» The Oil Spill Doesn’t Matter
Both these stories are from @YuleHeibel.
“Sobering thought: all that oil from the spill would have ended up in our environment anyway, burnt into the very air we breathe.” – @ToriKlassen
As Tori Klassen notes, the Deepwater Horizon’s oil wasn’t just going to sit in the ground: it was going to end up in the environment one way or another. I haven’t seen any comparative analysis on whether the climate or the ocean is better able to handle that oil. (Obviously burning it to clean up the spill is the worst of both.) The ocean’s ecosystems are collapsing, but that’s partially due to climate change. Both the ocean and the climate are reasonably good at dealing with waste and maintaining homeostasis – otherwise we’d already be dead.
The Gulf of Mexico is a big, messy, visible place to have a spill, but Nigeria has groundwater, wetland and coast spills all the time. Like all natural disasters, people only pay attention when it’s sudden instead of gradual and in somewhere other than Africa. But maybe it takes a loud wakeup call like Deepwater Horizon to get people to move toward renewable energy, which will result in lower demand for Nigerian oil.
We need to get better at assessing environmental impact besides looking at how much map changes color. Is offshore drilling in BC worse than the Alberta tarsands? How much should I sacrifice in my personal life to reduce my oil consumption?
I haven’t seen any analysis of this either, but it seems to me that it is clearly much, much worse for that oil to end up spilled in one location.
I don’t think this is at all obvious. The most pertinent questions are: how many litres of petroleum-derived fuel is used to clean up each litre of the spilled oil, until a sufficient amount of oil is cleaned up; and, what is the impact of those litres of burned fuel versus the amount of cleaned up spilled oil. As explained above, it seems that this oil spill is a much worse problem than the effects of the atmospheric pollutants from a similar amount of oil. So, unless it costs a lot more than I’d think to clean up much of the spill, then it seems to me obvious that cleaning up the oil is the best option.
This is a good point. I think that the best way to improve this situation is continued, increasing trade and commerce with Africa. According to the Environmental Kuznet’s Curve, after people achieve a per capita income of about $4000, they start demanding that their local environmental conditions be improved.
Don
6 Jun 10 at 4:35 pm
Excellent rebuttal, Don! Maybe we need Fair Trade oil from Africa?
Jared
6 Jun 10 at 6:26 pm