Review: A Sea in Flames by Carl Safina

I wanted to like Carl Safina's new book, A Sea in Flames: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout.  In fact, I did like it for the first 40 pages or so.

Safina is at his best in this book when reconstructing the events of the blowout itself and sharing the stories of those in the region whose lives felt the negative impacts.

He's skillful at building narrative tension, explaining what went wrong and why, describing decisions that were made or not made that led to the explosions, the subsequent destruction of the oil rig and death of eleven workers.

But Safina lets his journalistic guard down and his opinions, speculations, and grinds personal axes and he loses me.  There are one too many asides such as, "Really? Is that all you've got? Sorry; I have a lot of respect for professors, but I don't believe her," he writes in reaction to a professor who was demonstrating how to sniff food for traces of oil.

Also annoying is Safina's juvenile and relentless butchering of names (Admiral Thad Allen, of the Coast Guard, becomes the "Thadmiral").  Safina loses control of his story -- a story, well-told as certain passages are in this book, about which we should be left to make our own judgments.

And then, as almost an afterthought, Safina has a change of heart about the government's handling of the disaster, after sitting down with Dr. Jane Lubchenco, head of NOAA, and now-retired Admiral Allen, to hear their side of the story.  A better approach, in my view, would to have been to write the book with that perspective and knowledge, simply letting the story stand on its own.

I don't blame Safina for this; I blame his editors at Crown, who clearly didn't do their jobs in the rush to get this book out before most Americans thought the "Deepwater Horizon" was a new water ride at Six Flags rather than the disaster that captivated us for most of the summer of 2010.

The story of the incompetence, poor decisions, neglectfulness, hubris and bad judgment on the part of BP, Transocean, Halliburton, and others is one that needs to be told.  And when Safina sticks to that story, he tells it well.  We don't need the author to point out the absurdity of some of the things said by BP's then-CEO Tony Hayward; his statements and blunders do a fine job on their own.

Instead, Safina gives us knee-jerk environmental rhetoric and juvenile attacks on those involved.  So much so that I kept putting the book down in frustration, but picked it up again hoping Safina would tell me something I needed to know about the disaster.

He did.  My three-take-aways from the book: the disaster was preventable; we were neither prepared for this nor are we prepared for the next such disaster; and it didn't turn out to be as bad as the media led us to believe it was going to be.

I'm a fan of Carl Safina's Eye of the Albatross and Song for the Blue Ocean; both books are illuminating and enlightening.  Where A Sea in Flames sticks to the story of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Safina succeeds; too often, however, he fails to deliver the goods and lets his own story – of his shock, anger, and second thoughts -- get in his way.

The book is not a disaster, but its troubles -- like the blowout itself -- could have been prevented.

Green Energy Reporter's Top 10 Players in Green Energy for October

John Woolard, Brightsource

Always interesting to see who makes the monthly "Top 10 Players in Green Energy" list from our friends at Green Energy Reporter.  Here is their Top 10 for October.


Google hanging at #2 for the second month in a row.

Brightsource Energy's John Woolard in the number one spot.

And BP is a sleeper in the #4 spot -- but GER explains that steadily increasing investments in alternative energy helps BP go from corporate villain to list worthy.


It just shows to go ya...

Where's the Oil in the Gulf? The Green Skeptic on FOX Business

I was on FOX Business with Varney & Co this morning talking about the BP Oil Spill.  While it is not the greatest environmental disaster in history, there are still many people whose lives and livelihoods are affected by this spill and we won't know the full extent of the damage for months, if not years to come.




Here is a link if your browser is not compatible with the video above: Where is the Oil in the Gulf?

Dark Ecosystems Nurtured by Oil (NYT)

"How much oil seeps up from the seabed, aside from oil spills? Quite a lot, and a fascinating group of sea creatures thrives on it," writes William Broad in the New York Times Green Blog about sea creatures that thrive on natural oil seeps in the deep, dark ocean: Dark Ecosystems Nurtured by Oil.

"In 2003, the National Research Council released a comprehensive study, 'Oil in the Sea III: Inputs, Fates and Effects.' The 265-page report paints a global portrait of the petrochemical flows, both natural and unnatural. It turns out that the largest contributors [of petrochemicals in the ocean] far and away are the natural seeps, like those across the bottom of the gulf that power the dark ecosystems."

Of course, as one commentator pointed out, the BP Deepwater Horizon spill has leaked "an amount equal to 75 percent of the annual natural seepage worldwide, except it has occurred in 2 months in one specific location."

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Beyond Possible: Are the Plumes on Fire?

Live Stream from BP's Deep Water Horizon oil spill. Is that really fire under water?

Live Broadcast by Ustream.TV

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BP: Latest Effort Captures 1,000 Barrels of Leaking Oil Per Day

According to a report in yesterday's Environmental Leader, BP successfully connected a mile-long tube into a broken pipe at the Deepwater Horizon well to start capturing some of the leaking oil, which is being siphoned to a ship at the surface.

BP said it is capturing about 1,000 barrels per day in the Gulf of Mexico, a drop in the bucket compared to the 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons/795,000 liters) it estimates to be leaking daily.

Read the full article here: BP Roundup – Latest Effort Captures 1,000 Barrels of Leaking Oil Per Day

The question is, do those estimates underestimate the amount of oil gushing from the sea floor?

Some scientists believe that oil is gushing out at a rate of somewhere between 25,000 to 80,000 barrels a day. The New York Times reported over the weekend that huge plumes of oil -- some 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick -- have been found underwater in the Gulf.

BP has resisted efforts to determine the size of the leak, preferring to focus on containment efforts. They hope to have the leak stopped by the end of the week.

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Two Coasts Tell Tale of Where We Are

What happened on two coasts in the US the past two weeks speaks to our energy reality. The two coasts tell us where we are.

Both events illustrate the conundrum in which we find ourselves early in the 21st Century and very early in the transition from one primary fuel source to the next.

First the good news: Consent was given by US Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar on Wednesday for Cape Wind, the long-stalled 468 MW wind farm project off the coast of Massachusetts. The project was held up by local interests concerned about the appearance of a line of 130 wind turbines located miles off the coast in the Horseshoe Shoal area of Nantucket Sound.

The second was the explosion, sinking, and subsequent leaking of a deep water oil facility last week, which by some estimates is now spewing 5,000 barrels (200,000 gallons) a day into the Gulf of Mexico from below the ocean floor. This spill is set to threaten the Gulf Coast, just five years after Hurricane Katrina devastated that region.

One of these events represents the future of our energy production: Cleaner, renewable, and with a free resource feed stock (the wind). The other represents a variation on the past: Dirty, dangerous, and dependent upon a dwindling feed stock (fossil fuels).

What people forget, however, whether celebrating the victory or decrying the disaster, is that we are not in a position to switch from the old to the new like a light switch in the kitchen.

We are very likely going to need the old to help foster the development of the new -- and our dependence upon the old isn't going away any time soon. Furthermore, because oil is running out, we are likely to see more risky and dangerous ventures to access what's left in the immediate future.

Extracting fossil fuels is a risky and dangerous business, as we've seen with this drilling disaster and last month's coal mine disaster in West Virginia. The sooner we can foster the transition off fossil fuels and to cleaner, renewable source the better off we will be.

But let's not forget where we are in that transition: we are just at the very beginning.