by Courtney Wilson If I put a fish in a bucket of water and put a
slick of oil on the water and left it there for nearly two months, would you eat that fish? I wouldn’t. One, the fish probably would have died from lack of oxygen, and two, oil smothered fish are just gross. We all saw the photos of the poor little birdies, smothered in crude oil, but most of the news coverage in New Zealand focussed on BP’s joker of a chief executive, Tony Hayward, who only wanted his life back. But there were many other repercussions for the Gulf oil ‘spill’. Not only were 11 oil-rig workers killed, the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) reported 3902 birds, 517 sea turtles and 71 mammals died, with many more injured. It is easy to blame the bigwig CEO for all of this but is BP solely to blame – shouldn’t America have had proper policies in place to protect their economy and wildlife areas? People seem to have forgotten Obama has never opposed oil drilling- in fact he is trying to open up the Arctic for oil exploration for the first time ever. Twitter was once again an outlet for outrage, but Obama seemed to come out on top. An American blogger, Brian Solis looked at the tweets the White House and Obama received over 98 days. During that time they received 2.5 million tweets, approximately 213,000 of those were oil spill related and only 28.5 per cent were negative. Obama came out of the disaster with barely a scratch, no promise to stop drilling and still looking at the Arctic as a good source of money. BP on the other hand is not looking so good. Over the same time period BP received 1.1 million tweets, of those 59 per cent were negative and 9 per cent were very negative. Tweeps have decided. BP is to blame. Celebrities such as Lady Gaga, Kanye West and Backstreet Boys have vowed to not use BP during their tours. James Cameron offered his advice about plugging the well to the oil giants and tween favourite Bieber fronted a telethon to raise money. People on Facebook have also started up a BP boycott campaign (BP also owns Castrol and Wild Bean Café if you want to join in the boycott). The page has over 850,000 people who ‘like’ the page. However, Kanye and the public do not seem to realise most BP’s – in America at least – are owned by the little guy, but locals are getting their own back. The Daily Green reported that by law Americans are able to sue to stop water pollution and hold polluters accountable and several national groups, including Environment America, have filed suit. The potential fine? $4300 per barrel. The New York Times reports nearly five million barrels were spilt, not counting the 800,000 barrels contained that is a cost of $18,060,000,000 to BP. And with their stocks plummeting by $25 million during the spill they can hardly afford the payout. We cannot be too mean to the oil industry though, we use their product everyday in paint, painkillers and cosmetics such as lipsticks. BP’s by-products can be found in an array of things, from that unassuming jar of pickles to a surf board, video recording tapes and washing powder. I wonder if Lady Gaga would go as far as boycott all cosmetic products made from oil. issue 19 AUG 2010
But why has the disaster been labelled the Gulf oil spill by mainstream media if it BP is to blame? Why not the BP disaster or the Deepwater Horizon spill? A senior attorney at the National Resources Defence Council, David Petit, said he does not think blame needs to be placed in the name because it does not matter who it was; BP, Shell or any other oil giant. “The focus needs to be on the larger issue: do we need to be drilling offshore? And if we do, do we know what we’re doing?” Google Earth has an application where you can see the affect the oil spill would have on your city. In Auckland it would span from the East to the West coast, however not as dense in some regions. So with a disaster like that in our environmentally friendly backyard the Government’s proposal to look into offshore drilling for oil seems ludicrous. A permit was granted by Minister Gerry Brownlee in June allowing oil exploration in the Raukumara Basin off the North Island’s East Coast. Like the Petrobras permit, the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, already estimated to have put 400 to 600 species potentially at risk, was a permit for exploration. Opening up our seas to oil exploration is a gateway to more permits in our seas; the West coast is a migratory path for whales. New Zealand also is one of the most popular spots for penguins to visit. Do we want to open their environment to the threat of the sea birds in the Gulf, or protect our waters from one more threat?
This logo is the winner of a Greenpeace UK competition to “rebrand BP” by popular vote on their website. There is currently a campaign to spread the “alternate logo”. Designer: Laurent Hunziker of Paris, France.
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