Can you handle the truth about the Gulf oil spill?

The Gulf oil spill wasn't as bad as feared, according to Margaret Wente writing in the Globe and Mail. And if she's right, I think most people can't handle the truth.

She thinks we prefer the story of evil and so we can't accept the reality that the oil spill was bad but not that bad:

...it’s worth asking why we’re so determined to cling to the narrative of catastrophe. I think it’s because we saw the spill as a giant morality tale: evil versus good, rapacious oil interests versus the environment, greedy consumers (that’s us) versus oil-soaked pelicans and the unspoiled natural world. The visuals were devastating, and the coverage was relentless. The media took turns hyping the disaster. They had a lot invested in this storyline and, when it took an unexpected happy turn, they couldn’t handle it. They couldn’t even see it.

Luckily for us, they were wrong. “Nature’s resilience is truly magnificent,” writes Carl Safina. And that’s a good thing.

I don't know enough about the oil spill to say whether she's right. It's probably too soon to tell, and the real losses do matter even if some animals are thriving. Human systems will suffer for a long time, thanks to skepticism about the cleanliness of Gulf seafood. But I do think she's right that Armageddon didn't come for ocean ecosystems.

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Oily doom for tiny seahorse?

The world's smallest seahorse, the cute little 1 inch dwarf seahorse, is at risk of extinction thanks to BP's Gulf of Mexico oily disaster and subsequent cleanup.

So says Project Seahorse, the Zoological Society of London's conservation branch.

According to Project Seahorse, the dwarf sea horse is particularly vulnerable due to its small size, limited habitat, inability to migrate great distances, and low birth rate. The fish also mate for life, so the loss of even one breeding parent is doubly dangerous to the species' long-term reproductive health. The Deepwater oil spill occurred during the sea horses' primary breeding time.

Another problem is that the dwarf sea horse, unlike its cousin sea horse species, often lives close to the ocean surface in floating mats of sea grass. Not only did spilled oil accumulate in these mats, BP burned many of them to prevent them from carrying oil onto the shore. According to Project Seahorse's press release, "The burning of the mats has killed many marine animals while depriving others of their habitat and exposing them to further toxicity. Sea grass is vital to the long-term health of coastal ecosystems, sheltering marine animals, acting as fish nurseries, improving water quality and preventing erosion."

Meanwhile, Project Seahorse experts also express fear that the dispersants used to treat the oil spill will add further toxicity to the dwarf sea horse's habitat.

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BP tries to buy up Gulf scientists

If you're BP and you're worried about the damage you've done to the Gulf of Mexico, what's your first response? Would you hire all the scientists in the Gulf so that they couldn't testify against you in court?

Stories are circulating that say BP is doing exactly that, searching for prominent scientists who will work for BP and thus not be available to work against BP.

According to ai.com:

For the last few weeks, BP has been offering signing bonuses and lucrative pay to prominent scientists from public universities around the Gulf Coast to aid its defense against spill litigation.

BP PLC attempted to hire the entire marine sciences department at one Alabama university, according to scientists involved in discussions with the company's lawyers. The university declined because of confidentiality restrictions that the company sought on any research.

The Press-Register obtained a copy of a contract offered to scientists by BP. It prohibits the scientists from publishing their research, sharing it with other scientists or speaking about the data that they collect for at least the next three years.

Nice move, BP, really looks like you're trying to solve problems with this attempt to buy scientists.

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Methane disaster dead zone--not just an oil spill

If you thought the Gulf oil disaster was bad, it just got worse. Now it's a methane disaster too.

Scientists are finding evidence of new BP-caused dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. Methane is gushing out of the broken well and polluting the ocean at up to 100,000 times normal levels. Bacteria gobble up the methane and suck oxygen out of the water, similar to a more typical dead zone caused by excess nutrients.

This mess comes underneath (literally, deeper than) the "above average" dead zone already predicted by scientists because of the routine nutrient pollution fouling the area.

We've been treating the Gulf of Mexico like the Great American Toilet, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. We get the ocean we deserve.

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Oil harms cleanup workers

News reports say that nearly all cleanup workers from the Exxon Valdez oil disaster are dead, and their life expectancy is 51 years.

Reports are circulating that BP oil disaster cleanup workers are suffering illnesses.

President Obama says in one of the video clips linked above that toxic chemical levels are not elevated in coastal communities but "that may not be the case" out where people are doing the cleanup work.

This mess is so bad we have to stay away from the contaminated area if we care for our health. OK, marine life, please evacuate if you care about your health.

...which reminds me, there's a scary new report out on toxics found in sperm whales world wide, stay tuned...

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Oil spill cleanup doing more harm than good?

People don't like messes, and there's a natural tendency to want to clean up spilled oil. But evidence has accumulated showing that so-called cleanups can do more harm than good.

As BP struggles with a stained public image, like Exxon in Alaska in 1989, executives will do anything to appear busy and to reduce the bad visuals of oily beaches and birds. They'll do anything, including some things they might ought not do.

What are they doing, besides ducking blame? Spraying "dispersants" which are toxic chemicals designed to disperse the oil into smaller masses. The only problem is that massive, unprecedented amounts of dispersants are being sprayed into Gulf waters, in a giant toxicology experiment.

More than 250,000 gallons of dispersant have been applied both by air and underwater at the Deepwater Horizon spill site, the U.S. Coast Guard confirmed. What is the chemistry of oil dispersants? Interesting question, and we don't know the answer because the stuff is a trade secret. Probably some sort of toxic organic hydrocarbon, but exactly what is unknown.

Though considered by many experts as the lesser of two evils, the environmental impact of so much dispersant at one site remains “widely unknown,” Environmental Protection Agency officials admit. And the value of dispersants is questioned by some scientists. The stuff may be used mostly to hide the oil from public view by breaking it up into smaller globs.

Then there's the "cleanup" itself. Attempts to physically remove oil from beaches was widely criticized in the Exxon Valdez oil cleanup. Some studies indicate that cleanup did more harm than good.

An important observation that resulted from the Exxon Valdez oil spill was that natural cleaning processes, on both sheltered and exposed beaches, were in many cases very effective at degrading oil. It took longer for some sections of shoreline to recover from some of the invasive cleaning methods (hot water flushing in particular) than from the oiling itself.

According to one source, the Exxon Valdez "cleanup" was more than a big effort though. It was a big mistake, John Robinson, the chief scientist at the spill for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. "The aggressiveness of the cleanup in the end contributed to more damage than the oil did," he believes. Nine strips of beach were left untouched as an experiment, and those nine beaches look better today than the swept ones, where whatever was alive was cooked to death in superhot water.

Argh, the oil spill is bad enough, and adding a so-called "cleanup" may be adding additional harm. As they say: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

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