9 years ago
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The Government Is OK With a 75 Percent Chance of a Major Arctic Oil Spill. Are You?
The Department of the Interior says there’s a 75 percent chance of a major oil spill in the Arctic—and it’s willing to take that chance.
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http://www.psmag.com
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eh... I'm all for reducing fossil fuel use, but when you read the report here's what it says.
over a 77 year period (really 64 years because 1-10 are development and 75-77 are shutdown) the amount of spills that are calculated to be likely to occur (using standard factors of safety) at the well site is 0.5. The amount of spills calculated to occur along a pipeline is 0.9. This adds up to 1.4 total spills in 64 years. I don't know if I feel like these are that bad. I know that sometime in the next 64 years, even if I take care not to make a mistake, I'm going to spill gasoline, oil, or something harmful on the ground several times. Obviously, the consequences of me spilling a liter or so are way less than 1000 barrels, but it's going to happen to me and probably 10 billion other people in the world in that same time frame.
I don't want to discount this and say that it's not a big deal, but I did want to point out that the report isn't saying that there's a 75% chance that Deepwater Horizon II is going to happen.
About five years ago, on April 2, 2010, the president rudely tempted Fate by claiming "It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced."
A couple of weeks later, when the reckless, miserly inevitable, happened, he turned our federal government into a wholly-owned rent-a-cop subsidiary of BP in an astonishingly clear demonstration of who the president really works for.
This risk analysis on turning the American arctic over to its real owners is admitting that, yes, the inevitable will happen again. And it will not be "a liter or so." Maybe by not tempting Fate so blindly, things'll work out better than last time. Then again, the Interior Department clearly doesn't care one way or the other. Why should it, when everything in the goddamn world belongs to BP shareholders anyway?
Have you asked yourself, I'm curious, what's in it for you yet?