What the BP Executive Lamar McKay should have done was establish the framework which would lead towards greater accountability in the field (no pun intended) for the future. That being that each of these organizations, and more, each potentially has some measure of responsibility in what was probably a preventable accident.

The problem is one where there is no direct line of accountability within complex systems. Very large projects require that a large number of autonomous activities each perform at peak efficiency. Essentially the assumption is that failures in one system will not cascade across other systems for which there is no proper oversight and management. Add to this the Bush Administrations to push for energy independence at a rate which likely has exceeded the ability of government oversight groups to effectively monitor and control, and companies which are trying to both recoup from financial losses due to the financial market’s meltdown and increase profitability on their balance sheets.

A single point of failure in a project which is suppose to have multiple levels of oversight essentially means a cascade failure among all the parties involved that share responsibility to various degrees. Halliburton for example cannot renege on their responsibilities for capping the well if they are supposed to be experts in this field. If the removal of the mud prior to insertion of a cement plug is not something they do on a regular basis then someone from Halliburton should have been aware of the safety concerns and halted the procedure when a non-standard technique was about to be employed.

I’m not suggesting that this was or was not the direct cause of the explosion and sinking of the oil rig. Rather what I am suggesting is that this type of behaviour where unsafe practices are not identified and corrected because “that is not my job” or “that is someone else’s responsibility” is representative of the type of systemic issues that plague large projects.

Problems like this are often far too easy to recognize but are stopped mid-stream in the escalation process because eventually the communication of these issues hit the ‘pay-grade ceiling” – that is, the attitude that nothing can be done because the decision to take corrective action is “above my pay-grade”. Similarly, when there is a lack of communication across multiple organizations each having responsibility for a specific aspect of a project, communication can also be stopped because “that is not our area of responsibility”. There is an expectation that an individual’s span-of-control goes only so far and when safety or other concerns branch beyond that perceived span-of-control then they are forced through peer pressure to not make waves and let people do their jobs.

Unfortunately, for a number of projects that type of attitude isn’t good enough. In part because no one wants to be the outcast for saying that the “sky is falling”. In part because those people whose job it is will in general take exception to other people poking their noses into their job.  We can look to a number of instances such as the multiple NASA space flight failures, Chernobyl, Seveso, and Bhopal. Time and time again what we find is that even though it may be the actions of a few which have cause the actual catastrophe, it is the social culture which surrounds those individuals which leads to the pattern of behaviours that make such catastrophes inevitable.

So what should the Chairman and President of BP America said to the congressional hearing?

Every day around the world BP is engaged in hundreds of thousands of decisions related to the quality and safety of their global operations. Influencing those decisions are hundreds of thousands of other voices including local, federal, and regional government agencies, global business partners, environmental groups, and non-governmental organizations. And underlying all of those voices are thousands of risks and circumstances which cannot be anticipated, predicted, or mitigated.

The exploration for oil is one of the riskiest ventures that humans can for reach and accomplish. Companies like BP are expected to take every conceivable precaution but the bottom line is that no industry can uniquely provide a 100% iron clad guarantee that ever possible situation will be controlled to the point where failure is impossible. It just doesn’t happen as much as we would like it to.

So long as our culture has a thirst for petroleum, humans will continue to do stupid things like stick a hair thin straw into that 8000 mile wide orange we call the Earth and hope to heck nothing goes wrong.

What needs to happen is the culture from Government to BP and its partners need to be looked at to identify why the culture allowed safe practices to be compromised. Then engage in changes to the system which both support the culture through education, technology, and policy. And then it needs to be made into best practice around the globe with all organizations engaged in similar activities.

You can’t do that however in an environment in which is focused on assigning blame to the few organizations that are in the best position to be leaders of that change. Are they at fault – sure – but now that we’ve just invested $30 Billion dollars or more in their education why would we deliberately put them out of business and in so doing create a culture in which the rest of the players in this industry drive their bad practices further underground.

We need these practices out in the open in order to fix them and we need solid leadership to drive that point home to all the other competitors in the field that the status quo isn’t good enough anymore. It’s not going to be a quick fix. But if handled correctly by all parties it could prove the stimulus for substantive change in the industry towards better accountability and safety while the need for petroleum is still a major factor in the economies of the world.

Where I have a problem with this is that pollution by any other name is still pollution. As much as we are so concerned about global warming due to greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, what people still seem incapable of getting through their heads is that the whole reason why carbon is building up in the atmosphere is that the oceans are already saturated with the stuff. Hence the reason why our oceans are dying though acidification.

Basic chemistry lesson: if you take a liquid which is already saturated with CO2 and equalize the proportions of CO2 in the air above it with the liquid you get what is called an equilibrium. Now, remove CO2 from the air above the liquid and the liquid will start to aspirate CO2 in order to maintain that balance. Since water can retain fifty (50) times the amount of CO2 that air does the natural process is for carbon to leach back into the atmosphere and negate any effect CO2 removal from the atmosphere may have had. To get a true reduction you would have to remove billions of tons of CO2 so that the combined CO2 diluted in both the air and the oceans comes down in equal proportions.

Now – here is the rub – where do these supposed very smart people want to put all this CO2? At the bottom of the ocean or in / near the ocean floor where the CO2 has the very real potential of leaching back into the oceans and starting the whole mess all over again. And to top this off, the acidification of the oceans through excessive CO2 is destroying the one natural process the earth has of regulating CO2 rises and falls in the first place. That being the plankton and other ocean going photosynthetic organisms which naturally remove carbon in the first place.

What I don’t get – and maybe its just a bad me day today – but really – how much of a nob does one have to be to not understand that the way to calm runaway CO2 is to trap it in the natural processes which we as the human race have been systematically destroying for thousands of years? We have thousands of square miles of barren deserts that use to harbour forests and grasses. Just look at what the Israelis did to Sharm el-Sheikh and that whole area of the Sinai Peninsula. Barren – wasted – and now one of the most thriving tourist areas in the Middle East under Egyptian management.

We have technology that would allow us to bring water to deserts, transform barren regions into profitable farmland, re-establish ecosystems where none exist, and make productive use of the carbon we choose to capture. Instead, programs such as this continue to promote a love affair with landfills for toxic wastes that simply ship the problem out of our own backyards and leave the mess for someone else to find and clean up.

What we need to do is find a way to break down the CO2 into usable production components rather than pushing the problem off on someone else, even if that someone else isn’t going to be aware of the problem until 2 or 3 thousand years from now.

Its one thing to be forced to use landfills and other environmentally insensitive disposal mechanisms due to the historical infrastructures on which modern society is based. Those will take time to change – and change they will. It is another to go about creating new forms of landfills when the infrastructure supporting those institutions haven’t been built yet.

It is unethical. It is immoral. And it makes me sick to my stomach that our ’scientific elite’ are the ones that are leading the charge on this.  (not that I would have an opinion on the subject or anything).

In calling for putting a man on the moon, the technology was in the early stages of development already. New attitudes, technology, science and other aspects were needed in order to pull off the feat. However the moon landing didn’t require a massive overhaul of societal attitudes and supply chains. What was needed was for key sectors of R&D and the economy to advance a time table that they were already marching towards. The genius of JFK’s speech was that all which was needed was the right push at the right time.

Gore’s challenge is neither. Don’t get me wrong – I love the idea – I just don’t think its practical nor reachable. The breadth of the changes are too vast to be influenced by a single idea simply thrown at the wall like spaghetti. Most of it isn’t going to stick.

What is called for, if we were to press the JFK analogy, is for something relatively absurd but reasonable doable which focuses the efforts of a few key sectors to excel beyond anything they could hope to achieve without the right stimulus. As aptly put by JFK himself:

I believe we possess all the resources and talents necessary. But the facts of the matter are that we have never made the national decisions or marshaled the national resources required for such leadership. We have never specified long-range goals on an urgent time schedule, or managed our resources and our time so as to insure their fulfillment. (A Special Address to Congress On The Importance of Space – May 25, 1961)

What really stood apart however was the simplicity of the goal itself. To take a man from here – send him to the moon – and return him safely. Gore has I think missed this idea as part of his message.

What should we do? Many of the key challenges are to some extent all internal at this point. Yes there is President GW Bush’s goal of going to Mars but the technologies that we need to go there are starting to become more and more specialized to the point where mega-projects involving hundreds and thousands of specialists are needed in order to achieve the goal. Once that starts becoming common place those goals, while historic, are no longer capable of capturing the imagination of a world which has become use to the extraordinary every day. In fact the pace of technological innovation is such that a lack of extraordinary things occurring in people’s lives becomes extraordinary in of itself.

To answer the question we need to consider what we could do in the next 10 years that will change everything in one fell swoop. What can we do that will transcend cultural divides and bring a new global perspective to the world around us. Also something for which is outside of the range of the ordinary person to accomplish but which is within the grasp of ordinary people to aspire to.

My initial reaction is to say that most of those challenges are either cultural or technology-cultural oriented.

For example,

• I believe that within 10 years we could have a single world government with the rights and powers necessary to eliminate war between nation states. That would mean nation states would give up their rights to wage war in exchange for a common system of governance (not government) which would protect the rights of statehood irrespective of their system of government.
   
• I believe that within 10 years we could bring clean water to the deserts of the world and replenish their fertility in order to bring stability back to those ecosystems on which all life on earth is dependent. That would mean protection of rain forests which are only being cut down because of the fertility of the soil and the pleasantness of the surroundings.
   
• I believe that within 10 years we can develop the technology to cleanly fly an Airbus A380 fully loaded from Vancouver Canada to Sydney Australia without a single drop of jet fuel or other petroleum based equivalent. That would mean the capabilities to transform all major shipping forms and truly eliminate the dependence on oil for which we are dependent.

Each one of these would radically change life as we know it. Notice thou that in each case I am not talking about the goal being the final solution – but rather to bring society to the single milestone that could trigger the on-set of a global change in consciousness that will take us the rest of the way towards a new enlightenment of our capabilities both individually and as a globally interdependent society.

-K

The question however is what. Fish in a fish tank get the benefits of bubblers that circulate outside air through the water in order to oxygenate it. Would this work for some dead zone areas? I it would be a neat idea but without some type of limitation on nitrogen output I think all this would do is provide oxygen for the alge that are causing the problem in the first place.

I think one of the new terms people are going to start seeing soon is nitrogen capture. Similar to carbon capture it will also probably become a dirty word although with out carbon dioxide and without nitrogen there would be no food production.

So, here is the thing – what if we could creating floating islands of living bio-matter in order to grow crops. The water is saturated with carbon dioxide and nitrogen from water run offs. Farmers can’t seem to keep their chemicals on dry land and the success of their enrichment of algae populations, albeit unintentional, has been so successful that it is likely in part responsible for fish stock depletion. So if all the nutrients that are needed are out at sea then why shouldn’t farming move that direction as well?

Take a 10 acre section of ocean using hexagonal sections of alternating biomass and open water space complete with solar collectors for power, stability and water desalinization (if in fact it is required at all) and bingo – instant carbon-nitrogen filter for dead zones. Now if we could just figure out how to prevent those 100ft rogue waves from mucking up the works. Mind you – with enough of these things it may decrease the formation of those types of waves to begin with – possible? who knows.

Jessica Hellmann proposes that maybe we should move polar bearsfrom the North Pole, where the ice cap is more progressively disappearing, to the south pole where the ice cap is still disappearing but not exactly at the same pace. The concept being that while we are trying to reduce carbon dioxide levels, we should maybe give nature a helping hand by moving some of these species around to climates better suited to their sustainability.

The problem I have with this is that every time humans have interferred with the natural food chain in a specific area we have screwed things up so massively as to be unrepairable.

Let’s follow the logic in the case of polar bears just as an example. Assume we move 200 polar bears from the North Pole to the south. Yes there are seals in this area which are one of the primary food sources, but there are also a number of other prey that are not adapted to the presence of such a large land carnivore roaming around. Penguins for example will not have defensive mechanisms against Polar Bears and it would simply be like shooting fish in a barrel. Seals, who in the north create dens in the ice flows where they have an escape route under the sea ice will have no such protection in the south as most of Antarctica is a solid land mass. Again – like shooting fish in a barrel.

Mammals tend to bred based upon the availability of their food sources until they establish a natural equilibrium with the other plants and animals in the area which sustain them (present company excepted of course). With a very large abundant supply of food, Polar Bear populations in the south would tend to explode which would put further pressure on other already delicate food chain equilibriums. Such a situation would have radical implications for the entire food web all for the sake of those few animals at the top of the food chain which are, arguably, the most adaptable to changing circumstances.

In short – good idea, lousy execution.

The health of any ecosystem is only as good as its weakest link. If these people really want to make a difference then find the weak link in the food web and focus on the sustainability issues that impact the health and viability of that component. Polar Bears have adapted to global warming episodes in the past (Greenland was called Greenland for a reason in the not too distant past) and they will endure this one. The issue for Polar Bears is not the lack of accessibility of sea ice, it is the endangerment and accessibility of their food sources. Which means the weak link is further down in the food web.

Unfortunately it is always easier to apply a band-aid to the wound we can see rather than treating the internal causes. Hopefully that doesn’t mean transporting Polar Bears to Antarctica; something that will cause more harm than good I fear. – K

With the reduction of sea ice, this opens up the water surfaces to the atmosphere which is already fairly saturated with carbon dioxide. Since water absorbs 50x the amount of carbon dioxide as air, I would suspect that in the short run we should see a gradual reduction in carbon emissions as new waters which may not circulate with the Atlantic and Pacific ocean currents start to accumulate carbon dioxide.

The downside is two fold: 1) Ocean acidity, which is already on the rise, should increase dramatically as the pH levels of those waters currently circulating and those that circulate very little start to equalize. And 2) once these waters saturate, this will be the last big body of ice not land based that prevent the oceans and air to reach an even equilibrium across the globe. In short, once the arctic waters saturate, there will be no holding back carbon dioxide increases from that point forward.

Sure will will have water runoff from Greenland and Antarctica. But in general those waters should be close to saturation anyways being as they are in constant contact with the atmosphere. Kinda makes you wonder if anything is benefiting currently from the carbon dioxide increase. The giant sequoias maybe? – K