More on the Oil Spill
Posted in Environment by Steven Hayward
My long piece on the oil spill with Ken Green is now out on the interwebs, as is this
short video I did from the beach last week about natural oil seeps.
I'm booked to be on Bill Bennett's radio show Wednesday morning at 8:05 am eastern time. And I should turn up later tonight on the Jim Bohannon radio show (on more than 300 stations nationwide) at about 10:05 pm, though there is some uncertainty about this.
: include(/srv/users/prod-php-nltashbrook/apps/prod-php-nltashbrook/public/sd/nlt-blog/_includes/promo-main.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in
: include(): Failed opening '/srv/users/prod-php-nltashbrook/apps/prod-php-nltashbrook/public/sd/nlt-blog/_includes/promo-main.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/opt/sp/php7.2/lib/php') in
Steven, I know you have an agenda (and I leave to one side the question of whether that agenda’s been bought and paid for by people like Thomas Pyle) and I know that the graphs in the NAS report do make a striking VISUAL point (I note, though, that you didn’t use the Worldwide Marine Waters graph which is a little more damning than the one for North American Marine Waters) but surely even you can see that there’s a fundamental difference between the global accumulation of natural seepage and isolated incidents such as the one we’re staring at right now. Global natural seepage is, by definition, spread out around the globe; isolated incidents are, by definition, isolated and their economic and ecological effects on local ecosystems are devastating. Maybe there aren’t many such incidents. Fine. Maybe the total amount of oil that they contribute to the global total isn’t significant when looked at from the perspective of numerical totals. But surely even your indebtedness to the oil lobbyists hasn’t blinded you to the fact that such incidents are catastrophic.
Another Arab lover is more like it. How much are they paying you to stop American oil?
I wish you'd had the camera focus on the water and surf. I'm guessing it didn't look like the Gulf does now - in other words, like some kind of messed-up deep fryer vat.
Take a look - it's quite a picture:
https://www.guardian.co.uk/world/picture/2010/jun/14/bp-oil-spill-oil-spills#zoomed-picture
The natural seeps comparison is largely bogus:
https://www.theoildrum.com/node/6552
"The Deepwater Horizon site releases 3 to 12 times the oil per day compared to that released by natural seeps across the entire Gulf of Mexico. By May 30, the Deepwater Horizon site had released between 468,000 and 741,000 barrels of oil, compared to 60,000 to 150,000 barrels from natural seeps across the entire Gulf of Mexico over the same 39 day period."
Wow, that Bohannon show was like a non-stop conservative festival. Hayward, Newt Gingrich and Daniel Kish (hey, he works at IER, led by Thomas Pyle, the fellow mentioned by the first commenter here - I'd not heard of him until today - with Steven Hayward on their Board of Directors). Will there be a Bohannon program that gives some liberals a couple hours to speak on the issue?
But you ought to give your "Meh, no big whoop" talk somewhere on the Gulf coast.