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Comment by retube | Hacker News Reader

At the risk of getting downvoted, and I'm not saying the oil spill isn't bad - it is (very) - but let's remember some context:

1) The area is large. But this is meaningless without knowledge of the density.

2) I can't find a reference, but a prof of marine biology was on the bbc a couple of days ago and apparently this oil spill doesn't even make it into the top 40 worst man-made disasters (e.g compare to bhopal, chernobyl, pacific gyre)

The Niger Delta sees this volume of oil spilled EVERY SINGLE YEAR and no-one gives a fuck. No-one is held to account, there's no press, there's no nothing. The culprits are all the major US/European oil firms.

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More relevant than the comparison to other disasters is the list of largest oil spills:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_spills#Largest_oil_spills

on which it is currently somewhere between third and sixteenth, depending on which estimate you believe. The point being that if the ecosystem recovered from all these other oil spills (most of which you've never heard of) then it'll recover from this one too. If you want to worry about something, worry about overfishing in the oceans instead.

Besides, hasn't there been a shocking lack of photogenic oil-drenched wildlife washing up on beaches? Anyone know what the deal is with that?

Tighter controls over the media? Did they have no-fly zones and tightly restricted waters during the Exxon Valdez spill?

The entire coastline is free and populated... I haven't seen any pictures of dead wildlife or even oil on land yet.

There was a story[1] posted to HN last week with oil-covered animals and oil on land. I don't remember of there were any dead animals though.

[1] http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/05/oil_reaches_louisia...

Ah, I see. This isn't the worst oil spill ever, so it's really no big deal.

Kind of like if a tornado destroys your house, it doesn't really matter, because it wasn't the mythical F6 tornado.

Depending on who you believe, the scale on the Niger Delta might be slightly out. Not that it changes the overall validity of your argument.

One estimate from Google said 1.5 million tons of oil in Nigeria over 50 years. So that's something like 1.7 billion litres in 50 years, 34 million litres a year. PBS's estimate for BP's Spill, on the OP site, seems to cover the gamut of legitimate estimates put forward to date. It comes out at a range of 79-704 million litres in the Gulf so far.

Of course comparing them in this way is ultimately absurd, which is why I think your original point is still a really valid one.

I agree with your Niger Delta comment, but not with your 2nd point. It really comes down to defining what "worst" means and I'm not sure is that simple to compare all those completely unique disasters (and it's even harder to put the pacific gyre - I assume you're talking about the garbage patch - on the same category as bhopal/chernobyl) specially when you consider the probable long term effects they might have.

Regarding your 1st point, I think the different shades of black on the map reflect the density. Even though we still don't know what a 'light grey' or 'black' looks like in practice.

I agree with you that quantifying the size of a disaster is difficult. But I would say that rendering a 1000 square miles of land utterly uninhabitable for generations probably beats the damage caused to the US coast (Chernobyl). Or that 500,000 people rendered severely ill with long-term respiratory and realted health problems, thousands of deaths, premature babies with congenital defects, the destruction of farming land and poisoning of water for decades also probably tops Deepwater Horizon (Bhopal)

And guess what? Union carbide still haven't cleaned it up over 25 years later.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

This is an interesting one, because I think you're entirely right.

The tough question I see is this: would exaggerating, downplaying or relativising the severity of the BP Spill increase or decrease the chances of more catastrophes like Chernobyl & Bhopal? The prospect of continuing abuses by oil companies in poorer parts of the world? Would it increase or decrease the chances of catastrophes like those being dealt with and cleaned up?

I'm not wording those questions like I know the answer, cos I really don't. Optimistically, I try to hope that more environmental awareness is always a good thing.

Obligated to mention here that Union Carbide is owned by Dow Chemical.

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