Living the American Green

On hearing the news that the best and brightest minds on the case of the gulf oil spill have decided to double the estimate of how much oil has been leaking into the Gulf of Mexico since this thing started, we have an important question.  At this point, it seems like a complete toss up: is this the best PR way to play this thing, or the worst?  Our heartless money driven corporate overlords started us out slow, gentle even.  But there regularly scheduled upgrades to the estimate of how much is leaking keep making things feel worse and worse.  Every time we look back there are a new number of barrels being accredited to the same picture of gushing brown stuff.  How much is a barrel, again? 

A history of the numbers

Now, the spill currently stands at an estimate of 25,000 to 30,000 barrels a day, or 1 Exxon Valdez every 8 to 10 days.  That’s terrifying, and really hard to put into a decent fraction.  But because BP knows that Americans suck at numbers, they started us out reaal slow.  Remember back when it was a leak of 1,000 barrels a day?  Oh, those were the times, friends.  Those were the times.  Then, it became 5,000 barrels a day, which was bad, but still just peanuts to the real oil leaks of the past.  We held solid at 5k for a while, but the murmurs were starting that that was probably pretty low… and then suddenly, after a brief dalliance with listing everything by the gallon (which led to VERY large numbers being splashed on lower-thirds cable wide) we settled on 12,000 to 19,000 barrels daily.

Important to remember at this point:  The story has been told in such a way that it feels like the leak is getting worse and worse, and it started out small.  Nope.  This is a re-evaluation of how much it has been leaking the entire 53 or so days we’ve been doing this thang.

To pick back up our oily and sordid tale, BP was claiming for a while they were capturing 15,000 barrels a day, which would be great news if that was more then 75% of the oil leaking out.  Now, today, we jumped again, all the way to 25,000 to 30,000 barrels a day, meaning that the capture process is still leaving us with 15 times the original estimate pouring into the gulf every day.

To get back to my initial question for a moment: was it better to slowly reveal how bad this thing actually was, in a way that we all can’t really understand, or would it have been better to be honest upfront and not have the death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts news story every three days about the oil spill being worse then we thought?  We here at the American Green are no experts at PR (which explains in part why no one is reading this), but we think BP played this right: the last 53 days have all been trying to guess at the numbers, not focus on the horrifying amount of damage and the future of a barren and lifeless east coast.

Man, numbers are so much fun!  All these calculations of leak rates keep us from looking at those other numbers like “number of people not working today in there usual fishing jobs” or “number of shrimp I get to eat this year” or “number of beach vacations canceled” or even “number of blades of grass and pieces of coral that are now black”.

Can we just settle on a damn leak number so we know how outraged to be?  We can’t keep doubling out outrage every time the amount we’re dealing with doubles!

In other news, Environmentalism may be dead.    Killed by the antipathy of a constantly moving and horrific set of goalposts.

Who wrote this one?  TheAmericanGreen - The founding member of the American Green institute, and a New York based producer and writer hoping to make the jump from "freelancer" to "documentary producer". Read more from this author