A Dead Zone Was Already in the Gulf

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One note of caution: If the drill casing is shattered below the surface of the Gulf and is eroding, there is an extremely small possibility that the entire wellhead and drilling hole could collapse. If that happens, all bets are off. The entire contents of that oil reserve would then flood into the Gulf of Mexico.

Great Showmanship, Poor Statesmanship

There is your answer, the probable conclusion to the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster. But it's one the public is not likely to accept. As with the Toyota case a few months back, we want villains to blame and our pound of flesh, right now.

Politicians line up to point fingers at the other party's complicity in the damage, while the President is seen as impotent in his response to the crisis. To be fair, few elected officials have stood up and simply told the truth on the matter. Instead they seem to relish the role of torchbearers, leading the crowds to their public stoning of the guilty.

Government by mob action does not a federal republic make.

Once again, a crisis has highlighted our duality and ambivalence about oil. Many leaders and environmentalists, for example, call this event further proof that we need to walk away from the Oil Age—and then jump into their SUVs and speed to their next appointments.

The media haven't helped. We have learned the names of birds that were close to extinction and damaged by the oil spill, yet few can name even one of the 11 men killed in the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon. (To see their names or leave a condolence message, click here.) We are gratified that so many volunteers have quickly cleaned off the oil that covered the region's wildlife, but we don't want to face the fact that most of those animals have also ingested the crude and will likely not survive.

But the biggest thing we have not been informed of, especially considering the character of the current crisis, is that there was already a nearly 9,000-square-mile Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico. We weren't aware that it was caused in large part by the massive amount of fertilizer runoff from farms across our Midwest, fed into local rivers and tributaries, and carried by the Mississippi out into the Gulf.

Change No One Believes In

President Obama stated that this disaster has again taught us that we need to move more quickly to alternative energy. Apparently he was not aware of a study published in last October's Environmental Science & Technology, which showed that the current mandate to increase ethanol production to 36 billion gallons a year by 2022 has the potential to increase the size of the Gulf's Dead Zone substantially. More ethanol, the study concluded, would mean using even more fertilizers for biofuels crops such as corn, soy, switchgrass, and stover.

Then again, there's a reason you know everything about the current BP disaster and so little about the Gulf's quarter-century-old Dead Zone. It's easy to film oil balls and plumes, animals covered in oil, and empty beaches for the nightly news stories, but water that's hypoxic and devoid of oxygen just looks like water on your HDTV.

The president seems O.K. with trading one environmental disaster in the Gulf for another. The truth is that both can be corrected—in time.

Ed Wallace is a recipient of the Gerald R. Loeb Award for business journalism, given by the Anderson School of Business at UCLA, and is a member of the American Historical Assn. He reviews new cars every Friday morning at 7:15 on Fox Four's Good Day, contributes articles to Businessweek.com, and hosts the top-rated daytime talk show, Wheels, 8:00 to 1:00 Saturdays on 570 KLIF AM. E-mail: wheels570@sbcglobal.net, and read all of Ed's work at his news site, www.insideautomotive.com.

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