David Bennett

In 1987, the ship Esso Japan was converted into a storage vessel and renamed ‘Safer’. She was moored off the coast of Yemen in 1988, owned by the Yemeni government through its national oil company, and used to store oil.

Against that background, do you remember the Exxon Valdez that ruptured when it hit a reef off the coast of Alaska?

The oil tanker owned by the Exxon Shipping Company, spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound on March 24, 1989, and it caused the world’s biggest maritime environmental disaster.

In terms of volume of oil released it is second to the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but in terms of damage it is the worst by far. Despite a clean-up that went on for years, less than 10% of the oil was recovered.

Now fast forward to today, and just so we are sure we are comparing apples with apples, that was 11 million gallons of crude oil that leaked out of the Exxon Valdez.

In the oil industry, a barrel is defined as 42 US gallons, or 35 imperial gallons.

Well, the Floating Storage And Offloading Vessel Safer has 1.2 million barrels of crude oil in its tanks, and it is rusting away. That’s 50.4 million US gallons of oil, or more than four times the amount on the Exxon Valdez.

Since 2015 the vessel has been a pawn in a game of chicken between Iranian-back Houthi rebels and just about everyone else.

The Houthis want payment for the oil. The UN wants to avoid an ecological disaster.

Apart from the ecological damage at stake, to the south is the narrow Bab-El-Mandeb Strait (‘The Gate of Lamentations’ in Arabic) that gives out into the Gulf of Aden. Via the Suez Canal it is the shortest trade route between the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and the rest of East Asia – and one of the world’s major trade routes. 

The Houthis agreed to let UN inspectors in, and then changed their minds. And meanwhile the hulk continued to rust. Then the parties did a deal, but it costs money to pay for the oil and to offload it. So the UN asked for the money to do the job. That was two years ago.

Update June 2022

And now in June 2022, with the FSO Safer becoming unsafer by the day, the United Nations is passing around the begging bowl, asking the public to join in an make up the five million dollar shortfall because the national governments of the world’s countries have not been able to dig deep enough into their pockets. The five million will mean the UN can make a start, but the actual shortfall is twenty million dollars. So somewhere down the line they are going to need more money. And meanwhile, the vessel edges nearer to breaking up.

What a sad mess.

Enid Blyton was an English children’s author whose books have been translated into 90 languages and have sold more than 600 million copies. Making an assumption that each of those copies has been read by, let’s say, three people – that means we are going on for two billion people who have read her books. As a slice of the total human population on the planet from the 1930s when she began writing up until today – it’s a staggering number.

Enid Blyton continued to write up until her death in 1968, and somewhere along the way, I read her books. All this is interesting, but here’s the thing. She was due to be commemorated on a new 50p coin but it isn’t going to happen. In their recommendation, the advisory committee to the Royal Mint are said to have described her as “a racist, sexist, homophobe and not a very well-regarded writer”.
If quantity is a measure of how ‘well-regarded’ a write she was, then she was well regarded. 600 million copies is a lot of copies, no?

In response to the advisory committee’s recommendation, a TV talk-show host commented that ““It seems to me that if you were to draw a line in the year say 1955 and go backwards from there you could pretty much pick up anybody based on our modern values.”

I agree. When Enid Blyton wrote, she was speaking conventional truths through her characters – white is better than black, boy is better than girl, etc.
On her being homophobic, well it would be right and proper for her to be so in her time. Homosexual acts were a criminal offence in the UK until the The Sexual Offences Act was made law in 1967, and that only decriminalised homosexual acts in private between two men over the age of 21.

So to accuse Enid Blyton of being a homophobe is strange. In her lifetime she would be better described as an upstanding citizen decrying criminal behaviour. Of course, she could have been more sympathetic to homosexuality, but then she could have been more sympathetic to rapists, and what would the upstanding citizens of today say about that?

As I said, I read several of her books as a child. And perhaps my attitudes have been formed because of what I read. I haven’t trawled through her books to write this piece, so maybe I would be ‘absolutely appalled’ if I were to read her stuff now.

Assuming I would not be appalled, then I have sympathy for the opinion that we are living in a world of dangerously virtuous moral finger pointing at people who lived in another era.

The writing is on the wall because of climate change worries, but even without that there are the pollution consequences. So the argument goes that the more people who divest, the quicker fossil fuels becomes unattractive to others. That’s the argument. The problem with the argument is that for every stockholder that divests there must be a stockholder that invests – there must be a buyer for every seller. The buyers are likely be those who have listened to the environmental concerns and don’t care. Being who they are, they are more likely not to care what the oil companies do.

So the worst traits and behaviour are given more free rein, leading to more shortcuts, more Gulf Of Mexico oil spills. The price will find its own level and not fall through the floor, so the fossil fuel companies won’t suffer. Perhaps the divestment movement sees other effects – such as that Governments will be carried along by the wave of concern and legislate to keep fossil fuels in the ground.

But excepting knock-on effects like this, I can’t see a flaw in the argument that the unintended consequences of fossil fuel divestment is to concentrate ownership in the hands of those who don’t care.