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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Make an oily mess, earn a bonus

Do you get a raise and a bonus when you screw up bigtime? If not, try a new job in the oil industry.

The CEO of the company that owned the oil rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico got a raise and a bonus. And the company compounded the public relations error by declaring last year their "the best year in safety performance in our company's history." No wonder Transocean Ltd. found themselves on the front page of CNN, and BBC. Next stop, the Onion.

Just in case you want to look back and laugh while Transocean executives take the oil spill to the bank:

Du café renversé chez BP - Vidéos

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Oily bottom in the Gulf of Mexcio

Spilled oil remains a problem in the Gulf of Mexico. A new scientific study found ongoing problems with oil coating the ocean bottom and killing animals. Ugh.

As if that's not enough, too many baby dolphins seem to be dying in the region.

Meanwhile, deepwater oil drilling will resume, based on "proof" that we can do it safely. Forgive me for being skeptical. I know oil drilling will continue, but the idea that we can do it without spills is farcical.

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Oil in plankton in Gulf of Mexico

A new study found oil in plankton from the Gulf of Mexico.

Does this mean that we're all gonna die tomorrow if we eat a fish from the Gulf? Or does it mean that the Gulf ecosystem is working to break down the oil? Let the debate begin.

But first a quick correction.

Studies of Gulf plankton show a chemical signature of oil. This is not the same as finding oil. It's oil-derived carbon. How did it get into the plankton? It likely happened because bacteria ate the oil and plankton ate the bacteria. Voila.

This does not mean that the plankton are contaminated. Quoting the author of the study:

"What we found was that the system works. It doesn't mean everything is OK and it doesn't mean that there isn't anything out there that isn't toxic. It just explains that the ecosystem is working to process this oil as if it were food."

The oil was treated as "fuel" to grow and reproduce, Graham said. "It's all biomass conversion. If I eat a cow that ate grass, I'm not eating grass; I'm eating what got converted into cow biomass."

Carbon is the element that forms the backbone of all life forms, so the evidence of the oil carbon in the zooplankton doesn't necessarily mean the food chain has become contaminated, Graham explained.

OK, this is a bit tricky. Carbon from oil is making it's way up the food chain. This means the oil has been digested and converted into other forms of carbon--like zooplankton tissue. It doesn't say anything about contamination with actual oil.

Will the world see this as evidence of oil metabolism (the correct view)? Or as evidence that the plankton were dripping in black goo that will poison our seafood (the wrong view)? We'll see, but I'm betting on the incorrect view.

Of course it's good to worry about what our food ate. If we're eating a cow that ate cow brains, we may find ourselves with a brain wasting disease. That would be bad.

So what about this oil-derived carbon in plankton? I don't think seafood with oil-derived carbon is the scariest thing on plates of most people. I'd worry more about mass-produced meat and what those animals have been eating. Give me a Gulf snapper any day.

BTW, I must offer the now-traditional context statement: the oil spill was bad-bad-bad, and I'm not suggesting otherwise. Some animals in the Gulf are contaminated, we know that. And we have to be careful about oil in Gulf seafood. But this carbon from oil story doesn't address that point. This study says that the ecosystem is working to metabolize the oil and that's a good thing.

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An end to fishing is oil spill's gift to the Gulf

What is a bigger effect on fish in the Gulf of Mexico...

The Gulf oil spill?
The Gulf oil no-fishing zone?

Some scientists are finding increases in fish and shrimp, and they think an end to fishing may help more than the oil hurt.

This is the proverbial silver lining in a black cloud. Similar ghoulish benefits have been seen when fishing was closed for some very bad reasons, like fish getting bigger during World War 2 in areas where fear of submarines caused fishermen to stop fishing, creating a so-called war dividend.

Don't get me wrong, the oil spill is bad-bad-bad. But it's amazing to see what happens when we stop fishing for a while. I'd like to see the no-fishing experiment done without an oil spill.

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Biggest ocean oil spill ever

Almost nobody knows about the biggest ocean oil spill in history. Can you guess who is responsible?

Wrong, it's not the demon Big Oil, it's Gaia, the Green Goddess, Mother Nature. More oil is spilled naturally on earth than the amount of oil spilled by people.

As described on Green, a NY Times blog:

Natural seeps turned out to account for 600 kilotons annually, or 47 percent of the total. Consumption — from such activities as boating, urban runoff and industrial wastes — came in second at 480 kilotons, or 38 percent of the total. In third place were releases from such transportation-related activities as leaky pipes, tanker spills and cargo-hold washings. They amounted to 160 kilotons annually, or 12 percent of the total.

In last place were releases to the sea that tend to make headlines — those associated with oil extraction, like the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig on April 20. Globally, that kind of release amounted to 38 kilotons annually, or 3 percent of the total.

These figures are credible, they come from the US National Research Council.

Does this mean it's OK for Big Oil to be reckless with their drilling units? No, there are differences that matter in the timing and speed of oil leaking from Gaia's oil fields.

Size matters, and so does speed and style.

Biological systems are evolved to handle the the oil and gas coming from seeps, and many bugs and creatures live off the oil and gas, by breaking it down into food. But dump a tanker-load of oil on top of those "oil-eating" bugs and beasts, and they get overwhelmed. Natural oil seeps can be big enough to cause harm, but the harm tends to be small and localized.

Natural oil seeps (note that word--SEEP) leak oil and gas slowly, bit-by-bit, in a spread out array of sources all over the world. Sort of like solar energy spread out over the whole planet. But Big Oil's blowouts gush oil hard, fast, and huge, more like focusing sunlight with a lens into a destructive super-hot death beam.

Natural oil seeps are more like the drip, drip, drip of oil that leaks off humanity's infrastructure, roads, ships, ballast water exchange, etc. And this man-made drip, drip, drip, which is actually a bigger source of oil to the ocean than big oil spills, is still smaller than natural oil seeps. What is the effect of our slow leaks of oil? Because of the diffuse nature of these sources, they're less likely to swamp whole areas with oil, compared to a big spill. But in contained water bodies like Seattle's Puget Sound, they can have a big impact.

Based on the style of spill and harm the championship for causing the most harm from spilled oil goes to Big Oil and the Big Spills. At least, that's my guess. I'm not sure we can measure and prove who's the winner.

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Gulf oil: the stink that keeps on stinking

Just when you're starting to feel better about the Gulf of Mexico, new reasons to worry. First, claims that the FDA is using weaker standards for oil-tainted seafood compared to past oil spills.

More bad news, the chemical goo used to disperse (hide) oil in the Gulf seems likely to make the oil last longer.

"Some experts have also said that the use of Corexit (dispersant) has prolonged by decades the presence of toxic crude oil, because the dispersant sinks the oil beneath the ocean surface, where it cannot be quickly broken down by sun, waves and microbes."

Delightful, I feel better already.

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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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Sea turtle egg rescue in the oily Gulf

Scientists and turtle advocates are busy in the Gulf of Mexico, rescuing sea turtle eggs and taking them outside the oily zone. Without this rescue the baby turtles are likely to die from getting oiled, or from getting burned as humans burn oil.

Hope runs high for the first 56 baby turtles that were just released into oil-free areas.

Some scientists worry that it's hope and not data guiding decisions about turtles. It's true we don't know everything about baby turtles, so this could be a mistake. Maybe they're just getting released to starve or become bird food. Good intentions are no guarantee of good results. I suppose it makes sense to try something.

How about trying BP executives in a court of their peers (see photo, bottom).

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Surreal scene flying over Gulf oil disaster

This defies description. Like a scene from a sick imagination, the ocean is a living hell. Pink and purple slicks, dolphins and a sperm whale surfacing through colored slop in their death throes.

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Swiss view on the Gulf oil spill

Disgust about poor handling of oil--from the land of trains that run on time.

Du café renversé chez BP - Videos streaming

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Agency orders cuts in toxic oil spill response

Thanks no doubt to a blogfish post and subsequent public activism campaign (see photo top right of angry mob demanding less toxic oil spill dispersants), the Environmental Protection Agency has ordered the use of less-toxic oil dispersants. It's about time, and thanks for getting involved. Wasn't it rewarding?

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Oil doesn't just kill, it maims

What can we expect from the Gulf oil disaster? Oil is the pollution that hurts you once, and then keeps on hurting. Just as Nuka, the sea otter oiled in Alaska when she was a newborn pup. She's a swimming example of all the things that can go wrong with a sea otter, or at least most of them.

This story in the Seattle Times describes the woes of an oiled sea otter pup 20 years later and a whole array of other harms caused by oil, in addition to the obvious bad feather days it causes for the highly visible oiled birds. Oiled eggs, oiled food, etc. Stay tuned, we'll be hearing about these effects for a long time.

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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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