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Huge Amounts of Oil Found On Gulf of Mexico Floor
intellitech tips news of a study examining the Gulf of Mexico sea floor in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Marine scientists have found a thick layer of oil, and say it has devastated life there.
"Studies using a submersible found a layer, as much as 10cm thick in places, of dead animals and oil, said Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia. Knocking these animals out of the food chain will, in time, affect species relevant to fisheries. She disputed an assessment by BP's compensation fund that the Gulf of Mexico will recover by the end of 2012. ... 'The impact on the benthos was devastating,' she told BBC News. 'Filter-feeding organisms, invertebrate worms, corals, sea fans — all of those were substantially impacted — and by impacted, I mean essentially killed. Another critical point is that detrital feeders like sea cucumbers, brittle stars that wander around the bottom, I didn't see a living (sea cucumber) around on any of the wellhead dives. They're typically everywhere, and we saw none.'"
And this is the problem with allowing big business to violate the environment. No matter how much they can assure us nothing will go wrong, something generally does go wrong and then we're screwed. Sure we "fined them" and "made them pay for the cleanup" but still the ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico got badly damaged and will take a long time to recover (2012 my ass - shit, there is still oil on beaches in Alaska from the Valdez spill, that happened decades ago).
When will we learn that there are some risks we just shouldn't take.
All those dead animals will be oil in a few million years. We should be *thanking* BP for making more oil, not reprimanding them for the spill.
I accepted BP/Transocean's not-at-all-self-interested assessment of the Sound Science(tm) concerning this minor, but unfortunately unprofitable, incident with the uncritical, childlike, faith that every corporate person deserves. I, for one, am shocked, shocked, that actual scientists might have come to different conclusions.
Why is it that when a Democrat is in office, Republicans always say things like this, and when a Republican is in office, Democrats always say things like this? Is it because you're both idiots?
Don't worry, my friend. This is America. In America, scientists are tolerated only so long as they tow the party line. When science diverges from short term commercial interests, you can be sure that scientists cannot be trusted, that scientists are Communists, anti-God and anti-American Way. Your child like faith does you great credit, and will server you well when Sarah Palin is chosen to be the next President and all those pinko environmental laws are thrown out the window and any scientist who believes that the Earth is over six thousand years old or that large amounts of oil vomiting on to the floor of the Gulf of Mexico will be re-educated in their proper patriotic requirements.
God bless America, where freedom is slavery, ignorance is knowledge and war is peace.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If the politics of extraction industries in America's south-eastern coal producing regions are anything to go by, the theoretical damages will be very high indeed; but buying enough of the government to get it off their backs will be quite modestly priced. There will be 10-20 years of litigation, the fines that actually survive the appeals process will be approximately equal to those assessed for downloading a couple of dozen mp3s, and assorted slimy politicians will go on at considerable length about how any fines at all are "job killing", "anti-business", and "play right into OPEC's agenda"...
If anyone thinks that is just cynical speculation...... look at the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska for a history lesson. This was far, far, far, far worse and you can expect the same sort of BS from BP.
To be fair, the way our environmental law works in America right now, EPA included, is horribly flawed.
Its original mission was to stop the kinds of stuff that *everyone*, right- and left-wing both, can agree is bad: dumping waste into public water systems, belching smoke next to a school, and so forth.
The modern environmentalist movement has moved on from there to basically banning any and all projects, everywhere, if it impacts the environment in the slightest. Some ripe examples of environmentalist hypocrisy:
1) Building a wind farm in upstate Virginia? Some lawyers who owned a vacation farm there (and had *fought* NIMBYs before for companies) sued and got construction blocked.
2) Building an offshore wind farm? Teddy Kennedy,Mr. 90% voting rating by environmental groups, sues to have it blocked.
3) Building a massive solar project in the Mojave desert? Sierra Club sues to have it blocked.
4) Building a new interstate in North Carolina? 10 river snails found in a new branch of a river mean the project has to be rerouted at a cost of billions of dollars and with X tons of extra pollution going into the atmosphere every day from all the extra car-miles being driven, let alone the extra time on the commute.
5) The California High Speed Rail system, which has the support of environmentalists, is currently slogging through its three year and multibillion dollar environmental impact report. They've already been threatened to be sued by environmentalists for going through Pacheco Pass. (And if they went through Altamont? They'd be sued, too.)
Etc., etc.
The arguments always made by these duplicitous bastards is that, "Well, we aren't against X (Wind power, solar, etc.), we're just against it here." And if the place isn't 100% perfect, the judge will agree, and it'll get moved elsewhere, at which point the project gets sued again, and it gets delayed and moved again, and so forth.
One editor put it exceptionally well: You look at all of these developments that environmentalists love - canal walks by DC, highways leading to trail heads in the Sierras, and so forth. And then you realize that all of these things would be impossible to build today. We're so screwed up in our modern society that we could never do another Erie Canal, or a Hoover Dam, or the Interstate System. It's impossible.
So something needs to change. I wouldn't say that banning the EPA is the right way of going about it, but limiting and restricting the EPA to deal simply with actual sources of pollution, would be a very good thing. So they would no longer be an unelected and unaccountable limiter on construction in the US. Revising the Endangered Species Act to eliminate its abuses would be an excellent accompaniment.
More importantly though, we need reform for environmental lawsuits. Perhaps for every major project, a tribunal of judges could be set up to hold all hearings in a unified and systemic fashion. So lawsuits can no longer bounce projects around the countryside, and so that projects no longer require themselves to be perfect to be allowed to go forward, but merely the best option among several choices. And their default behavior should be to allow the project to proceed.