If Deepwater Horizon spilled millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the coverage of the crisis has spilled millions of column inches about oil all over the world’s media. Week after week, news reports have shown us bewildered seabirds smothered in grey goo, furious shrimp fishermen who’ve lost their livelihoods.... 

Don’t get me wrong: these appalling economic and environmental effects should be reported on – of course! - and reported on over and over again until fair reparations are made and the land is cleaned up.

But the unrelenting focus on just the immediately obvious consequences of the oil spill can do us a disservice by hiding the much bigger and more controversial story that the media ought to be helping us to understand. There is a much more shocking reality the media could expose – before it loses this extraordinary opportunity for enlarging public knowledge about oil extraction, brought about by the intense public interest in the Deepwater affair. 

Here’s one fragment of that bigger, hidden story.

If Deepwater has been bad for humans and other living things over several months, then the oil-fields in Nigeria have dealt worse blows to more people for much longer – for years, sometimes for decades.

In the Ogoni-lands, gas flares have billowed nightly from hundreds of well-heads. A 2009 BBC report described these flares ‘lighting up the sky 24 hours a day’. To this interminable light pollution, add noise pollution: the ‘continuous roar, like a jet aircraft taking off’ of these flares. Vivian Bellonwu, who works with the communities, adds: ‘When you approach a gas flare, the first thing you notice is the heat, the villages around the flares are all very hot.’

If you and your family could withstand this constant barrage of noise, light and heat, year after year, as these families have had to, Shell will provide you with even more to contend with. The hundreds of flares spread toxic smoke and chemicals over homes, farms and fisheries. ‘The smoke in some places is overpowering,’ says Bellonwu - adding, in what must be the understatement of the year: ‘It can't be good.’ Doctors report higher rates of children with asthma, she says, as well as higher rates of cancer. 

That’s just the fallout from the flares, which inexorably - absurdly - burn up the massive quantities of gas sorely needed by Nigeria for its energy supply. We haven’t even got to the oil spills yet.

The oil spills are deeply controversial. In December 2009, a court in The Hague heard a case brought by farmers and fishermen against Royal Dutch Shell and Shell’s subsidiary in Nigeria. They claimed they had lost their livelihoods after oil leaking from Shell’s pipelines had spilled over their fields and fishing ponds and devastated agricultural lands, polluted drinking water, made fish ponds unusable and harmed the environment and health of local people. The court found in the claimants’ favour.

But a new United Nations report says that Shell was responsible for only 10% of the oil spills (‘only’ about a million barrels). Campaigners, shocked but not surprised by the report, dismiss its validity, pointing out that it has been paid for by Shell and commissioned by the Nigerian government.

‘The UNEP study relies on bogus figures from Shell and incomplete government records,’ says Ben Amunwa of London-based oil watchdog group Platform. ‘Many Ogoni suspect that the report's focus on sabotage and bunkering will be used to justify military repression notorious in the Niger delta, where non-violent activists, including Ken Saro-Wiwa, were executed.’

Military repression? Execution? That’s what the man said. If you had lived in these oil-rich lands in the mid-1990s, you would have had to cope not only with gas flares and oil spills, but with the might of the military against you – armed and ready to shoot, at the behest of the then-government, seemingly more concerned to protect oil wealthy companies than its own defenceless citizens.

A Human Rights Watch report (1 July 1995) describes ‘a series of punitive raids on Ogoni villages characterized by flagrant human rights abuses, including extrajudicial executions, indiscriminate shooting, arbitrary arrests and detention, floggings, rapes, looting, and extortion.’ For a harrowing eye-witness account of these raids, check out the interviews with Nigerian women in the movie, ‘The Age of Stupid’. 

Executions, indiscriminate shooting, arbitrary arrests and detention, floggings, rapes, looting, extortion! That’s just a taste - a small, bitter taste - of what villagers in Nigeria have suffered at the hands of people for whom money matters more than protecting the lives of the poor.

The mainstream media did carry news about the Nigerian oil fields when Ken Saro-Wiwa and his colleagues were executed - 15 years ago. But Saro-Wiwa was a charismatic, westernised man, not exactly a typical impoverished villager.  And it seems that people living in the oil-fields continue to suffer from oil spills, even though the UN report points the finger of blame away from oil companies to local people.

We need to know more! The media needs to tell us the Ogoni story over and over again, bearing vivid witness to what is happening to the people there, investigating the causes and assessing the consequences, just as it has been in Louisiana.

Here’s the second example of how the Deepwater story could be presented more illuminatingly by the global media. 

Week after week, as I mentioned before, media reports have thrust at us images of bewildered seabirds, dying fish thickly coated with what looks like heavy-duty gloss paint, or the monstrous oily porridge bobbing heavily on the sea. It’s all ocean-based imagery. Which makes it all too easy for us to jump to the conclusion that the problem with the Deepwater Horizon rig was that it had blown up and spilled its oil into the ocean. If it had not, we might well infer, all would now be well.

But that’s just not so. In fact, that’s the biggest illusion that needs to be punctured.

The reality is that even if everything at Deepwater had gone perfectly according to plan, it would still have contributed to terrible environmental consequences – somewhere, sometime.  Because the gooey mess in the sea is only a secondary mess: a bonus horror. The primary mess starts elsewhere.

For oil doesn’t just paint the sea and sea-creatures: it also paints the sky.

Think of it this way. If this oil hadn’t poured into the sea, where would it have gone? It would have been poured into the fuel tanks of cars or trucks as petroleum. And the fumes emitted from the exhausts of these vehicles would have painted the sky with new coatings of CO2 molecules.

They would be very subtle coatings, so you wouldn’t be able to see them with your naked eye: they’re not obviously a problem, like the thick coatings of oil on the seabirds.

Nonetheless these fine layers of CO2 are wonderful warmers, like the fine downy feathers in a quilt.  And if one big soft feather quilt traps the perfect amount of heat to keep you warm at night, then two or three quilts could make you swelter. Instead of having a peaceful night’s sleep, you would be wildly kicking off the covers. In just the same way, excessive CO2 is trapping more heat than is good for the climate, and causing the disruption of traditional weather patterns so that wilder, more violent forms of weather - floods, storms, hurricanes, droughts – are appearing more and more often, and in more extreme forms.

In Pakistan, more than 20 million people have now (as I write) been displaced by unprecedented floods, and more floods are threatening.  In some parts of China, 12 million people have reportedly been forced to flee their homes in the past year - whilst the worst drought in a century has been scorching the south-west. In Africa, severe drought is affecting 10 million people…(Source: The Guardian).

And so the horrific toll continues. 

So the real problem with Deepwater Horizon is not that it blew up in a catastrophic accident. The problem is that it existed at all. 

That’s the fundamental problem with all the other oil rigs, and coal mines, and tar sands: that they exist at all. So the only real solution to the catastrophic human and environmental problems caused by fossil fuel extraction is the one that is summed up in this little rap:

‘Leave the oil in the soil, the coal in the hole, the tar sand in the land!’

…..


This is a critical, unmissable moment - a fantastic opportunity for the global media to help right a great humanitarian wrong, while the public is still listening intently to further revelations about the oil industry.

The media’s sustained, multi-page, investigative coverage for months on end about Deepwater have already helped release the public outrage that obliged BP to set aside $20 billion for reparations in the Gulf of Mexico.

But why stop there?

Media editors sensitized by the Deepwater affair could now ask oil companies how many billions of dollars they will set aside as reparation for people elsewhere, whose lives they have damaged for years but – without the media’s spotlight – will remain out of sight and out of mind.

Would they do it? They might just echo the editor of a once-famous print magazine whose attitude to reporting on global injustice was: ‘We don’t deal in sob stories.’

Ah, the righteous wrath of the rich: so much more newsworthy than the ‘sob stories’ of the poor. But if the media did investigate the human and environmental catastrophes outside the US all the way down the line, using the deep knowledge management resources at their disposal, what a wonderful silver lining they could pull out from the murky blackness of Deepwater.


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