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Panel Says U.S. Not Ready For Inevitable Arctic Oil Spill
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "As eagerness to explore the Arctic's oil and gas resources grows, the threat of a major Arctic oil spill looms ever larger—and the United States has a lot of work to do to prepare for that inevitability, a panel convened by the National Research Council (NRC) declares in a report released yesterday. The committee, made up of members of academia and industry, recommended beefing up forecasting systems for ocean and ice conditions, infrastructure for supply chains for people and equipment to respond, field research on the behavior of oil in the Arctic environment, and other strategies to prepare for a significant spill in the harsh conditions of the Arctic."
Shortest version: no one has any idea how any spill cleanup techniques would work in the arctic environment.
I expect I know how the mods will treat this, but - who cares? Why bother to clean it up at all? It will clot up and have negligible impact, and no one lives there.
cleansing or remodeling they call it,, perfect balance addicts
If we can make alternative energy work, that is.
Oil is... it's great, but there's a high cost, mainly air pollution which may cause autism and heart disease among other problems.
The spills are disasters which cause ongoing problems for decades if not longer.
In addition, the scarcity of the resource makes future wars, politics, etc. inevitable.
I'm looking for one of those reactor-type-devices from the end of "Back to the Future" that can deconstruct ordinary household waste and produce high amounts of energy. Were I President of the ol' USA, I'd slam resources into that before anything else but space exploration.
Futurist Traditionalism
Dangerous only if travelled upon. White bears and eskimos are all there is up there. They need to adapt. It's our oil.
Come on, just heard the polar bears out in it and have the sop it all up... Then you kill two birds with one, er, oil slick....
The Polar bears will become brown bears, which are NOT endangered in any way.. AND, the OIL will be gone.
You got to think OUT of the box on this kind of thing..
Too many humans. Cut it down to 1-2 billion and a lot of problems just disappear.
nazi zion WMD on credit shylok prosperiterrorstory
Doesn't this mean that Russia and Canada also cannot cope with spills?
the fucking beta Slashdot either, but that doesn't stop the site from forcing it upon users even when they specifically go straight to classic.slashdot.org
The US may not be prepared, but they can take a note from Australia's efforts when they needed to clean oil spills off penguins.
Retired Mobil Oil exec Louis Allstadt recently said that fracking can't be done safely with current technology. "Making fracking safe is simply not possible, not with the current technology, or with the inadequate regulations being proposed," said Allstadt, retired executive vice president of Mobil. http://www.timesunion.com/busi... This is similar to the situation with arctic drilling, but for somewhat different reasons. To do it right would require too much equipment and too many safety procedures to be cost effective. They would need to do the work quick and dirty to make a good profit. That is precisely what is happening with fracking, where gas companies have been exempted from the clean water act and other environmental protections. If they were required to comply, they couldn't afford to extract the gas. That explains the rush to frack, before the sweetheart deal is over.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
We've burned so much oil that we've melted the arctic, so we can get to more oil to burn, and we're worried about what happens if we spill a little bit of it instead of burning all of it.
There are techniques/tools that are available to clean up spills however I don't think that anybody is truly prepared for a large scale oil spill anywhere on Earth.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Oh, she'll take it.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
By pouring it into the sea, they have prevented it from being burned and poured into the sky as CO2.
the title leads one to believe that the US is not ready, but that others are. Wouldn't it be more accurate to say NO ONE is ready for such an event?
Can we expect the Chinese to do better when they go to exploit while we're sitting around deciding we're the only ones who aren't ready?
Now, you extrapolate taking into consideration a more remote area with even worse access conditions, and the colder temperatures.
An extreme environmental disaster will be the result.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Has there ever been a spill? What is your problem? We will deal with it if it ever happens. Because it won't.
There are ships that can completely encompass at sea another vessel and haul it from the water. What is needed around the globe are mega skimmer pump ships that are able to pump and transfer oil and petroleum leaking from source. Who wants to pay for these? Probably no one with any money, but do they owe the world a plausable solution to accidents on such a scale of disasters as what they describe to be inevitable? You are damn right they do. They are already scalping us at the gas pumps.
How y'all are gonna transport all that oil from Alaska south to the rest of your country anyways.
OH WAIT !! you will build a PIPELINE !!.
I am sure a new American pipeline running across Canadian soil with get a swift aproval.
heh.
war.
end of list.
So a few white bears become black bears.
Be realistic. Not many people like oil spills, but they like lower gas prices that come from oil extraction. Lower gas prices are popular with all races in America, black, white, and hispanic.
Panel says the average human being is not ready for the inevitable collision with a moving vehicle.
>> And if an emergency happens, there’s no infrastructure in place—no consistent U.S. Coast Guard presence...
Interesting. Related article covers Canada's and Russia's claims in the same area - the "Lomonozov Ridge"
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
That explains the rush to frack, before the sweetheart deal is over.
There's elections coming up. Vote out the old bums, and vote in some new ones. If you can make the alternatives even sweeter for them, they'll show up at your door asking what they can do for you. At this point though, I still don't know what greases a palm better than oil.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Let US companies off the hook, sue and "fine" foreign companies unmercifully. The logical extension of the process would be to sieze the assets of the foreign company entirely, using trumped up charges of fraud and corruption in the manner of the Russian Federation.
Any ecological collateral damage can be cosmetically managed with a small percentage of the proceeds.
There! Not so difficult, is it.
(prove yourself = industry. it fits...)
"naughty voice" we're sorry
"we no longer fuck the Earth, we DP it"
...ok this is probably a stupid question, but why would such a spill be the US's responsibility any more than say, a spill off Madagascar?
Yes, certainly, if it's within the small share of US waters off Alaska, but if you look at territorial claims on the arctic it's a relatively small sliver that the US even optimistically claims. A far, far larger share of arctic waters would be the responsibility of Canada, Russia, and/or Norway - let them sort it out.
-Styopa
One of the restraining forces to arctic oil exploration and drilling is actually the shale gas depressing energy prices to the point where it is, relatively, not worth the investment to go north. If the shale gas boom collapses, then it will be profitable to get the oil and we'll see more projects happening, but there will be no fast and dirty about it. There is simply no infrastructure to facilitate anything but massive long-term projects which can afford to build that out - not just to run an operation, but to get it set up in the first place. There is also a lack of commodity technology to facilitate willy-nilly expansion, it needs to be bespoke (today), which means long design/construction/testing timelines.
!Equality through palindromes semordnilap hguorht ytilauqE!
I just wish all the enviro-wackos would crawl back into the caves that they came out of. It's obvious that back in the cave man days, that not only did the strong survive, some of the weak minded ldiots did too!
Who injected the word "inevitable" into this conversation? I see no predestined outcomes here.
First, there is no such thing as eagerness to tap the Arctic, so I have no idea why this article exists; it's a big troll. The TAPS pipeline has had declining volumes for decades. There's been talk (for years) of a gas pipeline but it's pretty much not going to happen, for a number of reasons that no one really gives a shit about.
Second, I'm from Valdez, Alaska. I was there for the spill, and for about twenty years afterwards. The long-term environmental impact is practically nil. Fish stocks recovered quickly, same with sea otter and sea lion populations, shorebirds, etc. The spill happened about twenty miles from my hometown. Yes, in a few beaches you can dig down and find a thin sheen of oil in the shale, but it doesn't seem to affect the critters much. Massive oil spills are not necessarily all that big of a deal.
Thirdly, the oil companies have small spills fairly often, and while the existing methods of cleanup may not scale, it's less of an issue all the time, and not necessarily the end of the world if it does happen. Also, there's not actually all that much opportunity for a large spill: we don't have gushers up there, or supertankers, and the pipelines can be shut down pretty quickly. They're monitored to some degree, usually with 'smart pigs' which travel inside the pipeline cleaning wax deposits and checking for damage. There was an incident a few years back where some drunken yahoo shot a hole in the pipeline, but it did not result in a large spill.
My sister works on the North Slope, in the oilfields. It's actually a really sensitive area environmentally, and the oil companies have to report even tiny spills. Also, it's really hard to build on permafrost without it melting and subsiding into a huge bog. You can't even drive cars on it without tearing it up, they use smaller golfcart type things most of the time. The wells and pads are as small as they can be. I'm not going to eulogize the oil companies for having a good environmental record up there, but they have been limited by the terrain, perhaps more effectively than regulations might have done.
This panel has its head up its collective ass, though, and this story is just trolling. It's not inevitable that there will be a big spill, and it's not necessarily a problem if it happens, and it's not something that we don't know how to deal with. There are a lot of current methods for cleanup that probably wouldn't work so well there, and I'm sure it's worth someone's time to figure out what the best way to clean up big oil spills in Arctic conditions, but "inevitable big Arctic oil spill" is just sensationalism. In other words, it's horseshit, and you've all been had.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
They're typically called Inuit, not Eskimo, unless you want to lump a bunch of other tribes into the mix. Eskimo is apparently a perjorative in Greenland, and is generally a term used by the clueless.
Beyond that, the Alaska Native peoples got something less of a raw deal than the rest of the indigenous populations. No one took their land, in most cases they reside where they have for milennia. Also, in the 70s when they put the pipeline in, they formed all Alaskan tribes into regional Native Corporations, so each Native is a shareholder and receives dividends. The corporations get preferential bidding on contracts, so mostly they don't do too badly, and there's a steady supply of free money for each shareholder, plus compensation from the State, a lot of free education and medical services, and other assorted benefits. They also were introduced to alcohol, firearms, and snowmachines, for what that's worth.
The guy you responded to is right, however: there are very few natives up there, less than 15,000, and they live a fair distance from the oil fields -- the nearest settlement, Barrow, is a 40 minute flight, according to Google.
And not to detract from the rest of your ranting, but this is actually a non-issue. I'm always down for a good anti-'merica rant, I'm something of an ex-pat, if I can really even be said to be from there, but let's find a different pretext, shall we?
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Oil would move slow and tend to remain in thicker layers. Sccop shovel and kitty litter?
I dont mind oil exploration in the artic - after the cleaned every microgram of oil from the gulf and prince william sound and un-killed every bird, fish and marin mamal in those areas.
Which caused yours?