Panel Says U.S. Not Ready For Inevitable Arctic Oil Spill 95
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "As eagerness to explore the Arctic's oil and gas resources grows, the threat of a major Arctic oil spill looms ever larger—and the United States has a lot of work to do to prepare for that inevitability, a panel convened by the National Research Council (NRC) declares in a report released yesterday. The committee, made up of members of academia and industry, recommended beefing up forecasting systems for ocean and ice conditions, infrastructure for supply chains for people and equipment to respond, field research on the behavior of oil in the Arctic environment, and other strategies to prepare for a significant spill in the harsh conditions of the Arctic."
Shortest version: no one has any idea how any spill cleanup techniques would work in the arctic environment.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
If we judge by all the posters during BP's Gulf of Mexico spill, apparently puking vast quantities of oil into the sea is not only not bad, but is in fact very good.
Re:So? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: So? (Score:4, Insightful)
Canadian here. Keep your donation.
Unpleasantly enough, gathering crude oil from floating slicks and contaminated beaches might actually be less destructive than extracting it from tar sands... Luckily, with the Harper Regime's war on science going better than most wars on abstract concepts, we should be spared the knowledge of whether or not that's true.
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By pouring it into the sea, they have prevented it from being burned and poured into the sky as CO2.
Instead it's eaten by bacteria and such and released into the environment as CO2, without even the benefits of us burning it.
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By pouring it into the sea, they have prevented it from being burned and poured into the sky as CO2.
Instead it's eaten by bacteria and such and released into the environment as CO2, without even the benefits of us burning it.
But you are not taking into account the benefit of the oil killing a bunch of CO2 creating (ie: oxygen breathing) marine life, surely that will balance that out.
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How about the inevitability that volcanic activity will happen near or in an oil field?
How about the inevitablility that fracking will make scientists lie for money?
How about the inevitability that one day global warming will cause our highways to leech petrol products into the water supply as the roads turn to goo?
How about the inevitability that penguins will rule the world when we have destroyed ourselves by our trust in science?
How about a beer? Its noon somewhere and Ive run out of milk for cereal.
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If we judge by all the posters during BP's Gulf of Mexico spill, apparently puking vast quantities of oil into the sea is not only not bad, but is in fact very good.
Hey, I wanted to nuke the oil spill. All you mother earth hating bastards wouldn't get behind me. I even started a facebook group and only 3 people joined.
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Exactly. Why the hell are people modding down again? This is a great idea. If you people only understood science!
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That comment got me from terrible to just bad karma.
I just up-modded all of your comments, to help you out.
You can thank me later.
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We can still nuke it, Alaska too.
Hah. Go ahead and try it [wikipedia.org] you turkeys! We'll just nip this bud right next to the branch. Even if you somehow manage to get past our defenses we have our own doomsday machine [theforbidd...wledge.com].
And we have volcanoes. And lots of sharks.
Wriggle in fear you puny 'down southers'!
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Who is "no-one"?
There is a lot of life in the arctic. I expect it likes living in sea water with out s thick film of decaying oil on top.
Golly....
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Actually, I think you are somewhat correct. It will get very thick, and probably not harm the area all that much. But what happens when it floats south?
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I expect I know how the mods will treat this, but - who cares? Why bother to clean it up at all? It will clot up and have negligible impact, and no one lives there.
Firstly, people do live there, they are an indigenous people called Eskimo. I suppose they just one more form of indigenous people that the US can shit on though in addition to the native Americans you stole a whole country from.
Secondly, the problem with "just leave it there" is it stinks from a moral standpoint. It is basically saying "we fully expect to make a huge mess of some other area of the planet an not cleaning it up because we cannot be bothered". If the US wants to carry on behaving in that mann
Inuit, Actually (Score:2)
They're typically called Inuit, not Eskimo, unless you want to lump a bunch of other tribes into the mix. Eskimo is apparently a perjorative in Greenland, and is generally a term used by the clueless.
Beyond that, the Alaska Native peoples got something less of a raw deal than the rest of the indigenous populations. No one took their land, in most cases they reside where they have for milennia. Also, in the 70s when they put the pipeline in, they formed all Alaskan tribes into regional Native Corporations, s
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Beyond that, the Alaska Native peoples got something less of a raw deal than the rest of the indigenous populations.
Yup, but would that still be the case if we caused a massive oil leak then decided we could not be bothered to clean it up as only they lived there? I personally think not, even if they don't live near the spill I reckon you wouldn't have to kill to many animals with an oil slick to make it much hard for them to feed themselves.
What the parent poster was suggesting was pretty stupid, and I rather think that if you asked the average Innuit whether they mind me lumping them in with Eskimos while suggesting th
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Too many humans. Cut it down to 1-2 billion and a lot of problems just disappear.
Are you one of the ones whose selection criteria for the great cull are poorly defined, or one of the ones whose selection criteria are jaw-droppingly tasteless? They come in both flavors.
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Did you know that mixing bleach and ammonia makes an amazing cleaning solution. Your going to want a lot of this stuff so get the two biggest bottles you can find.
Can you guess my selection criteria?
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Did you know that mixing bleach and ammonia makes an amazing cleaning solution. Your going to want a lot of this stuff so get the two biggest bottles you can find.
Can you guess my selection criteria?
People who didn't watch King of the Hill? I'd be in favor of killing them all off.
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Nobody has to cull anybody.
It turns out that education and economic development leads rapidly to a decline in the birthrate. This has happened everywhere, pretty nearly universally, with exceptions among certain insular religious sects that value both a very high birthrate and literacy like Mormons and ultra-Orthodox Jews.
Re:Same old cause (Score:4, Insightful)
Am I correct in assuming that you do not believe that YOU are part of the 5-6 billion that should be eliminated?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Won't help in third world/uneducated/religious moron ar
Re:Same old cause (Score:4, Insightful)
figure out a way to make it socially acceptable for women to attend school and work outside of the home -- 99% of the problem solved right there. :(
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> .just give incentives
You nailed it. But our priorities are exactly the opposite. And by listing how the priorities should be, I'll upset people.
But here are a few ways we could encourage lower birth rates.
Birth control should be subsidized. Abortions, The Pill, hysterectomies, and vasectomies should be free.
There should be an annual tax on the biological father and biological mother for each child they bring into the world. Child Tax Credits only apply to adopted/foster kids.
Conceiving and bearing
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Birth control is subsidized. Abortions, the pill, hysterectomies and vasectomies are free. Oh, you mean in the US? Well, that's a different matter.
(Tragically) joking aside, the real way to decrease the world's population is to improve living conditions. The longer children live the fewer are needed to guarantee the next generation. As health & wealth increases, birth rates decrease. Medical and economic aid to developing countries is the key factor being reducing birth rates. In the developed wo
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Birth control is subsidized. Abortions, the pill, hysterectomies and vasectomies are free. Oh, you mean in the US? Well, that's a different matter.
This is called pragmatism. Not allowing poor people free or cheap access to birth control results in lots of unwanted kids to crap parents who don't really want to be parents, those end up costing a fortune when they grow up and are more likely to turn to crime.
You might think it morally repugnant to pay for someone to have an abortion, but that is far cheaper in the long term than a poor 16 year old single mom firing out 10 kids who all grow up into people we have to imprison for most of their lives as pri
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Note that the population projections ALREADY see the population beginning to decline later this century.
I take it, then, that YOU plan to have no kids? If so, we thank you for removing your genes from the gene pool.
If not, why not? If you believe that basically 85% of us should not have kids, what puts YOU in the 15%?
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Too many humans. Cut it down to 1-2 billion and a lot of problems just disappear.
You first, motherfucker.
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Subject is appropriate. We're talking here about proposals to drill for oil in Alaska.
But yes Russia and Canada would also face similar problems with disasters in the arctic.
Australia is ready to save the penguins again (Score:3)
The US may not be prepared, but they can take a note from Australia's efforts [snopes.com] when they needed to clean oil spills off penguins.
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when they needed to clean oil spills off penguins.
That can be done in a fast and efficient way using flamethrowers
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Yeah, but they probably wouldn't taste so good
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when they needed to clean oil spills off penguins.
That can be done in a fast and efficient way using flamethrowers
Anti Linux flamebait? Oh No.
ex Mobil exec says fracking can't be done safely (Score:4, Informative)
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That explains the rush to frack, before the sweetheart deal is over.
There's elections coming up. Vote out the old bums, and vote in some new ones. If you can make the alternatives even sweeter for them, they'll show up at your door asking what they can do for you. At this point though, I still don't know what greases a palm better than oil.
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Only found deeply within the very bowels. (Score:1)
I don't think anybody is prepared (Score:2)
There are techniques/tools that are available to clean up spills however I don't think that anybody is truly prepared for a large scale oil spill anywhere on Earth.
At BP, we're sorry... (Score:2)
Plenty of clues (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, you extrapolate taking into consideration a more remote area with even worse access conditions, and the colder temperatures.
An extreme environmental disaster will be the result.
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there's a subsets of whites (and apparently a few elected officials of mixed heritage) who would *love* to see higher gas prices :)
(le troll!)
Horseshit (Score:2)
First, there is no such thing as eagerness to tap the Arctic, so I have no idea why this article exists; it's a big troll. The TAPS pipeline has had declining volumes [theoildrum.com] for decades. There's been talk (for years) of a gas pipeline but it's pretty much not going to happen, for a number of reasons that no one really gives a shit about.
Second, I'm from Valdez, Alaska. I was there for the spill, and for about twenty years afterwards. The long-term environmental impact is practically nil. Fish stocks recovered quic
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Another Alaskan here (from SE) - just wanted to point out that the most popular bumper sticker in the state is a small black square that says "Cut, Kill, Dig, Drill". In those four words are the summation of the pretty much the entire of Alaska's ethos.....
And in related news... (Score:1)
Panel says the average human being is not ready for the inevitable collision with a moving vehicle.
More military presense...and Canada..and Russia? (Score:2)
>> And if an emergency happens, there’s no infrastructure in place—no consistent U.S. Coast Guard presence...
Interesting. Related article covers Canada's and Russia's claims in the same area - the "Lomonozov Ridge"
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/... [www.cbc.ca]
Um.. (Score:2)
...ok this is probably a stupid question, but why would such a spill be the US's responsibility any more than say, a spill off Madagascar?
Yes, certainly, if it's within the small share of US waters off Alaska, but if you look at territorial claims on the arctic it's a relatively small sliver that the US even optimistically claims. A far, far larger share of arctic waters would be the responsibility of Canada, Russia, and/or Norway - let them sort it out.
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That's just ignorant. We all live on the same little Blue Planet, not separate Planets, as some would ignorantly wish. The responsibility rests with all Humans.
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But you're saying the EXACT opposite.
You're saying "we all live on the same planet, it's all our responsibility...unless there's an accident. In THAT case, it's America's responsibility."
Which is hypocrisy, I believe.
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Who says Americans will be using the majority of the oil?
I'm not sure you have been paying attention, the US is net EXPORTER of oil now. Sure, we still import some, but we are largely now oil independent.
By that same logic, if the factory making iphones burns down, hipsters need to rebuild it?