Around 200,000 Tons of Deep Water Horizon Oil and Gas Consumed By Bacteria 170
SchrodingerZ writes "The University of Rochester and Texas A&M University have determined that in the five months following the Deepwater Horizon Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, bacteria have consumed over 200,000 tons of oil and natural gas. The researched was published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology (abstract). 'A significant amount of the oil and gas that was released was retained within the ocean water more than one-half mile below the sea surface. It appears that the hydrocarbon-eating bacteria did a good job of removing the majority of the material that was retained in these layers," said co-author John Kessler of the University of Rochester.' The paper debuts for the first time 'the rate at which the bacteria ate the oil and gas changed as this disaster progressed, information that is fundamental to understanding both this spill and predicting the behavior of future spills.' It was also noted that the oil and gas consumption rate was correlated with the addition of dispersants at the wellhead (video). Still, an estimated 40% of the oil and natural gas from the spill remains in the Gulf today."
A society without an attention span (Score:5, Insightful)
Politics in a democracy involve two sides cheering for their own while doing anything they can to damage the other side.
Whenever a disaster happens, whichever side that named its underlying cause as an issue makes a huge deal of the event. To gain maximum publicity for their (righteous) cause, they overstates the event and style it as a new coming apocalypse.
Then months later when the consequence isn't as big as they thought, the event and the issue it represents pass out of public consciousness.
There's a nasty see-saw effect as a result. We're either full on an issue, or have forgotten it, and our legislators write law accordingly. It's like a society without an attention span.
Re:A society without an attention span (Score:5, Insightful)
A narrow view.
The bacteria digested the oil, but what did they excrete. If they multiplied and now have no meal, they starve, and their carcasses in turn become something else. There was a process applied to the spilled oil by the bacteria. Is the remainder environmentally tenable? None of that seems to have been addressed.
No measurements have been made of long term effects as of yet, and so we don't know 1) quantity of remaining undigested oil 2) rate at which it can reasonably be digested 3) interim effects on ecosystems in the Gulf at this estimated rate 4) how much remaining oil there is to feed the equation 5) what current fishing rates do to the population, and what might replace the population given these rates, and more.
Democracy is weighing more than two sides of a question, as there are almost always more than two sides to a question. You're just used to American politics, which have devolved to become polarizing.
Re: (Score:2)
The bacteria digested the oil, but what did they excrete. If they multiplied and now have no meal, they starve, and their carcasses in turn become something else.
So... you're saying if we come up with something that eats said bacteria, everything will be fine right? EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE, RIGHT!?!?
Re: (Score:2)
What might eat the bacteria; what part of which food chain were/are benefiting? What about bacteria excrement? What is that, and how does it help/hurt? What eats oil-digesting bacteria poo? At what rate? To benefit what food chains and ecosystems? That's what's wrong trying to make sense of the report cited; it only serves as a very interesting data point, not something that you can make judgments with easily, if at all.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Hydrocarbons are hydrogen and carbon. They combine with oxygen to produce CO2. Sugar is the same way: apply oxygen to C6H12O6 and you get H2O (H6O12 becomes 6 x H2O) and C6 + O (C6 + O2 gives you 6 x CO2 if you can find 6 O2). Yes, sugar--food--is basically air (CO2), water (H2O), and sunlight (to strip the O2 off the CO2 and attach the remaining C to the H2O to give CH2O and O2).
We're dealing with CH4 here or basically C(n)H(2(n+1)) which when combined with oxygen gives CO2 and H2O. News flash: it's
Re: (Score:2)
Were it that easy. It's not that clean, and contains a number of other products that the refiners will tell you about; the most onerous is sulphur and various metals.
While it's a lot like sugar (lots of energy to burn), where do these bacteria live in the ecosystem? I mean-- I like the thought of bacteria gobbling errant oil spills, don't get me wrong. But the questions remain of how much, how long, what's left over.
Of course, the alternative would be to crack the crude, get varying fuels and materials for
Re: (Score:2)
Well yes but the impurities are obviously just left around. There's not much to do with sulphur unless you're an H2S burning bacteria, which isn't common up here.
We don't crack the crude because finding it is apparently hard. They need a way to refine it out of the water and such, which I guess is hard.
Re: (Score:2)
So, in other words, the water has been acidified.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's pretty much as postbigbang was saying though. 60% of the oil having been consumed by bacteria doesn't mean that 60% of the problem is gone. Being eaten by bacteria is just the first stage of the process. Also, in your post you said that we were just dealing with methane. There's a heck of a lot more in crude oil than just methane. There's a whole lot of different kinds of hydrocarbons as well as stuff that isn't hydrocarbons. The ability to metabolize hydrocarbons is also a fairly special skill. It's n
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
When you wrote:
We're dealing with CH4 here or basically C(n)H(2(n+1)) which when combined with oxygen gives CO2 and H2O. News flash: it's a fuel source, it burns
It was in post 41313793 [slashdot.org], which is the one I originally replied to.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The discussion was about what happens to these hydrocarbons when they're consumed by the bacteria. You talked about what happens to a bunch of carbohydrates. The only hydrocarbon you mentioned was methane which combines with oxygen very cleanly (and still doesn't produce only CO2). All of the hydrocarbons that the oil we're talking about is actually composed of produce all kinds of other stuff when combined with oxygen. Also, we're not talking about burning them in a furnace here, we're talking about them b
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Most oil spills aren't man-made. Natural oil seeps in the Gulf of Mexico release an estimated 1 million barrels of oil per year [nap.edu] (one ton of oil is about 6-8 barrels). The Deepwater Horizon spill was
Re: (Score:3)
Politics in a democracy involve two sides cheering for their own while doing anything they can to damage the other side.
Whenever a disaster happens, whichever side that named its underlying cause as an issue makes a huge deal of the event. To gain maximum publicity for their (righteous) cause, they overstates the event and style it as a new coming apocalypse.
Your position ignores that sometimes there is an objectively "correct" thing to do and that sometimes, someone is objectively wrong for arguing against it.
Then months later when the consequence isn't as big as they thought, the event and the issue it represents pass out of public consciousness.
There's a nasty see-saw effect as a result. We're either full on an issue, or have forgotten it, and our legislators write law accordingly. It's like a society without an attention span.
Do you know why Nixon (that notorious liberal) created the EPA?
The second largest (deep water is #1) oil spill in American history brought so much attention to environmental issues that he had no choice.
That was 42 years ago. I wouldn't call 42 years "forgotten" or "see-saw effect" or "without an attention span."
Re: (Score:2)
Your position ignores that sometimes there is an objectively "correct" thing to do and that sometimes, someone is objectively wrong for arguing against it.
That statement is not accurate. The only objectively "correct" things as relates to politics are facts. Interpretation of facts, determination the relative importance of specific facts with respect to a given social issue, and subsequent decisions are at the heart of politics, and there is never an objectively "correct" position for any point of that process-- it is all relative to objectives, philosophy, morality, ethics and beliefs. If you say that someone's political views are "incorrect" given a comm
Re: (Score:2)
> It's like a society without an attention span.
That's only part of the story. When you talk about society's "attention span" you have to talk about what's being put front-and-center as "news" by the media.
One deeper cause is our current trend of calculating the financials on everything, cutting costs as much as possible and maximizing profits. In particular, if you decide that delivering the news is a financial matter rather than a sacred trust necessary to maintain our democracy, you start turning t
We must destroy this bacteria. (Score:5, Funny)
How dare they eat our precious, precious oil.
Re: (Score:2)
This. Do you want the bacteria to win?
What kind of waste do these bacteria produce? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not like the oil just "goes away". It gets transformed into other materials. Are those hazardous? Is the Gulf now a giant cesspool of bacterial waste?
Re: (Score:2)
More like a cycle of life... the oil spill is eaten by the bacteria, and then the bacteria get eaten by something else, which then gets eaten by something else.
I'm wondering what the fishing boats in the Gulf are seeing, if there was a corresponding explosion of growth in populations of shrimp or such.
Re:What kind of waste do these bacteria produce? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm wondering what the fishing boats in the Gulf are seeing, if there was a corresponding explosion of growth in populations of shrimp or such.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill#Fisheries [wikipedia.org]
Re:What kind of waste do these bacteria produce? (Score:5, Interesting)
The money quote from that article regarding whether there is a corresponding explosion of population of life that feeds on this bacteria:
In late 2012 local fishermen report that crab, shrimp, and oyster fishing operations have not yet recovered from the oil spill and many fear that the Gulf seafood industry will never recover. One Mississippi shrimper who was interviewed said he used to get 8,000 pounds of shrimp in four days, but this year he got only 800 pounds a week. Mississippi's oyster reefs have been closed since the spill started. A Louisanna fisherman said the local oyster industry might do 35 per cent this year, "If we're very lucky." Dr Ed Cake, a biological oceanographer and a marine and oyster biologist, said that many of the Gulf fisheries have collapsed and "If it takes too long for them to come back, the fishing industry won't survive".[314]
So... no. If I had to speculate, the bacteria is most effective in high concentrations of dispersant. That dispersant is likely detrimental to higher lifeforms, so it's probably a smorgasbord of poisoned food. A shrimper who pulls in around 6% of his pre-disaster haul, that sounds like a completely devastated ecology. Also from the above article, they used dispersants right as tuna were spawning, and it takes a tuna fish 5-15 years to mature, so the effects of that might not hit the tuna fishing industry for 3 more years.
Re: (Score:2)
These effects on fisheries can very well be because of the remaining 40% of the oil. That's still a lot of oil, and many lifeforms perish quickly when there is oil in the water.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm an avid fisherman and amateur ichthyologist. Tuna mature in 3-5 years. The average lifespan of most tuna species is estimated to be about 8-15 years old. Counting the rings in the otoliths (ear bones) showed world record yellowfin tuna in the 400 lb range to be about 13-15 years old. The vast majority of yellowfin, bigeye, and bluefin tuna (the bigger ones) harvested commercially are in the 50-150 pound range (roughly 4-7 years). The older ones build
Re:What kind of waste do these bacteria produce? (Score:4, Insightful)
And, most importantly, long before the bacteria can do anything with it, the damage to the fish, coral, and everything else is done.
Though, I'm sure some people will say that since these bacteria will eventually clean things up we can spill and not worry about it.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm sure some people will say that since these bacteria will eventually clean things up we can spill and not worry about it.
I think that's rather optimistic: I think most people had already moved onto not worrying about it while the well was still spewing at it's peak. Not because of bacteria or cleanup efforts, because they didn't live in the gulf and assume the environment won't ever change.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:What kind of waste do these bacteria produce? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is the Gulf now a giant cesspool of bacterial waste?
It's worth remembering that the Gulf, as well as most of the rest of the world, has always been a giant cesspool of bacterial waste.
Re:What kind of waste do these bacteria produce? (Score:5, Informative)
In principal, chemically, all of oil could be processed, with potential release/consumption of water and carbon dioxide.
In terms of elements, chemically, oil actually is pretty clean, it's just basic organic elements of life, as every one of you knows. Oil pollution problem is a result it's physical properties: viscosity, density, etc. Which results from oil being bunch of rather long polymers.
Theoretically, it does not make sense for bacteria that consumes oil to produce polymers longer than oil polymers, most likely, it couldn't exert nothing but carbon dioxide, water, methane - smaller molecular compounds.
That's the bacterial waste directly from oil metabolism. Theoretically there could be toxins from other aspects of bacteria's life.
Theoretically.
Re: (Score:2)
They also consume the oxygen from the water to help that process, so when these oil spills happen a lot of times you have rampant bacteria growth that hurts other marine life that needs that oxygen.
Probably still better than having the oil in the water though.
Re: (Score:2)
Dead from oil or dead from lack of oxygen?
One isn't better than the other.
Apparently there's still a leak (Score:2)
Not at the wellhead but oil matching the signature of the Macondo field is (or was earlier this year) leaking out of the seabed from somewhere. If the oil has found a fracture line out of the bottom of the dead well then to quote the song , There could be trouble ahead...
Re: (Score:3)
Or they could be naturally occurring http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_seep [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Lets hope so. If a large fracture does open it'll be potentially unkillable and a large proportion of the contents of the field could escape into the ocean until the pressure is equalised making the wellhead spill seem like a small pot of ink.
It happens again and again in nature (Score:5, Insightful)
This could easily have been a natural occurrence, at anytime nature could again just decide to expel tons of deep ocean oil, but because now people have $$$$ involved and it could be blamned on someone (sued) then it's all the news with the environmentalists. Anyone who actually has studied some Geology knows this was not a big deal for the environment... and please.. we need to talk in scales of centuries.. not months.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes but it wasn't nature it was BP's subcontractors so I'm not sure what you're posting about. BP's subcontractors screw up, BP pays, because the subcontractors have friends in high places. Pretty simple.
Fixed that for you
Re: (Score:2)
Re:It happens again and again in nature (Score:5, Insightful)
They may say "twice the Exxon Valdez in a year" which may very well be true, but there are two giant differences:
1) both the Exxon Valdez and this Deep Water Horizon spills spilled their vast quantities of oil in hours or days, not spread over a year. They both caused a huge spike in oil concentrations, well over the naturally occuring spills.
2) the Exxon Valdez was at the surface, so the oil directly contaminated large parts of shoreline where the natural seep usually doesn't get to as it's all eaten by bacteria or dissolved in the water before it can reach the shore.
The reason there are natural spills all the time will certainly have helped in the clean-up of the Deep Water Horizon spill, as there is an existing ecosystem of oil-eating bacteria present. But to say "oh it doesn't matter as nature spills more" is false. Nature has a huge capacity when it comes to cleaning up our mess, given enough time, but that doesn't mean we should just allow it to happen.
Re: (Score:3)
I won't live for centuries, will you?
I want to be able to eat fish today, fisherman want to be able to make a living today. The question was never will the sea recover, it was what is the economic cost of the spill. Also what is the short term cost to the local environment?
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting. You could die naturally at any time, therefore you must be greedy. Hurry up and die please.
Re: (Score:2)
at anytime nature could again just decide to expel tons of deep ocean oil
Considering we can only access that oil because it has not leaked out after millions and millions of years, that doesn't seem too likely.
Re:It happens again and again in nature (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.allword-news.co.uk/tag/louisiana-fish-deaths-raise-oil-spill-questions/ [allword-news.co.uk]
But to get into the nitty gritty of it, the article you linked says that it's "twice the Exxon Valdez spill each year," and that is likely spread out over a wide area and released in small amounts that are less likely to clump. Also, consider the magnitude: the Exxon Valdez spill between 260,000 and 750,000 barrels of oil. So if we take the high estimate, that's perhaps 1.5 million barrels of oil that normally spill into the Gulf of Mexico each year, likely spread over a wide area.
The Deepwater Horizon spill was around 4.9 million barrels of oil, all released in a short time (much less than a year), all in the same place. No, spills of this magnitude do not happen naturally (except perhaps in exceedingly rare circumstances). Yes, it is highly damaging to the ecosystem of parts of the Gulf.
Re:It happens again and again in nature (Score:4, Interesting)
There are four regions offshore North America with known seeps. Two of these, the Gulf of Mexico and southern California, have a combined annual oil seep rate of 160,000 tonnes, derived by adding 140,000 tonnes, estimated from the Gulf of Mexico, and the estimate of 20,000 tonnes from Southern California.
source: http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10388&page=192 [nap.edu]
Spills of that magnitude at one location might be rare but they still occur and looking at time in a geologic timescale they're simply not that big of a deal. Man has simply decided that it needs to feed of the seafood in that area, and swim on those beaches so a spill is something to complain about. A meteor impact wiping out 80% of all species on the planet you could deem damaging to the ecosystem, it's still a natural occurence, life still finds a way and the world still turns.
The pictures of dead fish sure prompt a lot of people to get upset I'm sure but it does not make this event even remotely unprecedented in nature.
Re: (Score:3)
Even though oil does seep into the ocean naturally in some locations, human-caused oil spills are still bad news. Life will find a way, eventually, but in the meantime there is significant damage to the local ecosystem which was caused by humans, and resulting damage to human livelihoods. Even if you don't care about the ecological damage for its own sake do you not sympathize with the damage to human livelihoods?
To compare it to another scenario: floods sometimes happen naturally, but are sometimes cause
Re: (Score:3)
Drivel. The largest spill in history is by definition unprecedented. And of course the problem with pointing to previous natural disasters that lead to extinction events for "comparison" is the, you know, extinction event that followed.
A Meteor Impact isn't a Problem? (Score:2)
A meteor impact wiping out 80% of all species on the planet you could deem damaging to the ecosystem, it's still a natural occurence, life still finds a way and the world still turns.
Sure, on geologic timescales. Interestingly enough, it's the larger, more dominant predators most at risk to such an event. Know anyone at the top of the food chain you'd like to keep around?
Seriously though, if you don't define a meteor strike like the one that killed the dinosaurs to be a disaster, then the simple fact is that the word "disaster" holds no meaning for you. There is literally nothing up to and including the aforementioned "red giant" phase of the sun that will one day engulf the Earth that
Re:It happens again and again in nature (Score:5, Interesting)
Your article states that twice an Exxon Valdez seeps into the gulf naturally each year. Their methodology is pretty suspect - measuring the thickness of naturally occurring oil on the surface, extrapolating the expected bacterial consumption rate and natural churn rate, and multiplying this by the surface area of the gulf. But I'll accept their figures for the sake of argument. So that's 84,000 m^3. Deepwater Horizon was 780,000 m^3, 18.6 times larger.
You're saying that releasing 18 times that volume over the course of only a few months in a single location about 40 miles from a coast probably doesn't have much if any measurable ecological impact? Maybe Exxon Valdez was no big deal either, I mean that's the Pacific Ocean, I'm sure there are hundreds of times that much oil seeping naturally into the ocean, right?
Super Hero Bacteria? (Score:2)
I'm guessing they ate it to gain its super powers.
But what happens to it? (Score:4, Interesting)
What happens to all of the oil they consume? When a person devours a large plate of nachos, much of that tasty food comes out as undesirable waste products that have to be carefully treated and disposed of.
Do they turn it into some other chemical? Do they just eat the oil, reproduce, and eventually die, leaving 200,000 tons of organic matter at the bottom of the gulf (is that any better than 200,000 tons of oil?). Oil from the ground has lots of contaminants like sulfur, what happens to the parts of the oil the bacteria can't digest?
"40% of the oil and natural gas" (Score:2)
"40% of the oil and natural gas is still in the gulf" -- is this 40% of the total released quantity of oil AND natural gas combined, 40% of each of oil and natural gas, or some other combination?
What was the proportion of oil:natural gas released? I'd be less worried about natural gas in the ocean than oil, but maybe that's naive (although I've never seen a cleanup working cleaning up natural gas..)
So are they revising this report.... (Score:3)
Bacteria have now produced 114,000 tons of CO2 (Score:2)
"bacteria have consumed over 200,000 tons of oil and natural gas"
So, the bacteria have now produced over 114,000 tons of CO2...
As interpreted from "Effect of Environmental Parameters on the Biodegradation of Oil Sludge"
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC243289/pdf/aem00208-0071.pdf)
Ignore that, it is way wrong (Score:2)
Wrong... My fault. It is much, much more... They produce 57% of the theoretical maximum, which is a lot larger thanks to all the oxygen adding up with each carbon atom. Damn, I realized it right after pressing the send button...
Re:Where have all the Chicken Littles gone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Still an estimated 40% of the oil and natural gas from the spill is still in the Gulf today.
Read that. Basically, you seem like you'd be happy if I served you a glass of my piss, but before I served it to you I removed 60% of the piss and replaced it with pure water.
Some of us are not "enviro-wacko"s, but are not comfortable with self-regulating companies. We learned from the pre 1920's when corporations ran rampant. We learned from the period before 1970 or 1980 when companies polluted without consequences. I want progress. I want oil drilling. I don't want a blank check for BP and others to pollute or shortcut on safety.
I miss BadAnalogyGuy... (Score:3, Informative)
Read that. Basically, you seem like you'd be happy if I served you a glass of my piss, but before I served it to you I removed 60% of the piss and replaced it with pure water.
More like: 60% of the pee Michael Phelps put in the pool during the Olympics has been filtered out. Fancy a swim?
Re:I miss BadAnalogyGuy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pee is mostly water, containing a small fraction of contaminants.
Oil on the other hand, is 100% concentrated contaminant.
Can't compare the two so easily.
Re: (Score:2)
OK only 2% pee!! still do you want to drink it? the analogy is sufficient to make the point, it is not a whole solution to use in a comparison. It's just a way to illustrate to those who are not able to grasp the concept (like yourself or a child).
I'd rather drink a glass of sterile 2% pee than a glass of 2% oil.
WHOOSH (Score:2)
Yes, engaging in Pedantic Poutrage to ignore the point is ridiculous. He's engaging in a 10% less anal leakage [youtube.com] parody and you're whining that it's actually 23.67%.
Re: (Score:2)
More like: 60% of the pee Michael Phelps put in the pool during the Olympics has been filtered out. Fancy a swim?
To stick with your (bad) analogy, here are photos of Michael Phelps' pee in the pool [boston.com].
Re: (Score:2)
Given that artic drilling has been given the go ahead by various countries in water twice as deep and much colder with consequently little potential baterial cleanup if theres a spill, I doubt the powers that be really give a damn. So long as government get their taxes, the oilmen get their profits and idiots can drive 15mpg 2.5 ton SUVs to go to the supermarket it seems the enviroment doesn't matter.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Basically, you seem like you'd be happy if I served you a glass of my piss, but before I served it to you I removed 60% of the piss and replaced it with pure water.
Are you implying that 40% of the ocean is now oil?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well we know that a substantial amount was broken up by dispersants and adsorbed into substrata and being slowly re-released. More rapidly of course when hurricanes stir up the sediments. Of course added to this was in fact that it was crude-oil and comprised a range of toxic elements many of which simply evaporated away creating a more toxic atmosphere at those locales. Much was absorbed into enormous fish and animal kills which were buried at closed to the public locations.
Of course some media sites do
Re: (Score:2)
Or you served me a 12 fl. oz cup of water, peed
I'd still be horrified that you peed into my glass of water.
Re: (Score:2)
Pretty sure buying off regulators is self-regulation.
Re:Where have all the Chicken Littles gone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty sure buying off regulators is self-regulation.
Now all you need to do is get the rest of us to agree with you. My view is that heavy regulation doesn't become self-regulation merely because society fails to enforce it. It just becomes unenforced regulation.
While the two look similar functionally, it's worth remembering that solutions to the problems are different. If self-regulation doesn't work, then one can apply a fix merely by adding regulation that addresses the deficiencies. (Of course, you might create new problems by doing so. Just pointing how the process works.)
If regulation is unenforced, then it doesn't matter how much you add, it'll still be unenforced. So it is possible in such a case to end up with both heavy regulation and an industry that would disappear, if that regulation were ever enforced according to the letter of the law. (some industries, say the assassination industry, aren't worth having, but most such industries have benefit as well as cost, and would still exist in a reasonable regulation environment.)
Another problem is that regulation can be selectively unenforced. That allows certain companies to enjoy state-granted competitive advantages. Self-regulation doesn't create such opportunities. But it does have the disadvantage of the prisoners' dilemma. Namely, that businesses which voluntarily sacrifice in certain ways can be taken advantage of by businesses that do not.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Don't forget the cost of misregulation.
Like required Freddy and Fanny to buy junk mortgages on the secondary market.
When regulators have political axes to grind the regulations can be astoundingly expensive.
Re: (Score:2)
Another issue is that unenforced regulation can still end up with society paying for a bunch of regulators. It's just regulators that aren't for whatever reason doing their jobs. Self-regulation doesn't have this diversion of resources.
It (self regulation) is just so much bullshit without severe penalties to actually "self regulate". Corporations have one over-arching imperative - make money. The board member who fails to act in such a way that maximizes profit is guilty of malfeasance. If a director can legally give the corporate finger to the environment because the corporation makes more money that way, he/she must do so, and moreover, we should expect that behavior and stop with all the naive self-regulation horseshit.
Re: (Score:2)
I keep hearing the same song. We need to regulate industry because it won't self-regulate itself to our satisfaction. This ignores both the quality of the regulation, and how or if that regulation is enforced.
My view is that self-regulation, as skimpy as it is, can be a lot better than full scale regulation. It depends on the actual costs
Re: (Score:3)
What's needed is guns to the heads of the CEOs, Boards of Directors and top shareholders, with a promise that if such spills are not completely resolved in five years entirely at the company's cost, most assuredly the triggers will be pulled.
I doubt you would need any more regulation than that.
Rarely works because ... (Score:2)
I personally encountered that some years ago when I was a very junior engineer in a very dubious small consulting company and was offerred the chance to purchase a directorship. That was a bit of a double scam to get my money and put me in a position where I was likely to have to spend a bit of time in court taking responsibility for some very dubious advice given by my boss. The ninteen year
Re: (Score:2)
if an entire industry is not playing by the rules, then that industry absolutely should be allowed to die (but they should be made to clean up their mess first).
enforcement is still a viable solution to your dilemma, and perhaps regulations that the regulators must follow (not as stupid as it sounds - look at Internal Affairs in the police force).
effective government MUST be accountable to those they govern. you can't dodge the issue of ineffective government by knee-jerking and getting rid of it altogethe
Re: (Score:2)
if an entire industry is not playing by the rules, then that industry absolutely should be allowed to die
Why? The industry might be abominable, like assassination or slavery, but what if it isn't. Why choose to destroy the industry rather than scale the regulations back?
effective government MUST be accountable to those they govern. you can't dodge the issue of ineffective government by knee-jerking and getting rid of it altogether. rather you and everyone else should demand better.
luckily, Americans still have a second amendment that allows them to do this... the question is how much bloodshed are we all willing to tolerate for a greater good?
So if we have ineffective government, we should kill people until it becomes effective?
Re: (Score:2)
self discipline and personal responsibility
That costs money, and as most of the work is outsourced to contractors, often to the lowest bidder, it becomes quite easy to pass the buck and look the other way.
We can save money by getting someone else to cut the corners for us.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Why are you worried about the safety of others that are satisfied with their current level of safety (after all, they are willingly continuing their employment)?
Why do you believe regulation makes a difference?
Oh, you sound like somone who knows nothing about history. Look at how companies were run pre-1930. Look at how children were used for unsafe labor. Look at how adults were worked literally to death. But, hey, they could always go work somewhere else.
Face it. Your viewpoint on the way government shoul
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
40% of the oil remains in the gulf. Or, to put it more simply, you're a fucking retard.
Re: (Score:2)
Last I heard, oxygen is critical to sustain most forms of life. If you had read the article, you would have realized that they method used to arrive at the 40% sum was to look at how much oxygen depletion has taken place.
This is what happens to the oceans when there isn't enough dissolved O2:
http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/to [carleton.edu]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
200,000 tons is not 400,000 pounds. Try running your numbers again.
Re: (Score:2)
You dropped a few zeros there. 200,000 tons * 2000 lbs / ton = 400,000,000 lbs. 400,000,000 lbs / 306 lbs / barrel = 1.3 million barrels. Still not close to the 5 million mark, but quite a bit better than your 1324 barrel figure.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You dropped a few zeros there.
Ugh.. good catch. Much apologies. Funny how a few zeros can do that.
Re: (Score:3)
If one barrel is 306 pounds [info.com] and a ton is 2000 pounds then that's 400,000 pounds of oil consumed, or 1324 barrels. In contrast, BP trashed the Gulf with an estimated 5 million barrels [newamericamedia.org].
It's interesting that bacteria are working hard to consume the spilled oil, but hardly a successful method of cleanup.
I don't know how you arrived at "400,000 lbs" from 200,000 tons, but I came up about 1.3M barrels of oil:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=200000+tons++%2F+307+lbs%2Fbarrel [wolframalpha.com]
Which is still only about 25% of the spill, yet the article said that it accounts for 40% of the oil, what happened to the rest?
Re: (Score:2)
You're off by a few zeros.
Re: (Score:2)
... BP's subcontractors trashed the Gulf ...
Fixed that for you
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, because the world's problems are humans and before the concept of money existed, our population was less than 10% of what it is now.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, but you have a bizarre and unsuual threat every week, occasional mysterious changes in the look and feel of everything, constant dire threats to sector 0-0-1, and dramaticly shortened lifespans for people wearing red attire.
To quote Leanord: "I see just one flaw with your plan. This is not Star Trek!".
Re: (Score:2)
Not really. It's not *totally* unexpected, and it's certainly not a good bill of health. (Though I notice some are reading it that way.)
One important consideration for other spills is that the Gulf is a relatively benign environment as far as hydrocarbon eating bacteria are concerned. In a colder environment, the response would be, at best, much slower. And notice that around half is still left. And it's not a random half, it''s preferentially the hydrocarbons that the bacteria found harder to eat.
IIR