I happened to pick up a dead trees copy of the New Yorker this week and found in it a massive article on the BP oil spill written by Raffi Khatchadourian. I wouldn’t be surprised if he were working on a book on the same subject. In it, he brings the perspective that only the passage of time can give to a situation that was very hard to judge at the time.
Not only did the public not really understand the full scope of what was going on, but neither did anyone who was actively involved in the response to the spill. Khatchadourian’s article is what you might call the first revisionist history of the spill response.
As a liberal and an environmentalist, I found the article really valuable because it caused me to take a hard look at some of my biases and the role they played in my reaction to the response to the spill. A huge portion of the article is devoted to the role dispersants (like Corexit) played in the spill response.
Heavy use of the dispersants was highly controversial for a number of reasons, some good and some bad. The bad reason was that many people reported that Corexit was highly toxic and worse for the environment than the oil itself. That turns out not to have been true — Corexit is the most widely tested chemical dispersant available, and in the aftermath the EPA has found that it is less toxic than the oil being spilled. Fears (mostly unfounded) about the toxicity of the Corexit prevented it from being used as widely as it could have been.
The spill response team also started using Corexit at the wellhead to break up the oil as it was emerging from the blowout in addition to applying it using sprayers from the air. This had never been tried before and thus caused a lot of worry about what would result.
And also, nobody has used dispersants in the amount that they were used in the BP spill response. These last two fears were better founded. It’s important to look at the risks when you’re trying something new.
Ultimately, the dispersants were the most effective measure used by the spill response team, and the disinformation that was passed around about the dispersants probably reduced the effectiveness of the spill response.
Fundamentally, a lot of the negative impression of the use of dispersants resulted from people seeing the use of them as something that BP was for and the EPA was against. In truth, the spill response was coordinated by the most experienced and knowledgeable oil spill experts in the world, and the scientists working on the response ultimately agreed that using the dispersants made more sense than not using them.
That’s just one example of how people’s realtime impression of who was calling the shots affected public opinion, in turn making it more difficult to clean up the spill.
The article covers only one aspect of the spill — cleanup of the oil that spewed into the Gulf of Mexico. It didn’t cover the events leading up to the spill or the efforts to contain the blowout. It makes a powerful argument that in the end, technocrats and experts are our best bet at getting the job done, and that public opinion and politicians mostly tend to make things worse.
Where is the Amazon Prime of online journalism?
A lot of people have said that they wished that the New York Times’ new pricing system was more about offering more value for people who do pay rather than putting barriers in the way of people who don’t pay. Those remarks immediately made me think of Amazon Prime.
Amazon Prime subscribers pay $80 a year in exchange for “free” two day shipping on every Prime-eligible item they purchase from Amazon.com. It is, essentially, a loyalty program that you have to pay to join. I’m certain it exerts a powerful influence on the buying habits of subscribers. If a subscriber buys something from a site other than Amazon.com, they’re likely to pay more for shipping, receive the item later, or both. Plus, they’ve already got the sunk cost of the Prime membership on their mind. When they go to other sites, they probably think, “Shouldn’t I look for this on Amazon.com first to see if I can use my Prime membership?”
I always wonder how many Amazon Prime subscribers buy enough stuff over the course of the year to make the $80 they spend on their Prime membership a good deal. My guess is what they’re really buying is the ability to make impulse purchases without worrying about whether they should have waited to group items for free shipping, which in turn leads them to spend even more money with Amazon.com. Amazon.com further benefits from Prime because it encourages third party sellers who use the site to turn their fulfillment operation over to them as well so that their merchandise can be eligible for Prime shipping.
One of the core values at O’Reilly is to create more value than you capture. The fact that Prime benefits Amazon.com in many ways has nothing to do with why people pay for it — they pay for it because it delivers value to them. What can the New York Times offer that creates more value than it captures?
Clearly the New York Times would argue that their articles and blog posts deliver value well beyond their subscription fee. Unfortunately, they have lowered the perceived value of their product by providing free access to their articles for years, and more importantly, close substitutes for what the New York Times offers remain freely available.
Anyway, my plan was to make this a really awesome post with a suggestion for the New York Times that would save the paper and revolutionize online journalism. Unfortunately, great ideas elude me. I even sat and thought about what service I would gladly pay for from the New York Times, and I couldn’t come up with anything. Maybe I’m just happy I don’t work for a news site.