Gulf Oil Spill: A Symbol of What Fossil Fuels Do to the Earth Every Day, Say Environmentalists

[marmar]

via CommonDreams:



Published on Friday, May 7, 2010 by The Huffington Post
Gulf Oil Spill: A Symbol of What Fossil Fuels Do to the Earth Every Day, Say Environmentalists

by Dan Froomkin


The leading edge of a vast oil slick started to come ashore in Louisiana on Thursday night, a shroud of devastation falling on America's coastline even as the blown-out BP oil well that produced it continues to belch millions of gallons of thick crude into the Gulf of Mexico for a third straight week.

At moments like this, it's hard to see any silver lining here at all. But it's possible there is one. Many environmentalists say that the wrenching and omnipresent images of filth and death are at last providing Americans with visible, visceral and possibly mobilizing evidence of the effects that fossil fuels are having on our environment every day.

Rick Steiner is horrified at the damage. A University of Alaska marine specialist, he's watched cleanup efforts ever since the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, and has learned some bitter lessons.

"Government and industry will habitually understate the volume of the spill and the impact, and they will overstate the effectiveness of the cleanup and their response," he said. "There's never been an effective response -- ever -- where more than 10 or 20 percent of the oil is ever recovered from the water. Once the oil is in the water, the damage is done."

And most of the damage remains invisible deep below the surface, including the wide-scale destruction of essential plankton in the area and the wiping out of an entire generation of fish larvae. "This is real toxic stuff," Steiner said. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/05/07

[Strelnikov_]

1. "humans dump 27 billion bbls of oil into the environment each year"

http://peakoil.com/a-billion-gallons-of-oil-spilled-t58473.html

For some needed perspective, humans dump 27 billion bbls of oil into the environment each year. We take oil from the ground and mindlessly burn it into our atmosphere at a rate of 85 million bbls/day.

Humans will eventually dump every drop of oil we find into our environment. Thankfully, we appear to be past the halfway point in this destructive madness and the second half of this frenzy of pollution will pass rather quickly.

Thought this needed to be reproduced here.