The Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico shows a number of lessons. Taking them to heart, as individuals, as business people, and as a country, will be crucial. First, four specific lessons from this disaster. Points five and six address our long-term energy future.

1. It is absolutely essential to have tested remedies in place in case of catastrophic failure. BP’s throw-a-bunch-of-stuff-and-see-what-sticks approach would have been laughable, except that it was sickening. It became clear very early on that the company had absolutely no clue how to contain a large oil rupture. You don’t make those experiments after the failure, but well in advance—before you ever deploy any potentially dangerous and highly disruptive technology—you’d darned well know how you’re going to deal with an emergency. And those solutions will have been tested and demonstrated to work. BP clearly had no clue that working a mile underwater was different than working on the surface, and should never have been allowed to operate.

2. Don’t give the fox the keys to the henhouse. Government oversight was spotty, at best, and that led to a situation where BP was allowed to override the good judgment of its own engineers. Enforce the rules we’ve enacted to protect our people and our planet. BP so obviously neglected its responsibility to public safety and environmental responsibility that I wrote a post back in May wondering whether there was a good case to bring criminal charges agaisnt the oil giant.

3. When you take massive shortcuts with safety, when you cut corners in the name of short-term profit, the financial consequences are often more severe than doing it right in the first place. BP will be spending tens of billions of dollars that it could have easily avoided, by spending a few hundred thousand dollars upfront on safety equipment, and by heeding the warnings of engineers who said before the accident that their path was unacceptably risky.

4. Even redundant safety devices can fail. We saw this with the Titanic, with Three Mile Island, and with Deepwater Horizon. Engineers are not always skilled at anticipating how different systems interact, and what happens to a system downline from a system failure.

And now, at the federal policy level…

5. Deepwater Horizon is a wake-up call to move away from centralized, polluting energy technologies. The risk of gathering so much energy in one place is significant, and when catastrophes happen, they happen BIG. There are a dozen reasons why oil (and fossil fuels generally) cannot be the long-term answer. And there are a dozen reasons why nuclear should never have been deployed in the first place, of which catastrophic accident is certainly one. A major nuclear accident would make Deepwater Horizon seem like a leaky neighborhood sewer pipe. There are still parts of the Ukraine left uninhabitable by Chernobyl, 24 years ago—and even that was not as severe as the worst-case accident. We MUST change our economy over to non-polluting, renewable, decentralized technologies such as solar, wind, small-scale hydro, geothermal, and of course, conservation/deep-energy-efficiency retrofits.

6. This should be obvious, but apparently it’s not. All deep-sea offshore drilling needs to be shut down until the appropriate safety measures are in place so that Deepwater Horizon is not repeated. It’s a lot harder to put the genie back in the bottle than to keep it in to begin with.
Long-time environmental activist and Green consultant’s latest book is Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green.

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Rarely do I open up my morning paper and see even one positive story among the day’s major news. Today—though I already knew about two of them from other sources—there were three:

1. The Wall Street Reform Bill has passed both houses of Congress. Is it everything I want? Of course not. Is it more than I expected from this stalemated Congress? You betcha.

2. BP finally seems to have capped the torrent of oil from Deepwater Horizon. A lot of wait-and-see before claiming victory, but at least for the moment, no oil is pouring out.

3. Overwhelmingly Catholic Argentina passed same-sex marriage rights legislation, striking a major blow for equality and human rights. The bill, according to NPR’s All Things Considered last night, has the support of an astonishing 70 percent of the population. Major demonstrations helped sway the legislators.

A very good news day, all in all.

Footnote: My local paper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, ran all these stories in today’s first section. But its news pages are only open to paid subscribers, so I’ve linked to other sources.

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My friend Paul Krupin of Direct Contact PR sent me this memo from the Deepwater Horizon recovery team. Even if the Gulf of Mexico weren’t drowning in BP’s oil–a situation in which you’d expect the form letters would at least act grateful for the advice–this is one of the worst examples of corporate messaging I’ve ever seen.

From: horizon.support@oegllc.com [mailto:horizon.support@oegllc.com]
Sent: Saturday, June 19, 2010 10:08 AM
Subject: An Important Message from Horizon Support

Dear Paul Krupin,

Thank you for your submission to the Alternative Response Technology (ART)
process for the Deepwater Horizon MC252 incident. Your submission has been
reviewed for its technical merits.

It has been determined that your idea falls into one of the following ART
categories: Already Considered/Planned, Not Feasible, or Not Possible, and
therefore will not be advanced for further evaluation. To date, we have
received over 80,000 submissions with each submission receiving individual
consideration and priority based on merit and need.

BP and Horizon Deepwater Unified Command appreciate your contribution
and interest in responding to this incident.

Michael J. Cortez
Technical Manager
Alternative Response Technology Team
Deepwater Horizon Call Center – Houston, TX

Tell me what you think (in the comment space below. Then scroll down to see what I think.
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Here’s what I think it’s bureaucratic, it’s off-message, it’s downright snotty, it doesn’t even mention the specific idea submitted before dismissing it, and it doesn’t even give a brief recap of what else they’re trying or why the submitted plan doesn’t work. Oh yeah, and how about that highly specific and targeted subject line NOT? If this came to my mailbox, I’d have assumed it was spam. Eeeeeeew! Couple this with the combination of hubris, selfishness, corner-cutting, and cluelessness shown by BP from Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg and CEO Tony Hayward on down, and it doesn’t paint a pretty PR picture. Is there any wonder the company’s lost half its market cap? They don’t give much confidence in their ability to solve the problem, their understanding of why this is important, and the steps they might be taking to make sure it doesn’t happen again at a different well.

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