History Repeating
The oil spill in the Gulf has uncomfortable echoes of the banking crisis
The Whole Hog, 06 Jul 2010
In the middle of our first real summer in five years we mightn't have realised that the Atlantic hurricane season is already under way. But it is, and as I write the first tropical storm of the series is heading northwards. It will cross the Yucatan peninsula and hit the Gulf of Mexico in days. And that, my friends, is not good news.
Whether it becomes a hurricane and does a lot of damage on land is one thing. But it is also headed towards where frantic efforts are being made to cap the gushing BP oil well that is spewing a huge flood of filth and gunge into the sea and onto US coasts.
Even if the storm gives it a miss, the Deepwater Horizon is already America's biggest-ever environmental catastrophe. Worse still, although the company involved claims to be capturing or burning off tens of thousands of barrels of oil each day, it looks like the damaged rig could continue to gush for two more years.
It's a regional ecological disaster in itself. Vast quantities of the (unrefined) oil have slimed across the complex ecosystems of the coasts of Louisiana and Florida.
The unfolding horror and the subsequent efforts by Big Oil in general and BP in particular to PR their way out of the firestorm has uncanny parallels with what happened when the banks began to collapse.
Their promises have the same air of queasy optimism and assurance and business-school sloganeering. Larry Thomas from BP told an audience of fishing families in Louisiana that he was committed to "doing better". Others talk of "making it right".
Bollocks.
The campaigning author Naomi Klein sees the genesis of the Gulf Oil disaster in arrogance, stupidity and greed. Just like the banks, then. And of course, that means that those charged with oversight, both at Government and corporate levels, were entirely derelict in their duty.
Unlikely as it first seemed, we might even get a little touch from the disaster here, given that our shores are washed by the Gulf Stream – a piece from the explosion has already been found in Florida, a journey of over 300km.
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