We All Get Down and Dirty

(First published in the Bali Advertiser on June 2, 2010)

“Please don’t tell my folks I work in the oil patch. They still think I’m a piano player in a whorehouse.” – Texas and Oklahoma bumper sticker

The men and companies who help keep this old world running – which it mostly does on coal, diesel, gasoline and jet fuel – aren’t having such a good few weeks. There is BP’s little problem in the Gulf of Mexico, the collision between two tankers on May 25 in Singapore, and then the series of recent mining accidents that remind us that thousands of miners die each year -- because of poor safety practices or just the plain misfortune of working in one of the world’s most dangerous industries.

It is easy to tsk-tsk the greed of the men and companies that go in search of black gold in liquid or chunk form and bring the stuff up from the ground for us to use in fuel tanks and power plants. But that’s forgetting that it is our demand for such products that drives the exploitation of the earth’s energy resources. There would be no need of it if we didn’t insist on the right to monthly budget flights to all points Asia, air-conditioned riding comfort on our way to yoga classes and farmer’s markets, and making day out of night for our reading, viewing and social pleasures after the sun goes down.

Only our frequent warm showers (produced by hot water heaters run on electricity from coal-fired power plants) help us forget that we are stained with the same black hydrocarbon that is now keeping pelicans and other water birds grounded in the marshes and wetlands of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

Granted, and in the interest of full disclosure, the LeRois are an oil ‘bidness people from way back. Uncle Charles worked for 30 years for Amoco – bought by BP in 1998 – retiring as a vice president of offshore exploration long before the present troubles. An engineer brother works out of Australia in service to the oil division of a major commodity and mining company. My own first job out of university was with a small independent operator in the go-go oil fields of Oklahoma in the early 1980s, and other friends and family are scattered around the globe, if not making fortunes from oil, then making their living from it.

And it just isn’t justifiable to try and assign these folk – or even the CEOs and top executives of companies like Shell, BP, Exxon and Total – the sole blame for the results of our addiction to easy and convenient energy. That’s like blaming poor coca farmers in Columbia, Peru and Bolivia for the ravages of cocaine use among the celebrities and East and West Coast party hounds of North America.

No doubt there were many safety and regulatory lapses leading up to the disaster that continues to unfold in the southern waters of the United States, but the answer to getting America’s oil monkey off its back isn’t in the inevitable calls for a moratorium on offshore drilling. As with the production of illegal drugs, that just means the black energy the U.S. needs will be produced elsewhere – as most already is – and imported into the country to feed gas-guzzling SUVs and RVs.

The solution is only going to come when people -- in the U.S. and all around the world -- stop buying and using products either made from oil or produced using energy from oil and coal. But if you’ve been anywhere lately besides the old-hippie hangouts of Ubud, you’ll know that the buying hasn’t even slowed down, and even among the righteously clean and green you’ll find that they often have the latest in cell phone and computer technology – made of petroleum-based materials in oil-intensive processes and creating toxic waste disposal problems of their own because of the heavy metals used in their batteries and electronic components. Too, doesn’t traversing the hippie trail for the younger set consist mainly of hip-hopping around the globe on one long never-ending jet-fuel bender?

The problems and foul-ups such as what we are seeing now in the Gulf of Mexico aren’t going to end until each of us starts examining the way we live and the competition amongst us ceases to be about who can get more, but about who can get by with greater efficiency and less of everything – even if that means such hardship as eating rice, vegetables, chicken and pork instead of insisting that living in or even visiting Bali means we don’t have to give up Australian beef, French wines and cheeses, European beers and American junk food.

I’ll see you at the warung and the wet market, and we can compare the luster of our sheens.

Copyright © 2010 Lee Roy LeRoi