Alec Baldwin Dives to the Gulf Floor with Antonia Juhasz

Published Jul 7, 2015, 4:00 AM

BP recently settled civil lawsuits over the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill to the tune of more than 18 billion dollars. But it's not the end of the story for the worst marine spill in U.S. history. Journalist and author Antonia Juhasz recently took a submersible to the floor of the Gulf of Mexico — closer to the BP Macondo well-head than anyone had gotten since it was sealed five years ago. Her story in the June issue of Harper's Magazine details what she didn't see down there — any vibrant sea life — as well as what she did see: a huge carpet of oil 3,000 square miles in size. And evidence indicates that companies are preparing to resume drilling in the region. Juhasz has been monitoring energy companies for over a decade, and has seen how routine spills have become, but as she explains to host Alec Baldwin, she still feels shock and anger over the ongoing impacts of these spills on the environment.  

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This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing, My chance to talk with artists, policy makers, and performers to hear their stories. What inspires their creations, what decisions change their careers, what relationships influenced their work. My guest today is Antonio Uhas, a journalist and activist who wrote an article in the June issue of Harper's Magazine about the two thousand ten BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The article is more than an investigation into that monumental disaster, it's a highlight in a career dedicated to investigating the oil industry. For the past fifteen years, Uhas has been following oil, the companies that are entrusted with it, the executives who make the decisions about it, and the workers who get the oil out of the ground. People who work within the oil industry are lifers. They start out young, they work their way up through the company. Most of the heads of these companies are people who spent their entire lifetimes within the same companies, and they believe that they are doing the dirty, hard work that someone has to do. Someone has to go out there and go through the muck and go through the mud and do the harm and do all the things that need to happen so that we can drive our lovely cars. And they're the ones who are doing it. They also make a lot of money, and from the perspective of working their companies, they're doing a great job. X On Mobile is the most profitable corporation the world has ever known, over and over and over and over again. So if you work in x on Mobile, you're saying, one, I'm doing the hard, tough work that no one else wants to do. And two, I'm making more money than any company has ever made in the history of the world. So how can you possibly tell me I'm doing a bad job. So when you ask them, when you think about the what about you know the fact that the United Nations says that of fossil fuels have to stay in the ground if we're going to avert the worst of climate crisis, you know, what are you doing as a company. What they say is, while we're dependent on oil and fossil fuels, and we are, you need us to do our job. And then sometimes they say I don't want to get short, and sometimes they say, if you watch their commercials and we are doing the right thing. Look at all the money we're spending on solar and wind, and look at all the money we spend on human rights. And you know, Chevron has commercials all the time. So I did an investigation of this because you know, this is their clay and UM I did a piece for this in Rolling Stone, and you know, the truth is that the oil industry has been UM dramatically moving its way out of alternative energy investments, if it ever really was invested. The best company was at best, very generous four percent of total UM their total expenditures, and that was BP at its height, and I think that was two thousand and eight, but they don't have the year memorized, and that was the best. So the other companies were point two percent, point one percent. XN basically never even pretended to invest in alternative energy and really hasn't UM And a lot of that money was actually in bio fuels, not even in you know, wind or solar. But now the companies have all like, yeah, they count that, they count ethanol, so you know, and all the problems attendant with that, but they've basically removed themselves from from those sectors as well, so now it's almost nothing. And actually, even speaking of ethanol, VP, which is now almost completely divested from solar and wind, announced the closing of facilities in Louisiana and in San Diego for making sell elastic biofuels, So they're even now moving out of UM the biofuel sector, which is you know, probably good and actually from my perspective to be honest, you know, oil is a natural resource, just like UM, the sun, and the wind. There are places like the bottom of the ocean where naturally releasing oil actually lives over thousands of years in harmony with the environment. What this industry has done is taken a natural resource and turned it into a weapon of mass destruction. So I say, do we really want them to now because they've done such a bang up job with oil? Do we really want to give them the wind and the sun? Do we really want them doing alternative energy? So my answer is no, And what I would rather say is they haven't done a bang up job with the resource they've been given. So while we are dependent on their resource, they could do a much much much better job of providing it in ways that are much more environmentally and socially and economically beneficial. The two thousand ten explosion aboard the deep Water Horizon oil rig killed eleven people and lead to a powerful seafloor oil gusher that lasted eighty seven day is According to the ONSEEN Coordinator report, over two hundred million gallons of oil leaked into the Gulf of Mexico, and Tonio Uhas investigated the multiple causes of the disaster later. But on that first day April, she was far away a ten and I was in San Francisco following oil in the same way that I do, and I saw sort of a blip come across the screen about an explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. And honestly, at first it didn't bring a lot of bells because, in fact, there's a lot of offshore oil spills, particularly in the Gulf of Mexico. They happened fairly routinely. We don't necessarily pay a lot of attention to them, and there weren't any pictures or anything. You know, this is very far out when you say offshore oil spills that are routine. Routine means they don't blow up, and there's a lot of flames bellowing. Yeah, but we didn't know that, so you know at first. Um So, the more routine ones don't in of explosions and flames, right, not not something erupts and whale goes into the into the water. Oil spills happen often. Small explosions happen often. Um So there are and there is, um you know a lot of problems that happened with Riggs out in the Gulf. As the days unfolded, though, it became clearer and clearer that this was a significant incident, much larger than I had originally thought. And what seemed also clear as the days were moving on was that it wasn't something that was going to be stopped anytime soon. Um So. I was actually contacted by the Guardian to do a piece looking mostly at because they still didn't have a lot of information. It's still early on. You know. Now I know why there was an information, but at the time I just assumed, you know, we're just sort of learning a little bit at a time because it's not necessarily that big of a deal. I contact by the Guardian to do a piece and the piece is mostly focusing on is it a surprise that it's BP so you know this happens to a company as a surprised the VP as the company because BP had just been through UM the Texas City refinery disaster, which is was prior to this one of the worst workplace disasters in US history and the oil sector fifteen refinery workers dead, UM a hundred and fifty injured. UM the Alaska pipeline spill had happened, which was a BP pipeline m not a good time for BP, and Tony Hayward, who was the CEO at the time, had also been and happened for many years facing takeover rumors, and one of the reasons for the takeover rumors which continue to this day, was that BP it had a very low reserve replacement ratio, which means that it wasn't replacing oil at the same speed that it was producing it getting out of the ground, and that makes it a weak company. So he was being very adventurous in finding new fields, new finds and being able to book them, which means that UM, you can prove that you can actually produce the oil exactly as you're taking oil or extracting oil out of the ground. You want to know there's more out there. That you that's yours exactly exactly, and investors want to know that there's a half that you can replace UM. And so he was extremely adventurous and also seemed to be more willing than others to UM, you know, put time and money and profit ahead of other concerns. So when I was first looking at this incident, I said, you know, no, it's not a surprise that it's BP. But then and so that was the That was the first sort of look that I The first look was just the company. Then it kept unfolding, and so then by May I was down went down to the Gulf coast and did a tour of the Gulf coast and started interviewing people. UM started interviewing UM fisherman's and fisher folks, started interviewing elected officials, started to really try and us out what's unfolding here. And then that made it increasingly clear because at this point, you know, the spill is now UM twenty days in, it's not ending any time soon, It doesn't look like it's any ending any time soon. That not only is this a serious disaster, but there is a huge, untold story here of why it happened. UM, what's what if anything is going to be able to solve the problem, and what if anything is going to be changed in the future. And at that point I decided to write a book. And I'm like, this is what I'm going to need to do. It's an article. Isn't going to do it? This can't be a short one off, and I Yeah, there's just way too much. There's just way too much going on um way too many unknowns. And so I begin the process of writing a book and continue to write articles at the same time. But the book is Black Tied the devastating impact of the Golf oil spill, and that came out in two thousand and eleven, and I continued while still covering other issues, including traveling to Afghanistan to cover the role of oil and gas in the war in Afghanistan and other things. Now, when does when does Atlantis Alvin of the stuff that's in the Harper's article, When does that enter your windshield? So one of the first people I contact to find out what is the significance of this oil spill, which ultimately becomes the largest offshore oil spill in world history, is Dr Samantha Joy, a bio geochemist at the University of Georgia, who everyone tells me from the very beginning is the person to talk to about oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico because she is the person who has um done the most investigations in the field trying to just understand honest investigations. Patsy for the oil cups at all. You meet her, I meet her, I start interviewing her right away. And she's been in the Alvin before, so she's the only person to have led a previous ALVIN mission to the site of the oil spill after the oil spend, so she went in December two thou and ten that year that year. So it's just for people who were listening to the Atlantis is the ship and the Alvin is And who owns the ship? The U. S. Navy um the Yeah, the Navy owns this fleet of scientific research vessels. It's a ship, and the Alvin the submarine, and the Album which is the submersible they own exactly. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution manages all of a subcontractor. And the Alvin Submarine is the only human occupied research submarine that exists in the United States anymore. It was the first and now it's the last it's been around for fifty years. UM. It explored the Titanic. It found a nuke that got lost in the Yeah, so you know the hydrogen bomb. I can't remember, um, but it was lost and they she booked that trip for you, and you went out when so um Alvin goes under forty million dollars worth of refurbishing, it finally gets to go out again. And when she finds out that she's going to get to do the the first mission back to the side of the BP oil spill, she wants there to be a journalist with her, and she lets me know that I get to be the one to say the least thing blows a rth while I'm down there. They just refurbished it. Well, yeah, and it turns out, let me see that bill for that refurbishing of the Alvin exactly. Somehow, the refurbishing did not include restroom facilities. Those in need were forced to use a bottle. You can listen to earlier episodes of Here's the Thing by visiting our archives, like my conversation with Dr Robert Lustig, who talked to me about the growing obesity pandemic and its link to a very different energy source. And we've learned that the higher insulin goes, the hungry you get. Hungry you are, So the sugar is an appetite, stimulant in a sense, celerant, whatever you want to call you can call it that right. Absolutely, take a listen at Here's the Thing dot org. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing to better understand the impact of the two thousand ten beep the oil spill and tonio U has joined bio geochemist Samantha Joy last year in a submersible that traveled over five thousand feet down to reach the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. It took two hours to get down. The total trip was the tool trip in the album was eight, so five hours on the bottom. She were five hours down there with her. We've been there before. Yes, what did she say to you? She said, you know, Um, the first time she went down, there was nothing. All the sea life that could get away from the oil got away from the oil, and everything that couldn't, in her words, was nooked. It just got pummeled. We come back down. Refugee sea life, refugee sea life, UM and basically what I see is a moonscape. It's basically there's nothing. There's basically nothing down there. No, I mean normally you would see um, coral, sea fans, fish, even sharks and whales. You know, it's not like an underwater amazon. This is the deep dark bottom exactly. But you know, there would have been a lot more life. There should have been a lot more like nothing. There was. What we saw is a little bit of a change. So there's was the occasional sea life that came through, and so that was positive. There were giant isopods, which are basically foot long cockroaches. That was exciting to see flow by. I saw a couple of those. Um it's a fish that resembles a cockroach. It is an underwater cockroache. It's it's called an isopod. Yeah, who knew they existed? And I'm not entirely sure that. I'm happy to know that exactly, so that the giant cockroach has survived. We also saw, which was amazing, um one vampire squid, which is this um long squid that has a red head and it went zooming by and um that thrilled doctor Joy because those are incredibly rare to see. We saw the occasional eel and occasional crab, little teeny um like blue and pink fish, but mostly it was nothing. I mean, this was the occasional occurrence and maybe something that had wandered in their accident and they just have made their way, you know, in what we should have seen, we should have seen a lot more. But what is not good is that what was also out there is um three thousand miles worth of oil. I want to nail these facts down for people. You said, did you say it was an inch or too thick? The bed at most it's greatest steps. It's two inches thick, so it's greatest steps. This carpet, carpet of oil, of oil near the site is three thousand square miles sixty miles by or whatever. Whether it's shaped like an American flag or it's the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. So this isn't just around the site. This is a huge carpet of oil that has been there for four years. No, No, I want to ask you a couple of questions based on that. So there's a lot of myth making here and an urban legend, if you will, The myth that got circulated, was it all the oil was gone because the bugs ate it, right, that's circulated, or we're going to eat it? And that was well circulated. It was circulated by a scientist who was funded by BP to come up with that information. And scientist and I should know his name, and I'm forgetting it right now. That's bad. So a scientist funded by BP said, eventually the bugs are going to eat the oil. I mean he said initially that they've eaten most you know, most of it and um, and they've they've eaten most of it. I'm not positive that he said they're going to continue eating, but he definitely said they've eaten most of it. Now, what happens to oil that bonds, if it does bond. What happens to oil that corregs it is applied to because as most people know who were listening to this program, they know that the gulf was sprayed uh in my uh, my friend has a great phrase in my conspira noia reality that I live in. Um. The my friends said that they sprayed the corregit on there to get the oil out of the way so that the media couldn't see it. That was my probably my greatest disappointment in Obama that he allowed them to not have the press come and photograph and videotape and reports. Honestly, what happened that though all the press had to stay away from this, I thought that was the most disgraceful thing that Obama ever did in his administration. I mean, we were I was regularly threatened by police for trying to go to beaches to cover spill sites. Um. People who wanted to volunteer to take us out in boats were told that they would be fine sixty tho dollars for doing so and be sent to jail. Um. Fortunately, some people were so concerned with getting the truth out that they still brought myself another journalist out into the water. UM, I don't I mean, I don't know, hopefully not not. The ones that were kind enough to help me and people you know were paid, So it was, you know, they were desperate for for income and they were risking, you know, a dollar in the hand for the threat of a six fine because they were desperate and needed it. But I mean, the the obstacles were great in trying to cover this story. So what happens to the correct applied to so two million gallons of corrects that are applied. So part of the story here of dispersing it's a it's a it's a chemical disperse it. Part of the story is that the only thing that BP had prepared for, and that actually any oil company operating the Gulf prepared for, was oil on the surface of the ocean. And it's very common to apply a little bit of corrects it to a little bit of oil on the surface. The idea is to that you do want to break it up because you don't want animals to get cotton it. You also don't want it floating to shore. Oil is toxic, you don't want humans coming into contact with it. And the idea is that, you know, you apply a little at the top and it's some harm to the water, but it's worth it. But this was a totally impressed hended oil spill in size and scope and depth, and for the first time ever, the correct sit because they only plan for something at the top, not expecting a three month long oil spill, although they should have. They applied at the bottom of the ocean, so they sprayed it at the side of the spill. So you have this huge cocktail toxic cocktail of the toxic correct sit combined with the toxic oil, and what studies have found is that in fact, the combination of the two is at least more toxic than either alone. And the only thing that the correct It is supposed to do is disperse. That's all it's even meant to do. So what you're choosing to do Nearrell Co manufacturers corrects It, Yeah, And they for a very long time refused to release all of the chemical components of correct It, and they also refused to I think they have sense, And they also refused to make it available to scientists to do their own research on to be able to study the impacts. And I believe that has also since ended. But what they did was basically intentionally sacrifice the ocean in an attempt to protect the shore. But of course they failed it both because they also hadn't prepared to protect the shore. So not only did they apply all of this chemical to the ocean, but the oil also did of course make its way to the shore, as did now the chemical lye infused corrects It infused oil make it to shore. When you talk about corexit, you said oil is leaking into the Gulf as a matter of course, constantly, and the system has survived and even at its most uh, I don't want to say pristine, but at it's most natural and it's least impacted. There's still some oil coming out of the bottom of the gulf, because there's oil all over the gulf, and that just is how the ecosystem operates and exists. But correct is it is not something that comes out of the ground. Corrects It is a toxic chemical that's applied. Two million gallons of this substance poured into the Gulf of Mexico on top of that site. Is I'm going to guess that's spit in the ocean in terms of how it breaks down into the into the body of water. But has there been any research done to determine what corrects it itself has done to wildlife into the So is that two inch layer there because you said that they commingled the correctit with it at the site they shot it into the stream of oil at the site corrected at that's the wellhead and when they did that, is that layer of oil on the ground. Is that bonded with correct it? Is anybody to any tests about that? Yeah? There is um correct, sit correct. It and the oil have both stayed and are likely to stay forever because the bottom of the ocean is a dark, cold place. It's like the best freezer in the world, and so it's not going anywhere. But also um what's left of the oil essentially, so there there are um microbes that have developed over millennia that have feasted on this And just to make this clear, very teeny teeny tiny amount of naturally releasing oil that comes out of the Gulf of Mexico and very very small amounts, and over millennia, communities have developed around this oil and they have thrived because it's small and it's a natural occurrence and there's time for the species to commingle with the oil. So there are these naturally occurring microbes that do eat the oil, but they ate as much as they could, and it was only a small amount. But also they only ate what they could, so what they left behind is also the most toxic parts of the oil. It's what they didn't want to eat. And these are called polycyclic aero aeromaic hydrocarbons, which are um the most toxic part of the oil. Carcinogens known to be cancer causing human is at the bottom with the correct Now, how would you characterize BPS response to this what you've observed initially end down the road. We know now through the court case that um BP, first of all lied when it said that it was prepared for a blowout, for a deep water blowout. It actually had said in its exploration plan to drill that it could handle a blowout almost three times as large as the oil spill that actually ended up happening, and it was in fact totally unprepared. It also then lied about how much oil was being released every day from the oil well. It also had said that it could handle the oil spill, which to me, which also implies that it could stop the oil spill. But it turns out that the only method that it had available for stopping the oil spill, it in every other oil company, by the way, operating in the Gulf of Mexico, was the only thing they already knew how to do, which is also the most dangerous thing, which is drill another well. It took a hundred and fifty two days to drill another well. That's the only thing that permanently stopped the well pour. The sand in the First, they did the thing where they tried the um the top hat, which was throwing When we saw this on jokes made about it on TV because it was laughable. It's things that work in shallow water four feet. This was five thousand feet, so throwing golf balls and and tire and rubber rubber from tires onto it. What should they have done? Where have you seen examples of this going? Obviously not to that level because the deep water horizon is an anomaly I'm assuming correct in terms of scope. But where you've seen these kinds of things? Where have you seen something effective that's worked? It's not golf balls, but what do they do? So what's come out since is that there is another temporary method that they should have known about and should have had ready. They and every other company. Again, this isn't just BP. So I went into this story thinkings of company that really they were the unlucky ones. It could have happened to any of them. It could and still could. Yeah, they were exactly exactly. But I want to get back to this thing, which is where have you seen this? Because it's one thing to say there's something that they should have known after the fact, but at the time that it happened, what information did they have, because I want to be fair to them as well, at the time that had happened, what information did they have Where you've seen other people do this better, that someone's done it better. There isn't an example what they all did know. However, there are very clear examples. So um, what they all knew. All the companies knew was that the thing that they're depending on the most, which is something called the blowout preventer, which is the huge piece of equipment that sits on top of a well that's supposed to when there is a blowout prevented by shutting the well, and so it's called the blow preventer. That these pieces of equipment only had about a fifty success rate. This is the last line of defense they also should have, and this is something that is just them. They should have had it running as properly as it could have. So one of the things we also know is that they had allowed the batteries on the blowout preventer to run out. Literally it had old batteries. Does that affect them in court? Did they pay for them in court? So then you get their hands chopped off for that they were, so, so I guess there's there's there's three pieces of the litigation. The first, BP was found grossly negligent and definitely got in trouble by the judge for, in the judge's words, putting profits above everything else, and that was in what led to the blowout. So BP made decision after decision after decision on the rig and I guess in this circumstance, yes, there there are things that other companies have done better, that they could have done better, where they were trying to save time, trying to save money and just making um, you know, very very very poor decisions time and time again that contributed that made the blow out happen. And so for that the judge found them grossly negligent. But everything that came after, meaning their inability to stop the blowout, their inability to clean it up, their decision to apply two million downs of Cruxit, their inability to keep it from hitting the shore and killing a hundred thousand animals. For that, the judge said, no other company knows how to do it any better than you did, which means not at all. And the government didn't require you to do it any better. So you and everybody else gets a pass on everything that came after the judge said that. So where we're now coming to is the third phase of trial, where the judge is now going to say how much b p O s. And it could be as much as almost fourteen billion dollars for all of the oil that was released into the Gulf of Mexico, but it could be as little as a hundred and forty thou dollars. So that's why this low end is very important. And that's why the fact that it's important that the judge said that BP made very poor decisions, including allowing the blot preventer to run out of batteries, um that it was grossly negligent for doing that, and as well as Haliburton and trans Ocean were also found um negligent for their parts. You know, two of the largest companies in the world, which Haliburton. I'm not positive they will find something correct. I think they reached a settlement, but I'm not positive. Yeah, I'm not positive where they're out with their case. I'm pretty sure they settled. Now, you studied these companies for quite a while. Now, you've covered this industry for fifteen years or more. You're at the bottom of the You're in this submersible, and all of the fears of that aside everything, but with your knowledge of what's going on and why and what isn't happening and why, and you're with this woman who's this colleague of your this revered colleague from the University of Georgia, Dr Joy. Did you think when upset you? Oh? Yeah, I mean I would say, certainly, are you completely uh cynical about or does any of it really upset you? Oh? It always upsets me. And I you know, I can't. I can't tell you every day there's something new that I learned about this disaster that still continues to depressed me and shock me. And when I was down there, I was unbelievably depressing. I looked out of the window. Is at the bottom of the ocean. It was incredible, unthinkable opportunity. And it's a you know, basically a virtual dead zone. And not only are we down there and there's lots of time to reflect, but suddenly we see tracks in the ground which are parallel, which means that they're clearly man made, and that signals that not only is there this dead zone, but somebody's laying cable down there, which means that I later come to learn they're getting ready to drill again in the exact same area. So the federal government has divided up this lease area sold it to another company called L l o G. Without any public awareness or you know, debate. Um L l o G gets basically almost the entire lease and the rights to produce oil off of it. And and they are now and people aren't also paying attention because instead of going in in the exact same spot so you could see a rig, they're over an adjacent lease area, drilling from the adjacent lease area and then cutting horizontally under the ground into the original area. And this all they wrote a plan. It took less than a month for the Department of Interior to okay the plan. It looks remarkably and depressingly similar to the same plan that VP had drawn up originally. And everything is just um literally back, you know, back to business as usual. What hope do you think there is for accelerating renoble production in this country? Well, and first of all, the US government subsidizes the oil industry to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars every year, So there's lots of money there. They don't need it. They're the wealthiest industry the world has ever known. We can take those subsidies, those can be applied to alternative energy. UM. We can also you know, I think it absolutely is something that can be done and should be done at the local level. So if we look at local consumption, reducing local consumption of energy and providing energy at the local level, I think you'll also come up with more UM potential resources made available and partnering with government, with federal government resources. But there's a lot of money out there that can be UM successfully cut out of the budget that's being used to subsidize and support the fossil fuel industry that I think almost everyone would agree is unnecessary and that money at a minimum can be directed to government. It has not the only player, but it has a role. It certainly has a role to play. Antonia you Hass article on the repercussions of BP's oil spill is in the June issue of Harper's magazine. Lately, you has has been following the protests surrounding the Polar Pioneer Shells Giant offshore oil rig for Rolling Stone. I called Antonia up to learn the latest. Um we wanted to um add a comment from you about two events that I've been tracking recently, which obviously a plane to you, And the first one is the Santa Barbara spill. When I was reading that story and following that story, it led us to corrosion in the infrastructure of those pipes, and I'm wondering, is that something that that's pretty common now? Should we expect this to happen more often? Or is there the possibility is Santa Barbara an isolated incident or no? Um No, Santa Barbara isn't isolated for a number of reasons, the first being that corrosive old pipes is actually a huge problem throughout our oil and gas system. There are stills related to problems with pipelines, pipeline ruptures, including corrosion, that happened all over the United States all the time, and in fact, in two dozen and fourteen there were more of those bills than at any time and at least the last twenty years. And that's partly because we're moving more product through the pipes, but also because the pipes are, you know, just get older every year, and you know, disasters like what happened in Santa Barbara are actually unfortunately quite common. I remember when I first went to Santa Barbara to visit uh from l A. I was living in l A many many years ago, and I went up there to check it out. And when I was staying at one specific hotel, they had cleaning solvent and they had cloths that you used to take the tar balls off your and the oil blobs off your feet, because a lot of that stuff washed up periodically on the beaches. It was a very common occurrence. It was very regular. Now was that area still as busy and as still as productive and oil field off the coast of California? Is that still humming the way it has been for many decades now? Yeah, there's you know, a lot of oil and gas off the shores of California in general, but Santa Barbara in particular. That area is actually the birthplace of offshore oil drilling um in the United States, going back to the late eighteen hundreds. But oil spills are also unfortunately common and actually one of the largest offshore oil disasters in the United States before the deep Water Horizon happened in two thousand and ten. Happened in nineteen sixty nine in Santa Barbara, and that was a huge offshore blowout that led to three million gallons of oil spills and led to a movement to put in place moratoriums against offshore oil drilling, first in the waters right off Santa Barbara. That then the moratorium spread and they affected almost everywhere except for the US Gulf of Mexico and parts of Alasko where drilling was allowed to continue. But the existing offshore operations off California were grandfathered in. So there's still are these platforms that we see um when you're you know, in Santa Barbara, and it's actually from one of those old grandfathered in platforms, actually two of them, one from Exxonmobile and another operated by a much smaller companies called Venico, that this oil spill actually happened because the oil is typed into shore through subsea pipelines. Then once it gets to short put into a processing facility, then it travels along the onshore pipeline, and it was along the onshore leg that the rubsture happened. The oiled then spilled onto the beach and into the ocean. Um when you mentioned Alaska. The next question becomes your thoughts about Obama permitting drilling in and I want you to name the region more specifically up in the Arctic where what is the area described for us? What is the area where in the sea where Obama has now said they can have underwater drilling. Yeah? Well, now, um in the chup Cheese Sea, which is um off of Alaska in the Arctic, a part of Alaska that's heavily inhabited by indigenous populations and a broad diversity of wildlife, including polar bears and walruses and hundreds of different bird and fish species um. And also in and also describe if you would, the conditions of the water in the dead of winter there. It's freezing water. Um. Huge blocks of ice are primarily what you find here in the in the winter. Not not really water per se, but rather you know, ice sheet um. And they're supposed to be solid. Of course, global warming is making that less common. But that's why when Obama open to this area to offshore drilling, what that meant to what's supposed to mean is at the only time that the company's can drill is a very small window when there's actually open water there for them to drill in. So that's the summer months and I'm going only as late as October is their only opportunity um for when they are allowed to drill, because it is such a cold, frozen, harsh, h really precedented type of environment to try to engage an offshore oil drilling in. But I also read somewhere with it's very rough seas up there in the winter time. Correct, That's right, very rough water, exactly rough water, very deep distances between where you know, the coast Guard is stationed, where their their pockets of you know, land, and places where people are, where emergency services might come from, where where help might come from. What do you think it was if you can say that prompted Obama to make that Rolling Shell is the largest oil company in the world. That's the oil company that's had leases in this area for a very long time, and it's been trying to develop this area for a very long time. And the reason why it hasn't is because its operations keep running into problems. That keeps trying and failing, and you know, the Obama administration is still engaged in it's incredibly dangerous what it calls to all all of the above energy strategy, which is a you know, I believe a really false belief that you can simultaneously support alternatives and bio fuels and you know, clean energy advancements and regulation at the same time is allowing the industry to go anywhere and everywhere it wants all of the time. And you know, don't take my word for it now, it takes the Pope's word for it. Um that you really can't follow both of those, both of those tabs at the same time and keep the planet inhabitable for our species. But you know, there's a lot of money in the oil industry, and I you know, think that the political influence there is ultimately what you know, wins out. And Tonia, thank you so much for taking my phone call, and again, thank you for being a part of our broadcast. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. This is Alec Baldwin you're listening to. Here's the thing, Fine, don't make the time

Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin

Award-winning actor Alec Baldwin takes listeners into the lives of artists, policy makers and perfor 
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