When is it OK for an oil slick to coat a pristine beach?
When it’s a “natural occurrence,” of course!
My boss stayed at a hotel in Santa Barbara, and on the bed stand of his room, a pamphlet read:
“Tar found along local beaches is the result of natural seeps in the ocean that leak oil and natural gas into the Santa Barbara Channel. Like the La Brea tar pits on land, natural cracks and faults caused by ancient earthquakes allow oil and gas to escape from the ocean floor. The seepage then floats to the surface where some evaporates, some degrades and the rest thickens into floating balls of sticky tar. Tides, currents and winds can wash the tar onshore.”
Believe it or not, it gets better.
To hammer home the naturalness of the oil slick that coats the hotel’s beachfront, the pamphlet further noted that, “The Chumash Native Americans put tar seepage to work 5,000 years ago. Besides waterproofing baskets and bowls, they used a mixture of tar and pine to seal their canoes.”
So Captain Hazelwood did the Eskimos a service by providing them with plenty of sealant, right?
That was a cheap joke, but there is an actual policy point here.
If you can’t distinguish between a “natural” oil slick and an anthropogenic oil slick, and you think that all oil slicks are bad, then you’d want to do something about it. Well, it so happens that there is an easy fix for these “natural” oil slicks: drilling. By removing the oil, it can’t seep out and coat beautiful beaches.
So let’s drill, baby, drill! (for nature, that is)
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{ 3 comments }
Mr. Yeatman,
You should write childrens' books. Your logic may work on them.
-CJ
P.S. W is gone. Eat sheeet.
Thanks for the comment CJ!
May I suggest that you sign up for an RSS feed to get all my blogs from globalwarming.org?
Best,
w
Hmmmm. . . seems like a bit of a non-sequitur. It is true though that there are natural oil and gas leaks of the coast there – I remember going to places like Zuma beach and north as a kid and getting tar on my swimming trunks – and getting pissed at the oil industry for it. But these were probably natural leaks as you mention – although I don't think I would call it a "slick" such as occurs when a tanker runs ashore. Small, natural, localized effusions of oil and gas are an inconvenience to a beach goer in those few places where it occurs, but it is not a major environmental threat the way a true oil slick is, although even a small amount of oil can cover a large surface area (Benjamin Franklin found that it was just 1 tsp oil for a water surface area of one acre, proving unequivocally that the man had entirely too much time on his hands).
Some off-shore drilling there may not be the environmental threat that we
think it is (although tectonic activity may make it riskier). . . a lot
probably would be.
To address the final point, though, drilling for oil and gas in such
locations will not stop the natural leaks. The oil has already diffused
into perhaps thousands of different cracks, into sand and other areas where
taking the oil out of one area will not remove it from others. I don't know
a whole lot about the geochemistry of petroleum, but I would bet that deep
drilling would take hundreds of years to slow the release of oil – because
so much is already near the surface (and spread out in a way as mentioned
above that would take major invasive action to contain and remove – more
like what they do in the oil sands in northern Alberta, and would probably
cause a lot more leaking if this near-surface extraction was attempted).
Furthermore, we would have to assume that the extraction was very efficient
and that most of it was removed. This is unlikely given the dissected
geology of southern California and the mentioned crevices and cracks where
many smaller pockets of oil will be missed. But maybe, 200 years after
efficient extraction, the oil leaks would be reduced slightly, causing
major street riots in LA because there would be a scarcity of bootlegged
petroleum and tar with which to cook dinner in their post-apocalyptic city.
Cheers
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