The BP Spill: Has the Damage Been Exaggerated?

[thundley4]

President Obama has called the BP oil spill "the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced," and so has just about everyone else. Green groups are sounding alarms about the "catastrophe along the Gulf Coast," while CBS, Fox and MSNBC are all slapping "Disaster in the Gulf" chyrons on their spill-related news. Even BP fall guy Tony Hayward, after some early happy talk, admitted that the spill was an "environmental catastrophe." The obnoxious anti-environmentalist Rush Limbaugh has been a rare voice arguing that the spill — he calls it "the leak" — is anything less than an ecological calamity, scoffing at the avalanche of end-is-nigh eco-hype.

Well, Limbaugh has a point. The Deepwater Horizon explosion was an awful tragedy for the 11 workers who died on the rig, and it's no leak; it's the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. It's also inflicting serious economic and psychological damage on coastal communities that depend on tourism, fishing and drilling. But so far — while it's important to acknowledge that the long-term potential danger is simply unknowable for an underwater event that took place just three months ago — it does not seem to be inflicting severe environmental damage. "The impacts have been much, much less than everyone feared," says geochemist Jacqueline Michel, a federal contractor who is coordinating shoreline assessments in Louisiana. (See pictures of the Gulf oil spill.)

Yes, the spill killed birds — but so far, less than 1% of the number killed by the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska 21 years ago. Yes, we've heard horror stories about oiled dolphins — but so far, wildlife-response teams have collected only three visibly oiled carcasses of mammals. Yes, the spill prompted harsh restrictions on fishing and shrimping, but so far, the region's fish and shrimp have tested clean, and the restrictions are gradually being lifted. And yes, scientists have warned that the oil could accelerate the destruction of Louisiana's disintegrating coastal marshes — a real slow-motion ecological calamity — but so far, assessment teams have found only about 350 acres of oiled marshes, when Louisiana was already losing about 15,000 acres of wetlands every year. (Comment on this story.)

The disappearance of more than 2,000 sq. mi. of coastal Louisiana over the past century has been a true national tragedy, ravaging a unique wilderness, threatening the bayou way of life and leaving communities like New Orleans extremely vulnerable to hurricanes from the Gulf. And while much of the erosion has been caused by the re-engineering of the Mississippi River — which no longer deposits much sediment at the bottom of its Delta — quite a bit has been caused by the oil and gas industry, which gouged 8,000 miles of canals and pipelines through coastal wetlands. But the spill isn't making that problem much worse. Coastal scientist Paul Kemp, a former Louisiana State University professor who is now a National Audubon Society vice president, compares the impact of the spill on the vanishing marshes to "a sunburn on a cancer patient." (See TIME's interactive graphic "100 Days of the BP Spill.")

Marine scientist Ivor van Heerden, another former LSU prof, who's working for a spill-response contractor, says, "There's just no data to suggest this is an environmental disaster. I have no interest in making BP look good — I think they lied about the size of the spill — but we're not seeing catastrophic impacts." Van Heerden, like just about everyone else working in the Gulf these days, is being paid from BP's spill-response funds. "There's a lot of hype, but no evidence to justify it."

Time.com

[Eupher]

Read an article yesterday - I think it was in the WSJ - that most of the oil has simply.....


Evaporated.


Plus, there are oil-eating microbes that do a number on spilled oil. Around the spill, they've measured the O2 content in the water and found it to be low, a sign that microbes are hard at work.

This is what I meant when I said to all the hand-wringers and whiney moonbats that the planet is fine. It will recover, despite our "help".

[Wineslob]

that most of the oil has simply.....


Evaporated.

I believe Rush (maybe?) brought up this point early in the "disaster", that a major portion, according to "experts" would indeed, evaporate because of the kind of oil that's down there.

[debk]

Coastal scientist Paul Kemp, a former Louisiana State University professor who is now a National Audubon Society vice president, compares the impact of the spill on the vanishing marshes to "a sunburn on a cancer patient

More about Kemp - http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/oceanography/faculty/kemp.html

Marine scientist Ivor van Heerden, another former LSU prof, who's working for a spill-response contractor, says, "There's just no data to suggest this is an environmental disaster. I have no interest in making BP look good — I think they lied about the size of the spill — but we're not seeing catastrophic impacts." Van Heerden, like just about everyone else working in the Gulf these days, is being paid from BP's spill-response funds. "There's a lot of hype, but no evidence to justify it."

More about van Heerden - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivor_van_Heerden

I think it's important to note, that both of these men were former LSU profs. Regardless of whether or not they are still at LSU, they are not going to risk their reputations to downplay the damage from the oil, on the Gulf Coast.

If there was such a humongous body of oil floating around out there, Little Bonnie wasn't enough to totally disperse it. An Andrew or Hugo, maybe. I don't think Bonnie had high enough winds or was large enough on the surface of the ocean, to have done it.

However, the leak/spill was hyped up enough to get people every where who were upset with Obama for opening up drilling sites - which made a lot of Conservatives happy...to give Obama an excuse to shut down drilling sites, without even checking to see if it was warranted at even just one, let alone all.

[dutch508]

Not to be a CTer, but;

Hype up the damage, block any coverage, ban drilling.

Then after the bans in place- POOF! Oil gone, but too late to roll back the ban.

[Ptarmigan]

Not to be a CTer, but;

Hype up the damage, block any coverage, ban drilling.

Then after the bans in place- POOF! Oil gone, but too late to roll back the ban.

That could be possible.

[Ptarmigan]

I have read that the Deepwater Horizon had safety problems and 11 people are dead. Any chance of recovering them? Likely by now they are long gone. 

[JohnnyReb]

I posted the following in Breaking News but thought it might fit here also.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
OK, the link says "unavailable", so here goes what I have heard.

A firefighting crew that specializes in fighting fires on oil rigs was hired to put out the fire. They were using foam and fighting the fire in the proper way. The Coast Guard came in and "ORDERED" them to use high pressure water hoses and massive amounts of water that caused the rig (which floats) to roll over and break the pipe (well head) off.

To my understanding, the Coast Guard did not have and does not have the authority nor the expertize to take control of the oil rig firefighting operations. So the oil spill is the result of US Governments intervention.....own it Obama.   
 
 

[Wretched Excess]

of course it has.  it the absence of science, the obamites have declared war on the oil drilling industry.

and, until november, there isn't a thing that we can do about it

[Chris_]

Study: Petroleum-eating microbes significantly reduced gulf oil plume

The Gulf of Mexico ecosystem was ready and waiting for something like the Deepwater Horizon blowout, and seems to have made the most of it, a new scientific study suggests.

Petroleum-eating bacteria - which had dined for eons on oil seeping naturally through the seafloor - proliferated in the cloud of oil that drifted underwater for months after the April 20 accident. They not only outcompeted fellow microbes, they each ramped up their own internal metabolic machinery to digest the oil as efficiently as possible.

The result was a nature-made cleanup crew capable of reducing the amount of oil in the undersea "plume" by half about every three days, according to research published online Tuesday by the journal Science.

The findings, by a team of scientists led by Terry C. Hazen of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in California, help explain one of the biggest mysteries of the disaster: Where has all the oil gone?

Washington Post

[debk]

This study was done by scientists from Berkeley CA.... if they found that the oil has disappeared....it has.

If anyone would have wanted to find oil all over the place and causing damage, it would be scientists from the Liberal Capitol of the World....


Yet it will be at least November before drilling can resume, according to what was on Fox earlier this evening.

Great....just keep pushing the economy down, Obama.

[IassaFTots]

The oil has never been an issue for me.  I was raised on the MGC, and I always saw oil in the sand, and water, from regular plain ole oil.  That corexit stuff bothers me deeply.  The fact that it was just tossed out there, in the water, after all of the warnings (blah blah blah EPA) concerns me.  And quite frankly, I don't know if I am ready to eat seafood harvested from the Gulf just yet.  I sure am glad I bought all of that gulf shrimp right after that spill, and have tons in my freezer.

[JohnnyReb]

Obama Ban on Gulf oil drilling: 1/3 of our domestic oil production comes outta the gulf.

Obama knows what he is doing....wrecking The USA one crisis at a time.