14 January 2022 The Guardian Weekly39
of the interior Walter Hickel to issue a moratorium on off -
shore drilling in California’s waters. Decades later, few
residents of the Golden State were clamouring to change
this, Freudenburg and Gramling found. Virtually every
Californian they interviewed opposed off shore drilling.
In southern Louisiana, a series of blowouts also took
place in the 70s, polluting the Gulf and, in some cases,
causing fatalities. But unlike in California, no moratorium
on off shore drilling ensued. By the time Freudenburg and
Gramling conducted their study, more than 13,000 produc-
tion wells had been drilled in the Gulf of Mexico’s outer
continental shelf. Once again, the subjects of their study
all seemed to hold the same view of this activity, only this
time it was the opposite view: in Louisiana, opposition to
off shore drilling was nonexistent.
One explanation for these starkly divergent attitudes was
ideological: California was a liberal state whose residents
tended to care about the environment, whereas Louisiana
was a conservative one where people held favourable views
of business. But the divergence also refl ected radically dif-
ferent economic prospects. As Freudenburg and Gramling
noted, the Californians they interviewed did not seem to
care that closing the coast to drilling might hamper eco-
nomic development. Louisianians did not have the luxury
of thinking this way. The oil industry meant jobs in a poor
state where, for many people, there were few better options.
By the end of the 90s, nearly one-third of the US’s
domestic energy supply came from off shore production
in the Gulf of Mexico. To Louisianians who found jobs in
the petroleum industry, this was a source of livelihood and a
point of pride. But there were signifi cant downsides, includ-
ing the highest level of air pollution in the country and the
degradation of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands. Much of the oil
and gas that fl owed through the state’s pipelines ended up
servicing other parts of the country. Meanwhile, Louisiana’s
coastal communities were sinking, leaving the residents
of cities like New Orleans more vulnerable to storms and
hurricanes, a problem likely to grow worse in the future,
thanks to rising sea levels precipitated by the climate crisis.At the beginning of the pandemic, some analysts speculated
that the era of dirty energy was coming to an end. Lock-
downs and travel bans caused the global demand for oil to
plunge, and at one point, the price of oil futures fell below
zero, prompting some to suggest that fossil fuels would
soon give way to a new era of clean, renewable energy. But
without support from the world’s leading economies, the
shift to renewable energy stands little chance of being real-
ised. During Trump’s presidency, such support was sorely
lacking from Washington. The agenda appeared to shift
under Jo e Biden, who announced that he was elevating theclimate crisis to a national security priority. Not long after
assuming offi ce, however, Biden urged Opec to increase
production in order to alleviate the strain on consumers
saddled with high gas prices.
Such cognitive dissonance did not escape the notice of
the workers I met. “I realise oil and gas is not the best thing
for the environment,” one former roustabout in Louisiana
told me. “How’d you get here?” he asked, pointing to the
car I’d driven to our appointment.
Although they rarely made the news, oil spills have
continued to take place with distressing regularity in the
decade since the Deepwater blowout – in 2018 alone, there
were 137, according to the National Oceanic and Atmos-
pheric Administration. Fatalities are also still common.
“From 2008 to 2017, roughly the same number of oilfi eld
workers were killed on the job as US troops in Afghanistan,”
notes Michael Patrick F Smith, who worked on an oilfi eld
in North Dakota during the fracking boom. These deaths,
too, rarely made headlines, much to the dismay of Lillian
Espinoza-Gala , an industry safety consultant who worked
for years on an off shore rig, until an accident killed one of
her co-workers and nearly claimed her own life.
When I visited Espinoza-Gala at her offi ce in Lafayette, a
city in southern Louisiana , I noticed an award displayed on
one wall, recognising her as “one of the fi rst Gulf of Mexico
female production roustabouts”. On another was a picture
of 11 wooden crosses planted on a strip of sand, one for each
of the workers killed on the Deepwater Horizon. When the
blowout happened, it felt like 9/11 to her, Espinoza-Gala told
me. She turned on a computer and showed me a PowerPoint
presentation she’d made about the blowout. After coming
to a slide that showed the faces of some of the victims, she
paused. There was Donald Clark, 49, an assistant driller
from Louisiana. There was Aaron Dale Burkeen, 37, a crane
operator from Mississippi.
Before shutting down her computer, Espinoza-Gala
clicked on one other slide featuring a worker, a bearded
man in a navy suit and silk tie who was sitting at a congres-
sional hearing, delivering testimony. It was Stephen Stone.
Behind him was a woman with long red hair and freckled
cheeks dabbing a tear from her eye. It was Sara. On the next
slide, a congressman was shown holding up a photo of one
of the blowout’s better-known victims: a crude-encrusted
pelican, Louisiana’s state bird.
A proud Louisianian and committed conservationist,
Espinoza-Gala was not unmoved by the image of the peli-
can. But, like Sara Lattis Stone, she found it diffi cult to
understand why the pelicans aroused more sympathy
from politicians than the workers. “The widows were in
these hearings, where they’re holding up pictures of birds
instead of their husbands!” she said. For a long time, she
told me, this enraged her. Eventually, she came to terms
with it, reluctantly concluding that if not for the pelicans,
the Deepwater Horizon disaster would probably have been
ignored in Washington, the way most rig accidents were,
owing to the low value placed on the lives of the people
who did the dirty work.
“If 11 workers would have died, nobody would have
cared,” she said •
Adapted from Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden
Toll of Inequality by Eyal Press, which will be published
on 20 January
EYAL PRESS IS AN AMERICAN AUTHOR AND JOURNALIST
BASED IN NEW YORK CITYOff shore oil fatalities were four-
times higher per person-hours
worked in US waters than in
European waters