AAPG Explorer - American Association of Petroleum Geologists

SPOTLIGHTON ...
AAPG
EXPLORER
Crisis Creates Shared Ethical Responsibilities
By KEN MILAM, EXPLORER Correspondent
When BP responded to a massive oil
spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year,
the topic of ethics was among the
things bubbling up in discussions.
Rusty Riese, this year’s AAPG
Distinguished Ethics lecturer, had a
backstage seat during the crisis as a BP
geoscience adviser in alternate energy.
“I thought they (BP) did a wonderful
job of explaining and being transparent,”
said Riese, who retired from BP and now is
an adjunct professor at Rice University in
Houston.
The company met its basic responsibilities
to clean up the spill and compensate those
damaged by the event, he said.
The rancorous public debate
surrounding the spill raises other ethical
questions, Riese said.
Many parties have ethical responsibilities
in times of crisis, he said.
“It’s more than just corporations,” he
said. “Regulatory agencies, the public, the
courts, legislators and the media all have
roles to play.”
Responsibilities
In the Deepwater Horizon case, Riese
said the media and elected officials seemed
especially prone to bending ethical standards
and using the situation to their own ends.
For example, the media’s doomsday
reporting with pictures of threatened
beaches and swamps probably did more to
hurt Gulf Coast tourism than the spill itself,
he said.
“The horrible wash-over of oil into those
areas feared in the beginning never really
happened,” Riese said.
Photos of cleanup efforts consistently
referred to “devastated” beaches, while
interviews with experts invariably focused
on worst-case scenarios, he said.
Generating headlines “to suit a 24-hour
news cycle ... the media weren’t performing
in a really ethical manner,” Riese said.
Lawmakers and other officials likewise
“used hyperbole to make points with their
constituents,” he said – which meant some
legislators “did as much damage as the
media” to local tourism.
The public also has responsibilities, if
ethical behavior is to be expected from the
other parties involved, he said.
“People don’t do a good job of getting
themselves informed or analyzing the
information they get,” he said.
“They see the petroleum industry as
an isolated, stand-alone component of the
economy. They fail to see petroleum is just
one piece ... of a much broader energyproducing
industry,” he said.
“The public doesn’t realize the
importance of energy to the lifestyle
we enjoy,” he said, “or the scale of the
alternatives.”
Natural gas, for example, “is explored for
in the same way and by the same people
as oil,” he said; wind farms take up huge
swathes of countryside, and opponents
contend they may endanger birds, mar
scenic vistas, interfere with recreation areas
and the like.
Needed: More Data
Geologists frequently deal with ethical
questions, he said, adding that the
most common situation may arise when
presenting prospects when there is
competition for funding.
“The scientific community does
a poor job of providing data for
the public,” he said.
Scientists, Riese continued,
should inform themselves about
the various issues before such
crises arise, and should share that
information with others.
Setting aside the deliberate
torching of Kuwaiti oilfields in the
first Gulf War, Deepwater Horizon is stacking
up as the worst oil spill on record, he said.
The 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska
RIESE
isn’t even in the top 10, but
was headlined at the time as a
pending ecological disaster of
epic proportions.
“I was at Prince William Sound
(site of the spill) two days ago and
the wildlife warden looked happy,”
Riese said.
One of the worst spills, the
1978 Amoco Cadiz off France,
ultimately dissipated with little
intervention and relatively slight impact on
the coastal environment, Riese said.
Riese said most of the top 10 spills “self-
remediated” or were remediated with some
human intervention, and “none seemed to
have long-term impact.”
Riese’s traveling presentation, which
kicked off at the recent Pacific Section
meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, includes
a wealth of data that is available for the
asking, he said.
Riese hopes to make the information
available through AAPG’s website.
After his inaugural ethics talk several
people in the audience took away copies of
the data on flash drives or by downloads.
“That’s what I would like people to do.” EXPLORER
WWW.AAPG.ORG JULY 2011
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