Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

[Nony]

Apparently I live under a rock, for I only recently found out about this news. In case you are also a rock dweller like me, here's a news link: [u][url=http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/05/11/national/main6471488.shtml]Oil Spill Swells to 4 Million Gallons[/url][/u]

[quote]At least 4 million gallons were believed to have leaked since an April 20 drilling rig blast killed 11. If the gusher continues unabated, it would surpass the Exxon Valdez disaster as the nation's worst spill by Father's Day.[/quote]
[quote]The blowout aboard the rig, which was being leased by BP, was triggered by a bubble of methane gas that escaped from the well and shot up the drill column, expanding quickly as it burst through several seals and barriers before exploding, according to interviews with rig workers conducted during BP's initial, internal probe. The exact cause remains under investigation.[/quote]
[quote]Oil - be it a surface sheen, globules or balls of tar - has washed up west of the Mississippi River and as far east as Dauphin Island, three miles off the Alabama mainland at the mouth of Mobile Bay.[/quote]

Yeah, scary stuff. I heard there's, like, 200,000 gallons of oil leaking out per day. And the most permanent solution to the problem would take up to 90 days to complete, whereas this oil spill incident has already been happening for a couple to a few weeks now.

[u][url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8651333.stm]This link[/url][/u] has some interesting pictures showing off how far the damage has spread as well as a satellite picture of the spill.

It's amazing how much damage this is doing. I can only hope they'll be able to get a band-aid on this booboo ASAP.

[James]

[font=franklin gothic medium]This is really horrific - oil spills can be so devastating.

Only a few weeks ago a Chinese oil tanker actually got stuck on a bed of coral in the Great Barrier Reef. What's worse, the hull had cracked and there was a huge risk of a major disaster. Luckily repair crews from Queensland got there quickly enough to prevent damage.

However, the actual hull of the ship severely damaged a lot of the coral in the area.

I think the shipping company was heavily fined because according to Australian law, commercial tankers must bypass the Great Barrier Reef - trying to cut through the area was illegal.

If we'd had an oil spill there, it would have been terrible, being that the area is so environmentally sensitive and rare.

It just highlights the dangers involved with collecting and shipping oil. Obviously safety standards need to be constantly reviewed.

I've seen a lot of news on TV about this particular oil disaster in the Gulf and I really hope it doesn't get much worse. There's a lot of very sensitive areas around the Gulf - it will certainly be very very difficult to clean up.[/font]

[phonet]

It interesting to compare the standards and safety features applied to oil with those of nuclear energy.

Despite the fact that nuclear energy is cleaner, less expensive, and doesn't require being moved, it has more laws and regulations applied to it, supposedly to prevent something like the Chernobyl disaster on 1986 from ever happening again. Not even taking into account the fact that Chernobyl was not caused by the energy source itself but by the economic neglect from the collapsing Soviet Union, one should note that the Exxon-Valdez disaster happened only three years later to similar reactions.

The only thing this leads me to believe is that governments truly are ruled by oil money, which is foolish and detrimental to both the economic and political health of the country but now the environmental side too.

If the Chernobyl disaster and the regulations resulting from it where not motivated by personal interest, ie. keeping oil in control, then why where more rules not given to oil-transport related industry after the Exxon-Valdez incident only three years later?

[Brasil]

Unfortunately this spill won't stop "Drill Baby Drill." :-(

The math wasn't in offshore drilling's favor back in 2008. I sincerely doubt it's there in 2010. All the studies I read damn near concluded that it's completely asinine to pursue offshore drilling as any part of a broader energy policy because the math just doesn't work. Even if we were to tap out 100% of all of the estimated reserves, it'll amount to next to nothing within the larger global market and its effect on prices will be slim to completely negligible.

But of course reality has a well-known liberal bias, so "Drill Baby Drill" will continue to be chanted. Who the hell cares about math, or science, or the environment, or efficiency, or the right way to go about reducing our dependency on oil?

Sigh. Sorry. The entire situation aggravates me.

[Korey]

[FONT="Franklin Gothic Medium"][SIZE="1"][COLOR="Navy"]I've been following up on the coverage via the stateside news outlets and BP has really impressed me with the amount of accountability and compassion that they are displaying for the whole situation, given that they were operating with inaccurate and incomplete engineering documents.

But recently they've run into some problems with the cleanup as well. But I felt that after reading [URL="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37168216/ns/gulf_oil_spill/"]this here article,[/URL]I thought this whole disaster could have been prevented had the company just followed procedure.[/COLOR][/SIZE][/FONT]

[quote name='phonet']The only thing this leads me to believe is that governments truly are ruled by oil money, which is foolish and detrimental to both the economic and political health of the country but now the environmental side too.[/quote]

[FONT="Franklin Gothic Medium"][SIZE="1"][COLOR="navy"]I could launch into some schpiel about how it's lobbying and the severe lack of bi-partisan cooperation that is the cause of how our government is run, but I find this point of view interesting. As much as the world is dependent on oil, it would seem that it is the international currency.

The problem with nuclear (and oil too, to a lesser extent) power is the potentially catastrophic results that happen due to nuclear fallout. Given the amount of damage that Chernobyl produced and the long term effects it had on the ecosystem, imagine if something of that nature was detonated in say....the area where the oil spill occurred (don't know if that's even possible...but for argument's sake). You would be talking about immediate distengration of all things within miles of the blast, not to mention the after-effects of the radiaton. With one explosion, you just destroyed an entire ecosystem and made the area a toxic soup that is almost unusable. The reason behind the regulations for nuclear power isn't because of economic lobbying, it's the potential disaster that it can create.[/COLOR][/SIZE][/FONT]