From the U.S. Coast Guard press release:
Initial engineering calculations indicate potential volume of crude oil that could have been released from the affected pipeline is 1.1 million gallons.
So yeah, no one can go out there with a bucket and measure it, but that’s probably a safe estimate.
So you don’t find it questionable that this happened a week ago yet the most they’ve found is a couple hundred gallons?
And all these sites that claim a million, in their headlines, all say lower in their stories that there is no actual measurement and that it is only potentially?
I feel it undermines the issue when people are dishonest. I consider these headlines to be dishonest.
I regret engaging that one idiot that claims dispersants were used by BP to submerge the oil so people can’t see it.
That’s the kind of disinformation and dishonesty that makes it so difficult to have real outcomes. All the noise drowns out the signal.
Just FYI, we don’t exactly know how much CO2 we’ve released, how many particles are in the atmosphere, how much water is in the ocean, etc. We use math and statistics to create estimates. They’ll have some amount of error, but it is not strange. In fact, acting like someone does know the quantity exactly would make me a lot more skeptical.
Also, don’t say “look at this thing…” and then when that exact thing proves you incorrect you just move the goal posts. That’s called a bad faith argument. Either you had faith in the USCG report or you didn’t. If you didn’t, don’t use it in your argument. If you did, you must accept what it says.
That’s just it, the USCG DIDN’T say the leak was a million gallons. They said it could be that much.
They know there was a leak and they know roughly how much oil the pipeline holds.
That’s it. That is all they said. The story headline said that the USCG said that much DID leak when they very specifically didn’t say that.
Where exactly did I move the goal posts? What was my bad faith argument?
You: If you read the Coast Guard’s press releases, you will see they didn’t say a million gallons was leaked.
Them: From the U.S. Coast Guard press release:
Initial engineering calculations indicate potential volume of crude oil that could have been released from the affected pipeline is 1.1 million gallons.
You: I regret engaging…
Potential does not equal actual.
Are you that incapable of thought?
They know there was a leak and they know how much the pipeline holds but they don’t know how much actually escaped.
The same press release you are quoting says, “The volume of discharged oil is currently unknown.”
But the headline says more than a million gallons of oil leaked into the gulf.
If you don’t understand how that is sensationalism, then you have more problems than this dumbass Internet argument.
I regret engaging because holy shit, so many of you are really fucking stupid.
