Sixteen years after Deepwater Horizon, deep sea life shows few signs of recovery
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
By the time DwH happened we had already learned that
exposed, high-energy habitats bounce back;
sheltered and deep-sea habitats do not.
Out of all fossil fuel extraction methods, deep-sea drilling is the worst.
Heck man, give Stamets a shot with his oil-eating mushrooms; I thought that was an interesting suggestion.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute says that dispersants caused a drastic reduction in surface volatiles, allowing the cleanup crew to work longer and more efficiently.
> The model showed that, without dispersants, the atmospheric concentration of benzene would have been about 6,000 times higher. Benzene concentrations in the air two meters above the sea surface would have been 13 times higher than the levels considered acceptable to breathe during a 10-hour working day or a 40-hour work week, based on guidelines by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). However, the model showed that with the dispersant injection, atmospheric benzene concentrations were typically about 500 times lower than acceptable NIOSH levels.
https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/did-dispersants-help-du...
Nuclear power threatens oil companies.
We used to talk about replacing transportation fuels and low-carbon shipping (global energy). Now we talk about personal responsibility and rooftop solar (residential electricity). You can find oil company PR slide decks explaining why and how. Greenwashing worked, pushing the renewable ‘debate’ worked. We missed the windows on critical infrastructure change, and seemingly enjoy an unstable chunk of desert dictating global energy, inflation & food prices. <shrug>
For long distance heavy transport, alternative fuels or battery-electric is not feasible yet.
The transition will take decades.
We have this wonderful thing called trains. Many key long distance routes in Europe are even electrified already.
Ain't dictating anything. You're the ones with the guns all over who's doing that (and shaping said instability in the first place).
The UAE leaving in May'26 and now getting involved in the fight against the Houthis, while Qatar donated Bribe Force One to Trump, is quite telling as to how this is going re: the US though.
Consistently 2-3x the cost of wind or gas on an LCOE basis. And new build cost is about 7x as high, which has to be amortized over an extremely long period, which rates regulators do not like utilities doing.
Surely you mean the price, because we're not nearly done paying the cost of gas and other fossil fuels we use.
Nuclear is much scarier. Your argument fails to account for the extreme effort spent in order to keep it safe!
In the US, high explosives kill fewer people per year than painkillers. Despite this extraordinary statistic, we're not about to let anyone buy high explosives over the counter. Because we know that high explosives are in fact, much more dangerous than painkillers.
Same goes for nuclear. We have kept it safe(ish) so far, but we know what can happen if we don't.
Which I would still argue is far from making a "when" realistic. This entire comment chain started on the matter of cost. If someone has a reactor, the enemies won't try to explode. They will go Temüjin on it and seize it.
The area is still bad for humans; but not terrible for the ecosystem.
The damage is terrible for the ecosystem. Just not as terrible as human presence.
Why though? Why are we so afraid of accountability? Because this is what people point to when trying to deny things are true: ThErE iS NO EviDeNce, sHoW Me THe StUdY, etc. etc.
This behavior, being skeptical and precise, is the very thing that makes scientists more trustworthy than the average Joe with his motivated reasoning.
I'm confident that the people working on this would have made the causal claim if they had been able to collect enough data to support it. They may well be working on gathering data to support the causal claim right now.
But as long as we're bringing up general social woes, I'll point out that those misleading statements are pretty tame by today's standards. The more popular strategy now is to just lie outright.
Scientists write for other scientists who already know why they use the language they use. Compromising that language to try to cater to fools who couldn't care less about the truth would just make the scientist a greater fool for trying.
This is a better version of the point I was trying to make, thanks. The framing / who is the audience makes the biggest difference. Had fun watching Digger.
Humans don’t operate at a scientific level in our day to day.
Politicians need to make decisions about the economy with little to no data, and the legal system convicts people at a much lower standard than that science requires us to meet.
And we run our lives at an incredibly lower standard than what science needs to maintain.
It’s fairly easy to see that the Deep Horizon incident should have easily met any of those non science standards (it may have possibly fallen short of the legal standard), to actually enact changes in terms of regulations, or punishment.
Unfortunately, on one side you have an indifferent public that largely depends on activists that it maligns to protect its interests, and on the other side you have billion dollar industries that can buy out the decision makers.
Scientists should not change the scientific method so morons can continue to ignore or cherrypick their studies.
> Available evidence rules out natural phenomena as likely drivers, suggesting a large-scale pollution event and its associated mitigation measures most likely precipitated the declines...That the declines began shortly after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill points to that event as the most parsimonious explanation. These findings suggest that despite its immense size the deep-pelagic biome is vulnerable to human-induced disturbance and possesses limited resilience to facilitate recovery.
This means "the oil spill caused the declines". That is what this means in English.
The problem is that bad-faith actors weaponize this language to fight against science, facts, and reality. At some point, the evidence is strong enough that it's fine to just plainly say "x caused y" even if there is a 0.0000000000001% probability that by random chance, y would have happened regardless.
No? The companies are largely free from consequence?
Maybe our system is a bit broken.
Its kind of deceptive to talk about nearing an all time high without mentioning that the current all time high was 2 decades ago.
My point is merely that reasonable people can disagree if there was a suitable consequence to the event. Sure they're out 140 billion, but to a company like this that's not as grand as it sounds and not at all fatal. You provided your view, I am providing mine, which is that they did not suffer sufficiently.
I just said that the evidence that you are picking from tells a more complex story than "their stock is near an ATH" when it hasn't even recovered to where it was the day before the disaster.
When a company fucks up like that, it should die, and the people deemed responsible should go to jail. And if we cannot find who is responsible, then the top-level executives should go to jail. They are paid so much because they are "responsible", aren't they?
"But think about the normal employees losing their job when such a company fucks up", I hear. Well, think about the employees who lose their job when a normal company bankrupts "normally", who cares? And maybe, just maybe, there would then be whistleblowers from the inside because they would actually risk their job by just not contributing to preventing the company from fucking up that bad.
You could dissolve the corporation. The assets are sold off to competitors, including their claims to oil fields. The employees find new jobs. The shareholders (your retirement plan) might get screwed? But basically the same economic activities eventually continue under a different flag. I struggle to see what this actually accomplishes.
Financial risks should go with the benefits.
If damages and cause a bankruptcy, that also means the damaged party is getting paid.
The assets and people will go elsewhere? Saddle them with the debt.
> any board member or executive at the time of the incident should be indebted until the damage is repaired.
I do think personal culpability should play a role. Don't see how it's possible to remove profit motivations though. If people who didn't care about profit were capable of running an energy company, or any large company, how come we've never seen it happen?
That was 1989, 37 years ago.
After years of appeals that the $5 Billion they were ordered to pay was excessive, they paid a whopping $507 Million in 2009.
The implication was they could have contained it at the surface, sucked it up and treated it to remove oil from the water.
>But that would be incredibly difficult, and possibly so expensive as to bankrupt the companies responsible!
feigned gasp
Oh no.
But the real danger is that we have given certain members of our species superhuman abilities to unilaterally make decisions, where these then go on to cause harm on a scale that would never be possible as just 1% of our species operating within the scope of what 1% of our species can reach with their two hands. We've creating living gods essentially. We've even created nonliving gods: pools of capital people are beholden to grow that they themselves do not even own or control, but are enslaved to them nonetheless. Decisions are what is good for the nonliving god: what grows the money pile in the quarterly time frame, not what is good for our species or even what is truly individually good for the people believing themselves to have any control over these pools of capital.
Build a bunch of drones that carry explosives and leave them outside chemical plants, refineries, and nuclear plants across the world and then launch a simultaneous attack on infrastructure.
Budget $1000-$2000 per drone and then whatever your costs of transportation for the road trip are.
That's a massive amount of money that could have went to paying shareholders, and that's why they don't want it happening again.
Edit: want to add the sprawl also makes efficient mass public transportation nearly impossible.
People like fast, on-demand transportation they're in control of. The answer is electric vehicles.
Some places like Ethiopia have simply switched to EVs by encouraging their import and discouraging import of non-EVs. Now, most vehicles there are EVs.
It is often a huge increase in a family’s quality of life once one of them saves enough to get a motorbike or ebike.
Cars are literally an econ 101 textbook example of negative externalities.
Two-wheel vehicles are much more reasonable in all ways, I’m not arguing against them (although two-stroke ICEs are definitely terrible things).
So the people living outside of cities that commute because they can't afford to live there, will now pay that additional tax.
That's more than their current market cap ($127B), and the stock price right now is not that far from where it was just before the spill ($49 now, around $59 just prior to the spill).
I'm just curious how that was accomplished, given that it would not have been a great time for them to be borrowing or issuing new shares, for obvious reasons. Maybe if it was spread out over like 10 years it could be more doable, but still that seems like a lot.
If you checked the share price via Google Finance, it's off by 2x. The share price on April 19, 2010 (a day before the disaster) was $59.48, not >$100. Google Finance is erroneously reporting the price.
Humans may all die, but the planet was here before we were, and will continue to be here long after we're gone. We should be better stewards, sure.
He explained that the pollution is awful, but the metals extracted also electrified and connected the US.
He said we can both accept that it was a worthwhile trade, while also paying the bill to remediate the damage now.
We were discussing new lithium mines and he said similar tradeoffs exist today, but we have much more knowledge and technology to mitigate the downside.
Sold a bunch of assets to raise funds (about 38b apparently), cut the dividend, borrowed the remaining (you'd think after such an event it's 'hard' to raise capital but in reality BP has a great financial record and there's a chance they had prior agreements in place) and then spread cost out over ~10 years.
Related, but the American gov recently invaded a country to take its oil while simultaneously shutting down funding for green energy projects. Exhausting.
Well in this case the consequence is "we are destroying the conditions of our own survival". Open question is whether an advanced industrial civilisation can survive at all.
"Everything applies to the others, except for the one thing that makes it different". When it is "EXACTLY the same, EXCEPT for", it means it is not, actually, the same.
Did you just learn to read or something?
"All but one thing is the same" != "It is literally the same"
The effect of all life forms on their environment were described, and then ‘omg’ as if humans were somehow unique in this.
The dominant form of life on the planet is starting to have a dominant effect is unsurprising.
Entropy also exists. Entropy is far from unique to humans.
Notably, the population problem appears to be starting to self correct, but that may change with differences in ideaology.
For anyone that has raised animals or spent much time in nature, it’s clear humans are relatively low impact and pretty clean per human.
The issue is the sheer numbers.
Humans are obviously unique in that they totally dominate all the effects that could keep their activity under control. At the scale of the whole planet, i.e. at the scale of most species.
> For anyone that has raised animals or spent much time in nature, it’s clear humans are relatively low impact and pretty clean per human.
What the hell does that mean? Are you saying that "humans destroying the conditions of life for most species on Earth" is okay, because humans are clean enough to shower everyday? "Dirty, dirty horses, they never clean their teeth!"
I honestly don't have a clue what the hell you are trying to say. That each species takes as much space as it can? Sure. And the ecosystem being in balance means that they can't get to the point where they destroy it. Humans are unique in the sense that they have reached the point where they can (and are) destroy most species (including themselves).
There were a few mass extinctions in the history of Earth. We are measurably living in one. It's the first one that is caused by a species. So yeah, OBVIOUSLY humans are unique in this.
Fucking read, Jesus.
Further reading - carbonaceous period. Jurassic period. Etc. etc.
How no?
You're welcome to react to my comments as you see fit!
We are getting better at this. Time will tell if we are getting better at it fast enough. Ask someone in 2126.
And no I don’t think we will be dead, but if we do too much damage the world may be severely degraded and they might be quite angry at previous generations for basically leaving them with the bill.
So no longer own oil tankers and instead each ship is owned by its own LLC so just that piece goes down and the liability gets capped to its insurance contract.
Do you know that BP wasn’t the company that spilled? LLCs don’t let you shirk responsibility like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill
But the effect is that oil companies just manage the logistics of the ships and don’t own/operate them themselves.
Ex. BP founded an entity to manage all the ships they were acquiring and later sold all the ships off to avoid liability.
"In September 2014, a US district court judge ruled that BP was primarily responsible for the oil spill because of its gross negligence and reckless conduct."
But my comment was related to parties that break their empire into little bits to avoid responsibility. And yes, the corporate veil can be pierced. No, that happens so rarely that it hardly matters.
Yet you’re sitting here pretending to be outraged that people forming LLCs are related to this.
(some countries could be mentioned multiple times)
(some people will want to argue if all of these were true military invasions. fine, then let's call some of them CIA coups, soft-power takeovers, planned regime changes etc.)
(tried to contain this list to instances were it was about oil, remove the oil and the list would get a loooot longer)
“Oh, but there are other bad actors doing things” is not a counterpoint. That’s the same as claiming a government can’t work by pointing to a different failed policy every time someone points how how a policy failure was corrected.
Not enough stakeholders are terrified enough.
If the upside is profit and the maximum downside is losing money, corporations will happily rape the Earth.
The system is working as designed.
Because most people don't want to know. Cognitive dissonance keeps many people from realizing the inconvenient truth that modern life requires accidents like this. We have stats or projections about how many people earth can support, but none about how many people it can sustainably support. People want their plastic items and cars to be cheap, even if it results in occasional accidents of this scale (not to mention the minor accidents that occur frequently and don't make the news).
This is a completely baseless claim. It is entirely possible to have both a technologically advanced civilization and simultaneously one that doesn't have catastrophic industrial mistakes like this.
Perhaps the costs of an accident should be increased to the point that it makes sense to have the oversight.
It's true, you can't ever ensure 0 accidents. But you can do things to reduce the rate of accidents and try to limit the peripheral impact of the ones that remain.
Not the cost of an accident, but the cost of preventing them. The cost to consumers is something people wouldn't tolerate.
Seems like you believe the current system is not conducive to clean/sustainable infrastructure, but the world I think you want is actually the one we're already in.
We’re plopping down enormous grid scale batteries like it’s Sim City.
Electricity in the middle of the day is free!
Even still, fossil fuel revenues dwarf renewables by ×3-6.
To get people off of fossil fuels, remove oil subsidizes and tax fossil fuels a lot. Otherwise moving to renewals will take a very long time.
And yes, we can put up solar panels on your house, but that cost $ which people do not have. Solar Panels should be subsidized in an easy manner for people to get funds for installation.
Everything comes with a cost.