Dilution is the solution to pollution?

[HereSince1628]

Recently British Petroleum has made an attempt to dismiss the severity of their well blow out in terms of the volume leaked compared to the volume of the Gulf of Mexico.

Many readers have found that argument to be just STUPID.

But, why would a company with billions of dollars of assets at its service choose such a rhetorical approach?

Well, simply because they want to LIE about the truth is one explanation.
But, because they use thinking Homo sapiens to constuct "best optics" is another.

Toxicity is generally dose dependent. Dose is a quantitative measure of exposure per some unit of time. If we ignore that oil either forms curds or floats and try to spread the kilograms of oil vs kilograms of water in the Gulf of Mexico the spill looks, well, it looks pretty fucking minimal to the volume of water.

Unfortunately, the oil concentrates in physical forms as both surface films and subsurface balls. These physical realities do not relate to the volume of the basin of the Gulf of Mexico. The exposure of birds and shoreline is related to linear feet of surface, not cubic volume.

The consequences of the well blow-out in the Gulf have very very little to do with clever PR efforts to rescale our perception of the problem.