The explosions that rocked BP’s Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico set in motion a series of environmental events that captured the attention of the world for much of 2010.
The news media’s coverage of the environmental harms caused by the disaster, however, was sporadic, as were reactions to it by the White House and environmental organizations. Unsurprisingly, the oil industry was relatively mute.
Instead, the focus was largely on stopping leaking oil and economic recovery. In fact, within one year of the disaster, BP’s profits soared, and today offshore drilling is expanding in more remote and fragile ecosystems. How can this be the case?
Our research, just published in the Canadian Review of Sociology, suggests the answer lies in the fact that social and political attention focused on high-status political actors and the economy over the actual properties of environmental damage.
The oil spill fast became the largest human-made environmental disaster in American history. U.S. federal scientists estimate that five million barrels of oil flowed into the Gulf of Mexico during the spill.
Albeit shocking, oil spills are far more common than one might imagine. A year before the Gulf disaster, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) responded to 178 spills, and the year after, to 44. Yet few of these spills garnered significant national or international news media or political attention.
Perhaps more alarming is that although some of the oil from the spill was captured, a significant amount still remains at sea or onshore, along with the chemical dispersants used to dissolve oil slicks and subsea plums that many scientists believe adversely affect marine life and humans.
The chronic long-term effects of the disaster continue to plague the Gulf’s ecosystem and will continue for the foreseeable future. Despite this, BP’s profits continue to rise, and the company proudly advertises its commitment to building American prosperity. Why is there no outrage, and what happened to concern over the environment?
Perhaps BP has weathered the storm, so to speak, because it paid out more than $12 billion in claims to individuals, business, and government entities. As BP notes, funds have been directed at making the people and communities adversely affected by the accident whole again.
BP has also done much to cosmetically restore the Gulf’s coastal ecology. The U.S. federal government, likewise, has increased oversight and operational safety policies for offshore drilling. Yet oil continues to spill. So far in 2014, the NOAA has already responded to 67 incidents and the year is not over. When oil spills, does anyone notice?
To answer these questions, we conducted an analysis of news media coverage and response by the White House, environmental NGOs and oil companies to the environmental harms of the BP spill. We examined each week of 2010 to see which had the most engagement of the oil spill and coded the properties of environmental harms occurring at the time.
Conventional wisdom and previous academic scholarship suggests that media and social and political actors respond to issues and events that are easier to portray visually and are simpler to explain. As the old news adage goes, “If it bleeds, it leads.” In environmental terms, this means that oil-soaked birds are more likely to gain attention than the complex effects of chemical compounds in oil dispersants like Corexit on marine life.
Partially to our surprise, our research found that news media, the White House, and environmental NGOs predominantly respond to each other and not to the properties of the environmental harms. We found that the timing of social and political engagement of the oil spill largely occurred in reaction to statements by high-status actors rather than the actual ecological destruction. The oil industry conspicuously remained silent.
We also found that political feedback loops explain why the spill quickly moved from being framed as an environmental disaster to one of economic devastation and legal liability. After the well was sealed, the oil industry began to react, promoting its cleanup efforts and commitment to settle legal and financial claims against them. This prompted others to shift gears accordingly. This might explain a 2012 Pew Research study that finds 65 per cent of Americans in favour of increasing offshore oil drilling — surpassing pre-spill support levels.
The findings are important for Canadians, as oil exploration expands along the Atlantic coast and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. A recent Halifax Media Co-op article notes that in late 2013, 6,000 litres of crude oil spilled from the Hibernia platform off Newfoundland and between 1997 and 2013 approximately 1,100 barrels of oil have leaked into Canada’s Atlantic waters.
This brings into question how effectively the Canadian government and those responsible for an accident would respond and whether anyone is willing to notice the ecological threats currently posed by offshore oil production. Until news media, activists, government and the oil industry respond to environmental harms, not to mention the general public, the environment will silently suffer.
Andreas Hoffbauer is a PhD student in sociology, University of Toronto, and Howard Ramos is associate professor of sociology, Dalhousie University.