[The following article appeared in the June 12 issue of La Brèche, a revolutionary-socialist newspaper published twice monthly in Lausanne, Switzerland. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
In the first part of this article [see Intercontinental Press, July 11, 1977, P. 803], we showed that the source of the Ekofisk catastrophe lay in the fact that it is in the interests of the oil trusts to skimp on safety measures, and that the bourgeois governments are more than willing to accommodate these interests.
In the second part, we will deal with ocean pollution caused by the oil discharged from ships and refineries. Each year, six million tons of oil are dumped into the ocean. Discharges of all kinds by ships amount to 2.13 million tons a year, thus constituting the principal source of oil pollution. Coastal refineries add another 200,000 tons a year, while inland refineries are responsible for a large share of the 1.6 million tons of oil carried into the oceans by rivers each year.
Oil tankers rinse out their empty tanks with sea water to get rid of the fumes given off by the oil resides and avoid the danger of explosions. This is what is called "routine degasification." Other vessels do the same with their empty fuel tanks. Oil tankers that sail with empty tanks fill some of them with sea water to give the ship sufficient draft. These procedures all result in large amounts of rinse or ballast water being dumped into the sea, contaminated by oil.
In 1924 there was already talk of providing oil tankers with equipment for separating oil and water (Scientific American, January 1974, p. 12). But this was never really put into practice. An international agreement signed in London in 1954, and ratified by forty-three countries, provided that within a fifty-mile coastal area, discharges must not contain more than 100 parts per million of hydrocarbons. Outside this area, discharges were unregulated. This agreement was amended in 1962 and 1969, and finally revised in 1973. The current regulations are as follows:
• A total ban on discharges within the fifty-mile zone or in the Mediterranean Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, the Red Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico.
• No more than sixty liters of hydrocarbons discharged for every mile logged.
Oil Pollution-What
Oil is a complex blend of a hundred different substances which vary in their behavior and degree of toxicity. The full effects of oil on marine life forms are still unknown.
Oil floats. Thus, the organisms in plankton are the most affected: algae, tiny crustaceans, and fish larvae.* Oil film reduces the amount of light available to marine algae, and it is these algae that produce most of the oxygen in the atmosphere. Aeration of the water, and thus of the plankton, is reduced. Reflectivity of the sea, which makes up the largest part of the earth's surface, increases (Scientific American,
September 1970, p. 122), water evaporation decreases (Le Monde, June 7, 1977); this can cause unforeseeable climatic disturbances.
The algae in plankton are killed by a concentration of 0.1 to 1,000 parts per million of oil, depending on the species.
With 0.1 parts per million, the rate of
*But less plankton to eat means fewer fish.
• Total discharge limited to one-thirtythousandth of the cargo for new ships.
• All new oil tankers weighing more than 70,000 tons must be equipped with separate ballast tanks that cannot be used for hydrocarbons.
• Ports must be equipped with waste stations, into which the ballast water must be emptied after tankers have completed short trips of less than seventy-two hours. (La Pollution des Eaux Marines [Pollution of the Seas], Pérès et al., Gauthier-Villarx, 1976.)
To meet these requirements, tanker builders have installed "load on top" (LOT) systems, in which the rinse water is put in a special tank to settle out. After most of the hydrocarbons are removed, the water is discharged into the sea. The attitude of the capitalists-shipowners and oil trusts-toward such legislation is summed up in the OECD's [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] 1973 report on oil:
Suffice it to say that while the measures intended to reduce and perhaps eliminate pollution are often worthwhile in themselves, they usually increase operating costs. For example, it is estimated that the industry's "load on top""
It Does to the Sea growth is slowed down. The tiny organisms in plankton die in twenty-four hours with doses of 100 parts per million. With one part per million, adults usually survive, but the larvae die after two or three days. In the area polluted by the wreck of the Torrey Canyon, 50 to 90 percent of the sardine eggs died. In the laboratory, extensive destruction of the eggs and larvae of herring, cod, and plaice, and the hatching of deformed larvae, have been observed at 100 parts per million. Turbot larvae cannot survive 0.01 parts per million.
Diving birds pay a heavy price for oil pollution of the oceans. Professor R.B. Clark of the University of Newcastle, a specialist in the study of birds affected by the "black tide," estimates that millions of birds die each year (cited by H. Rothmann, Murderous Providence, Hart Davis, 1972, p. 240).
In his 1970 report to the Council of Europe, Jacques Cousteau stated: "... in most of the earth's oceans in the last twenty years, life has diminished by more than 30 percent and less than 50 percent."
method raises the cost of transportation by six cents per ton. The provisions that deal with indemnity payments, while desirable, must also be considered as a factor adding to transportation costs. Furthermore, in some countries, taxes are imposed by law to cover the costs of damages resulting from pollution (p. 126).
It is in the capitalists' interests to violate these provisions. Controlling illegal discharges over the vast surface of the ocean is at least as difficult as detecting fiscal fraud amidst the intricacies of banking transactions-assuming that bourgeois governments really want to put a stop to either one of these "economic crimes."
During a spot check carried out off the coast of the Cotentin Peninsula by the French Ministry for the Quality of Life together with the navy in November 1975, 147 ships were monitored from an airplane. Seven were caught in the act of illegal waste disposal (Le Monde, December 12, 1975). But as the Le Monde reporter pointed out: "During three weeks of 'close surveillance,' nearly 10,000 ships of different nationalities sailed past the Cotentin coast. Counting the eleven cases of pollution spotted in the twenty-five-hour flight the source of four cases was not discovered-La Brèche], it can be estimated that there are several dozen illegal discharges in this zone every day."
On April 14, 1977, the French National Assembly debated a bill dealing with civic responsibility and the obligation of shipowners to assume the costs of damages resulting from hydrocarbon pollution. The reporter for the parliamentary majority objected to this law being more restrictive than the London agreement on which it was based, considering that it was "pointless and ineffective to penalize our shipping industry by saddling it with a special burden." (Le Monde, April 16, 1977)
Obviously, a French law would have affected mainly French ships. However, in view of the competition on the world market, the more antipollution measures a shipowner applies, the more disadvantaged he is.
As for accidents at sea, they are not merely the product of chance. In an article in the January-February 1977 issue of Environment on the shipwreck of five Liberian oil tankers in American waters in the last two weeks of 1976, that killed nine persons, wounded fifty, and spilled 27,210 tons of oil into the ocean, Sheldon Novick writes:
Liberian registry frees a ship from the require. ments of U.S. law and allows the shipowner to disregard U.S. maritime union wage scales. Crews of Liberian vessels therefore may be paid as little as one-sixth what U.S. flag vessels must pay; Liberian vessels are also freed from U.S. safety and reliability regulations. A vessel which is too old to meet U.S. standards may be shifted to Liberian registry in a matter of hours.... Many of the owners of the ships are corporations in Panama or other states which permit considerable secrecy and impose few or no regulations. Many of the world's 4,500 tankers are operated by such corporations on charter to the seven giant oil companies which dominate world oil shipments. (p. 44)*
In the case of oil refineries, the OECD report cited above provides several figures that clearly show it is technologically possible to prevent discharges of hydrocarbons. Inland refineries discharge an average of eleven kilograms of hydrocarbons for every 1,000 tons of crude oil processed. Coastal refineries, which use the sea as a huge all-purpose garbage disposal, discharge an average of sixty-two kilograms per 1,000 tons of processed oil. But refineries that process their wastes, combining separation by gravity (settling out), chemical treatment, and biological treatment, drop to an average of 5.6 kilograms (pp. 166-167). And this certainly does not represent the outer limit of technological capacity.
*Liberia has the largest fleet of oil tankers in the world. With 25 percent of the world tonnage, it surpasses Great Britain, which has 14 percent. (Le Pétrole, report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1973)
w'h
"To make the environmentalists happy, we're spilling sea water on the oil!"
It is impossible to talk about pollution by the oil industry without raising the question of whether all the oil that is pumped, shipped, and refined is really necessary to meet genuine human needs. In fact, it is far from it. Large quantities of oil, and of energy in general, are wasted. Since the "oil shortage," various bourgeois studies have calculated ways to conserve it. But of course, these studies only visualize areas of waste that could be eliminated while maintaining capitalism (better adjustment of furnaces and engines, better insulation of buildings, speed limits, etc.). Even the amounts that could be saved in this way seem to be considerable; for example, a Ford Foundation study projects savings that could make it unnecessary to develop new offshore deposits in the United States until 1985. But much greater waste is inherent in the very nature of capitalism. For example, there is the waste of energy
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used to produce goods deliberately de signed to wear out quickly (refrigerators cars, and so on), or the waste of energy caused by the lack of planning, which prevents automatic recycling of the hot water or steam discharged by plants to heat nearby homes.
As in all other cases of pollution, the pollution of the oceans by oil highlights the need for an economy without private ownership of industry, without the profit drive, without competition for markets; an economy planned so as to satisfy and respect genuine human needs. Furthermore, overcoming the problems created by oil pollution of the oceans, with the thousands of polluting oil tankers that plough the seas, the rivers that carry oil through several countries into the ocean, the need to choose between offshore and on-land deposits, exemplifies the need for a worldwide planned socialist economy.