[Peakoil] The Big Fix: documentary exposes BP, U.S. Gov't on Gulf disaster/

[Keith]

Looks to be a controversial and useful project. The pressure is on big oil (and petroleum in general) from a number of angles.
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Keith Thomas
myrmecia at gmail.com
074 2929 4146
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Begin forwarded message:

On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 4:44 PM, Culture Change <info at culturechange.org 
<mailto:info at culturechange.org>> wrote:

The Big Fix: documentary exposes BP, U.S. Gov't on Gulf disaster
Interview: the Tickells, filmmakers
by Jan Lundberg, oil industry analyst and eco-activist
http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/839/1/

One of the world's biggest environmental crimes has been more or
less forgotten. This is part of our collective guilt as the world's
ecosystem continues its accelerated collapse. But the new
documentary film The Big Fix takes a detailed, daring look at what
happened in the Gulf of Mexico with BP's Macondo offshore oil
drilling rig. The story and facts that emerge are more than disturbing.

The movie is soon getting its major US national release in theaters and
on Netflix. Viewers will be made to recall the unsettling images of
oil slicks, fouled fowl, suddenly unemployed fisher folk, and empty
assurances by BP and the Feds.

The partially U.S.-owned British oil company has its origins in
geopolitical skullduggery in Iran, explained in the film's narration
and images. The history makes more convincing the subsequent telling
of of the corporation's and the U.S. government's going to great
pains to lie that all was being done that could be done to minimize
the blowout's damage and to clean up the mess.

But there was even more going on, undisclosed to the public, such as
the extent and effects of massive application of toxic Corexit. This
amounted to a double assault on the Gulf, done deliberately. Those
who believe that the whole episode from start to finish was an
accident, and that industry and government did their best with a bad
situation, are sadly ignorant. Or, they wish to simply keep driving
and consuming petroleum in other ways, because deep change is
inconvenient or frightening.

Corexit, a dispersant banned in the UK, was immediately employed by
BP soon after the blowout, and was ordered stopped by the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency. But BP kept on openly using it, and
then secretly so, as The Big Fix tells us.

Even more outrageous was that when the undersea oil well was capped,
and scrutiny by the average news-consumer slacked off, people were
soon misled by corrupt spokespersons that the oil was benignly
disappearing. There were contradictory reports of remaining oil
pollution that flew in the face of U.S. and industry claims that the
oil was 75% gone. It certainly was not gone, and the bulk of it
remains today -- perhaps in part from additional ocean floor oil
leaks. The oil has slowly been moving into the Atlantic, and may
damage the Eastern U.S. seaboard.

*What to do? The activist response*

Some environmental activists during the crisis' height did more than
hand-wringing and crying out for a clean energy economy some day. We
instead called for an immediate step-down in U.S. oil consumption to
compensate for what the BP blowout was spewing. Our coalition, World
Oil Reduction for the Gulf, was gathering steam when the blowout was
capped, but everything naturally went back to business as usual.

But some activists, such as Josh and Rebecca Tickell, were just
getting heated up. They could not keep their muckraking lens away
from the Gulf, and be like almost everyone else who just moved on in
their minds and ignored the plight of the Gulf. The BP blowout and
subsequent reports of persistent damage to wildlife and human health
were enough to draw the filmmakers to the New Orleans region, Josh
Tickell's boyhood home, to check out the whole situation in 2011.
Along for the ride with the Tickells on their rolling
headquarters-bus was Peter Fonda, friend to the sea and bait for
star-struck Cajuns. The Big Fix's first dramatic device was to show
footage of Fonda in Easy Rider, synced with Steppenwolf's Born to Be
Wild hard-rock tune.
_ _

Read the remainder of this report at
http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/839/1/

* * * * *

Culture Change
Publisher and Editor: Jan Lundberg,
independent oil industry analyst
P.O. Box 3387, Santa Cruz, CA 95063 USA
tel./fax: 1-215-243-3144 <tel:1-215-243-3144>
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