Shell's Drilling for Oil in the Arctic Presents Huge Environmental Dangers
Here’s a terrific 6-minute-long documentary that Joe Romm’s team at Climate Progress put together, presenting the environmental dangers associated with drilling for oil in the Arctic. Now that Shell is going to be leading the way, it may be good for us all to understand how much slower and feebler our response to a spill will be should it occur than was our response to BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill.
I interviewed Climate Progress’s Stephen Lacey for my current book project “Renewable Energy – Following the Money” at the organization’s offices last time I was in Washington D.C. Unfortunately, Joe was out of town at the time; I would have loved to have popped in and shaken his hand; he’s a living legend.
Craig,
It’s not about the relative “slowness” or “rapidness” of the response. It’s the environment.
The Gulf actually has tens of thousands of gallons of hydrocarbons leaking up from the gulf floor every year, but the warm waters have allowed for the prolific evolution of microbes that “eat” this trickle of oil, converting it to edible organic matter and waste gasses. When Deepwater Horizon started spewing millions upon millions of gallons of the same oil within that warm water… the microbes started reproducing on a geometric scale, so that any oil that remained within the gulf (that did not get stuck on a shoreline) was rapidly consumed.
That is not possible in the arctic, where there is not currently healthy populations of microbes that eat oil, and we cannot just transplant those microbes because they are not evolved to deal with the harsh cold. The cold will also serve to slow any growth, reproduction, and evolution of any species of microbe that is currently within the region.
So even if our deployment was just as vigorous as that seen in the Gulf, most of the cleanup in the Gulf wasn’t done by humans, it was done by bacteria.. Without the help from the bacteria, we humans would take decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to clean up a similar sized mess.
Thanks, Glenn. The documentary makes your point, but also speaks to the absurd difficulty of the logistics of getting clean-up to the arctic location.