Thursday, March 29, 2018
Why a disaster?
Why do we always describe oil leaks as "environmental disasters"?
Caveat: I'm weary of the Things are better now line in general. Most of the alleged betters are actually worses, and some are a matter of taste.
One unquestionable better is our mastery of high-value energy sources from coal to petroleum to nuclear fission.
One aspect of this better that isn't properly appreciated: We have SLOWED DOWN oil leaks dramatically.
Look at any long-term history of petroleum and you'll see that oil was leaking and spewing all over the place UNTIL we tapped and controlled the wells. People had been using petroleum for thousands of years in North America and the Middle East, because it was bubbling to the surface where they didn't need technology to find it. Oil still spews and flows through the ocean floor constantly.
Oil doesn't flow openly on land now because we've drawn down the overflowing reservoirs. The occasional rare leak from wells or pipelines can't remotely approach the scale of the constant seepage through the seabed.
Secondarily, we know from the controlled experiment of the Exxon Valdez crash that NATURE cleans the area better than our desperate efforts to scrub away the oil with detergents. Several years after the "disaster", the areas we hadn't touched were more alive than the areas we'd sterilized. THIS SHOULDN'T BE A FUCKING SURPRISE because petroleum is an ORGANIC CHEMICAL that breaks down and provides NOURISHMENT for bacteria. The unscrubbed areas had MORE FOOD than the "cleaned" areas.
¶ 2:23 AM 
