oil spill (Page 4)

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is not simply a random accident. Is it a conspiracy? There will be more of these spills to in the future, because the days of easy oil are over.

Anthropologist Bret Gustafson says, “BP and other oil companies have tried to portray this spill as an accident or an aberration, but in fact there are spills on off-shore and on-shore sites around the world, increasingly.” A rig sank off the coast of Venezuela in May. Last October, a rig spilled oil for two months into the Timor Sea off of Australia. There are recurring spills in virtually every oil region, such as the Peruvian and Ecuadorian Amazon and Nigeria.
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BP is not the only oil company to ruin the environment due to careless drilling. When Texaco (which later merged with Chevron) drilled in the rainforest in Ecuador from the early 1960s until 1992, they created what has been described as the worst oil-related environmental catastrophe ever–and they still haven’t paid that country any reparations.

In the June 4th edition of the New York Times, Bob Herbert quotes New York lawyer Jonathan Abady, who is part of the legal team that is suing Chevron on behalf of the rainforest inhabitants, as saying, “As horrible as the gulf spill has been, what happened in the Amazon was worse.”
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The BP oil spill may be leading to an almost unimaginable disaster–an extinction event that could kill off a large swathe of marine life.

Methane gas can deplete oxygen in the water, leading to the kind of oxygen depletion that can create a fish-killing dead zone. While methane occurs naturally in ocean water, high concentrations of it can encourage the growth of microbes that consume the oxygen needed by marine life.
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Oil exploration plans in eastern Russia are a serious threat to gray whales. The Rosneft company is about to begin a seismic survey around Sakhalin island, a place where these whales come each summer to feed. This kind of seismic oil survey work, which produces high-intensity sound pulses, would seriously disrupt their feeding.
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