Six Things We Need To Know About the Gulf Oil Spill

I just had a great weekend at my 25th college reunion away from the news, remembering the past and reconnecting with old friends. I had heard earlier in the week that we were awaiting results of BP's latest attempt to put a tourniquet on the gash they put into the earth that is threatening the health and vitality of the world's great seas, the Mexican Gulf. I have also heard more frustration and uncertainty about what our situation is. We go from one BP-proposed Hail Mary technique to the next. And the angst of the American people is becoming more palpable each day.

Maybe I'm just not informed enough about what is going on, but I think we may be suffering from too much information about an arbitrary set of things. If this were a spill on my property, I would not be satisfied if the contractor kept coming back to me with partial information about what the situation is. After a few days of hearing, "I'm not sure what's happening or what to do about it," I would demand that he take a different strategy. I would want to know the few pieces of key information that would guide my decisions, policies and areas of focus on getting my arms around what seems to be an intractable problem.

So, I propose that we start asking for six pieces of information from our government on a regular basis. Where they get this information from -- BP, the Military, university scientists -- that's the job of experts. But with these six pieces of information, we will understand a lot about the current situation, and both the rationale and effectiveness of solutions being proposed or tried out.

1. New flow of oil into the Gulf. We need to know this in order to have any idea whether we are making progress on the clean-up. If your boat springs a leak at one bucket per minute, you better be able to bail at faster than one bucket per minute, or your boat will sink.
2. Volume of oil being captured. I hear that we are "vacuuming" up oil from the surface into tankers. How much volume? A simplistic analysis might be able to tell what percent oil vs. seawater is being sucked up, thereby telling us how much oil is being removed from the Gulf.
3. Net increase / decrease in spill. This is (1) minus (2). We should know this number, because until it is negative, the problem is just continuing to get worse. It also could focus us on strategies to suck up the oil while we're waiting for the leak to be plugged. It seems to me that, if oil is so valuable, it would be important for someone to capture the oil and find a way to refine it (get the saltwater out), instead of poisoning the water supply with emullsifiers, or whatever they're dumping in the Gulf now.
4. Undersea map of uncaptured oil. We also need to know where the uncaptured oil is, and where it is likely to go. It is not all on the surface, like with the Exxon Valdez; rather, it is mushrooming out from the sea floor upwards. We should also be able to forecast, like the weather, where the oil "clouds" are.
5. Protection strategies for endangered zones. We should know the strategy that is being employed for every section of our coastland, how impacted it already is or what is the risk of impact.
6. Clean-up strategies for endangered zones. Cleaning up a contaminated marsh is different from removing oil from a sand berm or a rock surface.

Now, knowing this information does not automatically result in a cleaner Gulf; however, I see no way for our leaders (or BP, or citizens' groups) to make helpful decisions on resolving this catastrophe without it. I am weary of information that is not useful in providing insight.

I understand that BP is afraid of making itself further liable. And the federal government does not want to remove responsibility for action from BP. But we need a federal project manager that is systematically employing strategies to outrace the leak from the sea floor. Public confidence will grow in this solution as we see strategies that have a clear impact. We all know that the situation is at disaster levels. We are all conjecturing differently about what's happening, though, and that's not all that helpful, especially when some targeted intelligence on the situation could help everyone know where we need to focus. Would building more berms faster help? What are the trade-offs in doing that? Would employing more tankers to vacuum up the spill be helpful? And if they do, do we know what to do with the vacuumed oil-and-water? Do we have refineries that can strip out oil from water? Does anyone?

Because we, the people, don't know the answers to these seemingly obvious questions, we start to fret. We start to panic. As Captain Lovell (dramatized by Tom Hanks in Apollo 13) said (paraphrased), "We must not go bouncing off the walls, at each other's throats. Because we're just going to be back in the same place with the same problems." Now is the time for Apollo 13-style problem-solving. And that means solving the whole problem, wringing every risk and negative outcome out, and employing every means necessary before it is too late.

If everyone else knows this and I am the only one who didn't get the memo, I apologize. But so far for me, there's been a lot of ink spilled, but not a lot of focused problem-solving.

My 2 cents...

Commons Sense Dinner Fellowship #1

Six of us got together -- Stefan, Wyatt, Carl and me, later joined by Linda and Mariama -- to talk about what it means for our lives to be connected: to each other, to systems we don't fully understand, to a global economy, to and through technology.

It is a big and seemingly overwhelming topic, but we had a delightful time plumbing its depths and breadth together. I think the "together" part was our first lesson.

We talked about many things. Here are a few highlights:

• The complexity of the systems that support our everyday life (Food Inc., Wall Street, etc.) is beyond our ability to comprehend them or their effects.
• We have replaced personal love relationships and trust with artificial substitutes, like brand names.
• The empire that rises one day will fall the next.
• We need to heed the 80/20 principle and SIMPLIFY our lives.
• Connectedness and the intimacy of small groups is more important than ever
• The church needs to model the unplugging from the counterfeit and reconnecting in genuine ways.
• A Boston Globe article, The Joy of Boredom, points out that every "boring" nook and cranny of our lives threatens to be crowded by technology or media -- a dangerous possibility. We need pregnant pauses in our lives: less is more.
• Ezekiel 34 warns of the strong sheep and goats butting out the weak and then ruining the grazing and the watering hole essential for the weaker sheep and goats (vv17-19). A cautionary tale for how the wealthy work in our societies today.
• We need to encourage people to connect and share so they can access their own inner healing.
• We reminisced on times when we had the freedom of time to think hard and work through complex thoughts: college, theatre troupe, early days at a start-up with other like-minded folk.

Books we should look into:

• Community: The Structure of Belonging, Peter Block. This is a book we should consider reading as a group.
• A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving.
• The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul. It talks about the amorality of technology; technology just "demands" to be used.

In the spirit of full disclosure, we spent quite a bit of time talking about how Google has become the new evil empire. That said, I used Google and Google Book Search to find the links for this posting.

Citizen of the World?

"I come to Berlin as so many of my countrymen have come before, although tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for president, but as a citizen -- a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world..."

Barack Obama, Berlin Speech during Presidential Campaign, July 24, 2008

"What's at stake is the future of this extraordinary experiment in individual human freedom.
I am not a citizen of the world. I am a citizen of the United State of America. No government bureaucracy has the right to take from you the rights that God gave you..."

Newt Gingrich, "Hannity," Fox News, June 10, 2009

Within less than a year, two campaign speeches from two political leaders present two very different views of the concept "citizen of the world." One recognizes a common bond we all have as members of the human race, sharing a "hot, flat and crowded" world. The other claims that the American experiment is at risk because of such ideas -- that God's inalienable rights are voilated by such thinking.

There is an ideological fault line that cuts through the concept of a common destiny -- whether it be Americans as global citizens with Germans and Chinese, or New Englanders as national citizens with Alabamans or Montanans, or Waco natives as Texans along with their Mexican-born compadres in Brownsville.

There are strong political views on either side of this debate. Though it is tempting to dive into that debate, I want to spend my time differently here. I want to reflect on the underlying principles that give life to this debate in the first place. These are the same principles that drove every issue of the 2008 US presidential elections: national security, healthcare, the economy (and financial crisis), immigration, education, gun rights, gay rights, abortion. These battles of ideology have at least one thing in common: they are about to what degree these topics need to be considered part of our common interest. They are our "commons" problems.

Listening to these debates over the past several years -- amplified and brought into focus by the recent presidential election -- I have come to the conclusion that we as a people have grown less and less aware of the philosophical underpinnings of our political stances. As a result, our politics become hollow and contradictory. A focus on the "commons" helps me to see these debates in greater clarity. My hope is that, by highlighting the underlying issues of the commons, these debates can generate more light than heat.

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The concept "citizen of the world" implies that there is an important connection that one must recognize between people of the various nations of the world. It recognizes that globalization has connected everyone together, and that we cannot simply act independently. Actions of one group or nation can affect all the others. A failed Somali state is not just a problem for Somalia, but it fosters gangs of pirates that hijack the shipping lanes of our global trade. Public health policy in China is not a regional concern when influenza from there can be imported into the United States overnight through a traveler or a shipment of goods. Policies that govern the management of the South American rainforests are not just a local concern when we all depend upon them to absorb carbon dioxide and generate oxygen for our global environment. And failures of the Muslim world to provide safety and a reasonable standard of living result in the migration of dissatisfied Muslims to Europe and the US at the same time when these countries are tightening border control.

So, it seems that the concept of being a citizen of the world is an inevitable thing. This was the heart of then-candidate Obama's opening remarks in Berlin.

If inevitable, it would seem that Gingrich's rebuttal statements were as foolhardy as trying to restrain the wind. But, whatever your political persuasion, Gingrich is no fool. And he brings up the cost of "global citizenship." It is that, if you marry yourself to someone with whom you have (or want) nothing in common, you lose your independence and your freedoms. You become "unequally yoked" as the Bible declares when talking about marriage of a believer to a non-believer. Like two oxen pulling in different directions, you get nowhere but frustrated.

Both men make important points, whatever their political motivations. What I am more concerned about, though, is our ability as citizens to understand the choices we are making in light of these challenges. I believe that, if you are going to promote globalization for the purposes of maximizing shareholder value, then one has made one's self a citizen of the world. If one is going to ship American jobs to India to strengthen the bottom line, then one better care about the welfare of those in India and the geopolitics of Pakistan and Afghanistan that directly affect that region. If one is going to make computers cheaper and faster by manufacturing them in China, or borrow from them to fund a war against terror headquartered in Baghdad, then one better care about what's happening in China. And if we are going to consume a quarter of the world's fossil fuels with only 5 percent of its population, we need to understand how that trade imbalance affects our destiny and relationships with those whose oil we depend upon.

One does not have to think hard to come up with inconsistencies and contradictions in our policieis or our politics when it comes to these issues of being a citizen on the world. We are trying to hold onto our cake and eat it, too. Are we that dense as a people? That stupid? Are we so disconnected from reality? I think what has happened is that we have lost focus on the underlying philosophies that hold our complex world together.

We talk about freedoms and liberties as if they exist in a vacuum. God-given freedoms are inextricably bound to God-given responsibilities for stewardship. Nowhere in the Bible, for example, does it say explicitly that God has given us the rights to life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness. But it does say that we are our brother's keeper. It does say that the greatest human commandment is love of your neighbor. It does say that the first shall be last and the last shall be first.

We talk about free-market capitalism as if it exists in a vacuum. We hold to the principles of profit maximization, wealth creation and creative destruction as the nature of the free market. But we conveniently forget that free markets only work properly when information is available so that people are free to make rational choices. How can someone make a rational choice about buying a mortgage-backed security, as the now-bankrupt Norwegian nations did, when they think they are buying assets that are not nearly as risky as they were? Do we really think the American people would encourage house-flipping and refinancing the way we did if we realized that no one was responsible for pricing the risk that was being pushed into our financial system? I think it was not free-market economics itself that failed, but that we failed free-market economics because we failed to understand the near-ancient truth of the tragedy of the commons: what happens when free-market capitalists ignore the commons that each of them depend upon to do what they do.

So the debate around whether or not one is a citizen of the world is incomplete without first having a debate around what is in the global "commons." Is global environmental stewardship part of the commons, or are we all on our own to do what we think we should do? Is a common rule of law (they key innovation of the British Empire, and what makes outsourcing to India possible) something that everyone needs to buy into, or can we have global trade where not everyone abides by contract law? Does a global community watch on terrorism need to emerge, or can we each build "gated communities" to protect our own national interests (our near bankruptcy as a result of the Iraq war suggests gated communities may be out of our income range)?

When we can start having a real conversation about our "commons destiny," only then will we be able to truly understand whether or not we really mean what we say about being -- or not being -- a "citizen of the world."