ART AGAINST OIL/ OFFSHORE AND OTHER EXPERIMENTS IN ECO-REPRESENTATION

A Guest Post by Imre Szeman

If we didn’t know it Before, it’s hard to imagine that any of us don’t know it by now: we are creatures of oil, inhabiting societies made possible by this substance from the age of the dinosaurs.

Lower Platform2

I’m writing this at a moment when falling oil prices are making our dependence on fossil fuels all too evident. Cheap oil has made the Canadian dollar drop precipitously. The economy of Putin’s Russia is in free fall, as are the economies of every other country that depends on petrodollars to fill up the tank of their GDP (gross domestic product). We like to imagine the 21st century as a time defined by high-tech wireless communications and gadgets for doing things faster and better. When we manage to look past the sheen and glow of new technologies, it’s clear that our faces are as marked by the grime and murk of fossil fuels as they were a century ago—indeed, even more so. And it doesn’t look as if this will change anytime soon.

Interventions by artists and filmmakers into contemporary practices of resource extraction have played a crucial role in making the public aware of the energy systems on which modern life is dependent, as well as the short- and long-term consequences of this dependence. But awareness is one thing; creating real change is another. One of the limits we have reached in our understanding of the causes and consequences of our use and abuse of fossil fuels is a gap—a growing one—between knowledge and action. We might know that we’re oil creatures. We might understand that depending to such a large degree on a resource in limited supply constitutes something like a civilizational category mistake. We know, too, that being content with being oil creatures will have very real long-term consequences for the environment—consequences with which subsequent genera- tions will have to contend. Yet we do nothing—an indictment not only of contemporary politics, but also of the deep faith we have in our society’s use of knowledge for the betterment of all.

Brenda Longfellow’s Offshore is a documentary that sharply challenges our easy acceptance of our fossil-fuel societies, especially the lack of action that has accompanied our growing awareness of just how saturated with oil our societies are. This is not the first time that Longfellow has taken on the subject of oil in her work. Weather Report (2007) travels to sites around the world in an effort to render the true extent of global warming visible. The short film Carpe Diem (2010) is as much about the environmental consequences of our economic practices as an experiment with the shape and form of political documentary. Part comic opera, part puppet show, Longfellow’s black comic poke at the easy cynicism worn by oil executives is as hard to forget as the mutated, two-headed fish that appears on a plate just before the whole misadventure of the oil sands goes into a tailspin. A follow-up, Dead Ducks (2011), mixes standard documentary footage and fictional elements with the puppetry and opera of Carpe Diem to investigate the death in 2008 of huge numbers of migrating birds in oil-sands tailing ponds. While there might be more documentaries than ever bearing witness to all manner of crimes and misdemeanors, audiences have come to learn all too quickly how to domesticate and contain them. Longfellow doesn’t only want to get the facts out, but has reimagined documentary for a new era and a new audience, engaging seriously with the problem of how (and if ) the visual can close the gap between knowing and acting.
First encounter. My browser is open to what looks to be an on-line video game. I press play and am greeted with the words of David J. O’Reilly, CEO of Chevron: “The era of easy oil is over.” The words fade to images of the Gulf of Mexico taken from the air. I’m in a helicopter, looking down at docks, at inlets filled with fishing vessels, at drilling rigs sprinkled haphazardly across the water. The sun is bright, though the background music makes the scenes feel dark, threatening and full of danger. Every few seconds a crackle of static causes the images to be superimposed with a grid or a jumble of lines. Beneath these ordinary images lies a network of knowledge systems that shape and coordinate how we experience them and indeed are the reason why any of these structures are even there. There might be many tales to tell about the sea; for us, it is a resource to be managed and used. My helicopter lands on the deck of the rig Spartan 208. What I do next is up to me.

Offshore is described as a feature-length interactive documentary—a promising new genre that includes recent experimental documentaries such as Philippe Brault and David Dufresne’s Prison Valley (2010) and Dufresne’s follow-up, the popular Fort McMoney (2013). Longfellow initially imagined the film as an “operatic documentary” on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in April 2010, the largest maritime oil spill in history. Her sketches for Offshore—which also included plans for a chorus, underwater ballet, re-enactments of events and fictional elements in addition to documentary interviews— draw on some of the experimental aspects of Carpe Diem and Dead Ducks. The final project, however, is far more than just a feature-length expansion of these earlier short films. Offshore takes the form of Web-based, visual hypertext, a sequence of narratives that viewers can encounter in their own way, at their own pace and in their own time. Distinct aspects of the story of the BP disaster are encountered via an interface that mimics first-person video gaming. Once on the deck of a rig in the middle of the Gulf, viewers can move about its various levels, clicking on and watching the documentary shorts they encounter, or flipping through paper files and probing other objects that they might find.

Second encounter. In real life, I’m drinking bourbon to try to keep the bruised skies on the screen from bringing me down. On the screen, I sit in the helicopter. The deck of the rig beckons, but a folder lying on the seat across from me is too tempting not to check out. I click on it and it flaps open. Documents from the accident inquest into the rig I’m on. It was built by Hyundai Heavy Industries in 2001, owned by a Swiss company and registered in Panama. I didn’t expect that the Swiss would have a maritime industry given that they don’t have a sea. I wonder if the little fuel-efficient car I use to get around, my Hyundai Elantra, was built with some of the same technology as this rig. Global chains of property designed to minimize responsibility while maximizing profit. I close the folder and step out on the deck.

A click on a ‘play’ icon shows me a series of short docs arrayed under the title “A Dangerous Frontier.” I learn that the engineers and scientists who build these expensive rigs are playing with fire. As wells closer to shore are drained, rigs have had to move farther and farther—and farther—out to sea. The farther out, the more vulnerable they are to hurricanes and typhoons. Hurricane Katrina destroyed 115 oil platforms in 2005. Who knew that there were so many out there to begin with! There is some kind of justice in the fact that rising ocean temperatures are making hurricanes more powerful. The more oil we burn, the more extremes we have to go to to get it; the more we burn, the hotter the planet, the more dangerous those already dangerous extremes get.
Back on the deck, I see a sign showing me the way to go lower and deeper into the rig. I take a sip of my bourbon and head downstairs.

Political Documentary intends to bear witness, to confront viewers with images they might otherwise never encounter in their daily lives. In this way, documentary film has contributed to active public discourse about democracy and citizenship, social being and belonging and our vexed relationship to the natural world. However, one of the very real challenges faced by documentary is not to repeat in its very form the tendency to treat all our problems as exceptions. Not only the mode of exposé but even the very act of filmgoing sometimes repeats the phenomenal pattern that has allowed liberal capitalism to get away with murder, rather than unnerving it. Disasters such as the BP spill are viewed as unfortunate accidents—a figure set against a ground of normal life in which everything trundles along much as it should. Sometimes when one watches a documentary, one shakes one’s head at the ineptitude or ill will of some people and discusses the failures of government with one’s friends over dinner, only to plunge back into what we take to be the safety and rationality of everydayness: it’s hard to transform political insight into political action.

“The economy isn’t in crisis; the economy is the crisis,” we are reminded in the post-2008 manifesto The Coming Insurrection (The Invisible Committee, MIT Press, 2008). Longfellow’s web doc repeatedly draws our attention to the larger system of oil extraction that makes disaster possible even when it is introducing us to oil-rig workers and to the fishermen who depend on the Gulf for their livelihoods. Our desire is to treat the Deepwater Horizon as nothing other than the consequence of a greedy company intent on profit at all cost. We explain it by explaining it away, or indeed, by forgetting about it once the insistent press of the news has faded away (who could say they remembered the even larger Ixtoc I oil spill in the Gulf some 20 years before the BP debacle?). Longfellow holds us accountable by using the expansion of offshore drilling to interrogate the general functioning of the energy apparatus-a system that constitutes an environmental crisis not only when it breaks down, but precisely when everything goes according to plan. When it all works, we don’t even think about it. This is the real problem that we face with the oil system that fuels oil modernity:the oil system isn’t in crisis; the oil system is the crisis. Through its various bits and pieces, through the multiple narratives and complex intersections of forces and contingencies into which it pulls us, Offshore never lets us forget this equation.

Third encounter. I go back on-line and pick up where I left off. The lower deck is empty and dark. Mechanical noises make me wonder if the accident inquest was about a past event or one just about to happen. Does this explain why I am the only one on board? I watch a clip about a retired oil worker, Mr. Floyd, who spent his whole adult life offshore as a drilling man. He notes at the end of his recollections: “Had it not been for the oil fields in south Louisiana, we would have never become middle-class people.” I head down another level to hear the voices of those whose lives have been torn asunder by Deepwater Horizon. The once impossibly rich fishing grounds of the Gulf of Mexico have been devastated. Fishermen and women report hauling in only 10 percent of what they once did. What does end up in their nets is often too diseased and cancer-ridden to end up on anyone’s plate. The Macondo spill site was capped in September 201o. Someone obviously forgot to tell this to all the living things that depend on the waters of the Gulf, creatures and humans alike, all those whose lives the spill has changed forever.

Offshore names a tricky place to do oil work, a place whose dangers we try to manage and are surprised when we cannot. It also names an epistemic sensibility: out to sea, off in the distance, away from prying eyes. “Although fully half of the world’s peoples now live within a hundred miles of an ocean,” John Gillis reminds us, “few today have a working knowledge of the sea.” Fewer still have a sense of the massive mechanical apparatus that is already afloat all over the world, drawing on metal straws stuck in the muck thousands of feet below the waves (the Deepwater Horizon drilled at a record-setting depth of 35,000 feet). In a neoliberal era, offshoring is an apt description for the last frontiers of ideology: if you don’t see it, it can’t possibly matter, even if you might suspect it’s there. Longfellow’s Offshore represents the direction politically charged image-making has to take: rich with information and accessible by anyone at any time, it not only clears the fog from what we secretly want to offshore, but is unafraid to name a system in which we are all implicated.
Back to the rig…

 

Imre Szeman is Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. He is currently working on On Empty, a book about the cultural politics of oil. This essay was  published in the Spring 2015 issue of POV.

Moby Dick and the Carbon Bubble

“Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!” Starbuck, first mate of the Peoquod, tries one last time to prevent Ahab from attacking the whale.

Herman Melville’s epic novel about apocalyptic obsession was released to a mostly indifferent public in 1851, roughly co-incidental with what is generally recognized as the peak point of the North American whale oil industry.

In 1853, American ships, comprising about 81% of the global whaling fleet, killed about 8000 whales, bringing home 6 million barrels of oil.

This was a point of apogee where whaling was the fifth-largest U.S. industry and profits were high with whale oil prices ranging from $200 to $1500 per barrel. A sort of “Blubber Bubble” if you will. Whale oil lighting separated the haves from the have-nots, and sent the money-hungry to the most northern and southern stretches of the world’s oceans. Yet, two short decades later, the game had changed and production and prices had fallen to small fraction of their peak levels, while once-plentiful sources of supply as the sperm and right whales had been hunted to near-extinction. Petrochemicals had replaced blubber as the premier liquid fuel of the western world, both lighting the path and greasing the skids to our current condition of petro-addiction.

One hundred and fifty years and a trillion barrels of petroleum later, we are at another point of apogee. Like the Pequod and its crew, own “age of easy oil” is over, and we find ourselves looking mesmerized at something called the “Carbon Bubble”, shimmering black and breathtakingly large.  The 21st century Captain Ahabs are a more well-groomed lot than Melville’s hairy protagonist, but as equally bent on pushing forward into the dark dangerous spots of the world.

The original premise of the Offshore documentary was centred on the concept of hyper-expensive oil. Crude prices of $100 a barrel or more were the key to unlocking billions and billions (and more billions!) of barrels of oil reserves previously inaccessible in deep and ultra deep fields in places like the Gulf of Mexico, the Bight of Benin, the Arctic Ocean, and the Pre-Salt deposits off of Brazil. The Deepwater Horizon explosion and resulting fallout of 2010 should logically have exposed the inherent dangers and potential for catastrophe in deep-water oil exploitation, but was this only a blip in an upwards bell curve of development.

But as of time of writing this post, crude prices are now well below the $100 a barrel level (roughly $51 on Feb 26, 2015). What does this mean? Well, there’s no easy way out of our crazy Pequod voyage, it would seem. The obsession remains, and harpoons have been replaced with gargantuan amounts of cash as apart of a complicated numbers game that blurs the distinction between large multi-national conglomerates and nation states.

In the case of newly completed offshore projects like the Chevron/Maersk/Statoil leases in Jack/St. Malo in the Gulf of Mexico, where $8 billion USD has already been invested, the break-even price is as low as $35 per barrel. For projects still in exploration and development, tie-backs to nearby existing offshore productions mean profits at $30 a barrel. All these numbers add up to an amazing transformation of expensive oil into cheap oil. Cheap oil might be crashing some economies, but it is fuelling others. So it passes that Russia’s pain becomes Japan’s gain. And an oil-producing country like the United States is still the worlds leading consumer of oil at almost 19 million barrels a day.

Moby Dick is a work of fiction from history, but the “Carbon Bubble” of 2015 is for real.

The net worth of fossil fuel companies is calculated on the basis of their declared  reserves – the amount of technically and economically recoverable oil and gas. But today there’s a big catch: if the world ever does move toward significant and legally binding restrictions on carbon usage, most of those reserves will have to remain locked under the seabed or underground. Currently estimated at $20 trillion world wide, these reserves will become virtually worthless.

The aesthetics of Herman Melville’s novel are almost comically masculine: ‘dick’ and ‘sperm’ and ‘captain’ and ‘thrusting harpoon’. How easily these translate into the ‘probings’ and ‘drillings’ of the modern offshore oil industry! There can exist a weird primal feeling that the acquisition, extraction, and consumption of fossil fuels is somehow more ‘manly’ than questioning its sustainability. Real men burn oil. And like the whale oil of the 1800’s, petroleum is used to separate the haves from the have-nots, the men from the boys.

But consider the top image in this post, a whale on a beach in the Arctic community of Barrow, Alaska. This melancholy scene actually represents sustainability. Many of Barrow’s four thousand inhabitants rely on a fragile ecosystem in order to eke out subsistence living. The whale isn’t profit, it’s food, the product of a yearly hunt in waters now shared with the drilling platforms and oil rigs owned by Shell, and BP. No doubt, there is considerable material benefit to the community from their presence, but also a growing realization the community is being pushed aside by men who say “Step aside, simple villagers, we’re on a sacred mission to heat the world”.

Visit Barrow Alaska in Offshore International

 

 

OFFSHORE INTERNATIONAL IS LAUNCHED

We are very excited to announce that OFFSHORE INTERNATIONAL is now live. Brenda presented a tiny sneak preview at the amazing World of Matter conference in Montreal and it is now up for all to see.

OFFSHORE INTERNATIONAL follows the story of the proliferation of offshore drilling off the coasts of Ghana, Brazil and Alaska. For the past two years we have had an incredible time working with filmmakers in each of those areas. Sedem Ofori, a journalist in Accra, Ghana managed to get access to a Tullow FPSO (Floating Production, Storage and Offloading vessel)–the huge tankers which are used off the coast of Western Africa. Debbie Dahl Edwardson, our collaborator in Barrow, Alaska gathered amazing, moving stories from Inupiat activists and elders who fear for the future of their community as oil exploration begins in their traditional fishing grounds. In Brazil, we worked with a producer, Daniela Moreira who gathered incredible stories of fishermen whose livelihood has been under attack, activist organizations whose members live under 24 hour police protection and young workers injured on dangerous oil rigs drilling in the enormous pre salt deposits, miles off the coast. Offshore-International brings you dozens of stories from these are communities who are living with the tremendous impacts from the new frontiers of offshore drilling.

It’s hard to say ‘enjoy’ but we hope you find them as provocative, moving and enraging as we do.

Brenda

Under Western Skies and Gross Negligence

At the Under Western Skies Conference on Environments/ Technologies/Communities in Calgary where it is 1 degree C and there is snow on the ground! Will be showing excerpts of OFFSHORE on Thursday. The conference opened this morning with utterly inspiring talks by Justice Thomas Berger and the four amazing women who are the key organizers of Idle No More. (more on them later)

Justice Berger made Canadian history in 1974 when he chaired the Berger Commission on the Mackenzie Valley pipeline which revolutionized the process and protocols of royal commissions in Canada by actually travelling to 35 First Nations’ communities in the western Arctic whose traditional lifestyle would be immediately impacted by the building of a pipeline. Those hearings, which were broadcast across the country and were the subject of a National Film Board documentary, provided a crucial and historic wakeup call to Canadians who suddenly witnessed the tremendous chasm between First Nations’ profound spiritual, political and cultural views around land, ownership and environmental obligation and their own unchallenged assumptions.

Despite the 50 million dollars invested by oil companies in advocating for the pipeline, Berger ultimately recommended that treaty claims had to be settled before any development proceeded. While supporting the possibility of a southern pipeline (if scrupulous environmental precautions were taken), he concluded that the northern part of the pipeline from Prudhoe Bay through Alaska should never be built as it would have a tragic and deadly impact on the porcupine caribou migration. As events transpired, the MacKenzie Valley pipeline was never built and over the last forty years attention turned to other resource projects including the tar sands and fracking. But how astonishing that in 1974, in the wake of the so called ‘energy crisis,’ that a Canadian royal commission would recommend a stall to the bulldozer of progress and to the power of the transnational oil companies who were lobbying for the pipeline in the first place. Seems nearly unthinkable today.

Last week another Justice did the right thing. After more than a year of deliberations and countless representations, U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier found BP “grossly negligent” and “reckless” in causing the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Of course most people would concur (this was essentially the conclusion of the 17 month joint inquiry by the U.S. Coast Guard and BOEMRE which found that decisions made by BP to save time and money severely compromised safety) but I suppose it is extraordinary that a senior judge in the U.S. Justice system would, under enormous pressure, make this finding. For the past four years BP has lied about the amount of oil spilled, tried to shift the blame onto others, employed a team of lawyers to stall the proceedings and basically did everything to diminish its legal liability for the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. Finding BP ‘grossly’ negligent as opposed to merely ‘negligent’ means that the ultimate fines imposed could be increased by about $18-billion (U.S.). While there was much brouhaha in the press about justice being served, insiders pointed out that BP has enough liquidity to eventually handle this additional amount. While this may produce a chill for smaller companies contemplating risky plays, for large companies with deep pockets (and BP has very deep pockets) this could simply be the cost of doing business. But you have to ask yourself and shareholders are starting to do this about the very deep financial risk of deepwater drilling.

But before we start cheering, any financial pain inflicted on BP may be years into the future. They are appealing and the case could very well drag on for years (the Exxon Valdez took nearly twenty years to finally resolve by which time most of the plaintiffs had died!)

Nafeez Ahmed

Spent the weekend reading an incredible series of articles in the Guardian by Nafeez Ahmed. Ahmed is an investigative journalist and international security scholar and his many books (including a novel), articles and interview provide startling insights into the Machiavellian politics that animate the desire to preserve oil profits and oil interests—at any cost.

Think of any of the international crises that have dominated the news this summer—the military siege of Gaza, the ISIS rampage throughout Syria and Iraq and you’ll discover the primary engine fueling these events is the geopolitics of oil and gas. But then, again is there any geopolitics today that is not motivated by desperate machinations to secure privileged access to oil and gas in an era of dramatically declining reserves of conventional sources ?

According to Nafeez, one of the primary motivations of the relentless and ruthless assault on Gaza has to do with Israel’s desire to control access to the 1.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas discovered in 2000 off the Gaza coast, valued at $4 billion. Israel’s long-term goal, he writes “besides preventing the Palestinians from exploiting their own resources, is to integrate the gas fields off Gaza into the adjacent Israeli offshore installations.”

Here is Nafeez on the current fiasco in Iraq: “The meteoric rise of Isis is a predictable consequence of a longstanding US-led geostrategy in the Middle East that has seen tyrants and terrorists as tools to expedite access to regional oil and gas resources.” According to well documented reports and correspondence from US private intelligence firm Stafor (made public through WikiLeaks), jihadist groups in Syria (including Isis) have been generously funded (to the tune of 1 billion dollars) by the Gulf States, particularly Saudia Arabia and Qatar with tacit support and knowledge of U.S. and British security agencies. Nafeez links this support to a “Divide and Rule” strategy operative in the Pentagon and U.S. state department which involved “exploiting fault lines between the various Salafi-jihadist groups to turn them against each other and dissipate their energy on internal conflicts.”

Now, as he points out, “Iraqis are paying the price yet again for our ill-conceived imperial hubris.”

If there is any good news that Nafeez sees in the current geopolitics of oil it is that the move to non-conventionals (including shale and offshore oil) is economically unsustainable. In this case, ‘unsustainability’ has nothing to do with the real long term ecological impacts but everything to do with free market economics.

As he puts it, “Since 2000, the oil industry’s investments have risen by 180% – a threefold increase – but this has translated into a global oil supply increase of just 14%. Two-thirds of this increase has been made-up by unconventional oil and gas. In other words, the primary driver of the cost explosion is the shift to expensive and difficult-to-extract unconventionals …” The dramatic rise in production costs, he adds, is “fatally undermining oil company profits, forcing them to announce cut backs in expenditures.”

The fact that the economic calculus of continued oil production is so bad may become the tipping point that leads us into a saner and sustainable energy regime.

Offshore in Russia brought to you by Exxon Mobil

Here’s an incredible update on the Russian oil frontier in the Arctic. For anyone following our blog, we had posted interviews with some of the family members of the Canadians who were part of the Greenpeace Arctic Thirty–jailed for 50 days for protesting Arctic drilling. A year later, Russia when it isn’t supporting ultra nationalist Russian thugs in the Ukraine, is plotting big moves in the Kara Sea. Last weekend a drilling ship sailed from Norway to being prospecting, a venture where the key collaborator is Exxon Mobil. With 60% of its exports depending on petroleum, and facing international sanctions for its role in the turmoil in Ukraine, there’s a lot at stake here.

Brenda

Welcome!

Yes, welcome to everyone who has recently subscribed. We are delighted to have you with us on the journey. We know that ‘out of sight…out of mind” is the mantra of multinational oil interests as they proceed to drill and explore for oil off every coast in the world, but it’s our intention to keep hauling the ‘invisible’ into public consciousness. And it’s not as if the story will ever go away…

In February, a group from the Florida State Department of Environmental Protection discovered an 81-square-foot tar mat cruising the shallows off Pensacola beach. That’s 1,250 pounds of oily garbage that slithered across almost 200 miles of seabed, damaging environments and amassing sand and marine fragments. Tests determined that this mat was the condesate of the oil that spilled into the Gulf of Mexico as a result of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

We’ve been taking OFFSHORE to various events including the fabulous I-Docs Conference in Bristol England and SXSW in Austin (where it was nominated for an award in the green activism category). We didn’t win that one, but we are also nominated for awards in the Green and Activism categories for the Webbies, and you have one day to vote for us in the People’s award: http://www.webbyawards.com. In June, we will be showing OFFSHORE at the Sheffield Documentary Festival.

We are hard at work editing stories from Alaska, Ghana and Brazil and hope to have our Alaska chapter launched in early July. Please stay tuned for notices.

Brenda

Out and About

Offshore has been busy these past months. We premiered the Installation version at Smart Fipa in Biarritz. Brenda presented the work at the Sustainability Festival at York University and at Reframe, a wonderful documentary festival in Peterborough, Ontario. We had a cyber presence at the cool online International Environmental Festival (FIFE) Paris, France. We just found out we were nominated in the Activism category at SXSW among many other fantastic interactive documentaries. We had a small Toronto launch with the journal PUBLIC whose new issue includes an essay by Brenda “Extreme Oil and Our Disappearing Future.

In March, Mike Robbins, our lead web designer and Brenda are off to the I-docs conference in Bristol, England.