One of the fringe benefits of being a computer programmer is getting to know a lot of people who are hyper-rational. Whenever I would take some extra steps to recycle a container, suggest combining some trips to save fuel, talk about wanting an electric car, or ask when it would be possible to buy a double-walled house like they have in Germany, my friend Barry would heap derision on me. “If the CO2-based global warming thesis is correct, all the conceivable conservation measures by Americans will delay the meltdown of the Earth by about 12 hours,” he noted. Barry was probably correct from a technical point of view. We’ve already dumped a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. China, India, and other rapidly developing nations are going to add a lot more, regardless of what Americans do.
Still, I didn’t feel like a chump walking over to the recycle bin while Barry puffed on a cigarette. After the big Gulf oil spill, though, I’m beginning to wonder if a soda can in a Massachusetts landfill has any significance. The U.S. has millions of environmentally-conscious citizens. We probably have close to a million people involved in complying with various environmental laws and regulations. Yet we’ve just destroyed the ecology of the world’s ninth largest body of water, 660 quadrillion gallons (6.6 x 10^18) of water. This was home to sea life for 300 million years before we came along and trashed it. Will it be possible to summon up any outrage the next time we see an SUV driver throwing a cigarette out the window?
We have not destroyed the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico. We couldn’t do that if we tried. A spill of similar size and scope occurred in 1980 (Ixtoc I) and certainly did not destroy the Gulf. Spills like Ixtoc I and the Deepwater Horizon are bad in the short term, but are simply not long term problems.
I grow tired of the hype from both the media and the White House on this issue. I feel terrible for the people who are suffering from this right now and for the damage to the environment. But in two years it will be difficult to find evidence of this spill, and in 5 years it will be impossible. It would be nice if everyone could keep this in perspective.
BTW, your friend is right about CO2 and AGW theory. Assuming it’s all true I haven’t heard one single rational plan to actually do anything about it. Kyoto, cap and trade, etc. won’t affect the warming curve by more than a year or two according to their own climate models. What’s the point? The fact that AGW believers are not serious about their solutions only breeds contempt for them.
If the world is really being destroyed by AGW then we should be racing to replace all fossil fuel fired electric plants with nuclear plants while we research and develop a suitable replacement battery so EVs can compete with gasoline powered cars. Solar and wind will never power our electric grid plus our vehicles, which will require a minimum 50% increase in the production of electricity assuming night charging of most vehicles. (Double with day charging of most vehicles.) When someone says we need more solar and wind to combat global warming I merely laugh at them. They’ve never run the numbers if they believe that nonsense.
A realistic time table for accomplishing all of this and becoming just about carbon neutral might be 50 years for the U.S., perhaps 75 years for the world. But that means racing to build enough nuclear reactors, building fast breeder reactors and waste reprocessing plants, and finding a permanent storage site for used rods. And coming up with some form of acceptable nuclear framework for countries like Iran. We’re doing none of this. We haven’t even started one new plant here in the U.S., and we’ve destroyed the Yucca Mountain project.
So why should I care what car I buy or what my carbon footprint is? Why should I pay taxes that will accomplish nothing on this front? If the Earth is going to warm, let it, because environmentalists have never been serious about stopping it.
(Yes, I’m a computer programmer.)
“As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world – that is the myth of the atomic age – as in being able to remake ourselves.”
– Mohandas Gandhi
Sure, we’ll summon up outrage. We like feeling indignant.
Some people are already beginning to dispute the long-term damage this most recent oil spill in the GOM has caused. Things like this are along the same lines as the seeds of doubt spread when some of the climate data was apparently shelved by a few global warming researchers when it didn’t support the global warming thesis; it gives people an excuse to say, “we don’t need to do anything… it’s all a politically-driven hoax.”
At least one guy is comparing the Ixtoc-1 spill to the recent Macondo spill in an effort to downplay the long-term effects of the spill in order to hash out whether BP is still worthy of investment. It’s a really sick conflict of interest when our society pits the people directly affected by the Gulf spill against the people directly (financially) affected by having BP as a major component of their investment/retirement portfolio retirement.
All remaining text quoted from “Straight Talk on the BP Oil Spill” by Elliot Gue – http://seekingalpha.com/article/210333-straight-talk-on-the-bp-oil-spill?source=email
“…The Ixtoc disaster had a significant environmental impact. The oil flowing from the well drifted into U.S. waters, and tar balls washed onto Texas beaches. Mexican beaches also were heavily oiled; the bird population suffered, and commercial fisheries had to be closed for a time after the spill. Studies showed that biomass–the quantity of animal life in the region–fell more than 50 percent for some species in the immediate aftermath. But most marine biologists who studied the after-effects of the spill were surprised at how quickly the Gulf recovered. In the warm waters of the Gulf, oil degrades at a far faster pace than it does in colder conditions; the basic rule of thumb is that for every 10 degrees Celsius oil degrades at about twice the speed. Accordingly, the oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez in Alaska took much longer to break down than the oil in the Gulf of Mexico… Oil and gas leaks into the Gulf and have occurred for thousands of years. Oil naturally seeps from subsea reservoirs all over the world; producers even look for natural seeps as an indicator of good regions for further exploration. Although the exact amount of oil seepage is unknown, estimates suggest that 1 to 1.5 million barrels of oil (42 to 63 million gallons) leak into the Gulf of Mexico each year.
Mother Nature has a way of taking care of herself; the Gulf’s waters contain natural microorganisms that break down oil.
By most accounts, local fisheries had recovered to more or less normal levels within two to three years after the Ixtoc-1 spill. Some believe that fishing bans in the wake of the spill alleviated overfishing in the region and helped total population…” – from http://seekingalpha.com/article/210333-straight-talk-on-the-bp-oil-spill?source=email
I know that “recovered” is a disputable term, when you ask an oil exec, a politician or a marine biologist. Still, considering that even after more than 20 years, one of the main fishing stocks of Prince William Sound (Herring) hasn’t rebounded at all, and has taken two dramatic plunges since the spill, can we really claim that the Exxon mess is over?
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008912109_exxonherring24m.html
There are still walls of tar in the sound, the fishing stock and the businesses that accompany it are way down – what’s “recovered?”
I agree there’s probably too much hype: hell, I’ve barely paid attention to it at all. You gotta think some of the hype’s deserved, since it makes them more careful to keep something from happening again (like this). At the same time, you really don’t want to see something like this happen at all no matter how quickly (in years) things get put back together.
I tend to think the guys serious about AGW *do* take it seriously, and are the ones who realistically think that the only way to become neutral is to build up nuclear power, with additional technologies to help things along, and that things won’t even out for about 50 years and isn’t going to take the GDPs of every country in the planet to fix things. At least this is what I tend to see from a site like climateprogress (of course he’s looking like one of the people over-hyping the disaster).
(Computer programmer! Party!)
“After the big Gulf oil spill, though, I’m beginning to wonder if a soda can in a Massachusetts landfill has any significance.” Edward Abbey would sympathize with you. He threw empty beer cans out the car window while driving across his beloved desert. Similar argument – that the magnitude of despoliation done by industry can’t compare to a cigarette butt or a beer can tossed by an individual. I’m not so sure, being still wedded to a vague notion of personal accountability that’s starting to look like some kind of quasi-religious delusion… :-/
Follow-up to Yule: Embracing personal accountability might better be characterized as among the highest forms of personal empowerment, rather than quasi-religious delusion. Each of us seems to have some degree of freedom in constructing our personal value system. If more of us would embrace a value system of aspiring to leave each path we take (figuratively as well as literally) better for our having taken it, we collectively would presumably be better off, and we as individuals would seem to be better off.
I think the adage, “take only pictures, leave only footprints” is inadequate — in the sense that we should not just leave things as we find them, but better off for having found them.
“I wouldn’t go so far as to call the brother fat, I mean he got a weight problem. What’s a brother gonna do but eat some more”
– Jules, Pulp Fiction
a small example from me: I used to dutifully clip the plastic binders that the six-packs of sodas came in because it was the thing to do to help wildlife from being caught in them. Then one day I got put in charge of the company picnic. It was a small company, about 500 employees so around 1,000 came to the picnic (family were invited). Of course I stayed around to help with the cleanup. At the time, even though you were ordering thousands of cans of soda for the picnic, they all still came in the 6-packs with plastic holders. We couldn’t spend all day clipping those so into the trash bags they went, unclipped, ready to strangle ducks and baby seals for all the rest of time. We went through more plastic holders in that one day than I would use in my lifetime. I realized then that my personal clipping was a futile and hopeless effort and never clipped another holder again. Of course now the cans come in 12 packs in cardboard so industry inadvertently solved the problem on their own anyway.
I honestly understand both sides of the issue here. The oil impact will be negligible in the long-term due to the natural breakdown from microorganisms (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1992/bacteria-0401.html). The economic impact will remain for a number of years, with BP and their insurers taking the big hit (along with small companies w/ limited cash flow).
The thing that kills me is how the blame-game has shifted somehow to the President! Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a tree hugger nor am I a hyper conservative. But it seems after the Monica Lewinski thing that the Presidential role in the U.S. has become kind of a joke. How is a BP oil spill miles away from the shore of the U.S. his fault?
BP should pay to clean up, fix the problem as soon as they can and that’s that. Relax people, give the President some support for cryin’ out loud.