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Comment by frmersdog | Hacker News Reader

Didn't they dump tons and tons of chemicals to break up the oil spill, rather than spending the time and money to actually clean it up?

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Those aren’t mutually exclusive - time and money were spent to dump tons of dispersants in an effort to actually clean it up. This comes after the Exxon Valdez spill where it was learned that hot water and high pressure hoses to clean areas did more damage than good - the untouched beaches recovered faster via natural breakdown than the beaches that were cleaned. In deepwater, they skipped the scrubbing and cleaning and emphasized dispersants (y’know, solution to pollution being dilution) and it probably hurt the ecosystem more than letting natural enzymes and such take care of it. The bottom line is that every major oil spill clean up effort is an experiment. But sometimes the instinct to “do something” causes more harm than good. Would the public tolerate an “all natural” approach or a light touch of beach cleaning? Probably not, even though there’s good reason to think the ecosystem (exclusive of human needs) may be better served by that.

How about taking the full "do nothing" approach and leave the carbon under the seabed? Where it won't trap IR from escaping the atmosphere and adding energy to the atmosphere, driving ever-more energetic weather events.

K, global oil demand is expected to keep rising towards 120m bpd between now and 2050. We are not plateaued, much less reducing reliance on fossil fuels. We are actively leaning into our use of it every day of every month of every year. The production and retailing of the computer you used to type that message above and the energy demand to power it makes you complicit in that. In all of it. So you can talk all you want about dreams and fantasies, but every aspect of your life is impacted by society's capacity to meet energy demand. We almost drove whale species to extinction and nearly deforested many states for biomass fuels before we discovered how to refine fossil fuels at scale and employ them. Hardly a world I want to return to. Fossil fuels are here, they're queer, and not going anywhere without massive tradeoffs that the global population is not willing to accept. The choices to back off energy demand are so bleak they're unrealistic. Sorry I don't have solutions that haven't already been thought of (resilient solar, nuclear), but really all you and I can do that's effective is vote for new energy generation and storage solutions and the policies that enable them and lead the way. The talking part doesn't do much except use more energy.

Not antagonizing but curious: how else would you do it?

I'm not an expert and it's been a long time, but I recall reading articles at the time that they were dumping chemicals in the ocean that basically bound to the oil to split it apart and make it sink. Out of sight out of mind.

The implication was they could have contained it at the surface, sucked it up and treated it to remove oil from the water.

How much oil would they have to burn for fuel to do that? Neither option sounds good for the environment.

Don't know why you're down voted, good question :-)

So detergent?

Is the implication that dumping thousands of gallons of detergent into the ocean is a good or neutral thing?

Filter and separate the oil, dispose of it responsibly.

>But that would be incredibly difficult, and possibly so expensive as to bankrupt the companies responsible!

feigned gasp

Oh no.

break it up? no. it just made the oil heavy enough to sink. it's all still there, just at the bottom of the ocean now

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