Sixteen Years After Deepwater Horizon, Deep Sea Life Shows Few Signs of Recovery
e360.yale.edu67 points by speckx 4 hours ago
67 points by speckx 4 hours ago
> 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 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.
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.
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.
"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).
Would people stop burning oil if there weren't people out there concerned with profit?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.