Street Roots • April 17-23, 2015
last year.
They’ve also known for five years that
they are facing these huge fines. None of
the fines being proposed are at all outside of
what people knew from the very beginning
were likely to be part of the outcome - so
BP has had five years to prepare financially,
and it’s its responsibility to be prepared for
the fines and to be able to cover them, so
it’s totally ludicrous that it’s finding it can’t
come up with the cash.
News
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E.G.: Did BP split off the offshore arm
prior to the spill?
A J .: No, it only did it recently.
E.G.: Has BP made any changes in its
Practices that would help to prevent similar
spills in the future?
A J .: Not anything particularly
noteworthy, no. And nor has the industry or
the regulators. Some changes have occurred
on the margins. There are more federal
investigators to monitor offshore drilling
operations in the Gulf of Mexico, for
example. And the agency that makes money
off of offshore drilling and that which
regulates it in the U.S. are now two separate
agencies. But, every expert I’ve interviewed
is deeply concerned that it is not only
“business as usual” in offshore drilling but
that things are getting more dangerous as
the companies drill even deeper and farther
from shore.
P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F A N T O N IA JU H A S Z
Antonia Juhaszdeparts the Atlantis Research Vessel after joining-a two-week research mission in 2014 at the site of the BP Deepwater Horizon
oil spill. Juhasz’s book “Black Tide” extensively covers the spill and its aftermath in the Gulf of Mexico.
Attempted regulations have been quite
weak but have started to trickle in. Bût the
most significant change has only been
voluntary measures by the industry to use
what they are calling “safer cars” or
“reinforced rail cars.” The problem is that
there’s now been a slew of new crude-oil-
train incidents that have involved those new
“safer cars,” and those cars have punctured
and exploded just like the weaker cars have,
It seems like one of the main problems is
that the primary type of crude oil being
moved by rail in the United States is the
Bakken crude from North Dakota, which is
highly volatile and is more like a gasoline in
that sense than traditional crudes, and that
when the trains carrying Bakken oil derail
and as it turns out, trains derail a lot — they
not only spill the oil they are carrying; they
also have a tendency to explode, which is
why they’ve been dubbed “bomb trains.”
E.G.: Five years later, how does the
environment in the area around the spill and
the community that depends on economic
benefits tied to that area of the Gulf of Mexico
compare to how it was prior to the accident?
A.Ju. Some areas have been totally
devastated, while others are recovered. It’s
a mixed picture, as it is a huge body of water
and huge part of the country, and some
parts were hit harder and longer than
others. For example, the African-American
fishing community of Point a la Hache, La.,
where I have spent a lot of time doing
interviews, has been totally decimated. They
are oystermen, primarily, and, after
generations of making their living from
oystering, those who could leave town did,
and for those forced to stay, the outlook is
grim. The hardest-hit beaches in Louisiana
are still totally closed to shrimping,
oystering, etc. But other areas are back to
normal or even doing better than before the
spill. Many animal species have suffered
greatly, such as dolphins, which continue to
die in dramatically larger numbers than
before the spill. Oil still washes up on some
beaches and still clogs marshes, adding to
coastal erosion. But some beaches are
pristine. It’s going to be a long time before
we know the full impacts.
E.G.: Here in Portland we have a track
record for valuing socially responsible,
companies, yet our landscape is densely
sprinkled with Chevron, ARCO, 76 and Shell
gas stations. Environmental impact aside, do
you have any examples from your research of
how these oil companies are exploiting human
rights? W
A J .: Working in the oil sector is now the
most deadly job in America byanenorm ous
• margin, particularly because of the
P H O T O C O U R T E S E Y O F A N T O N IA J U H A S Z
Juhasz works'as a reporter in 2012 from Afghanistan, where she followed the trail o f oil
reserves, interviewing villagers along the way. In an article for The Atlantic resulting from her
tour o f the country, she said, “The result is clear, and fa r from unique to Afghanistan: As
development o f the oil and gas sector has risen, so too has violence and insecurity.”
dangerous Bakken region oil refineries.
Communities that live next to refineries
deal regularly with companies that just
flagrantly break the Clean Air Act and the
Clean Water Act for years and years and
years - but the fines are so small, it doesn’t
matter, and the regulations are so
infrequently implemented that it doesn’t
matter.
I’ve written extensively in my books, and
in the three alternative annual reports on
Chevron that I edited, about growth of oil
companies abroad, and in these locations
around the world, including Ecuador most
recently— an Ecuadorian court held that
Chevron owes that country billions of dollars
for environmental human health abuse -
there’s a well-documented track record of
human rights abuses in the .operation,
production, transporting and refining of oil.
E.G.: Should the people of Portland be
concerned about the crude oil being
transported through their city?
A J .: Most definitely. The National
Transportation Safety Board, which is an
independent federal agency that investigates
transportation accidents in the United
States, has said very clearly that regulations
have simply not kept up with the dramatic
increase in the amount of crude being
transported by rail in the United States and
that where possible, those trains should be
diverted out of sensitive areas and
population centers.
E.G.; This past September, you wrote an
op-ed that urged the federal government to
cancel its contracts with Exxon. A t Street
Roots, we reported on our city’s recent purchase
of $20 million in ExxonMobil bonds. Why
single out Exxon as the company to stop
supporting?
A J .: I had written a cover article for The
Advocate magazine called “What’s wrong
with Exxon,” and this was a follow-up. The
cover article was written because
ExxonMobil has the lowest score in the
history of Human Rights Campaign
Corporate Equality Index. Exxon routinely
gets negative 25 out of 100 possible points
because not only do they not have
protections and health benefits for their
LGBT employees and their families, but
when they acquire a new company, they
See JUHASZ, page 11