McKibben on the invisible oil slick

Bill McKibben nails it in, Oil Slick You Can’t See Threatens the Entire Ocean:

If you think that slick of oil spreading across the Gulf of Mexico is a nasty sight … well, it is. And so we’ll probably do something about it. Within hours of the crude reaching the coast, an aide to President Barack Obama said new offshore drilling would be put on hold.

But here’s the problem: An even bigger slick — this one of acid — is spreading across the entire ocean. It’s doing damage far more profound than even the oil. But since you can’t see it, nothing’s happened.

The day after the gulf rig blew out, the National Research Council quietly issued a report on what exactly carbon dioxide, which is warming the atmosphere, is doing to seawater. As the oceans absorb some of the carbon our factories and engines pour into the atmosphere, the “chemistry of the ocean is changing at an unprecedented rate and magnitude,” the report said. “The rate of change exceeds any known to have occurred for at least the past hundreds of thousands of years.”

Already fishermen report that oysters aren’t reproducing, and biologists are saying that coral reefs may not survive the century. “This increase in [ocean] acidity threatens to decimate entire species, including those that are at the foundation of the marine food chain,” said Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J.

…

At a conference in spring 2009, Nancy Knowlton, an American researcher, described what’s at stake with refreshing bluntness: “Coral reefs will cease to exist as physical structures by 2100, perhaps 2050.” She’s far from alone in her view. “We are overwhelming the system,” says Richard Zeebe, associate professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii. “It’s pretty outrageous what we’ve done.”

Pretty outrageous, sure. But here’s the thing: Doing anything about it would mean confronting fossil fuel. Not telling BP to put better blowout preventers on its rigs — that’s easy. We’ll definitely do that. But facing up, really facing up to our addiction to fossil fuel, that’s hard. British Petroleum pretended to do it in the 1990s, when with great fanfare it changed its name to Beyond Petroleum. But it didn’t mean it.

…

Let’s say we were serious about saving the ocean from crude oil, and from the acidification of carbon. We’d have to stop using oil, not to mention coal and gas. We’d have to take the steps urgently to move the world off fossil fuel and on to renewable energy. Those steps aren’t impossible, but they do require a resource we’re short on: political will.

Yep. I couldn’t agree more strongly. In fact, just the other day I said to my wife that if we could see the CO2 in the air, and we routinely published/broadcast/blogged photos of large cities covered in a filthy, smog-like blanket, the effort to muster public support for reducing those emissions would be dramatically easier.