This is the best summary I could come up with:
On Facebook, the Coast Guard said that oil was “skimmed and sampled” roughly four miles southeast of South Pass, Louisiana on Friday, at which point they retrieved about 210 gallons of “oily-water mixture.”
Matt Rota, senior policy director for Healthy Gulf, told CBS affiliate WWL-TV that the amount of oil thought to have spilled could still increase.
NOAA is helping oversee the incident, and the agency’s emergency operations coordinator Doug Helton told WWL that it’s not necessarily the amount of oil, but its impact, that is of most concern.
Just north of the spill and Plaquemines Parish lies the Chandeleur Islands, where last year, the world’s most endangered sea turtle species, the Kemp’s Ridley, was found hatching for the first time in three-quarters of a century.
“Continued oil and gas development in the Gulf represents a clear, existential threat to the whale’s survival and recovery,” a group of 100 scientists said in a letter to the Biden administration last year.
“The government’s Natural Resource Damage Assessment on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill estimates that nearly 20% of Gulf of Mexico whales were killed, with additional animals suffering reproductive failure and disease.”
The original article contains 686 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 72%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
“No way to prevent this” says only planet where this regularly happens
I haven’t forgotten how BP used chemicals to make all the oil just sink to the bottom of the gulf so people would forget what they did quicker. We don’t deserve this planet.
While submerging the oil with dispersant may lessen exposure to marine life on the surface, it increases exposure for animals dwelling underwater, who may be harmed by toxicity of both dispersed oil and dispersant. Although dispersant reduces the amount of oil that lands ashore, it may allow faster, deeper penetration of oil into coastal terrain, where it is not easily biodegraded.
Sorry if I didn’t use the exact terminology you deemed appropriate. Either way I don’t find my description is incorrect. They used the dispersant to push the issue below the surface of the water.
Nice cherry picking.
Here, let me provide link, from the EPA:
https://www.epa.gov/emergency-response/dispersants
“Dispersants can be applied on surface oil or below the surface, closer to an uncontrolled release of crude oil from a well blowout source. In an oil spill, these smaller oil droplets disperse into the water column where they are transported by currents and subjected to other natural processes such as dissolution and biodegradation.”
There are plenty of arguments against the use of dispersants, not the least of which is the toxicity of the dispersant itself. However there is a strong argument that supports it as the lesser of two evils.
People should have gone to jail over the BP spill. So many flagrant safety violations and illegal behavior were identified.
But you’ll never forget the “submerging of the oil”.
If you are going to virtue signal, at least base it off a real issue.
For comparison, this is less than 1% of the deepwater horizon spill, and they’ve turned off the entire pipeline so there’s little danger of it increasing in size.
The danger, as the article says, is letting them continue to operate in the area. At what point do we say “okay we’ve nearly totally fucked this place up, find someplace else”
Ideally? Back in 2010 when BP made it clear they were systemically hiding critical safety and environmental control failures.
Comparing a bad thing to another bad thing that was larger doesn’t make the lesser not also still a bad thing. Not that you necessarily think that of course but some people use this as a defense quite often. “Like x person in history killed a million people but I only murdered one why are you so mad at me?!How am I bad!” haha
Turns out, building your entire economy and financial system on O&G causes problems for the environment, huh?
