I still have trouble comprehending how truly very, very bad this all is. I think it's been hard to feel the scale of it because it's such a slow-motion event, so it frequently falls out of the news cycle, even here in relatively nearby Houston. It makes me even more pessimistic about the prospect of humans getting it together to deal with truly slow-motion problems, like global warming.
What makes me most pessimistic about it is that even in the face of empirical, observational evidence of global warming, there are still people out there who deny it.
The real gravity of this situation in the Gulf is being drastically underplayed -- because no one has accounted for the combination of its enormity plus the fact that hurricane season is nigh. And NOAA is predicting a higher than average hurricane season. Even if NOAA ends up being wrong about that, one or two hurricanes of even moderate strength anywhere near that enormous oil spill, which I suspect is FAR larger than anyone at BP has admitted (several researchers indicated that based on analyzing BP's video, BP's estimate of 5000 barrels per day is short by close two orders of magnitude), will whip the entire coastline into a toxic nightmare.
I'm surprised that it hasn't gotten more attention, but the thought of a 120 MPH wind whipping all of those miles-long plumes of toxic glop into a froth and splattering all over the Gulf coast definitely concerns me -- especially with the beginning of hurricane season so close, couple with the National Weather Service forecast...
Not too long ago there was a fuel oil spill in the SF Bay. Some of the oil washed up at Ocean Beach where I frequently run (barefoot).
A few times (long after the spill and several beach cleanups) I'd get home and notice a blob of tar stuck to my foot. It is nearly impossible to remove and extremely disgusting.
One can only imagine how much of this tar will be left by the BP spill and for how long it will remain.
Having visited New Orleans after Katrina, you could not escape the feeling that neglect, and dereliction of duty of our elected officials displayed before, during, and after the event. Strong words came to mind at the time, something akin to treason, but time has passed, and we move on to other issues.
And here we are again, where an entire way of life might be destroyed and the already battered economy of the region (and more so,its unique wild life habitats) will be gone due to neglect, cutting corners and protecting profit margins at the detriment of society and our natural environment.
The golf states are being destroyed by neglect, and i cant shake the feeling that to some degree however small it is my fault as well.
"Having visited New Orleans after Katrina, you could not escape the feeling that neglect, and dereliction of duty of our elected officials displayed before, during, and after the event. Strong words came to mind at the time, something akin to treason, but time has passed, and we move on to other issues."
That's the understatement of the decade. New Orleans was a deathtrap, and a large part of the damage was self-inflicted.
The city sank itself by drawing water out of the aquifer below (which gradually leeched out the dissolved limestone, a bit like the sinkholes in Florida, but not as dramatic). The barrier islands that the locals have been callously destroying, mostly by ripping out the vegetation ("weeds") that held them together used to protect the coastline from the massive storm surges that come along with the bigger hurricanes pretty much every summer.
To top things off, the levies weren't built to spec -- the Army Corps of Engineers cut corners, as usual, not driving the supports in deep enough to anchor them into solid ground. So they drifted under hydraulic pressure from the canals, and eventually started to leak, since they were anchored in soggy earth. In spite of complaints about flooding from the leaking levies, no one bothered to examine and/or repair them.
On top of that, the way that they've screwed up the Mississippi's outflow gives it only one place to go when it floods: New Orleans. Which, being below Lake Ponchartrain, the Mississippi, AND the Gulf, leaves the water with no way out.
So the only thing that kept the 3 major bodies of water out of the city were the levies that were poorly built and unmaintained.
That's not just neglect, it's bordering on suicide.
Sadly, I'm afraid that the only real hope for cleanup is to rely on natural processes. From the reading I've been doing about past oil spills and the efforts they've taken so far with this one, the dispersants and other chemical measures used to stop the spread of the oil may be more toxic than the oil itself. Although millions of gallons of oil leak into the gulf each year naturally, they are certainly not all at once and in so contained an area. We will feel the impact of this for a long time into the future.
This might be the event that finally drives home the long-term consequences of our actions as a species.
The problems we're creating today have no immediate solutions. We are fucking things up in ways that will take hundreds or thousands of years to fix.
Of course, that only seems like a long time because we measure things in terms of human lifespans. 500 years is nothing to a 4 billion year old planet.
And earth's seen much worse. A single supervolcanic eruption would do more damage than all the man-made disasters of the last 500 years combined.
Unfortunately I am cynical about this. We thought the Exxon Valdez disaster might be a turning point as well, but it wasn't. Some incremental change may come of this, but probably nothing revolutionary.
No doubt, you'll soon hear folks trying to put the public at ease about the long-term consequences of this spill. Something about how it's not too important in the big scheme of things, nature will have the place perfectly restored in about a decade, and so on. That's what they said about the Valdez. At the time I thought it was a reasonable argument. Then I pretty much forgot about it and went on my merry way. It wasn't until this spill that it came to my attention that the Puget sound still hasn't recovered ecologically from the spill.
I fuzzily remember a quote about either the hot-air balloon or the gatling gun; something to the effect that it would make war so terrible that it would no longer be waged. It doesn't matter how terrible the consequences of something are to everybody else; if it profits someone who's powerful enough to get it done, it'll get done.
> dispersants and other chemical measures used to stop the spread of the oil may be more toxic than the oil itself.
There are less toxic ones out there but I've read that BP has a deal with one of the producers of the most toxic dispersant (Nalco Co.) so big surprise, that's what they are using.
That same segment of the population still supports off-shore drilling. Environmental concerns don't matter to vocal members of the conservative movement until they actually start coughing up smog.
On the other hand, liberal President Obama's drilling plan might actually collapse now. At least, one might hope that the oil industry can't successfully bribe Congress anymore — er, excuse me, make sufficiently large campaign contributions.
(Blatant politics and off-topic for HN, I know. Sorry.)
Well, perhaps if we had opened up ANWR there would be less need for offshore drilling. Or if liberals hadn't spent the last several decades demonizing nuclear power, apparently under the delusion the alternative is Living in Harmony with Gaia rather than coal and oil.
ANWR would need decades to begin production and even then would produce only modest amounts of oil. Nuclear power has proven to be extremely expensive; I am not aware of any country that generates a significant fraction of its power using nuclear power plants without massive investment and control by the state. Since the people generally opposed to government funding and control of industry on a massive scale are not usually liberal, your comment is of questionable veracity.
> Nuclear power has proven to be extremely expensive; I am not aware of any country that generates a significant fraction of its power using nuclear power plants without massive investment and control by the state.
"control by the state" is a choice. Many countries have national oil companies, but that tells us only that they like national oil companies as other countries have private ones.
The "massive investment" for nuclear power is well within the capabilities of many US companies. For example, at least three of the California utility companies can afford it. (PG&E has at least one. Sacramento used to and at least one of the LA basin companies is bigger than Sacramento's company.)
Note that at least some of the "expense" is also a choice. We spend a lot of money on nukes that has nothing to do with safety or power production.
I'll agree that nukes could be safer, but as long as we're spending money on things other than safety, I reject the claim that safety is a high priority. (And yes, some of those things are driven by folks who scream "safety".)
Well, eating is a choice. And yet I choose to eat every day. The word 'choice' conveys very different meanings: everything we do is a choice, but many of our actions are highly constrained. After decades of nuclear power development, no one earth has successfully run a nuclear power system without massive government funding or control. That suggests that we don't know how to do such a thing.
The "massive investment" for nuclear power is well within the capabilities of many US companies.
Not in anything that looks like a free market. Right now, the federal government provides very large subsidies to nuclear power operators. As a result, we've had...no new nuclear power plants built in the last three decades. In the absence of the massive government subsidies we have in place now, I don't believe there are any utilities that could afford to build a nuclear plant on their own or secure the necessary financing.
Note that at least some of the "expense" is also a choice.
And yet nuclear power is very expensive all over the world. Nuclear power plants are almost always over budget and late no matter where they're built. When different people all over the world keep making the same mistakes, at some point, you have to consider the possibility that all these mistakes are not just random individual failures but reflect intrinsic properties of current reactor technology.
We spend a lot of money on nukes that has nothing to do with safety or power production.
> After decades of nuclear power development, no one earth has successfully run a nuclear power system without massive government funding
PG&E does. So do the other private power companies in the US that have nukes.
> or control.
What do you mean by "control"? The US does regulate power companies, but it's unclear that such regulation makes it possible for them to run nuclear power plants.
> Right now, the federal government provides very large subsidies
Nope. It limits their liability, which is different. If you think that their without-such-limits liability is close to correct, the liability that we apply to other power sources is hugely wrong (on the low side).
Which reminds me - are there any privately operated power producing dams in the world? If not, then surely hydropower .....
Ok, but then to be fair a substantial portion of the defense budget should be counted as subsidies to oil companies.
I've heard this before and it makes no sense to me. The US spends a lot of money on defense because Americans love the military and use it to funnel money into all sorts of places that would otherwise be quite poor. And most US military operations around the world don't do anything to reduce the price of oil. I mean, Iraq is not exactly giving us oil for free now is it?
The French seem to not be starving.
True, they're not. But the original claim was that liberal opposition to nuclear power was the problem. My counterclaim was that you will find zero support amongst American conservatives for a nuclear power policy anything like the successful one used in France. Can you point to any important American conservatives who publicly speak favorably about the France's nuclear system and advocate for adopting it in the US?
And large projects being late and over budget is not at all surprising, regardless of the field.
I have friends that do design and construction for power plants and, according to them, the cost and schedule overruns in nuclear plant construction really are surprising.
> My counterclaim was that you will find zero support amongst American conservatives for a nuclear power policy anything like the successful one used in France. Can you point to any important American conservatives who publicly speak favorably about the France's nuclear system and advocate for adopting it in the US?
So what?
Note that US conservatives do support more nuclear plants like the ones that we have.
It's also fairly easy to find conservative support for nuclear power under a variety of other circumstances.
Yes, France does use reprocessing, but the US nuclear power industry didn't ban that here.
Do you want to argue that the French system is cheaper because the French govt is not subject to the review cost that US companies must pay? Or is it that the French govt doesn't have to pay certain "in operation" costs by virtue of being a govt? In either case, imposing those costs is clearly a choice.
BTW - You can't damn someone for not going along with an "authority" unless you accept said authority. In other words, by suggesting that we should agree with said conservatives in all things, you're saying that you do.
> I mean, Iraq is not exactly giving us oil for free now is it?
Good point.
Suppose that you wanted to use the US military to get cheap oil. Would your plan for doing so have anything to do with how the US military is currently deployed?
Or if liberals hadn't spent the last several decades demonizing nuclear power...
I've seen plenty of demonization of nuclear power, but (in my experience) there's a correlation with level of education (less education => more nuclear outrage) rather than a political left/right correlation.
I'm genuinely curious about this. Are there any stats to back up your assertion that liberals demonize nuclear power?
Only an idiot would even suggest that. It's one of the few remaining wildlife refuges in the world that's still truly wild, and if we destroy it, we might as well just give up and admit that our grandchildren will be living in acrylic domes surrounded by a toxic hellhole.
Again, the choice is not "despoil the environment, or live in a pristine world of magic and unicorns". We need energy, and lots of it. So we can continue our current lousy policies, or look for alternatives which while not perfect are clear improvements. I'm pretty sure that the entire drilling operation in a tiny portion of ANWR would do substantially less damage than this one spill.
Drilling is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an improvement. It is rather a continuation of the lousy policies that we're already destroying the world with.
The answer is not more drilling, the answer is better ways to produce energy.
"I'm pretty sure that the entire drilling operation in a tiny portion of ANWR would do substantially less damage than this one spill."
Until there's another spill... this is the real world; there WILL be more spills, and in place like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, all it would take is one.
On a mostly-related slant, Grassroots Mapping is working with local groups to take home-made high-resolution aerial photographs of the oil slick (from balloons and kites): http://grassrootsmapping.org/
the sad part it, it seems as though this spill is getting comparatively little attention compared to other disasters. Hell, this will probably much more damaging than Katrina in the long term, but the difference in the levels of conversation are staggering.
Worse still is the fact that since the oil companies run america, this will get swept under the rug. The ecological and economical damage will last for more than half a century. And there are hundreds of these things scattered along the now-trashed Gulf coast.
On the need for a second try at inserting a 4 inch tube to capture some of the oil coming out of the 21 inch riser pipe:
'“This is all part of reinventing technology,” Tom Mueller, a BP spokesman, said on Saturday. “It’s not what I’d call a problem — it’s what I’d call learning, reconfiguring, doing it again.”' http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/us/18spill.html
However, as much as I hate to say, it doesn't really affect us directly, probably not those that are reading this comment on HN anyway. Yes, we're angry, disappointed, disillusioned - throw in other emotions - but that's about all.
Those who are directly affected are merely inconvenienced or at worst having to pay the price of cleaning up.
The wildlife there are paying with their lives, because of us.
I hope people with the power to effect change can learn something from this disaster, especially the CEO of BP who's going to get his million dollar paycheck anyway at the end of the year.
For all those holdouts still insisting that peak oil is just a silly theory, I ask you: if the easy-to-reach reserves weren't already in production, why would we be trying to pump oil out of risky, technically-difficult places like this?
Then we wouldn't have gotten so addicted to begin with.
The point is that current oil consumption rate and projected growth are completely unsustainable, as we're just going to have to keep doing crazier and crazier stuff like an addict on the street who needs the next fix.
