14th Anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

April brings up a lot of events. While Spring has already sprung, it is through April that we can enjoy the warming of the weather and the extending of daylight further into our evening hours (at least above the equator).

April 14 is “National Dolphin Day” for those of you who want to take the day off to honor dolphins. And “Earth Day” is on April 22, for those of you who want to pause a moment and inhale on behalf of our celestial home.

Earth Day in April is also the the anniversary of the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil platform blow-out disaster, when the BP “Thunder Horse” drilling rig lost control of their wellhead.

We all had a reckoning with this event – which was the largest American oil disaster since the Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound, which dumped 260,000 barrels of oil into an enclosed habitat. The impacts continue to be revealed.

On on the other hand, the BP disaster spilled at least 4 million barrels – ~16 times more oil – but in the open water of the Gulf of Mexico, where the public would be less able to monitor the impacts over time.

For the record, the 1969 Santa Barbara Oil Spill – which arguably was ‘the last straw’ that triggered the Environmental Movement of the 1970s only dumped an estimated 100,000 barrels of oil onto the beaches of Santa Barbara.

Under the rubric of “out of sight, out of mind,” the oilmen came up with this strategy of blasting Corexit – an oil “dispersant” directly into the plume of oil gushing out of the failed wellhead. This had the effect of “dispersing” the oil before it reached the surface. Understanding the importance of visual data, Representative (now Senator) Ed Markey (D-MA) along with many other representatives insisted that a live video be provided to the public, making sure that we were continuously reminded that this was happening.

While the image of a plume of toxic hydrocarbons is not as compelling as videos of volunteers anxiously and gently cleaning oil and muck off the wings of pelicans and the fur of otters, it remained an ongoing feed that a few media agencies had the courage to feature below the banner of their news programs.

But unlike Santa Barbara, or Prince William Sound, the extent of damage from the BP Oil Spill remains largely out of sight, thus out of mind, although a benthic area the size of Oklahoma is now being poisoned by a sludge of well-head hydrocarbons and Corexit.

We like to remind everyone that like the Santa Barbara and Exxon Valdez oil spills, the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill continues to exact environmental costs. We also like to remind people that when the oilmen “have their way” with our planet – arguably to the benefit of this thing we call “The Economy,” the metrics of this economy only incorporate where we are now relative to where we came from. The metrics on where we are headed are only speculative – which makes it so enticing to people who love to gamble…

And with the economic ‘success metric’ being somewhat ambiguously wrapped around the words “more, now,” variables such as oil spills, or climate catastrophe don’t conveniently fit into the calculus of a successful Economy.

‘Long live the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill.’ …