About 30 minutes ago, the Coast Guard, in coordination with BP and Transocean, began gathering parts of the huge oil spill resulting from the explosion and the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon into smaller, more concentrated pools – in order to burn the crude oil. The Unified Command describes the burn as “a strategy designed to minimize environmental risks by removing large quantities of oil in the Gulf of Mexico following the April 20 explosion.”
Removing large quantities of oil in the Gulf of Mexico? That suggests that the oil will simply be taken away, disappearing and causing no harm. Unfortunately, that’s not possible. The oil will undergo a chemical transformation – oxidation – and will rise up into the air, but it won’t be gone. It simply won’t be oil floating on the water any more.
What the oil will be transformed into is a great deal of carbon dioxide and toxic materials that will disperse into the Earth’s atmosphere. Consider that the crude oil now being burned by the Unified Command was not at all refined. It contained a large number of impurities that will now be rising up into the air, and going all the way around the world.
The benefit of this transformation is that pollution that’s easy to see and take photographs of will become pollution that’s almost impossible to see and take photographs of. The pollution won’t be gone, though. It will just change from water pollution to air pollution.
The Unified Command seeks to reassure, stating that “In order to ensure safety, the Environmental Protection Agency will continuously monitor air quality and burning will be halted if safety standards cannot be maintained.” What do those safety standards mean, though? Those safety standards reflect concentrations of pollutants in the air at points near where the burning is taking place. They won’t measure the impact of the dispersed pollutants.
So, if the pollution created by the burning is taken by a nice breeze and blown away, the EPA will declare the activity to be safe. Somewhere, someone will breathe in those pollutants, though. They’ll be spread around the whole globe, so that no one will be able to attribute their disease to the Deepwater Horizon. Yet, the pollution will be there, increasing the concentration of general industrial air pollution that we must suffer with.
The burn strategy that the Unified Command is adopting today is a strategy of psychological maneuvering, much like the strategy employed by a child who spills milk on the floor and tries to make it look clean by spreading the milk around. This strategy doesn’t remove the environmental harm from the oil spilled from the offshore drilling disaster. It just makes it invisible, and helps BP and Transocean evade responsibility.
http://irregulartimes.com/index.php/archives/2010/04/28/stats-show-oil-spill-response-isnt-enough/
Two points:
1. The oil was going to end up in the air anyway after it was refined, turned into gasoline, and burned by cars.
2. Transocean and BP are not going to avoid responsibility for this when the story is all over the news, the governement is investigating, and the lawsuits have already started flying.
John, if you think about it, there weren’t going to be more cars driving just because that oil was shipped into the US, which is experiencing an oil glut now anyway. So, the amount of oil burned by cars would remain pretty much constant. This burning is additional, on top of that.
As for your second point, the degree of oil that’s perceived in the environment will correlate with the amount of responsibility that Transocean and BP will have to deal with. Making the pollution invisible decreases the pressure on them. Congressional investigations by Representatives who are taking thousands of dollars in payments from the oil industry may not be something that BP and Transocean need to worry much about. It’s public pressure that’s going to make the difference.
but, which is worse? burning it or letting it come onto shorlines?
I think they’re different versions of bad. One bad is concentrated in Louisiana shorelines, and the other bad is spread out and shared by people around the world. I don’t think it’s possible to say one is worse than the other. What I can note is that one form is conveniently difficult to trace. I find that very suspicious.
i see, through a cloud of smoke; i see.