your own career. >> now one book tv antonio talks about the 2010 deepwater horizon oil explosion which killed 11 men and released millions of barrels of oil into the gulf of mexico. this is about an hour and a half. [applause] thank you for coming to the institute policy studies for biological diversity and peace for all of being here. helping celebrate the launch of my book which just released on monday in time for the one-year anniversary of the explosion of the deepwater horizon, and i wanted to hold this event on

earth day. i can't think of a better place to do it than at busboys and poets which has always made such a wonderful home for me for my books. i think this is my third book in a row the five launched and had a book he bent to the streets and right here which is incredibly wonderful, busboys and poets supports the community, art, learning and being able to come together in rooms like this and talk about critical events at a critical time and please support busboys and poets not only tonight but every night. and future events, and i also wanted to pull together and even for earth day that brought together the people in the groups who my thought had really done the most heroic and ongoing and important work not only in the wake of the explosion of the deepwater horizon but preceding it. there aren't that many organizations, people,

communities who have been focused on the ongoing dangers of offshore drilling. the ongoing dangerous to people to the ecology and development and the groups who have been of the forefront of that are the center for biological diversity and they've been at the forefront of the response to this disaster not just in the wake of the explosion but in a year long effort to which involved 210 million gallons of oil being released into the gulf of mexico on an ongoing ecological crisis and ongoing human crisis an ongoing environmental crisis and these groups have continued to be there and i wanted to make sure we presented the best discussion we could come and i couldn't ask for to better people than john who is the ocean can painter victor that greenpeace and peter galvin

who's the conservation director of the center for biological diversity. and then we will have a discussion with some questions and then on will sign your books. thank you all very much for being here tonight. [applause] >> i echo antonio and say that it's always nice to have an opportunity to come to busboys and poets. the response to the deepwater horizon blowout began pretty much immediately. we can see as good many others that this was going to be one of the biggest disasters that we face in our continent. so one of the things we have to do in the beginning is figure out what the appropriate

response to something on this scale looks like and that's not an easy question. it pretty quickly became apparent that one thing about was needed was a second opinion really, some ground truth. we were hearing from very early on what was pretty clearly skin from not just bp but often the own government. and so, we felt that it was necessary to be there on the ground to provide images, to be able to share firsthand accounts and ultimately to be able to collect data on with the true scope and impact of the disaster were on the ecosystem in the gulf of mexico . so, it started with a small tea that was basically they're just as the oil was starting to reac the shore and we were working o the coastal areas of louisiana primarily but also in alabama, mississippi and a bit in florid as well. looking as the oil came ashore

what was happening to it, was i washing into the wetlands where the models and models of boom doing their job and keeping it out of the sensitive habitat, what was the cleanup response looking like, where their huge numbers of wild life being killed or not, these were all big questions early on, how muc oil was coming out, it wasn't something we were going to be about to answer easily but at least we could talk about where we were seeing the oil and what the impact will click on the ground. over time, also backing up a little bit, so part of that we spend a lot of time in the day speed in the gulf of mexico and in louisiana didn't. unfortunately we saw things that are going to stick with me probably the rest of my life. you know, nobody wants to see

dolphins surfacing through oil or you know, dead fish or dead birds, any of that is pretty awful. but i think as a marine biologist some more thinking about the habitat of was going to be lost. seeing oil that covered the entire expanse of some small islands that were absolutely critical habitat, these are all just completely packed and knowing that was when to kill off the grass is and the other vegetation that holds them together and so they are fairly quickly if likely to wash away. there isn't an alternate habitat of any similar types. so, thinking about the long-term effect that that could have on many of the

seabirds including the brown pelican which had just come off the endangered species list. it was also disturbing to look at things like the hermit crabs . you don't read a lot in the newspapers or on cnn you're not seeing anyone talked about hermit crabs and in keeping a running count and using dead hermit crabs as evidence for the lawsuit. but in one area certainly not bigger than the size of this room lysol the estimated to be 10,000 dead hermit crabs and counting those of the same time that these birds are walking around eating these hermit crabs knowing the birds are likely not going to make it. the whole beach habitat in that area at that time was no longer capable of sustaining life. so then we move further offshore and we brought one of

our ships, the arctic sunrise to the region and put together a three month long research expedition working with scientists from over a dozen institutions. mostly gulf universities to again, really try to get a second opinion to begin collecting more data on what the true scope and impact of this bill were in the ecosystem and in the gulf. we looked at the plankton. primarily we focus on the blue crab with scientists from tulane university. and one of the challenges for us throughout this was we had a 24 hour news cycle where people want answers, but science is slow. the data that we collected with this just one small project to examine one very small piece of the impact come even collecting the data took months. but to analyze that will probably take them two years. so the one-year anniversary we

had a lot of people asking. so you know, it's been plenty of time what happened. was it as bad as everyone said, was it not so bad bp and the government was saying the answer i think is that it is going to be decades before we can look back and feel like we have a true sense of what the damage was. but we saw the science is from tulane from these mysterious orange blobs in their sample that they're fairly sure were caused by disbursement. and so this is the oil and the disbursement answering the food chain in the gulf of mexico through these blue crabs. we also worked with the scientists from a number of universities using acoustic monitoring, basically they sit out there and listen for moraes and from sperm whales and

others and this was important because it is pretty difficult to actually understand what's happening just by counting them . mostly they are under water. so they had a data set stretching back several years in the same area so we are able to compare what whale population used to look like in that area of the gulf with what happened after the disaster. and again, it is too early to say with the detailed results were but they did find that in this site closest to the deepwater horizon there are far fewer sperm whales after the accident than before and this is significant because government scientists estimate as louis as many as two or three would be enough to potentially wipe out the population and this again is because whales are slow to mature, they have low numbers of offspring and the are very vulnerable.

we worked with science from texas a&m, not exactly you think would be the most eager to partner but this is interesting because despite all of the money that we heard was out there for the research, many of the scientists that we talked to found it difficult to get access to funding to do research that might not be popular. so if bp was getting all the money they felt that they had a say in directing type of research and obviously that wasn't o.k. so it's part of why we wanted to be out there. so the texas a&m scientists came with us and they were looking at oil in the water column and also we were doing a lot of work to see how much we were finding on the bottom. around this time is when noval was putting out a statement. it was the u.s. government with their name on it that said that three-quarters of the oil was gone. this was the big mission accomplished moment you may remember it. but actually if you look at the

numbers and not how they talk about the numbers the reverse is true more like three-quarters was still there in the gulf of mexico. a little bit heavy fabric and smaller had been recovered but most of it was either still in the water, washed up on the shore or down there on the bottom. that fit with what we found. about a mile deep away from the deepwater horizon i think it was 15 miles away, we were finding the oil on the bottom of the broth of the samples and it just reeked of oil. we also found signature of the wheel, so not like a big if thick cloud but signature 300 miles to the west of the deepwater horizon and this is far away from a very different direction than people had been previously looking. later on we actually took a two-person submarine down in the gulf and hit a nice

opportunity to be the pilot of the sob and we brought science from the university of north carolina and marine conservation biology to say look at the impact of this bill on the deep sea coral in the gulf of mexico and part of it is helping people understand how complex the ecosystem really is. you think of the gulf of mexico and people have very different ideas. maybe you just think it's a bunch of oil rigs and it's nothing special but actually it's one of the more biologically rich places i've ever been. you see dolphins and birds in the numbers you don't see in other places. so the bottom of the gulf in many areas you have these incredible communities of the deep sea corals far below sunlight so they are not the same kind that your use to if

you've been scuba diving scuba diving in the tropics. but still a similar role as far as providing habitat for commercially important fish sometimes and also high areas of biodiversity. we are happy to see the area we visited the there was no visible impact of the wheel. but again, really this is something we are going to still be analyzing years from now. a lot of is whether there were sublethal impacts, whether it's affecting the growth rate, the reproductive rate, more susceptible to disease, that kind of thing. but unfortunately at the same time a little bit closer to the deepwater horizon with a different kind of submersible it was able to go deeper another group of scientists or finding oil that carpeted the bottom and killed huge numbers of coral. and i guess one thing i forgot to mention that i will touch on

we started this expedition actually far from the impact site out on the july and if you remember when the accident began in the early days people were quite sure that was going to be pulled into the current and sucked through the keys and potentially all the way of the east coast of the united states through the gulf stream. the good news is that didn't happen at least in large amounts, so we were there looking at sponges which are an important by you indicator because they pumped huge amounts of water for them each day so they are a good place to look to see and to see if there are low quantities of oil and could be quite a long time before the finish that and analysis. but, it is just a good reminder science is slow. and they seem to be too quick to assume they knew what the impacts were and if too quick

to forget that this could happen again. so really come a lot of the thrust of our work to two directions. one was providing a second opinion and getting the facts about what was happening and the other was reminding the policy makers we can't allow this to happen again. a lot of our work has been moving forward making sure that we learn from this and do not allow drilling in the arctic, we do not allow more jeweling anywhere and ultimately we phase out offshore drilling and move away from that to claim a renewable energy and i will stop there. [applause] >> thank you. >> introduce yourself.

>> hopefully this is the right flank and distance. >> my name is peter in the conservation director of the center for biological diversity . thanks for coming tonight. i want to thank also busboys and poets peace and antonia for the great service she's done writing this book. it's not a happy topic but an important one for us to know as much as we can. in the early days of the deepwater horizon disaster the media was portraying but even as if this this for natural disaster, terrible natural disaster deutsch a technological glitch the was beyond the control of humans and early on in the first night as we spoke it was clear to us that this was not a natural disaster, this was a policy disaster. this was a disaster caused specifically by policies implemented by the u.s. government.

and as we begin to look at the management service now interestingly de service which is no stalwart of environmental protection would not allow the same exclusions in arctic drilling and we had known some of this for quite some time, but the reality was it all became very apparent that the gulf of mexico was basically in national sacrifice area. and the policy of the government were intended to make it a national disaster area. natural sacrifice syria. a year has gone by and what have we learned? the sad reality is not much.

we learned a lot about the impacts of this bill, though we haven't made a lot of policy changes that were going to present us from this disaster recuring next time. we released a report is available on the web site, biologicaldiversity dhaka word and in the report, we calculate the martelle the numbers for a variety of different species based on the fast best available evidence available, government reports, scientific reports, and one of the big problems with the oil spill and we see this in the press where they start to mention the numbers of recovered animals, only a small number of animals that die or ever recovered. the ocean is a big place, and they just don't run across all of the mortalities. for example, we conclude approximately 6,000 sea turtles were killed in the event.

26,000 dolphins and whales. 26,000 other marine mammals and 82,000 birds. so this staggering, the total was staggering and will probably read as the largest environmental disaster ever to have occurred in the united states. hopefully there will never be a larger one. since this bill we have launched and lawsuits and three endangered species list in the petitions. the most significant one is probably the clean water act lawsuit against bp. the government file a duplicate keys about eight months later. defines the we are seeking and to redirect to the gulf. the environmental restoration land acquisition we are seeking $19 billion of penalties against bp, and this is the

maximum amount allowed under the clean water act on the calculation of negligence which triples the damages, and a certain penalty per gallon of oil spills and we are not even sure that the amount isn't more than 200 million gallons but that is the best estimate anybody can come up with. so we are trying to make dp cough up 19 billion a pretty is pointing the finger of devotee of. the coast guard released a report that puts a lot of the blame on transocean. we are also suing transocean under the clean water act. of course bp recently sued transocean asserting that they should pay and not bp. and of course this will be going on for a long, long time. one of the reasons we felt it was important to file lawsuits was to make sure that the government doesn't try to offer some kind of sweetheart settlement. and certainly we know that

would happen under the bush administration, no question about it and we are concerned that could happen under the obama administration. and just of course before the disaster obama, the president stood on me to give a press conference and said they don't usually blow up. nuclear power is safe and we can see that there is a massive disconnect the majestic huge disconnect between the reality and the policy progressed nation's, never that word is. >> [inaudible] >> thank you. [laughter] >> and it's really just amazing to see the gap. some of the other litigation is over disbursements. we launched a lawsuit over the use of these disbursements we heard so much about. the reality is the epa approves the use of the disbursements

but they don't actually test what will the disbursements due to the various endangered species. what are the impacts of dumping millions of gallons of disbursements and if any of you listen to democracy now, the representative of the group here was on and amy goodman pointed out, it was interesting that she noticed that the mean disbursement used in this bill is actually a band in the u.k.. can't be used in the u.k. so bp has a stockpile of millions of gallons of this that can't be used in the u.k. or anywhere in europe so what do they do? let's shoot over to the u.s. we've got to get rid of it. and it's we see how so many decisions, these policy decisions are made basically with a gun to the head because you have lisa jackson the head of the e.p.a. desperately trying to figure out is their anything we can do? and the government is under

criticism for inaction. we are going to dump millions of gallons because we have to show people we are doing everything we possibly can and we will deal with the impact leader because our decisions are being made on a 24/7 news cycle and that is the scary have reality that we live where our policy decisions are being made in very short windows. it used to be people have said the best way to make decisions is to look for seven generations. we've gone from seven generations to 24 hours and that is no way to make decisions. as we've got the disbursement lawsuit, the bp clean water act lawsuit, bp transocean clean water act is we are in the middle of a giant litigation marra s. we just found out today there

are 100,000 lawsuits now filed over the bp oil spill and that doesn't include kenneth feinberg's payoff payment scheme. that is a separate deal and a lot of these are, you know, big toxic cases, people who've lost their livelihoods and didn't take the compensation grout wrote from bp and it's amazing to see our attorney is part of the plaintiffs' steering committee in this is a very cumbersome group. is very important public interest environmental groups be in there because as good as the trial lawyers are and they are trying to do the best they can for their clients, they are not necessarily public interest environmental groups have a different outlook on things and it is our goal to try to get as much of the money as possible of the 19 billion back to the gulf for restoration and not bobby jindal's stand barriers or any crackpot ideas he has come up with to spend the money

. we want it to be real restoration land acquisition to make people whole. we have filed endangered species listing petitions for the dorcy course. it's the smallest seed worse in the u.s., third or fourth smallest in the world and lives in a sea grass beds and i think we have all seen sea horses and aquariums, they are beautiful little things and very sensitive, very sensitive to changes in habitat and decimation of sea grass and a lot of what happened with the disbursement is the oil doesn't go away it just breaks into smaller particles and sinks to the bottom and of course they get into the grass beds and are a problem for the sea horses and other creatures that live down there. we are currently looking at as john mentioned the brown pelican was a success story under the endangered species act had come back from just a few hundred to tens of thousands of individuals in the last 20 years but thus build

the recovery in jeopardy and now we're talking to a variety what it will be necessary to put the brown pelican on the endangered species list due to this. we filed an endangered species petition to get the atlantic bluefin tuna added to the list and the atlantic bluefin tuna is a highly prized fish that is becoming rare. it's one of the fish at the high-end souci restaurants if you see a very expensive piece of souci deily kazushi and it's a good chance it is blue fan. earlier this year a blue fin tuna upwards of 1,000 pounds was auctioned off in tokyo for $400,000 for one fish. $400,000, so you can imagine that there is an enormous economic pressure to keep this

species of of the endangered list. the bluefin spawning area is in the gulf of mexico, the prime area the atlantic bluefin and much of it was inundated, it was like a direct some scientists estimate 20 to 30% of the young were lost and that is the beginning. we don't know what the long-term implications are and a lot of these things it's a combination of factors it's not just the oil spill, there's overfishing, there's a huge amount of habitat degradation that is occurring so now we had this impact and it's kind of light have many cards can you pull out before the house of cards just collapses. we finally lawsuit over the policy that allows these categorical exclusions and one of the things we found after this bill is that bp had actually written a letter to the epa just months before this bill demanding that more

categorical exclusion speed granted because these studies were taking too much time and they were duplicative because they already had the answers because the and in drilling so safely so we have that going on . we have a lawsuit i would say it's one of lawsuit but it's actually several different losses because the fifth circuit court of appeals is byzantine in this process. we are challenging over 40 individual plants in the gulf right now. most of these have been granted since this bill and that's what's important for people to understand is very little has changed. ken salazar, he will go down in history as he wants to keep the boot on the heel of bp. so when you look into the history it turns out secretary salazar, there was virtually no greater champion of expanding

drilling in the gulf than ken salazar in you know an interesting look at how someone station in life, political station might change things when president obama was a senator he had an excellent record on offshore oil drilling . he posed as fervently as did joe biden and rahm emanuel. they all voted against expanding offshore oil drilling in the gulf, and then a few years later the situation is different now they have different calculations to make and come out on the other side and so it's just very disappointing in that regard. i'm going to wrap up but i want to let folks know we fully intend on continuing to track this issue and doing everything we possibly can to try and make sure this never, ever happens again. please take a look at our web site and see our policy recommendations on the report that we just released, the companion report to the wild

life toll at biological diversity.org. thank you very much. [applause] .. >> my first book was the bush agenda, invading the world one economy at a time. that book looked at the bush administration and a handful of corporations including oil corporations, energy services companies, and weapons

manufacturers. it was a natural corollary to that discussion to where the tyranny of oil, the world's most powerful industry and what we must do to stop it looking at the power of the industry, the policy relationship of this industry to our government and our policymakers, and somewhat ironically at this point, that book took its title from a speech that then candidate obama made when he became the first african-american to win the iowa caucus. he announced in the speech he would be the president to once and for all end the tyranny of oil and in the same breath, end the word in iraq. i found that very powerful and i used that as a title of the book. when the deepwater horizon exploded on april 10, i was in houston with a group of oil

activists, or actually not activists, that's the wrong word. a group of people who lived in oil impacted communities around the world, angola, california, texas, alaska, and who all came together, and they came to explain to the shareholders what it means to live in a chevron impacted community. while we were there, it had been a couple weeks during the course of our time there after the explosion happened, after the loss of life of 11 men, after the oil started flowing, when we realized that this not only was an enormous loss of life or disaster, but a really crushing reality to people like myself who had spent a significant amount of time setting the oil industry who had a significant amount of time being in places where oil operations take

place. something dawned on all of us. the oil industry had absolutely no idea whatsoever what to do about a deep water blowout, none at all. they said they knew what to do and planned what to do, but the reality was what they knew how to do is somewhat deal with the blowout at 400 feet, and for most of the time since 1970s, most deep, deep water drilling meant drilling at 400 feet blow of ocean's service. this well and what deep water drilling means now is drilling at 5,000 feet below the ocean surface. that's just the oceans here. this well was another 13500 feet below that. actually, the -- a well's slightly further out, not even the deepest well anymore is

another well as far down as mt. everest is up. they were trying to apply technology developed in the 1970s for 400 foot wells to a 5,000 foot well, and they didn't know what they were doing, and they weren't able to stop the gusher, and not only that, but they had guaranteed us that were there to be a blowout, and everybody knows it's possible, the gulf of mexico is one of the most difficult places to drill in the world, one of the reasons why it's gassy. it bubbles up, it kicks, and makes drills difficult. everyone knows this and every plan says we can handle kicks, blowouts. well, they have been increasing in the gulf happening more and more frequently. the people on the rig knew that

the second drill. another well was kicked off the well and had to go home. the deepwater horizon was a replacement. the deepwater horizon was $100 million over budget. it was many, many days off schedule, and the people on the rig knew they were in trouble and there could be a blowout, and the industry promised they could handle an oil spill of 3,000 barrels per oil a day. what we found out was that likely at its worst, this spill was 80,000 barrels a day, and yet, they had no capacity whatsoever to deal with it. they did not have ships ready to contain the oil. they didn't have underwater vehicles to address the blowout. they didn't have booms to

protect the shore or skimmers to skim it up. they had not prepared. even after the 1989 disaster, they had been committed to responsible for, legally obligated to invest in research on what to do if they have an oil spill and prepare for it. they hadn't, none of them. we are using this exact same technology that utterly failed to clean up after valdez and only 14% of the oil was cleaned up. today, in response to this. now, to put this into scale because they didn't know what to do and spent three months walking around, well, that's not fair. they tried hard. , sat around a table, tried really, really hard. scientists, junior engineers hard at work to stop the gusher, but they couldn't for three long months. what happened in the course of the three long months, they

finally did figure out how to put a cap on it thank goodness, but they didn't know or feel secure that that well was closed until five months later when something else happened with the drilling of the relief drill. what that means is what they know how to do is drill so if there's another blowout, there's no reason to assume that a cap will be able to be applied because the only thing we're sure that worked was the relief well, so that means if there's another blowout, what we should anticipate is five more months worth of oil and what we know about deep water, and remember this is new going out this far. there's only 148 of them in the world. they have been going on for about 20 years at this depth, and they are pushing out this far because there's a lot of oil out there, so what we know about deep water is when you have an accident, it's a long way to go to get to it, and there's a lot

of oil, and put the amount of oil into context, we've all been hampered from being able to explain and really grasp and put into words the cig cansz of the -- significance of the size of the spill because there aren't the words. it's the largest oil spill in world history, but there's one reason why we can't say that. that's abuse saddam hussein used oil as a weapon in 1991, and intentionally opened up oil pipes and tankers to attack american and british troops with oil in cue wit, and that -- kuwait, and that's the world's largest spill because he did it intentionally. had that not happened, this would be hands down the world's largest oil spill in history. one thing we know for sure, and

when this happened and we learned it was bigger than we thought and that the 11 men who died, the story wasn't going to end with them or their families. it was going to spread, and it was going to spread to all the people across the five states who live around this, the ninth largest body of water and affect the sea life and everything living in the ocean, but the thing to know about the gulf coast is everything in the ocean is part and partial to the land and the people and their livelihoods, their being, and their community, and the effect on the sea is the effect on the people and the lively hoods and communities of those people. what i learned in going down in just the first couple of weeks in the first couple days i was there is one this was a huge story. two, transparency was so difficult. getting information was so difficult from that first time i

went down. private security guards, police officers, sheriffs kept us off of beaches. you couldn't look or take pictures or record the event. one of the things that happenedded was controlling the story became very important to everyone involved, and one tool bp utilize the which was powerful and you saw the pictures in the beginning that john showed, green peace took such important photographs of the event, not just the work, but the photographs used to capture it, and they are used throughout my book to try and make tangible or im-- imagery, the story of the event. one reason why it was difficult because if you remember in valdez, it was the photographs of the oil spill that really captured people's souls, and people organized aggressively in the response to value deed and

shut down stations, protested, demanded policy, and they got out the bush administration, the bush senior administration a critical piece of legislation, the oil pollution act, similarly in 1969 off the coast of santa barbara when an oil well blew, people organized, gay that newsed, were -- galvanized and were ready. it captured their hearts and souls, and then they got earth day, the environmental protection agency, and 11 long years of organizing later, there was a moratorium put on offshore drilling in some places. what happened here was that those photographs, particularly the brown pelican soaked in oil, the sphait bird of -- state bird of louisiana captured people, our hearts, and our minds. the pictures started to go away, and what people assumed the pictures went away because what? the oil birds were going away;

right? that's not what happened. what i was able to track in the book is in fact as the number of oil birds were increasing the photographs were decreasing, and the reason why was we were threadenned to be thrown in -- threatened to be thrown in jail if we went to beaches where there was oil. i was trying to talk to people and go on boats and go out on the water near boom, and when the person found out i was a book author, they would not take me because i'd get a $40,000 fine and thrown in jail. i went on to beaches even though it meant risking jail and i did what i could to tell the story, and we all did o best to do it, but the story became very difficult to tell, and i knew that was going to happen, and that's when i decided very early on this was going to require more than an article, more than a few days. it was going to require a full

book of investigation, and it was going to require spending as much time as possible in those communities most effected, and i basically spent my time and also realized my previous books for though of you who read them, really policy books. my background is public policy. i worked for two united states members of congress. my masters is in public policy from georgetown. this was going to be a very different book, and it's really a book that is the human story of the human impacts and the people who are impacted on all sides. i talked to people employed in the oil industry, oil executives, fishers, environmentalists, policymakers, spent a good time in washington with policymakers up there and down here, and the story that is told, and just to say -- i was just overwhelmed by the graciousness from people at the

hardest point in their lives taking me in. i stayed in their homes, played with their children, went to their churches, went to the beaches, helped when there was work to be done, and was brought in and continue to be brought in, and some of the most impactful stories were the ones that i then tried to tell one year later. the story began as a shareholder meeting, and it doesn't conclude, but the next step in the tale is a week ago while in london at bp's annual shareholder meeting, and i went there with five gulf coast residents and people deeply impacted by the disaster there representing their communities, and the gulf coast fund, an organization founded after cay -- katrina, to link 200 communities around the gulf to organize together, stepped up in response to this disaster because of what

we heard time and time again, what i heard as i traveled through the gulf coast was people who had just, just recovered from katrina, from gustav, rita, from ike, who worked so hard to get themselves back on their feet financially, emotionally, spiritually, and then the oil struck, and you could feel just this sense of sorrow and, you know, how can we get a break sort of. we worked so hard, and now the oil is here, and the gulf coast fund organized in response to katrina and now in response to the oil disaster, and they helped bring these five community members to london, and this was byron, the president of the oyster association and the

president of the shrimpers organization, and we came because bp had said in its documents leading up to the meeting that it learned its lesson from the disaster. it was going to go deeper into the deep water and push more into deep water drilling, but it had weighed the risks, and it was ready to go, and so they came to explain to the board and the chairman of the board and the new ceo and the shareholders what it means to be people from the gulf coast experiencing this ongoing disaster, and we did a bunch of press before we got there. the bbc loved us, knew who we were, we showed up, and bp would not give any of the residents access to the meeting even though they held legal proxies to get in, they could not. i got in because i purchased

shares. i didn't know they didn't get in. we got separated. i had a special card that said i couldn't speak inside the meeting during the timeshare holders get to speak. what i found out when they were not there, i spoke anyway, and i said that bp had not lived up to its financial, legal, or moral obligations in the gulf. that it was arguing tooth and nail about the amounts of oil spilled, so when peter cited that figure of $20 billion owes for the oil they spilled, bp is arguing instead of a per barrel rate, they want to pay a day rate, and the day rate equates to not $20 billion, but $3 million, with an "m". bp is organizing that half as -- arguing that half as much oil was spilled as all the presidential scientists found

and arguing it's half as much spilled and they cleaned it all up. how can that be? bp is fighting every step of the way to pay the claim's process. the company that spills the oil has to set up a claims process and pay claims. well, fortunately, this has gotten a lot of press this week. bp made that process so cumbersome and the cso for the state of florida is suing bp because they intentionally made it so cumbersome that only one-third of the claims have been paid out, 40% have been processed. that means most people who have been out of work for a year, have not gotten any money. this is a sub sis tonight area of fishing, and they can't eat their fish either. the other thing i came to do there was deliver a message from keith jones, and keith jones is

someone i spent a tremendous amount of time with over the course of writing this book, and his son, gordon, was 28 years old, worked for a contractor called miswaco, and was a cement mixer, and he died the night the rig exploded. they died trying to save the rig, and they could have been somewhere elsewhere the rig blew and could have survived, but stayed there trying to say it, and they all died. what keith sent me there to say, and gordon died one week prior to birth of his second son, maxwell jordan, died before the birthday of his first son. he died because he took over for his coworker. keith sent me with a statement because he couldn't come, and the statement that bp and

transocean and hall burr ton -- halhalliburton had cult corner -- cut corners and turned this into something about just making money and that they were greedy, and that they had rolled the dice with gordon's life and that they had lost, and that what keith wanted to make sure was this doesn't happen again, and what every single presidential commission and study and investigation and scientific study has concluded is that this is a problem, the problem that led to this disaster is in no way isolated to bp, and one of the things i go over extensively in the book is looking at the spin of the oil industry so looking at how -- what did the oil industry do in response to this disaster, not only what did

environmentalists do, not only what did fishers do, not only what did scientists do, but what did the oil industry do? what they did, i think, qualifies as one of the most successful lobbying efforts on behalf of the oil industry to date, and that's saying a lot. their strategy was isolate bp, make this a bp problem, but even within that, because bp is the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the united states, so if you say it's a bp problem, you take a big gamble because that says half of the oil produced in the united states is dangerous, so they said it's a bp problem, but it was a fluke. that spin worked. one of the reasons why it was able to work was unfortunately because the obama administration on which i had named in my last book, while this administration

is not an oil administration, it certainly isn't the way the last administration was. it doesn't get money from the oil industry, but from the industry, but it's the finance industry, not the oil industry. even this government is not immune from the incredible weight and financial lobbying and pressure of the oil industry, and even this government that came to that pressure, and the key moment that peter mentioned and john mentioned when basically public attention was completely swayed and alters, and we really lost the momentum, not lost the entire race, was on august the 16th srb so, let me back up a little bit. there was enormous public pressure the same way after 1959

and 1989, enormous public attention on this disaster. people were gripped. they were watching that spill cam, and there was a huge push for legislation. there was a great number of bills moving through the congress, there was a great amount of momentum to see them passed, and two things happened. the first is the well was capped which is fantastic. we wanted the well to be capped, but that didn't end people's attention. they cared very much about the outcome of this disaster. the more important thing that happened was on august 16th, when carroll browner, the climate went on every morning television show back to back to back and said the vast majority of the oil is gone. that was like a end scene moment and it was utterly not true. the same document and scientists who worked on the document said

it's exactly the opposite. the majority of the oil is there, only a portion of it is gone. what the obama administration wanted to do is to get this problem out of the way, and this is not to say that there weren't thousands of government employees that worked very hard to address this disaster because there were, but the problem, the overarching problem that the obama administration faced with this disaster is more that president obama's name was linked to it to lower his poll numbers. he had a lot of other things to do. he was trying to pass health care. he had two wars fighting in, and a long list of stuff. he wanted to get it out of the way, and they did that with two million gallons of dispersant and they did that for a long period of time oil coming out of

the well, and they did it by telling us the oil was gone before it was. the combination of the obama administration's funding that track and the oil industry making us believe this was a fluke accident and it's a british company, one company problem, made it so that that push for policy stopped, the attention on the gulf coast and impacts on people's livelihoods and lives and the ecosystems stopped, and the push for change in policy to deal with this industry stopped, and what we know for certain is that this was not just a bp problem. for one, let's just look at the incident itself. bp is the least c of the rig. they are the managers, responsible for every final decision, and they made every final decision. transocean is the owner and

operator, and transocean operated that rig in just an inconscious way for the safety of workers. hundreds of maintenance issues went unattended, a blowout preventer was low on batteries and leaking hydraulic fluid, alarm systems intentionally prohibited. i have to say this every time i talk because the woman who i think is the hero of the day, she had been tainted by the industry as the evil doer on the rig, and it's picked up to be the movie for this. they paint andrea as at fault. when was she was the hero of the day and that's because the alarms on that rig were

inhibited meaning when natural gas came into the rig, lights should have flashed, alarms should have sounded. we're in a room, this room -- as soon as the gas came in it, it should have been saled so everybody was safe out there even if we had to die. none of that happened. the alarms were turned off so they could record information so we knew what happened, but the alarms would not go on. what andrea did was sitting on the bridge saying the alarms didn't go off and she pushed the button making the alarms go, and what transocean is says why didn't she push the alarms minutes earlier. it's her fault. no, it's their fault they were inhibited, and we learned that's true across the fleet. transocean is the largest owner and operator of all offshore rigs in the world. everything that went wrong on the rig is a reason to be concerned about every rig operating around the world.

halhalliburton failed in those operations. cameron,ed builder of the bop failed. every single oil company who didn't know what to do in response to the disaster who had not planned, not prepared, guilty in this disaster, and what the bottom line is all the companies are to blame and need to be held to account and pay up. the bottom line of the story is that we shouldn't be having these operations, and that's what we learned after 1969, and it's what we should be learning today, and the obama administration knows this as peter said. all of them were good on this issue. even when obama was running for office at first he was opposed to offshore drilling, and then he was for it in the middle of the campaign, and same happened to john mccain. the oil industry wants offshore drilling because they are running out of the places to operate, and they are willing to

make that risk and spin the dice and risks the lives of the people in the wild places of the gulf, but we can't let them do that. one of the amazing ends of this story is that when i started writing this book in the gulf, you couldn't get environmentalists in the gulf coast to say anything bad about the oil industry. oil and fish and oil in the gulf is part and partial to being there, and one of the stories i tell in the book is of the fish and petroleum festival enand the king and queen are in my book and they have these crystal crowns and made in crystal is a green oil dearic coming out of the crown and a pink shrimp and that's the relationship between fish and petroleum in the gulf. one of the things we lerched is -- learned that while the gulf is a petro state, it's not.

angola is a petro state. iraq is a petro state. this isn't a petro state. it's not. the people who worked in the industry told me by the end is, you know what? we could do without this work. it's not safe. we don't like it. it's dangerous. give us something else to do. we can't do it. we can't organize for it here. we're in the gulf of mexico. it's hard to organize for the alternatives here. we can work on it, but we need your help. you folks who work with green peace and the center for bilogical diversity and you folks in california and dc, you have to fight so that we can have alternative energy jobs, wind, solar. they are ready, but they need

our help, and the one year anniversary is the time. it is the opportunity. this is the time when the world focuses on this issue again, when public attention is gripped again, and we can actually organize to see change put into place, so thank you very much for listening. obviously there's a great deal more about this written in the book. we are eager to answer your questions and have discussion and thank you very much for being with us tonight. [applause] [inaudible] [inaudible] >> somebody in the back can get the room covered, okay? thank you. thank you for keeping everybody's attention on this.

two points, questions. [inaudible] where is the money coming from with the scientific research we need for the next year or more, ten years, whatever you said, and who is sponsoring those? my other question has to do with lisa who says we know where the oil is, we can go get it. i assume it's alaska, but i didn't read. is that anwar and things? >> well, the money for our litigation is coming from you. thank goodness. our members -- we have 42,000 paying members and 300,000 e-mail activist, and people are responding. they are spending in the money we need to keep in court, and we

have incredible team of 22 lawyers. we're working with a host of other lawyers who have volunteered their time, and with the help of our members and our supporters, we will continue the litigation fight for as long as it takes. that's the good news. i think the other part of the question was -- oh, -- >> where's the money coming for science? >> as far as -- >> [inaudible] >> as far as where the money for the science is coming from a lot of it is held up. bp is not really making that available, and somebody mentioned, you know, aapparently slibtly made -- deliberately made the process difficult. a lot of scientists have done a great job collecting data under

difficult situations, but now they cont get money -- can't get money to analyze it. >> government? >> it's a mess. there is government funding, but a lot is tied up in the court process so even data that is being analyzed, it's not shared with the public because they are treating it as evidence. that doesn't mean the public doesn't have a right to know. you know, i would also give a plug for a friend at cbd who are doing great work, and like cbd, green peace, doesn't get corporate funding. we don't take money from the government. it's all from you. thank for making it possible to do that. >> one thing very quickly is one of the problems is that bp has put up $500 million for research as they should. they should put up $500 million for research, but they are in control of the funds. they are requiring scientists to

sign three year confident agreements. they are torn. there isn't other money. there's bp money, and then there's nothing. scientists are saying no and trying to find support where they can, but they get it from groups like green peace and from universities and so therefore, they all need our support. they basically have to counter bp's control of the funds with alternative funding sources so people like samantha joy who is an amazing woman and i spend a great deal of time with in the book goes down to the bottom of the ocean once a month since this happened, mapped the oil on the ocean two inches thick 80 mimes east of the belowout. she was on the team that found the plumes, fighting noaa every

day. these scientists need our support. yes, please. >> yeah, something, you know, we have long suspected, and it came out and might have been greenpeace's freedom of information agent recently, i think so, but a lot of documents, thousands of documents emerged that bp has done everything possible to very specifically direct how the money goes. gee, i don't like the way the study is going, let's pull the plug or give the money to these people because they have a good background in the oil industry, and let's spend the money here. you can imagine, they are very much trying to direct their $500 million to studies that benefit them and ultimately things they use in their defense in court and get a tax deduction for donating their money for defense in court. >> what an opportunity for us all to work together on this.

bring that money home, bring the national guard home. [inaudible] really work on this, and we were anxious to work with you. how does the navy -- [inaudible] we had to absolutely report every drop of oil we spilled to the coast guard and absolutely could not use any detergents on the oil. that was prohibited. don't they have the same rules today? >> yeah, they still -- they still have to record every release of oil and there's millions of gallons of oil released into the ocean by oil rigs, accidents, workers die all the time. one of the workers i interviewed, i was sitting with

his wife and newborn baby, and he was trying to make her feel better by says, oh, honey, these explosions happen all the time. don't worry about it. she didn't know he broke his arm and leg and that came out during the interview and oil spills happen constantly. the use of dispersant happens constantly. one of the things, this wasn't the largest use. it was 2.5 million used, but nobody did any research. the oil industry didn't do any research. they don't care. they didn't -- they didn't test it or study it and used it again this time. this time they used it at the source of the gusher underwater, and we've seen dr. smith joy who saw footage of this, the trail of the dispersant and 98% went

into the ocean. did you want to add to that? >> it was reported a while ago that the $20 billion that bp was supposed to put into the fund was directly connected to the gulf production money. is that still the case? it was reported, but i haven't heard that again. in other words, they didn't -- obama administration apparently allowed them to only tie that to gulf's oil production so that bp could then hold the obama administration hostage because if they didn't allow more drilling in the gulf, than the $20 billion was gone. has anything been done about that? >> well, i don't think that's exactly accurate, but the reality is this was a company about to go down the tubes. their share price dropped hugely every day. the market exapization was cut in half in a matter of days.

had some agreement not been reached, i think the government's fear was this company will go away, one of the largest companies on earth will day in front of us, and then who will pay? we won't have the british punching bag available to us. ultimately, a calculation, a calculation on a very short term basis, a 24/7 news cycle calculation was made that we have to have something that a, gives us some certainty that there's going to be some funds available for the people, but, b, and possibly more important that at that point the obama administration made a determination that it's not in their best interest politically or even in the government of the country to allow this company to die at that time. i think that's what the $20 billion represented more than anything else. >> one thing i'll just add. the very first -- the moratorium

that the obama administration put in place was not on drilling in the gulf of mexico. it was just on exploration in the gulf. we are producing more oil at this time than last year. production didn't suffer at all. of course, just to make the point for people listening out there who think that drill, baby, drill is the answer, we're producing more oil now than we were at this time last year, but the price of oil and gas are significantly higher, so they are not connected. the very first knew lease for exploration was granted to bp, and explore race, you know, grants are going out left and right now and all the companies are getting new grants. also, that $20 billion has been put forward that it's just for the claims to think the claims are well taken care of. that $20 billion, just a promise, only about $3.5 has been delivered is for everything, every potential charge against bp. it's not nearly as large as it

sounds and also hasn't been paid yet. >> time for one last question. >> i want to note quickly that the clean water act lawsuit that we have filed seeks $19 billion that's entirely separate from the other $20 billion fund. >> you mentioned -- [inaudible] [inaudible] what do you think -- how do you think you're going to get -- [inaudible] >> well, that is a good question, and we're in this terrible, terrible spot. with the attacks for the decades, and it's just a sad, sad iron yi under a democratic

administration when we can fight back in the darkest, darkest days of all branches of government controlled by hostile s, we beat the challenges. basically the wolf was taken off the endangered species list by an act of congress all in a calculation to reelect john tester, just a naked calculation made by the bean counters over there at the white house, and all i can say is it's very depressing. we think we will get the dwarf seals on the list because another group of people make that decision. if they don't, we'll sue, and then it will be on the list. this is the question everybody's asking now, and you see it's like the domino theory they talked about in vietnam. if you take the wolf off by legislation, the most

charismatic animals there is, then, you know, i understand your question about the sea horse, which is a darling little cree orture -- creature by the way,. we are in a world of hurt in that regard. we are in a world of hurt. >> any last questions? >> one question that i get asked a lot that you might have asked if you had more time is how good a job did they do with the cleanup effort, and it's a difficult one to answer, but for me it comes back to the simple truth which people don't generally want to face, and that's where you have offshore drilling, you have spills. you have the risk of accidents, and this gets back to what antonia juhasz was saying. they are rolling the dice, and it's just a matter of time. it was not so much an accident, but an accident waiting to happen, and so that's why really we need to be working together more than ever to make sure this doesn't happen again. we have to get rid of offshore

drilling. >> [inaudible] [applause] >> i'm sorry, didn't mean to jump in, but i think more importantly, we have to get rid of our addiction to oil and the idea that all of us here use oil somehow today to get here. you may have flown on a plane to get here. i think that's one the reasons why people don't get emotional about this because they think i'll drive down to the coast so i can like fight the oil. wait a minute, i just drove in a car that used oil. no, it just how do you turn that around? that's the bottom line. as far as the, you know, the business and the fines, you know, the $20 billion is ridiculously low. i just was fined $200 for putting a ketchup bottle in a trash can that was not a recyclable can. that's a fine. we do a really good job of this

stuff. i'm amazed that companies like that can get away with so much crap. [laughter] >> so, i think it's an important place to end our own responsibility, our own culpability in dealing with oil. there's to piases of that. -- pieces of that. one is hands down the largest source of oil, use of oil and gasoline in the united states is transportation. it's cars, planes, and trucks. i think the greatest solution for that is, you know, we are at a time of economic crisis, incredible job loss, ongoing job loss, if we can make the type of public commitment to public transportation like we did to public highways, we could have an amazing jobs program and could move people in public transportation instead of moving people in cars, and that would be a huge shift, but the whole field of advocacy for public transportation is one that

doesn't get a lot of support and a lot of energy, and it's, i think, you know, really the silver bullet. there's individual actions we can take, but collectively, we will be far, far more powerful, and the way to be powerful collectively is by demanding it possible for people to make that choice away from their individual use of cars. the other piece is the industry, and so i've made -- i've spent a lot of my life organizing around the oil industry, and it's one that's very difficult to organize around because it's the wealthiest industry the planet has ever known, and it's not susceptible to the type of consumer boycotts that so many other large companies are, and i think the -- all that is missing is continuing to have that type of corporate analysis that allows us to say the industry is making choices, companies are making choices and using money in a way that is makes it very hard for us to make the

individual decisions and the policy decisions that we want to and to continue to bring that corporate analysis into the picture and support the organizations like greenpeace and policy studies that do that work and do it and target the industry and oil companies as a whole so that we can one, attack the negative work they are doing, and support the positive alternatives at the same time, so i think that's it. thank you all. [applause] >> thank you all very much. i'm going to sign books somewhere even though we've gone over. >> you're watching 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books on c-span2's booktv. >> nathan hodge is the author of armed humanitarians, the rise of nation builders.

define nation builders. >> it's a tricky term nobody wants to own, and that's one of the reasons i chose to write about it. i'm not using them in the political science or development sense. i'm using them in the way like george w. bush or david petraeus would have used it which is this is a way of describing this kind of mission of armed nation building we're involved in, it's been described in as arms social work, and i'm trying to describe this phenomena to the ordinary reader who might have the idea looking at the news and looking at iraq and afghanistan and show them another picture of what goes on, the three cups of tea side of the war. that is what the military calls the nonce nittic sides of thing. i want to get at the experience of people who are really getting their hands dirty doing these kinds of things, rebuilding schools, bigging wells, building roads, fundamentally nonmilitary

missions in places like iraq an afghanistan. >> is the u.s. military currently building schools, building roads, doing nonmilitary functions? >> you'd be surprised to see the extent of which they embraced that mission especially in places like afghanistan where doing these kinds of nation building missions is a corner stone of the exit strategy creating a government capable of delivers things like criminal justice. that's the big concern in afghanistan is that the taliban could outgovern the coalition. that's where civilians with nonmilitary expertise get to step in. >> where did the term "nation building" come from? >> it's a term, it's woolly, it's sort of very unsatisfying term. it's -- precisely, i really wanted to dig into it because back in the 1990s, there was a lot of hand ringing within the national security set that the u.s. military was too tied down in nation building and in fact when he was running for office in 2000, george w. bush said he

didn't believe we needed a nation building and the u.s. military shouldn't be involved in this thing, but bid end of the term he embraced it calling for the creation of a civilian nation building sponsz core in a -- response core in the state of the union address. it was a dramatic turn around and in part in kind of arms humanitarianism is seen as a way of getting out of the mess we got into in iraq. >> how is it that nation building became a political term where george bush in 2000 said we don't nation build? >> right, or barak obama in december of 2009 saying he wanted to send more troops to afghanistan, but with the caveat that the nation he wanted to do, the nation he wanted to build was our own. you know, nation building in some circles is kind of a dirty word. you know, it's sort of -- it's not what the military should be doing. they are to train for high end,

force-on-force missions. it's kind of -- well, what i say pines for many a way because it's simple, direct. your o opponent wears a uniform and has formations you can count. they have to navigate the laws of cultural differences, language barriers, and getting to the problem is proving harder in practice than it is in theory. >> so what's been the reaction of the pentagon to its new role? >> interesting. if you see some of the more recent remarks by secretary of defense robert gates, a hawking about -- he talking about the worries that the military could back a 19th searching ri. it's not at that point yet, but they are trying to master those chores, those nation building tasks, there's a worry within the military establishment that the pendulum may have swung too far in that direction, there's a

need to go back and concentrate on the fundamentals, get back to sending tank rounds down range, that kind of thing, but there's a reasonable argument behind that which is these fundment tally are not military missions. these are missions for the development, agencies of development, they are there for diplomats. part of the problem is that diplomats, aid workers are not trained to operate in the hostile environment while doing the work while being shot at, and there's this very difficult transformation for agencies like the departments like us-aid who are build around the embraced embassy. that's the organizations and get people to be willing to go out and volunteer, you know, on this sort of frontier in afghanistan, for instance. >> so nathan, has this

diminished the role of government? >> it's the ambitions that is defending these sort of, you know, put more wing tips on the ground, and the ability of, you know, agencies like the state department to do it. it's a simple matter of math. the department of defense at this point spends somewhere north of around $700 billion a year. it's got the personnel. look at the japan relief operations oink on now. there's the nern kneel, -- personnel and trains to get to places in a hurry. look at the haitian military operation as well. part of the effort underway, we need to fix the inner agency, get diplomats to get out there, be all together, going along going to drink tea with an elder. it's not as simple as that because what happens when you got shot at along the way. >> has it been an effective

foreign policy tool? >> it sends mixed messages. >> that we're armed human tear yaps? >> yeah, it's a contradiction and sends a signal that, you know, for instance, if we're talking about in parts of the developing world that we think that an important principle of civilian control is the military people doing the training. it says something interesting about how kind of we are, and i worry as well, especially when it comes to operating in places like this, that we adopt a little bit of a kind of fortress america mind set. a talk a lot in force protection in the military, and inevitably sometimes that ends up putting -- because of the risk in some situations, putting barriers between you and the people you want to reach out and help. >> you referenced greg mori

tinson and -- mortonson. >> he's the guy best known for a briefing called the pentagon's new map. he in the early 2000s was a guy who captured the department of defense with a couple famous briefings, a powerpoint briefings. it explained how the post-9/11 world shifted. i dive more into what he was arguing, and part of what he was also getting at was there needed to be something like kind of a nation building mission available on call addressing gap states, these failing states. i think he said his idea was you have the army, you know, the big forces that go in and kind of do regime change fundamentally, knock on nations if called to do

so. they are a mix of aid worker, boy scout, u.s. marine, you know, kind of this mishmash of different things, but he was an early person who articulated it in a lot of ways and tried to explain the new reality to people in the department of defense, so he's a character that's in the book. >> how does center for new american security play into your book? >> well, they became the locusts of the -- they sort of became the hum for the counterinsurgency set. really, the counter insurgents in washington starts as insurgents as a lot of ways. it was the reagan style, military establishment, an intellectual rebellion, not anything more than that, by people who experienced their first tours in iraq and afghanistan, and came back and were groping for intellectual answers why the u.s. military was losing in iraq.

they reached back and found these intellectual antecedents and french counter insurgency theories talking about the roles and missions and how to refashion government to get at this really tricky problem, and they played an interesting role in advocacy and as described by other reporters, they are a farm city for the obama administration in the foreign policy. >> what's your day job? >> i write for the "wall street journal" and cover national security. >> finally, what's the image on the front of your book? the young boy on the wrap around and soldier? where did you get the image? >> i think the image conveys a little bit of how i felt about this mission as i observed it unfold which was kind of like at times kind of the ronald rage p saying i'm from the government, here to