Street roots., April 17, 2015, Page 8, Image 8

Page 8
News
Street Roots • April 17-23, 2015
CARLOS BARRIA/REUTERS
A plastic bag contains oil from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill south of Freemason Island; La., on May 7,2010. Five million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf after a BP oil rig exploded and sank:
BY EM ILY GREEN
Stone and The Nation, and her next article
will appear in the June issue of Harper’s
Magazine.
ive years ago this April, the United
When Juhasz was 26 and working as a
States watched one of the worst
legislative
assistant on Capitol Hill, she says,
environmental disasters in history
unfold in the Gulf of Mexico as 5 million she was shocked to discover the amount of
influence corporations had on members of
barrels of oil spilled into the sea. First came
Congress, and she switched her focus to
the explosion on British Petroleum’s
addressing those influences. Her attention
Deepwater Horizon oil rig, killing 11
quickly turned to the “most powerful and
workers, and then the subsequent leakage
wealthy
influence at that time,” she says:
from an underwater pipe. For 87 days, oil
“the oil sector.” During the 18 years since,
flowed untethered as the nation watched in
Juhasz has maintained that focus and is one
horror.
of the foremost experts on the industry
In the years since, the accident and its
today.
aftermath have exited center stage, losing
Her reporting has taken her to Iraq,
the attention of most people living outside
Afghanistan and Ecuador, and she’s a
of the Gulf region. But it hasn’t lost the
regular media commentator, appearing on
attention of Antonia Juhasz.
programs including “Democracy Now!,”
Juhasz, an oil-industry watchdog, author
“PBS NewsHour,” Fox’s “Hannity &
and award-winning journalist based in San
Francisco, has investigated the impact of the Colmes” and NBC’s “Today” show.
In 2010, she received the Project
spill and has been following BP’s trial. In
Censored Award for her alternative annual
her 2011 book, “Black Tide,” she chronicled
report on Chevron. She’s also authored
the experiences of people living in the Gulf
“The Bush Agenda” (2006), “The Tyranny of
region, and the families of men who died in
Oil”
(2008) and contributed to six other
the explosion, the public policies that set
books about the oil industry and
the event in motion and the oil industry’s
globalization.
response.
As the trial over BP’s role in the oil spill
Emily Green: What effect has the
approaches its conclusion, Juhasz’s
experience of immersing yourself in the lives of
continued coverage of events has appeared
the BP oil spill’s victims, and then watching
in national publications including Rolling
ST A FF W R IT E R
a
the trial - where it looks like BP might escape
virtually unscathed- what kind of impact has
this had on you?
Antonia Juhasz: First, I wouldn’t say
that I agree that they’re unscathed. While
the public has looked away, it’s still a very
full-blown disaster, including the legal
portion, which is still unfolding. BP is still
on trial for potentially as much as a $14
billion fine, and under thé Clean Water Act,
it is still finishing a process called the
Natural Resource Damages Assessment. It’s
very important for public attention to be
focused on these processes — even though
it’s five years later — to make sure they are
held to account
The thing that’s been very frustrating,
covering this for five years and in getting to
know people impacted very personally,
including the families of the men who died
on the rig, is how quickly public attention
just disappeared. When it comes to public
policy to regulate the oil industry, there’s
been no change whatsoever, from a policy
perspective, to regulate offshore oil drilling.
The reason why that happened was that the
public stopped paying attention. There was
pressure that had been building for several
months on policy makers, and it looked like
there was going to be policy change, but
they just waited out the public’s attention,
and when the public turned away, the policy
evaporated.
Today, instead of better protections for
offshore drilling, we have President Obama
proposing to open up the Atlantic Coast for
offshore drilling, and that’s definitely been
the saddest part. There are moments when
we can come together and support
communities that are in trouble, but then
we have to stay focused in order for that
compassion to turn into action, and that
ended pretty quickly outside of the Gulf of
Mexico.
E.G.: BP has said there is no way it can
pay anywhere near $14 billion, and it looks
like it might get a much smaller fine as a
result,
A J .: What they did, which was really
sneaky, is they split off their U.S. offshore
arm from the rest of their U.S. business,
and they’re saying, basically, that their
offshore business doesn’t have enough
money — and it’s just ludicrous.
I mean this is something oil companies
do very, very often to avoid lawsuits, which
is to just split off the offending arm of the
company from the parent, and the parent is
what we should be looking at, and the
parent company, which is BP based in
London, made over $200 billion in revenue