BP is spraying on the oil to make it sink out of site.
CCAN director Mike Tidwell gets a firsthand
look of the BP oil disaster during a flyover May 27th.
I’ve come here on a three-day tour to see for myself just what’s at stake for states like Virginia and Maryland if any plan for new offshore drilling moves forward in the mid-Atlantic region. Thankfully, due to the activism of people like you, President Obama last week announced the cancellation of a plan to sell drilling leases in an area just 50 miles off the Virginia coastline. That’s a good start. But it’s not a done deal. The cancellation could just be temporary.
Photo of oil invading Louisiana wetlands as seen
from air by CCAN director Mike Tidwell on a May 27th
tour of the disaster zone.
Based on my trip to Louisiana this week, here’s why we need a permanent ban on all new offshore drilling everywhere in America: We will never be safe with oil. Never. Besides the fact that it’s wrecking our climate, there’s no way to permanently regulate away human error and equipment failure. As long as we have thousands and thousands of drilling rigs off our shores, our shores will sooner or later see another spill. Oil is a destructive fuel on every level.
Here’s the human level. I’ve spent three full days now visiting and interviewing innocent Louisiana fishing families who are now being wiped out by the spill. Many of them weep openly as they talk. They describe spending their whole lives fishing here only to be told in May 2010 that they’ll get a $10,000 fine if they drop a single net or line in the water.
CCAN director Mike Tidwell flies over the Louisiana
oil disaster site May 27th with Aaron Viles of
the Gulf Restoration Network.
Fear and anger run rampant here. No one knows when the oil disaster will end. Will the Gulf be biologically dead by the time this is over? Will a proud 200-year fishing culture be doomed? People cry a lot over those questions here. Grown men in their 70s cry. Working mothers in their 20s cry.
If a similar blowout occurred off the coast of Virginia, we’d have oil from Virginia Beach to Cape May, NJ. And it would be innocent Virginia watermen crying. Innocent motel owners and dockworkers crying. Virginia offshore wind power, conversely, using a small portion of the coast, could provide enough electricity to power 3.6 million electric cars forever. With practically zero pollution even if, god forbid, a hurricane blew through and knocked down some or all the windmills. It’s clean energy.
Yesterday I spent time with a Cajun woman named Phyllis Melancon of Leeville, Louisiana. Standing next to her idle shrimp boat, here nets hanging dry for the first time anyone can remember in the month of May, she said, “BP thinks they can repay us with money. But they’ve take away something no money can repay. They’ve taken away our way of life. Our life on the water. Now all we have are dry nets and a big emptiness inside.”
We are all victims of climate change all over the world, of course. But these are the victims, right now, of one of our more obscene addictions within the climate crisis. It’s our responsibility to make sure the suffering down here is not in vain.
Photo Credit: Jeffrey Dubinsky, Gulf Restoration Network
