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Comment by faitswulff | Hacker News Reader

> “We found actual photos of the workers at 2 in the morning dumping — not only dumping barrels off of the barges in the middle of the Santa Monica Basin,” he said, “but before they would dump the barrels, they would take a big ax or hatchet to them, and cut them open on purpose so they would sink.”

Incredible.

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I would make sure that it sunk too if I was dumping toxic stuff in the ocean... That is what BP did when they had that huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico... The dispersant (Corexit[1]) that they used to sink the oil was even more toxic then the oil itself, but at least it hid the mess.

1. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/04/bp-corexit-d...

I'm still amazed they're able to use that stuff

Corexit was a way bigger crime than the oil spill itself and a huge amount of profit was made selling the chemical. Discusting.

I still boycott BP, to this day. But I am probably a minority. In some areas in Florida, they purchased most gas stations after the spill happened, so it is sometime not easy to avoid them.

I didn't bother boycotting BP because I assumed that all the big oil companies are similarly corrupt, put profit over the environment to the same degree, cover up their incidents, etc. BP is just the one that got unlucky and had a PR disaster about it. The article mentioned above implies that Corexit is commonly used - so nothing special about BP here.

> Corexit is a go-to product for energy companies like BP when they’re dealing with massive spills.

Wikipedia shows that BP's usage was by a very wide margin the largest use of Corexit, so I suppose I'm going to stop buying BP too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corexit#Use

It wasn't a huge PR mess for no reason...

See? This is why we don't need environmental regulations. The market will regulate itself if externalities are properly priced in!

(Just pay no mind to how those externalities might be systematically priced and how penalties might be retroactively enforced. If you do you're a freedom-hating socialist!)

> A pilot experiment more than a decade ago to bury the DDT [at the Palos Verdes superfund site] under a thick cap of clean sand showed mixed results. Then sampling in 2009 suggested that most of the DDT had mysteriously vanished — prompting a burst of headlines and more internal paralysis. The longtime project manager unexpectedly retired, and many of the scientists who had dedicated decades of their careers to the chemical have also either retired or moved on.

The fact that DDT outlasted the scientists' careers is another strike (among many) against untrammeled libertarian free market thinking.

Ah, so the front fell off. In that case the DDT was just transported outside of the environment. There's nothing there, except water, and fish, and birds.

(In case it isn't clear to anyone, this is heavy sarcasm and a reference to a well known satirical skit.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM

That's a silly comment considering it was the gov't who has done a shit-ton of ocean dumping in the past (not this case, but others).

Who will regulate the government?

The people. People like me, and I would hope you, would demand the government pass laws to not do these things.

And how exactly are you asking your government to pass those laws?

Through voting and protests. If those don't work then there's also other avenues.

After the 2nd world war, governments all over the world exploded atomic ordinance on land, on islands, in water and underground. The environmental effects were unimaginable.

Regulate that.

It's hard to say whether you're commenting in good faith, but ... World leaders did work to do exactly that, on a global scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_Nuclear_Test_Ban_Treat...

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