It’s truly exhausting to know the damage we’ve done to the ecosystem and how many bad actors only concerned with profit are out there preventing it from happening again.
No, they are definitely terrified about it happening again. Deepwater Horizon cost BP nearly $70 billion total in direct financial payouts, including $20 billion in fines. $140 billion if you include total financial cost to BP. This is an enormous amount of money, even for a large corporation such as BP. BP suspended their dividend because of the spill.
That's a massive amount of money that could have went to paying shareholders, and that's why they don't want it happening again.
Just about every week there’s news of some kind of ecosystem damage by another negligent company that streams into my RSS feed.
Related, but the American gov recently invaded a country to take its oil while simultaneously shutting down funding for green energy projects. Exhausting.
I don't condone corporate negligence or violations of environmental protection laws, but some kind of ecosystem damage is an inevitable consequence of humans existing with an advanced industrial civilization. We're going to have an impact.
> but some kind of ecosystem damage is an inevitable consequence of humans existing with an advanced industrial civilization
Well in this case the consequence is "we are destroying the conditions of our own survival". Open question is whether an advanced industrial civilisation can survive at all.
If you compare our impact per capita and per dollar of GDP it’s much less today than 50 years ago. There’s just more dollars and more capita.
We are getting better at this. Time will tell if we are getting better at it fast enough. Ask someone in 2126.
And no I don’t think we will be dead, but if we do too much damage the world may be severely degraded and they might be quite angry at previous generations for basically leaving them with the bill.
Yes but we could have a significantly less one though. We're extremely wasteful and plan ahead poorly for minimizing the environmental impact, which becomes a partisan political issue instead of just doing our best to live in a healthy environment.
Even if it was enormous enough in fines to put them out of business, the industry as it is with all its inherent risks will still exist because that is still legally allowed. Forget a fine; outlaw the behavior that lead to the issue. Incentivize new emergent behavior instead of just hedging.
The behavior that leads to the issue is individual consumers driving cars. Outlawing this would nuke demand for fossil fuels which encourages risky well drilling. But since 99% of Americans drive they tend to get very unhappy about the prospect of banning the vroom vroom. This is a real and challenging political problem. We can't get around it by pretending that corporations drill for fun.
There is no oil drilling off the Santa Barbara coast. There is plenty of oil there, they just care about different things. I agree it would be good to get rid gas cars, but you can't just outlaw them-- for practical and legal reasons. Maybe have the price of every environmental harm added to each gallon and let people adjust their habits accordingly?
I’d take it a step further. Most people don’t drive by choice, but because of the zoning and regulations that create sprawling suburbs meaning almost no one can live without a car. Can’t get to work, can’t get groceries, can’t get the kids to day care without a car.
Edit: want to add the sprawl also makes efficient mass public transportation nearly impossible.
Cars make themselves not-fast by their sheer inefficiency unless huge amounts of taxpayer money is continually poured to the infrastructure. What’s incredible is that cars have been getting even larger, an example of astonishingly perverse incentive structures.
From my experience in the third world with quite poor infrastructure (e.g. unpaved roads, lack of traffic control devices anyone respects etc.), cars and motorcycles are still everywhere.
Some places like Ethiopia have simply switched to EVs by encouraging their import and discouraging import of non-EVs. Now, most vehicles there are EVs.
> $140 billion if you include total financial cost to BP.
That's more than their current market cap ($127B), and the stock price right now is not that far from where it was just before the spill ($49 now, around $59 just prior to the spill).
I'm just curious how that was accomplished, given that it would not have been a great time for them to be borrowing or issuing new shares, for obvious reasons. Maybe if it was spread out over like 10 years it could be more doable, but still that seems like a lot.
Essentially how most businesses (big and small) handle this situation. Multi pronged approach.
Sold a bunch of assets to raise funds (about 38b apparently), cut the dividend, borrowed the remaining (you'd think after such an event it's 'hard' to raise capital but in reality BP has a great financial record and there's a chance they had prior agreements in place) and then spread cost out over ~10 years.
BP share price was over $100 the month before the disaster. They sold $45B in global assets and subsidiaries (including most of their refinery business and land holding 6 billion barrels of proven reserves) and cut their dividend to fund the damages and fines.
> BP share price was over $100 the month before the disaster
If you checked the share price via Google Finance, it's off by 2x. The share price on April 19, 2010 (a day before the disaster) was $59.48, not >$100. Google Finance is erroneously reporting the price.
The most galling/depressing thing to me is that our population is so overwhelming that if even just 1% of us are bad actors, that's still so many that catastrophes like this (environmental and otherwise) become mathematically inevitable.
It isn't so much that 1% can even do this though. What can I or you possibly do that can wreak havoc on this scale? We cannot pull the sufficient levers. We don't have authority. We don't have actual power.
But the real danger is that we have given certain members of our species superhuman abilities to unilaterally make decisions, where these then go on to cause harm on a scale that would never be possible as just 1% of our species operating within the scope of what 1% of our species can reach with their two hands. We've creating living gods essentially. We've even created nonliving gods: pools of capital people are beholden to grow that they themselves do not even own or control, but are enslaved to them nonetheless. Decisions are what is good for the nonliving god: what grows the money pile in the quarterly time frame, not what is good for our species or even what is truly individually good for the people believing themselves to have any control over these pools of capital.
> What can I or you possibly do that can wreak havoc on this scale?
Build a bunch of drones that carry explosives and leave them outside chemical plants, refineries, and nuclear plants across the world and then launch a simultaneous attack on infrastructure.
Budget $1000-$2000 per drone and then whatever your costs of transportation for the road trip are.
I very much doubt it. For consumers it is all about cost. Heating in winter with Natural Gas is 1/3 the price of electricity and much cheaper than Oil.
To get people off of fossil fuels, remove oil subsidizes and tax fossil fuels a lot. Otherwise moving to renewals will take a very long time.
And yes, we can put up solar panels on your house, but that cost $ which people do not have. Solar Panels should be subsidized in an easy manner for people to get funds for installation.
Yes. Not immediately—firstly, because the finite speed of light in a vacuum precludes simultaneity—but eventually, when relieved of rent-seeking intermediaries, we'd be free to invest in sustainable infrastructure.
We are already massively investing into renewable energy... to the tune of about $1trillion since 2020 in the US. In 2024, 95%+ of all new electricity capacity was solar/wind/batteries.
Seems like you believe the current system is not conducive to clean/sustainable infrastructure, but the world I think you want is actually the one we're already in.
Think it's still a mixed bag. There's not broad consensus (in the US at least) that continued investment in renewables is the future. We're still investing heavily in fossil fuels, we've had two military campaigns in the last three years to influence global oil supply and the sitting US President signed an emergency order to bypass restrictions on fossil fuel projects on literally his first day in office. There's plenty of people and policy makers who are fine with the fossil fuel status quo.
Oil subsidies total $4.5 trillion in that same period, and the ratio used to be worse, so it doesn’t take a genius to see why people accuse the energy policy of being biased toward a dangerous status quo.
"It’s truly exhausting to know the damage we’ve done to the ecosystem and how many bad actors only concerned with profit are out there preventing it from happening again."
Because most people don't want to know. Cognitive dissonance keeps many people from realizing the inconvenient truth that modern life requires accidents like this. We have stats or projections about how many people earth can support, but none about how many people it can sustainably support. People want their plastic items and cars to be cheap, even if it results in occasional accidents of this scale (not to mention the minor accidents that occur frequently and don't make the news).
You said something interesting: "... modern life requires accidents like this."
This is a completely baseless claim. It is entirely possible to have both a technologically advanced civilization and simultaneously one that doesn't have catastrophic industrial mistakes like this.
Is it? Because at the very least, modern life involves the mass production of plastics, mining of various minerals, and the use of copious amounts of energy. That last one is only kind of solved (as long as everything works and nothing breaks), but I have yet to see any convincing evidence that there is any feasible substitute for the first two.
The solution to the first two is reuse. With enough energy, some form of recycling of becomes feasible for pretty much anything. No oil? Just make plastic from atmospheric CO2!
How would we know such a society is possible? There's zero proof of that to date. Errors and inevitable catastrophes are part of the cost of a highly complex technically advanced society run by humans.
The Deepwater disaster recovery very effectively demonstrated the phenomenon of "out of sight out of mind". they dumped almost 2 million gallons of "dispersants" on the oil spill... which was DESIGNED to make the oil heavier than water and sink to the sea bed. it never dissolved anything, it just hid the problem from the public. and all that oil is just sitting on the sea bed.
I don't know for sure, but I found it interesting that there was such lively debate, and yet what they ended up doing seems to have been one of the few solutions that was intuitively worse than nothing.
Heck man, give Stamets a shot with his oil-eating mushrooms; I thought that was an interesting suggestion.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute says that dispersants caused a drastic reduction in surface volatiles, allowing the cleanup crew to work longer and more efficiently.
> The model showed that, without dispersants, the atmospheric concentration of benzene would have been about 6,000 times higher. Benzene concentrations in the air two meters above the sea surface would have been 13 times higher than the levels considered acceptable to breathe during a 10-hour working day or a 40-hour work week, based on guidelines by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). However, the model showed that with the dispersant injection, atmospheric benzene concentrations were typically about 500 times lower than acceptable NIOSH levels.
> While researchers stopped short of concluding that the oil spill had caused the declines
Why though? Why are we so afraid of accountability? Because this is what people point to when trying to deny things are true: ThErE iS NO EviDeNce, sHoW Me THe StUdY, etc. etc.
> Available evidence rules out natural phenomena as likely drivers, suggesting a large-scale pollution event and its associated mitigation measures most likely precipitated the declines...That the declines began shortly after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill points to that event as the most parsimonious explanation. These findings suggest that despite its immense size the deep-pelagic biome is vulnerable to human-induced disturbance and possesses limited resilience to facilitate recovery.
This means "the oil spill caused the declines". That is what this means in English.
I think you're reading the wrong motivation into this and reaching the wrong conclusion.
This behavior, being skeptical and precise, is the very thing that makes scientists more trustworthy than the average Joe with his motivated reasoning.
I'm confident that the people working on this would have made the causal claim if they had been able to collect enough data to support it. They may well be working on gathering data to support the causal claim right now.
This technically useful skepticism can be weaponized against you by a rhetorical opponent by just pointing out that you "refuse to say for certain". All you have to do is say "some scientists believe there is some uncertainty" and you can convince a crowd to stop listening. Scientific communication works very poorly as mass communication.
Statements of certainty can be weaponized even more. That same rhetorical opponent would be just as happy to point out some exceedingly rare edge-case counter-example (no matter how dubious) and crucify the entire study (or worse, haul you in front of Congress and try to pepper you with "gotcha" questions in the hopes of catching you in a "lie" so they can make an example out of you). You rhetorical opponent is not going to argue in good faith either way and their audience are not people who will care.
Scientists write for other scientists who already know why they use the language they use. Compromising that language to try to cater to fools who couldn't care less about the truth would just make the scientist a greater fool for trying.
I doubt you're implying that scientists should "say for certain" even when they aren't certain, or that they shouldn't say anything at all. So I assume you're just saying "misleaders gonna mislead", which is true.
But as long as we're bringing up general social woes, I'll point out that those misleading statements are pretty tame by today's standards. The more popular strategy now is to just lie outright.
Humans don’t operate at a scientific level in our day to day.
Politicians need to make decisions about the economy with little to no data, and the legal system convicts people at a much lower standard than that science requires us to meet.
And we run our lives at an incredibly lower standard than what science needs to maintain.
It’s fairly easy to see that the Deep Horizon incident should have easily met any of those non science standards (it may have possibly fallen short of the legal standard), to actually enact changes in terms of regulations, or punishment.
Unfortunately, on one side you have an indifferent public that largely depends on activists that it maligns to protect its interests, and on the other side you have billion dollar industries that can buy out the decision makers.
Interesting that the spill hasn't dampened long term prospects for offshore drilling (besides the brief push against it around 2016) whereas Chernobyl basically nerfed American nuclear power gen.
If you listen to utility executives talk (and they have to talk a lot to wall street), they have been very clear for about 30 years that the number one reason they built everything other than nuclear was cost.
Consistently 2-3x the cost of wind or gas on an LCOE basis. And new build cost is about 7x as high, which has to be amortized over an extremely long period, which rates regulators do not like utilities doing.
We used to talk about replacing transportation fuels and low-carbon shipping (global energy). Now we talk about personal responsibility and rooftop solar (residential electricity). You can find oil company PR slide decks explaining why and how. Greenwashing worked, pushing the renewable ‘debate’ worked. We missed the windows on critical infrastructure change, and seemingly enjoy an unstable chunk of desert dictating global energy, inflation & food prices. <shrug>
Well, the damage to the ecosystem from the BP oil spill will likely last a few hundred years. The damage from Chernobyl will likely last for a few tens of thousands of years.
Sure. In the same way that flying is far safer than driving. There are massive amounts of safeguards in place to keep it as safe as possible. The problem is that when something goes wrong, it goes very, very wrong. This is why some people fear flying and nuclear power.
I'd argue that Three Mile Island was more impactful to American hesitation towards nuclear energy than Chernobyl ever was. By the time Chernobyl happened American nuclear industry was already in a massive panic over TMI
Well TMI didn't kill anyone and the environmental contamination was minimal. It was just a scary few days because of the theoretical worst case outcome.
There are so many open wells left behind from the 50's on. The federal gov't pays to fix them, but they can't do anywhere what they need to do. They should charge the fees upfront with drilling permits
And the companies are also struggling to recover, right? Because the damage to the company is commensurate with the damage to the environment it works within?
No? The companies are largely free from consequence?
When a human does something really really really bad, they go to jail and then they struggle for the rest of their life (not saying it's good).
When a company fucks up like that, it should die, and the people deemed responsible should go to jail. And if we cannot find who is responsible, then the top-level executives should go to jail. They are paid so much because they are "responsible", aren't they?
"But think about the normal employees losing their job when such a company fucks up", I hear. Well, think about the employees who lose their job when a normal company bankrupts "normally", who cares? And maybe, just maybe, there would then be whistleblowers from the inside because they would actually risk their job by just not contributing to preventing the company from fucking up that bad.
Their stock price is near ATHs and their revenue looks pretty good. Maybe they lost a bit at the time but they don't seem to be feeling any long term consequences from that. The implication is that relative to the damage they caused they don't seem to have suffered any actual consequences. Up to the reader to decide for themselves, but I'm pushing back on the idea this was some cataclysmic event to body-corporate.
I mean we can't know where they'd be in the counterfactual scenario. Glancing at Shell and Exxon shows BP is probably underperforming similar companies. How much of that is due to this event vs. other factors? I don't know. We wouldn't tend to expect the same extent of up-and-to-the-right behavior from dividend producing shares but BP seem to be failing to capitalize on the current oil price spike.
My point is merely that reasonable people can disagree if there was a suitable consequence to the event. Sure they're out 140 billion, but to a company like this that's not as grand as it sounds and not at all fatal. You provided your view, I am providing mine, which is that they did not suffer sufficiently.
I just said that the evidence that you are picking from tells a more complex story than "their stock is near an ATH" when it hasn't even recovered to where it was the day before the disaster.
I'm not an expert and it's been a long time, but I recall reading articles at the time that they were dumping chemicals in the ocean that basically bound to the oil to split it apart and make it sink. Out of sight out of mind.
The implication was they could have contained it at the surface, sucked it up and treated it to remove oil from the water.
Those aren’t mutually exclusive - time and money were spent to dump tons of dispersants in an effort to actually clean it up.
This comes after the Exxon Valdez spill where it was learned that hot water and high pressure hoses to clean areas did more damage than good - the untouched beaches recovered faster via natural breakdown than the beaches that were cleaned. In deepwater, they skipped the scrubbing and cleaning and emphasized dispersants (y’know, solution to pollution being dilution) and it probably hurt the ecosystem more than letting natural enzymes and such take care of it. The bottom line is that every major oil spill clean up effort is an experiment. But sometimes the instinct to “do something” causes more harm than good. Would the public tolerate an “all natural” approach or a light touch of beach cleaning? Probably not, even though there’s good reason to think the ecosystem (exclusive of human needs) may be better served by that.
How about taking the full "do nothing" approach and leave the carbon under the seabed? Where it won't trap IR from escaping the atmosphere and adding energy to the atmosphere, driving ever-more energetic weather events.
K, global oil demand is expected to keep rising towards 120m bpd between now and 2050. We are not plateaued, much less reducing reliance on fossil fuels. We are actively leaning into our use of it every day of every month of every year. The production and retailing of the computer you used to type that message above and the energy demand to power it makes you complicit in that. In all of it. So you can talk all you want about dreams and fantasies, but every aspect of your life is impacted by society's capacity to meet energy demand. We almost drove whale species to extinction and nearly deforested many states for biomass fuels before we discovered how to refine fossil fuels at scale and employ them. Hardly a world I want to return to. Fossil fuels are here, they're queer, and not going anywhere without massive tradeoffs that the global population is not willing to accept. The choices to back off energy demand are so bleak they're unrealistic. Sorry I don't have solutions that haven't already been thought of (resilient solar, nuclear), but really all you and I can do that's effective is vote for new energy generation and storage solutions and the policies that enable them and lead the way. The talking part doesn't do much except use more energy.
In 1979, Ixtoc I released 3.3M barrels into the Bay of Campeche (DwH released 4.9M).
By the time DwH happened we had already learned that
ref: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/marine-science/articles...ref: https://beneaththehorizon.org/ixtoc.html
As someone who studied marine science this is right. Anything deep sea grows slowly, needs to conserves energy and is likely very old.
Also there's comparatively little oxygen available and almost no currents to mechanically break up large masses of tar.
Out of all fossil fuel extraction methods, deep-sea drilling is the worst.
It’s truly exhausting to know the damage we’ve done to the ecosystem and how many bad actors only concerned with profit are out there preventing it from happening again.
No, they are definitely terrified about it happening again. Deepwater Horizon cost BP nearly $70 billion total in direct financial payouts, including $20 billion in fines. $140 billion if you include total financial cost to BP. This is an enormous amount of money, even for a large corporation such as BP. BP suspended their dividend because of the spill.
That's a massive amount of money that could have went to paying shareholders, and that's why they don't want it happening again.
Just about every week there’s news of some kind of ecosystem damage by another negligent company that streams into my RSS feed.
Related, but the American gov recently invaded a country to take its oil while simultaneously shutting down funding for green energy projects. Exhausting.
I don't condone corporate negligence or violations of environmental protection laws, but some kind of ecosystem damage is an inevitable consequence of humans existing with an advanced industrial civilization. We're going to have an impact.
> but some kind of ecosystem damage is an inevitable consequence of humans existing with an advanced industrial civilization
Well in this case the consequence is "we are destroying the conditions of our own survival". Open question is whether an advanced industrial civilisation can survive at all.
That sure sounds like the definition of "condone."
If you compare our impact per capita and per dollar of GDP it’s much less today than 50 years ago. There’s just more dollars and more capita.
We are getting better at this. Time will tell if we are getting better at it fast enough. Ask someone in 2126.
And no I don’t think we will be dead, but if we do too much damage the world may be severely degraded and they might be quite angry at previous generations for basically leaving them with the bill.
Yes but we could have a significantly less one though. We're extremely wasteful and plan ahead poorly for minimizing the environmental impact, which becomes a partisan political issue instead of just doing our best to live in a healthy environment.
It wasn't enormous enough in fines, since they're still in business and capable of doing it again, and again surviving such fines.
Even if it was enormous enough in fines to put them out of business, the industry as it is with all its inherent risks will still exist because that is still legally allowed. Forget a fine; outlaw the behavior that lead to the issue. Incentivize new emergent behavior instead of just hedging.
The behavior that leads to the issue is individual consumers driving cars. Outlawing this would nuke demand for fossil fuels which encourages risky well drilling. But since 99% of Americans drive they tend to get very unhappy about the prospect of banning the vroom vroom. This is a real and challenging political problem. We can't get around it by pretending that corporations drill for fun.
There is no oil drilling off the Santa Barbara coast. There is plenty of oil there, they just care about different things. I agree it would be good to get rid gas cars, but you can't just outlaw them-- for practical and legal reasons. Maybe have the price of every environmental harm added to each gallon and let people adjust their habits accordingly?
I’d take it a step further. Most people don’t drive by choice, but because of the zoning and regulations that create sprawling suburbs meaning almost no one can live without a car. Can’t get to work, can’t get groceries, can’t get the kids to day care without a car.
Edit: want to add the sprawl also makes efficient mass public transportation nearly impossible.
In places with absolutely no zoning whatsoever, people still drive cars, motorcycles, mopeds, etc.
People like fast, on-demand transportation they're in control of. The answer is electric vehicles.
Cars make themselves not-fast by their sheer inefficiency unless huge amounts of taxpayer money is continually poured to the infrastructure. What’s incredible is that cars have been getting even larger, an example of astonishingly perverse incentive structures.
From my experience in the third world with quite poor infrastructure (e.g. unpaved roads, lack of traffic control devices anyone respects etc.), cars and motorcycles are still everywhere.
Some places like Ethiopia have simply switched to EVs by encouraging their import and discouraging import of non-EVs. Now, most vehicles there are EVs.
So can I work from home then instead?
> $140 billion if you include total financial cost to BP.
That's more than their current market cap ($127B), and the stock price right now is not that far from where it was just before the spill ($49 now, around $59 just prior to the spill).
I'm just curious how that was accomplished, given that it would not have been a great time for them to be borrowing or issuing new shares, for obvious reasons. Maybe if it was spread out over like 10 years it could be more doable, but still that seems like a lot.
Essentially how most businesses (big and small) handle this situation. Multi pronged approach.
Sold a bunch of assets to raise funds (about 38b apparently), cut the dividend, borrowed the remaining (you'd think after such an event it's 'hard' to raise capital but in reality BP has a great financial record and there's a chance they had prior agreements in place) and then spread cost out over ~10 years.
BP share price was over $100 the month before the disaster. They sold $45B in global assets and subsidiaries (including most of their refinery business and land holding 6 billion barrels of proven reserves) and cut their dividend to fund the damages and fines.
> BP share price was over $100 the month before the disaster
If you checked the share price via Google Finance, it's off by 2x. The share price on April 19, 2010 (a day before the disaster) was $59.48, not >$100. Google Finance is erroneously reporting the price.
Is it close or adjusted close?
The stock price fell by 50ish percent, and they've spent 16 years recovering.
Yet, our ecosystem likely never will. I wonder which is more important to not let fail.
BP's revenue in the last 30 years is over $6.5 trillion. Other than the bad press and some lost coins, they don't really give a shit.
The psychopaths are ruining the world.
The most galling/depressing thing to me is that our population is so overwhelming that if even just 1% of us are bad actors, that's still so many that catastrophes like this (environmental and otherwise) become mathematically inevitable.
It isn't so much that 1% can even do this though. What can I or you possibly do that can wreak havoc on this scale? We cannot pull the sufficient levers. We don't have authority. We don't have actual power.
But the real danger is that we have given certain members of our species superhuman abilities to unilaterally make decisions, where these then go on to cause harm on a scale that would never be possible as just 1% of our species operating within the scope of what 1% of our species can reach with their two hands. We've creating living gods essentially. We've even created nonliving gods: pools of capital people are beholden to grow that they themselves do not even own or control, but are enslaved to them nonetheless. Decisions are what is good for the nonliving god: what grows the money pile in the quarterly time frame, not what is good for our species or even what is truly individually good for the people believing themselves to have any control over these pools of capital.
> What can I or you possibly do that can wreak havoc on this scale?
Build a bunch of drones that carry explosives and leave them outside chemical plants, refineries, and nuclear plants across the world and then launch a simultaneous attack on infrastructure.
Budget $1000-$2000 per drone and then whatever your costs of transportation for the road trip are.
You'd be flagged and arrested/killed wayyy before you manage to even organize such an attack.
Would people stop burning oil if there weren't people out there concerned with profit?
I very much doubt it. For consumers it is all about cost. Heating in winter with Natural Gas is 1/3 the price of electricity and much cheaper than Oil.
To get people off of fossil fuels, remove oil subsidizes and tax fossil fuels a lot. Otherwise moving to renewals will take a very long time.
And yes, we can put up solar panels on your house, but that cost $ which people do not have. Solar Panels should be subsidized in an easy manner for people to get funds for installation.
Yes. Not immediately—firstly, because the finite speed of light in a vacuum precludes simultaneity—but eventually, when relieved of rent-seeking intermediaries, we'd be free to invest in sustainable infrastructure.
We are already massively investing into renewable energy... to the tune of about $1trillion since 2020 in the US. In 2024, 95%+ of all new electricity capacity was solar/wind/batteries.
Seems like you believe the current system is not conducive to clean/sustainable infrastructure, but the world I think you want is actually the one we're already in.
Think it's still a mixed bag. There's not broad consensus (in the US at least) that continued investment in renewables is the future. We're still investing heavily in fossil fuels, we've had two military campaigns in the last three years to influence global oil supply and the sitting US President signed an emergency order to bypass restrictions on fossil fuel projects on literally his first day in office. There's plenty of people and policy makers who are fine with the fossil fuel status quo.
Oil subsidies total $4.5 trillion in that same period, and the ratio used to be worse, so it doesn’t take a genius to see why people accuse the energy policy of being biased toward a dangerous status quo.
Here in Australia I have been very pleasantly surprised by our renewable energy build out being far ahead of my jaded expectations.
We’re plopping down enormous grid scale batteries like it’s Sim City.
Electricity in the middle of the day is free!
"It’s truly exhausting to know the damage we’ve done to the ecosystem and how many bad actors only concerned with profit are out there preventing it from happening again."
Because most people don't want to know. Cognitive dissonance keeps many people from realizing the inconvenient truth that modern life requires accidents like this. We have stats or projections about how many people earth can support, but none about how many people it can sustainably support. People want their plastic items and cars to be cheap, even if it results in occasional accidents of this scale (not to mention the minor accidents that occur frequently and don't make the news).
You said something interesting: "... modern life requires accidents like this."
This is a completely baseless claim. It is entirely possible to have both a technologically advanced civilization and simultaneously one that doesn't have catastrophic industrial mistakes like this.
Is it? Because at the very least, modern life involves the mass production of plastics, mining of various minerals, and the use of copious amounts of energy. That last one is only kind of solved (as long as everything works and nothing breaks), but I have yet to see any convincing evidence that there is any feasible substitute for the first two.
The solution to the first two is reuse. With enough energy, some form of recycling of becomes feasible for pretty much anything. No oil? Just make plastic from atmospheric CO2!
How would we know such a society is possible? There's zero proof of that to date. Errors and inevitable catastrophes are part of the cost of a highly complex technically advanced society run by humans.
have we tried adding "make no mistakes" to the humans' prompt?
Not with humans.
The Deepwater disaster recovery very effectively demonstrated the phenomenon of "out of sight out of mind". they dumped almost 2 million gallons of "dispersants" on the oil spill... which was DESIGNED to make the oil heavier than water and sink to the sea bed. it never dissolved anything, it just hid the problem from the public. and all that oil is just sitting on the sea bed.
What should have done instead to deal with 5 million gallons of oil?
I don't know for sure, but I found it interesting that there was such lively debate, and yet what they ended up doing seems to have been one of the few solutions that was intuitively worse than nothing.
Heck man, give Stamets a shot with his oil-eating mushrooms; I thought that was an interesting suggestion.
I'm not sure it's so cut and dry.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute says that dispersants caused a drastic reduction in surface volatiles, allowing the cleanup crew to work longer and more efficiently.
> The model showed that, without dispersants, the atmospheric concentration of benzene would have been about 6,000 times higher. Benzene concentrations in the air two meters above the sea surface would have been 13 times higher than the levels considered acceptable to breathe during a 10-hour working day or a 40-hour work week, based on guidelines by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). However, the model showed that with the dispersant injection, atmospheric benzene concentrations were typically about 500 times lower than acceptable NIOSH levels.
https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/did-dispersants-help-du...
It should have been collected and disposed of, even if that means BP goes bankrupt.
It's always sad to me the atrocities that can be committed if you do them behind a corporation that makes people a lot of money.
> While researchers stopped short of concluding that the oil spill had caused the declines
Why though? Why are we so afraid of accountability? Because this is what people point to when trying to deny things are true: ThErE iS NO EviDeNce, sHoW Me THe StUdY, etc. etc.
I read the source
> Available evidence rules out natural phenomena as likely drivers, suggesting a large-scale pollution event and its associated mitigation measures most likely precipitated the declines...That the declines began shortly after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill points to that event as the most parsimonious explanation. These findings suggest that despite its immense size the deep-pelagic biome is vulnerable to human-induced disturbance and possesses limited resilience to facilitate recovery.
This means "the oil spill caused the declines". That is what this means in English.
I think you're reading the wrong motivation into this and reaching the wrong conclusion.
This behavior, being skeptical and precise, is the very thing that makes scientists more trustworthy than the average Joe with his motivated reasoning.
I'm confident that the people working on this would have made the causal claim if they had been able to collect enough data to support it. They may well be working on gathering data to support the causal claim right now.
This technically useful skepticism can be weaponized against you by a rhetorical opponent by just pointing out that you "refuse to say for certain". All you have to do is say "some scientists believe there is some uncertainty" and you can convince a crowd to stop listening. Scientific communication works very poorly as mass communication.
Statements of certainty can be weaponized even more. That same rhetorical opponent would be just as happy to point out some exceedingly rare edge-case counter-example (no matter how dubious) and crucify the entire study (or worse, haul you in front of Congress and try to pepper you with "gotcha" questions in the hopes of catching you in a "lie" so they can make an example out of you). You rhetorical opponent is not going to argue in good faith either way and their audience are not people who will care.
Scientists write for other scientists who already know why they use the language they use. Compromising that language to try to cater to fools who couldn't care less about the truth would just make the scientist a greater fool for trying.
I doubt you're implying that scientists should "say for certain" even when they aren't certain, or that they shouldn't say anything at all. So I assume you're just saying "misleaders gonna mislead", which is true.
But as long as we're bringing up general social woes, I'll point out that those misleading statements are pretty tame by today's standards. The more popular strategy now is to just lie outright.
Scientists are - rightfully - reluctant to assign causal relationships when the data does not support it.
Scientists should not change the scientific method so morons can continue to ignore or cherrypick their studies.
Because they're scientists and not activists.
And both are needed.
Humans don’t operate at a scientific level in our day to day.
Politicians need to make decisions about the economy with little to no data, and the legal system convicts people at a much lower standard than that science requires us to meet.
And we run our lives at an incredibly lower standard than what science needs to maintain.
It’s fairly easy to see that the Deep Horizon incident should have easily met any of those non science standards (it may have possibly fallen short of the legal standard), to actually enact changes in terms of regulations, or punishment.
Unfortunately, on one side you have an indifferent public that largely depends on activists that it maligns to protect its interests, and on the other side you have billion dollar industries that can buy out the decision makers.
We definitely didn't need the nuclear power activists just like we definitely don't need teh data scenter activists today
Interesting that the spill hasn't dampened long term prospects for offshore drilling (besides the brief push against it around 2016) whereas Chernobyl basically nerfed American nuclear power gen.
If you listen to utility executives talk (and they have to talk a lot to wall street), they have been very clear for about 30 years that the number one reason they built everything other than nuclear was cost.
Consistently 2-3x the cost of wind or gas on an LCOE basis. And new build cost is about 7x as high, which has to be amortized over an extremely long period, which rates regulators do not like utilities doing.
Oil drilling helps oil companies.
Nuclear power threatens oil companies.
We used to talk about replacing transportation fuels and low-carbon shipping (global energy). Now we talk about personal responsibility and rooftop solar (residential electricity). You can find oil company PR slide decks explaining why and how. Greenwashing worked, pushing the renewable ‘debate’ worked. We missed the windows on critical infrastructure change, and seemingly enjoy an unstable chunk of desert dictating global energy, inflation & food prices. <shrug>
We're replacing ICE cars with EVs. Sales are rising every year.
For long distance heavy transport, alternative fuels or battery-electric is not feasible yet.
The transition will take decades.
Well, the damage to the ecosystem from the BP oil spill will likely last a few hundred years. The damage from Chernobyl will likely last for a few tens of thousands of years.
And yet even including Chernobyl nuclear is far safer than oil and gas per kw
Sure. In the same way that flying is far safer than driving. There are massive amounts of safeguards in place to keep it as safe as possible. The problem is that when something goes wrong, it goes very, very wrong. This is why some people fear flying and nuclear power.
Way more people will die from climate change because we were forced to rely on oil instead of building out nuclear.
Its not when something goes wrong, its if. And it still is much safer and a lot better for the environment than oil
I'd argue that Three Mile Island was more impactful to American hesitation towards nuclear energy than Chernobyl ever was. By the time Chernobyl happened American nuclear industry was already in a massive panic over TMI
TMI hadn't even entered my mind while typing out that comment which just goes to show how political the historiography of this stuff is.
Well TMI didn't kill anyone and the environmental contamination was minimal. It was just a scary few days because of the theoretical worst case outcome.
There are so many open wells left behind from the 50's on. The federal gov't pays to fix them, but they can't do anywhere what they need to do. They should charge the fees upfront with drilling permits
The American economy didn't yet rely on nuclear power, we're long deep into oil brain.
And the companies are also struggling to recover, right? Because the damage to the company is commensurate with the damage to the environment it works within?
No? The companies are largely free from consequence?
Maybe our system is a bit broken.
As another comment pointed out - total cost to BP over this is somewhere in excess of $140BN. It's hardly "free of consequence".
When a human does something really really really bad, they go to jail and then they struggle for the rest of their life (not saying it's good).
When a company fucks up like that, it should die, and the people deemed responsible should go to jail. And if we cannot find who is responsible, then the top-level executives should go to jail. They are paid so much because they are "responsible", aren't they?
"But think about the normal employees losing their job when such a company fucks up", I hear. Well, think about the employees who lose their job when a normal company bankrupts "normally", who cares? And maybe, just maybe, there would then be whistleblowers from the inside because they would actually risk their job by just not contributing to preventing the company from fucking up that bad.
Yeah sure... https://www.google.com/finance/quote/BP:LON?window=MAX&tab=e...
I don't understand what you're implying.
Their stock price is near ATHs and their revenue looks pretty good. Maybe they lost a bit at the time but they don't seem to be feeling any long term consequences from that. The implication is that relative to the damage they caused they don't seem to have suffered any actual consequences. Up to the reader to decide for themselves, but I'm pushing back on the idea this was some cataclysmic event to body-corporate.
Their stock price hasn't recovered to where it was when the disaster happened more than 15 years after the event, and they are out $140 billion.
Its kind of deceptive to talk about nearing an all time high without mentioning that the current all time high was 2 decades ago.
I mean we can't know where they'd be in the counterfactual scenario. Glancing at Shell and Exxon shows BP is probably underperforming similar companies. How much of that is due to this event vs. other factors? I don't know. We wouldn't tend to expect the same extent of up-and-to-the-right behavior from dividend producing shares but BP seem to be failing to capitalize on the current oil price spike.
My point is merely that reasonable people can disagree if there was a suitable consequence to the event. Sure they're out 140 billion, but to a company like this that's not as grand as it sounds and not at all fatal. You provided your view, I am providing mine, which is that they did not suffer sufficiently.
I didn't actually provide my view on that.
I just said that the evidence that you are picking from tells a more complex story than "their stock is near an ATH" when it hasn't even recovered to where it was the day before the disaster.
There are plenty of beaches near Valdez, Alaska where you can scratch away beach sand and have black oil on your hands.
That was 1989, 37 years ago.
After years of appeals that the $5 Billion they were ordered to pay was excessive, they paid a whopping $507 Million in 2009.
What a crappy article. It talks about the 60% decline right after the spill but doesn’t quantify the recovery or lack thereof.
Didn't they dump tons and tons of chemicals to break up the oil spill, rather than spending the time and money to actually clean it up?
Not antagonizing but curious: how else would you do it?
I'm not an expert and it's been a long time, but I recall reading articles at the time that they were dumping chemicals in the ocean that basically bound to the oil to split it apart and make it sink. Out of sight out of mind.
The implication was they could have contained it at the surface, sucked it up and treated it to remove oil from the water.
So detergent?
How much oil would they have to burn for fuel to do that? Neither option sounds good for the environment.
Those aren’t mutually exclusive - time and money were spent to dump tons of dispersants in an effort to actually clean it up. This comes after the Exxon Valdez spill where it was learned that hot water and high pressure hoses to clean areas did more damage than good - the untouched beaches recovered faster via natural breakdown than the beaches that were cleaned. In deepwater, they skipped the scrubbing and cleaning and emphasized dispersants (y’know, solution to pollution being dilution) and it probably hurt the ecosystem more than letting natural enzymes and such take care of it. The bottom line is that every major oil spill clean up effort is an experiment. But sometimes the instinct to “do something” causes more harm than good. Would the public tolerate an “all natural” approach or a light touch of beach cleaning? Probably not, even though there’s good reason to think the ecosystem (exclusive of human needs) may be better served by that.
How about taking the full "do nothing" approach and leave the carbon under the seabed? Where it won't trap IR from escaping the atmosphere and adding energy to the atmosphere, driving ever-more energetic weather events.
K, global oil demand is expected to keep rising towards 120m bpd between now and 2050. We are not plateaued, much less reducing reliance on fossil fuels. We are actively leaning into our use of it every day of every month of every year. The production and retailing of the computer you used to type that message above and the energy demand to power it makes you complicit in that. In all of it. So you can talk all you want about dreams and fantasies, but every aspect of your life is impacted by society's capacity to meet energy demand. We almost drove whale species to extinction and nearly deforested many states for biomass fuels before we discovered how to refine fossil fuels at scale and employ them. Hardly a world I want to return to. Fossil fuels are here, they're queer, and not going anywhere without massive tradeoffs that the global population is not willing to accept. The choices to back off energy demand are so bleak they're unrealistic. Sorry I don't have solutions that haven't already been thought of (resilient solar, nuclear), but really all you and I can do that's effective is vote for new energy generation and storage solutions and the policies that enable them and lead the way. The talking part doesn't do much except use more energy.
break it up? no. it just made the oil heavy enough to sink. it's all still there, just at the bottom of the ocean now