“The complete lack of evidence is the surest sign that the conspiracy is working.”
- author unknown
"“In fact, one thing that I have noticed . . . is that all of these conspiracy theories depend on the perpetrators being endlessly clever. I think you'll find the facts also work if you assume everyone is endlessly stupid.”
- author unknown
"The popularity of conspiracy theories is explained by people's desire to believe that there is - some group of folks who know what they're doing”
- Damon Knight
American Science Fiction Author, Editor, Critic and Fan
1922 - 2002
“Many journalists have fallen for the conspiracy theory of government. I do assure you that they would produce more accurate work if they adhered to the cock-up theory.”
-Sir Bernard Ingham
Chief Press Secretary to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and
prominent opponent to wind energy
1932Sarah
Palin promoted the slogan "Drill,
Baby, Drill!" during her 2008 Vice Presidential campaign as the Republican candidate. In April 2010, President Barack Obama came out in favor of off-shore drilling, reversing his earlier more pro-alternative and renewable energy / pro-environmental concerns position.
On April 20, 2010, two days before Earth Day, the Gulf of Mexico oil drilling rig
Deepwater Horizon exploded, and
subsequently sank into the gulf, killing 11. It appears likely to be one of the largest oil spills in history. Atttempts to control the volume of oil include controlled burning. President Obama now appears to be at least temporarily returning to his original more cautious position on off-shore drilling. Proponents of the practice, including Sarah
Palin, have for the moment gone relatively silent.
Meanwhile, the conspiracy theorists on the political Right have gone out of their ever-loving minds; the further to the right, the crazier the conspiracies they promote while trying to politicize the disaster. I will provide the highlights of these conspiracy theories, but first...
A little background on Earth Day; Earth Day is a core part of at least some of these conspiracies, so a brief overview is
germane. Back in 1970, a U.S. senator from Wisconsin, Gaylord Nelson, came up with the idea for a nation-wide environmental "teach-in" day in response to widespread environmental degradation. His proposal achieved an unexpected success, participation by an estimated 20 million people back in 1970. The celebration of Earth Day has spread to some 175 countries, and 500 million people. It is, in other words, no longer an event unique to the United States. Senator Nelson had the bright idea for this annual event, in part to emulate the college and university 'teach-ins' held in response to the
Viet Nam war; and in part as a response to witnessing as a senator the damage done by an oil spill in 1969, near Santa Barbara, California and the lack of a government response.
Ah, history! The more things change, the more some things stay the same...just variations.
One of the key pieces of misinformation in some but not all of these conspiracy theories is the ignorance of the correct meaning of the acronym "SWAT". In the context of the oil rig explosion, it refers NOT to "Special Weapons and Tactics Teams, the type of law enforcement special ops personnel, garbed in bullet proof black clothing, bristling with sexy weapons and lethal skills. It refers to the personnel of the Minerals Management Service, the branch of the Department of the Interior responsible, among other things, for the management of safety and the environment in drilling for oil and natural gas on the federal Outer Continental shelf. The Federal Continental Shelf includes an area off the coast of the eastern United States covered by the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico off the southern United States, a large area under the Pacific Ocean off the western United States, an area around Alaska including land covered by the Gulf of
Alaska, the Bering Sea, the Chukchi Sea, and the Beaufort Sea (sorry, but I love geography). The Department of Interior SWAT
teams are assigned to check the blow out valves and other safety compliance and records - not shoot anyone. They are more geeks than 'gun bunnies'.
So, lets go through some of the right wing media 'talking heads' and their notions about the oil rig explosion conspiracies. Lets start with what many might consider the biggest - Rush Limbaugh. Rush has made not one but two different sets of comments on the explosion, the SWAT teams assignment, and the coincidence of the event taking place around the time of Earth Day. Rush states the rig blew up on April 21st, the day before - as he likes to deride it -'
Erf Day', as an indication that the rig explosion might have been caused by sabotage carried out by environmental extremists. Except that the explosion and fire occurred on April 20
th, if that makes any difference. And Rush claims that Earth Day was started because of the Cleveland River catching on fire - not the Santa Barbara oil spill. There was a
Cuyahoga river fire in 1969, the year that Senator Nelson began working on Earth Day for April 1970; and it was related to an oil slick on the river along with debris and other pollution, but it was an ongoing problem, not related to a specific 'spill'. The same river had caught on fire before - in 1868, 1883, 1887, 1912, 1922, 1936, 1941, 1948, and in 1952 -- the 1952 fire was more extensive and costly than the 1969 conflagration. So while the river catching on fire did draw attention to the polluted state of the river, which in turn influenced federal clean water legislation in 1972, this was not a new experience for Cleveland, but rather more of a chronic problem that flared up from time to time - pardon the pun.
But we're talking here about Rush, so we can hardly expect a high threshold of fact to be characterize his rant. Rush goes on to claim that the rescheduling of cap and trade legislation is a red flag signalling that the environmentalists who opposed this kind of drilling because it was more dangerous than proponents advocating it would admit (and who were correct, as it turns out) also were in opposition to nuclear power proposals from President Obama. So Rush finds it
plausible to float to his
audience that this might be sabotage, instead of an accident. That environmentalist wackos would some how sneak onto an oil rig 42 miles out in the ocean - undetected; blow it up - remaining unscathed, where others were injured or killed; escape - again undetected; all with the intention of causing exactly the kind of damage they oppose. Lets us not forget, without taking credit for their sabotage, and skipping the opportunity to make their point clearly. This conspiracy has more holes in it than the Deepwater Horizon has oil leaks!
A more fact based cause and effect theory can be traced to more recent developments than the '69 river fire and earth day eco-commandos. Under the Bush administration, dating back just to 2003. Oil companies doing off-shore drilling were exempted from the requirements for additional safety measures that these same companies, like
BP, are required to have in place by an overwhelming majority, virtually ALL, other countries in the world which have ocean drilling for oil. Experts indicate that had this equipment been in place this explosive fire and spill, and resulting complications would have been avoided.
According to a 2007 study by the Minerals Management Service, there were 39 rig blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico between 1992 - 2006, which suggests that while the explosion of the
BP Deepwater Horizon rig, one of the largest ever constructed, is a bigger event than the others, it is far less rare than most of us were aware --- another important factual
omission from Rush Limbaugh, as he insists we can do this kind of drilling safely.
By
omission, I don't mean that Rush Limbaugh is deliberately withholding the information; I mean the man is profoundly ignorant, and doesn't care that he is inaccurate or uninformed. At least, he doesn't care enough to inform himself or his listeners with any information that doesn't suit his predetermined position.
Another little factoid that Rush either doesn't know or doesn't care about is that
Haliburton, you know, that company that Cheney was CEO of from 1995 - 2000, was the company servicing the
Deepwater Horizon, performing a job called 'cementing' that is connected to the probable cause of the explosion -------- along with 18 other instances of those 39 rig blowouts addressed in the 2007 Minerals Management Service study. But that doesn't make for a Rush approved conspiracy theory, so it is unknown or omitted, just like he omitted the information that
BP did not prepare for anything resembling a major spill, in the arrogance that it simply couldn't and wouldn't happen.
Rush then goes on to quote his 'official climatologist, Dr. Roy Spencer' who according to Rush claims that the Gulf of Mexico and similar oceanic bodies of water simply take this in stride, oil leaks along the ocean floor all the time, and in Rush's words "the ocean's pretty tough, it just eats it up." Intelligent design proponent Dr. Spencer, affilardiated with the University of Alabama at Huntsville, may have to eat his words, which could be a good alternative to eating seafood out of the Gulf of Mexico any time soon, or for a long time to come. Huntsville is quite a ways inland, but it is looking as if all of the Gulf states will be affected, from Texas eastw to the gulf coast of Florida.
Limbaugh goes on to state that the oil spill from the Exxon Valdez in Prince William sound is all cleaned up - in Limbaugh's words, because "They were wiping off the rocks with Dawn dishwater detergent and paper towels and so forth. The place is pristine now." Except that it is not - but Rush doesn't want any legitimate opposition to the perils of drilling, so he leaves out those annoying facts, AGAIN.
The Exxon Valdez accident occurred in part because of Exxon being cheap - the ship was single hulled instead of double hulled, the captain was a drunk, the crew involved with piloting the ship were inadequately trained and had not had the mandated safety measure time off to rest, and equipment was in poor repair including a crucial
Raycas radar system, among other factors.
According to the
NOAA study in 2007, more than 26,000 gallons of crude oil remain in the contaminated shoreline, and is only declining at the rate of 4% per year -- far from the land or water 'eating it up'. Twenty years after the event, a number of studies show the area is still
ecologically and economically
devastated, and the effects of the spill are lasting far far longer than anticipated - by Exxon. Salmon and herring and other fishing industries have yet to recover from the damage, and tourism and sports industries are are still adversely affected, and a native American corporation, intended to help the various
Eskimo groups had to file chapter 11 bankruptcy. There were even
multiple suicides in the area attributed to problems from the spill. Not what anyone with a factually based reality could call 'pristine' in terms of clean up of that oil spill. But that's what you get when you listen or watch
ol' Rush Limbaugh, much like the skewed information that comes from Fox News. Follow Rush here for yourself:
www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_042910/content/01125113.guest.htmlMuch of this information about the Exxon Valdez spill after-effects, incidentally, comes from studies done by the state of Alaska, home of "drill, baby, drill" it's- all-safe Sarah
Palin, who as governor of the state that did all of these studies should know better than most how UN-safe some of this drilling really is when an oil spill results. I would also expect that as
Palin claims to have oil expertise, she would be - or SHOULD be - familiar with the largest oil spills in history, which involved larger amounts of oil, and which led to better understanding of oil spill consequences (both long term and short term) as well as triggering advances in clean up techniques. For those readers who are as unfamiliar with risks and damages from massive oil spills, I will refer you to lazy-style research, on
Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_spills. They provide a lovely graph.
And then there is my personal favorite, the conspiracy theory being promoted by right wing talking heads like Michael Savage, the claim that it was North Korea torpedoing the
BP Deepwater Horizon. Some versions have this as an attack by North Korea on the United States for --- fill in the blank
reasons. Other versions claim that because the South Korea industrial giant Hyundai corporation built the rig, that this was actually an attempt by North Korea to attack South Korea. It is rumored that South Korea / Hyundai is already contracted to build more of these rigs, so I'm unclear as to how giving them even MORE business, building a replacement rig, is a damaging attack; but heck, this is conspiracy theory thinking, not logic.
We have another right wing talking head, Alex Jones, who is promoting the conspiracy that the 'accident' is actually an intentional attempt to make oil more scarce so that oil speculation will be profitable again, and working in the 'one world government' paranoia angle.
Then we have Mark Levin, who helped Betsy
McCaughey promote the death panel hysteria before
Palin made it popular, who is positing that the oil rig was really blown up by terrorists, until he gets a caller who has a different convoluted theory - all very
technobabble, which appeals to conspiracy fans - to explain what really happened.
Geeze, I guess we don't need to wait for that investigation - talk radio has an unverified, unconfirmed CALLER to tell us all we really need to know.
I could go on with talking heads, pundits, and correlate all of the "
internets" right wing conspiracy theories. As the oil spill spreads, I'm sure the theories will grow along with it, providing at least a few laughs for the rest of us sane people during this crisis. A few facts go a long way to 'explode' the conspiracies.
Rep. Joe Barton, R - Texas 
There is a certain, odd, even freakish resemblance between the human and the cartoon character....that is BP CEO Tony Hayward on the right.
I decided to make a revision to this post, with a better comparison between cartoon and political figure -- Senator Joe Lieberman, (I)CT, and another cartoon hound, Droopy Dog.
