The BP oil spill might not be the accident we thought. Commentators are now saying it's the result of depleting oil reserves. Welcome to the age of "tough oil" where drilling will go deeper and further. The result: more environmental devastation by oil companies.
Writing in the New Yorker Elizabeth Kolbert writes: "Having consumed most of the world's readily accessible oil, we are now compelled to look for fuel in ever more remote places, and to extract it in ever riskier and more damaging ways. The Deepwater Horizon well was being drilled in five thousand feet of water, to a total depth of eighteen thousand feet … While the point of "peak oil" may or may not have been reached, what Michael Klare, a professor at Hampshire College, has dubbed the Age of Tough Oil has clearly begun. This year, the United States' largest single source of imported oil is expected to be the Canadian tar sands. Oil from the tar sands comes in what is essentially a solid form: it has to be either strip-mined, a process that leaves behind a devastated landscape, or melted out of the earth using vast quantities of natural gas."
In other words, the oil spill goes beyond BP's incompetence or greed. The tough oil theory suggests there could be many more of these disasters ahead.
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