Natural resilience
I have written an op-ed article in The Times today. It's behind a paywall, but here's my last draft before editing by the newspaper, together with links.
So long as the cap holds, and assuming that is the end of it, the Deepwater Horizon spill (up to 600,000 tonnes in total) will now take its place in the oil spill hall of shame. BP’s cavalier incompetence has made this probably the worst oil-spill year since 1979, the year that saw not only the previous worst rig spill – the Ixtoc 1 platform off Mexico – but also the worst tanker spill, a collision of two supertankers off Trinidad.
All this, just when things were going so well in the oil-spill business. The number and collective size of oil spills (over 7,000 tonnes) has declined in each of the last four decades, from 25 large spills and over 250,000 tonnes a year in 1970-1979 to three spills and about 20,000 tonnes a year in 2000-2009: that is a drop of more than 90%.
No wonder the other oil companies are livid with BP, a company that spent the last decade and a half burnishing its reputation as an environmental paragon, apparently to the detriment of its capacity to manage old-fashioned oil production safely. `Within the fossil fuel industry itself,’ said the prominent environmentalist Lester Brown in 1998, `some companies such as Enron, British Petroleum, and ... are already looking to the future, and beginning to invest in alternative energy sources.’ It seems unkind to curse the third firm he mentioned by naming it, but let’s call it Scallop.
The clean-up will be long and difficult, and the effects of the spill will be felt for a long time in the pensions of Britons, the priorities of politicians and regulators as well as the pelicans of the Gulf. So it might be a good idea to learn lessons from previous oil spill clean-ups. Some of these are surprising.
First, be careful not to do more harm than good. When the Torrey Canyon was wrecked off Cornwall in 1967, spilling 120,000 tonnes of oil, the British government not only bombed the wreck (and missed with one bomb in four), but sprayed 10,000 tons of detergents, which were much more damaging to marine life than the oil itself, then bulldozed the oil and detergents into the sand on some beaches where it persisted for longer than if it had been exposed to the elements.
The mistake was repeated in 1989, when the Exxon Valdez spilled about 40,000 tonnes in Prince William Sound. Thousands of volunteers were sent out to wash rocks with hot water, which helped kill lots of microbes that would otherwise have eaten the oil.
Speaking of microbes, do not underestimate nature’s powers of recovery. After most big oil spills, scientists are pleasantly surprised by how quickly the oil disappears and the marine life reappears. This is true even in Alaska, where the sheltered waters, low temperatures and abundant wildlife conspired to make the slick damaging and persistent. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says on its website: `What scientists have found is that, despite the gloomy outlook in 1989, the intertidal habitats of Prince William Sound have proved to be surprisingly resilient.’ A scientist who led some of the research into the Exxon Valdez says that `Thoughts that this is going to kill the Gulf of Mexico are just wild overreactions’.
When the Braer went aground off Shetland in 1993 and spilled 85,000 tonnes of oil, storms quickly dispersed the oil, so the effect on most of the local wildlife was barely measurable. As one scientific report drily noted, after running through a list of undetected effects on birds, shore life and seabed creatures, `five otters were found dead in the oil spill area. However, three of these were killed by vehicles, one was recovered before the oil could have reached it and the cause of mortality of the fifth did not appear to be oil contamination.’ (One of the road kills was allegedly caused by a television crew’s car.)
This rapid recovery was also a signature of the last big Gulf rig spill, the Ixtoc 1 disaster off Mexico in 1979. Although the number of turtles took decades to recover, much of the rest of the wildlife bounced back fairly rapidly. `To be honest, considering the magnitude of the spill, we thought the Ixtoc spill was going to have catastrophic effects for decades’, Luis Soto of the National Autonomous University of Mexico told a newspaper this year. `But within a couple of years, almost everything was close to 100 percent normal again.’ The warm waters and strong sunshine of the Gulf of Mexico are highly conducive to the chemical decomposition of oil by `photo-oxidation’, and are stuffed full of organisms that actually like to eat the stuff – in moderation.
Indeed, the sea floor in the Gulf is rich in `cold seeps’ -- communities of tube worms and other organisms that live off oil naturally seeping from beneath the seabed. (The annual flow of oil through such seeps is about half the total spill.) Hundreds of these clusters of clams and tube worms have been found since the 1980s in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, living off the microbes that eat the oil.
Such ecosystems are not equipped to cope with being inundated with so much oil even if it is their food, but one Texas scientist told the New York Times that `the gulf is such a great fishery because it’s fed organic matter from oil...it’s pre-adapted to crude oil. The image of this spill being a complete disaster is not true.’
Another lesson to learn is that the media covers the disaster and not the recovery. When the Sea Empress spilled 70,000 tonnes of oil off Pembrokeshire in 1996, the oil was quickly dispersed. The impact on the 500,000 pairs of birds that breed nearby was relatively small, but the impact on the 500,000 tourists who normally visited the beaches of Pembrokeshire each year– and the businesses that relied on them – was dire. In about a year Louisiana’s tourist businesses will be protesting that their beaches are now clean and would the tourists please come back, but the media will largely ignore them. Good news is no news.
The final lesson is that the environmental threats that matter are the slow, continuous ones, not the telegenic sensations like oil spills. BP’s spill is known to have killed just over 1,300 birds so far. Just one wind farm, at Altamont Pass in California, was until recently known to kill perhaps 1,300 birds of prey every year. If BP really wants to kill birds, it should indeed go beyond petroleum and into wind, an industry that kills far more rare birds per joule of energy produced than oil does.
Comments (36)
In Australia we too have just had our political and media "Farce on the Reef" about an oil leak on the GBR.
"About once in a decade a ship runs aground somewhere on the Great Barrier Reef. Although this has never resulted in other than trivial damage to the reef, a three ring media circus always unfolds. Politicians posture in mock displays of righteous anger or feigned concern. Environmentalists emote predictions of dire consequences... this farce remains perennially popular." - Dr Walter Starck
"The actual physical damage to reefs from ship groundings is but a tiny fraction of 1% of the tens of thousands of hectares of reef that are reduced to rubble almost every year by tropical cyclones. Recovery in either case is similar and rapid. "
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2010/04/farce-on-the-reef
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/commen...
But ... how about THE OIL SLICK? ... good question:
"Oil floats, coral doesn’t. The damage to reefs from oil spills is minimal and recovery is rapid. Follow-up studies of oil spills have repeatedly found that environmental recovery has invariably been much faster and more complete than predicted with the worst affects being inflicted by clean-up efforts. The use of dispersants, as was done in the current event, is only a PR stunt by government wanting to be seen to be doing something. For the reef, it is the worst thing to do."
- Dr Starck.
And let's have a look at the "devastating effects" of this "giant oil slick" :
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/commen...
... what? ... you can't see any oil here? ... well .... don't worry ... nobody else can either!
See also these links about the current huge, natural and ongoing oil seepage in the Gulf of Mexico and off California:
http://alfin2100.blogspot.com/2010/04/more-oil-seeps-naturally-than-from...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090513130944.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/01/000127082228.htm
Nice post, Matt; couldn't agree more.
I'm currently living in the Tampa Bay area, and can confirm much of what you say about the media coverage. Generally, people who see themselves as 'environmentalists' have had a near-hysterical reaction to this spill. You're a year off in your forecast that the Gulf communities will be begging tourists to return - this is already happening. The media coverage seems to have made people assume that the beach of any Gulf destination is covered in oil, which simply isn't true, and tourism revenues are suffering.
As usual with events of this type, there's an undeclared, possibly unintentional, alliance between the media (which likes high profile, alarming stories), NGO environmental groups (which have an agenda which this spill serves perfectly) and academics (who will get research funding and publicity if they say the 'right' - alarmist - things).
There doesn't seem to be any room for a rational response - my line in discussing this is that BP (in the US) is obviously a pretty horrible organization from the safety point of view (they're good in the UK North Sea, from my personal experience); but that doesn't mean that this spill is necessarily a disaster, or that it holds some message about the desirability of offshore drilling in general.
BTW - in your review of oil pollution 'disasters' you didn't mention the first Gulf War. Am I the only one who remembers all the environmental groups prophesying the end of all life in the Persian Gulf after Saddam set fire to the wells in Kuwait?
[...] Ridley, “Natural resilience”, The Rational Optimist, 19 July [...]
Matt
Have you any data on the numbers and species of birds killed by wind turbines in the UK?
If not, maybe you could tell me where to look.
Thanks
Reply: no I don't have data on the UK. I'd be interested in what you find.
Michael,
The number of birds killed each year by wind turbines is probably quite large, if this recent news story is anything to go by:
"Primary school forced to turn off wind turbine after bird deaths. A primary school has been forced to switch off a £20,000 wind turbine because it keeps killing passing seabirds."
"We were told by the manufacturer to expect maybe one fatality a year but it killed 14 in six months so we took advice and made the decision to turn it off... Mr McLeod said he worried about the impact on the birds and his pupils, who got upset when deaths happened during playtimes and lunchtimes."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/7870929/Primary-school-forced-to...
Sir -
Another way to present the bird kills at Altamont Pass in California would be to take the low estimate (880 bird kills/year) instead of the highest bound (1300 bird kills/year), and to mention that there are more than 5000 wind turbines in the wind farm. Viewed that way, it amounts to one bird killed annually for each six operational turbines. At the high bound of 1300 birds, it's still only one bird killed for every four turbines each year.
Suddenly, that doesn't seem so catastrophic. It's all how you present the data.
To get a clearer perspective, one could also calculate the total number of wind turbines in the USA and divide by the total number of bird kills per year. Want to bet the average is well below 0.01? A rigorous student would perhaps compare the total kills against the total estimated bird population in the study area, to see if the turbine bird kills are significant in the grand scheme of things.
Yet another way to think about the environmental cost would be to calculate the number of birds killed per kilowatt hour of energy produced by the wind turbines.... But enough already.
Regards,
BF
10,000-40,000 birds killed per year in the U.S.:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/wind-turbine-kill-birds.htm/printable
It's good to know, that the true damage is not done to the planet, but to us, who rely on a certain state of the planet's environment and climate /sarcasm
This spill has already killed tens of thousands of birds. Your flip comparison to bird killing makes me suspect this entire article is full of crap.
It seems impossible for most of humanity, and the media in particular, to assess threats rationally.
Anyone familiar with oil company operations in the US is not surprised at BP's mess . They have been the most callous in their disregard for good operating procedures for decades . Look at the death toll in their US refineries if you want a wake up call .
Lest spill more oil then!!!!!
I like your take on this, and it is interesting. Can you provide the scientific sources from this? I try very hard not to take word-of-mouth information as gospel. I hope that the gulf recovers quickly from this spill, and that the microbes do a swift and efficient job, and that the dispersants don't create problems.
I DO want to point out something that I noticed was a little skewed in your article. You quoted Altamont as your wind farm bird death statistic, but failed to put it into any sort of perspective. 1) that Altamont was something of a freak: http://www.alternativeenergyprimer.com/Do-Wind-Turbines-Kill-Birds.html, really poor planning and siting, as well as old technology and 2) that birds are killed in MUCH HIGHER numbers by things like: automobiles, electrical wires, and the domestic cat to name a few... I know this link is a little old, but http://www.awea.org/faq/sagrillo/swbirds.html
The spill has not killed thousands of birds. Or even hundreds.
Here's the problem with too many Left-environmentalists: you have to lie to have a leg to stand on. What sense does it make to lie about the situation when it's already as bad as it is? That just discredits you and creates sympathy for the one you are lying about.
Or are you on the Left that disconnected from reality?
What utter tendentious drivel. Matt, you sound like another oil industry shill :(
I wonder if anyone has studied the feasibility of placing protective grills around the blades on the large electric-generating fans. It seems like the obvious solution to killing birds, and it would work just like a fan at home.
@Jenny,
>> This spill has already killed tens of thousands of birds.
Actually, as of today, a MAXIMUM of 2599:
http://www.fws.gov/home/dhoilspill/collectionreports.html
** These numbers are accurate to the best of our knowledge at the time the report was created. The numbers of injured and dead fish and wildlife, as well as the cause of injury or death, are not official until verified. The categories on this report -- visibly oiled, no visible oil or pending -- are not an official determination of cause of death.
Can anyone please refer to various well-informed sources regarding how to deal with an oil spill?
Obviously, if the calculations are to be correct, the oil spill does have an effect not only on the marine environment nearby but also the tourism sector (most especially on the beach) since people going there are concerned about their health. This is why they shun affected areas in favor of (surprise, surprise!) other beaches where there is no oil spill around.
To assess threats (and biases) rationally, one must explain carefully the notion of what I call "eco-dogma" which philosopically and ideologically claims to protect and conserve the environment while imposing its own will upon ordinary people such as me in the form of policies that are different and, worse, tied to the whole religion of environmentalism.
It is time to open our eyes and truly reveal and unveil the ingenious solutions to such problems as oil spills, polution, climate change, poverty, and underdevelopment never knew exist. But first, we ordinary people must challenge the the philosopical and ideological doctrine of environmentalism or "eco-dogma" I call it before the trouble gets worse.
It is now time for work cut out even when a robust discussion starts.
Great article. I totally enjoyed it. Some obvious points are missing:
How long does it take before local fish/seafood catches from the affected area are safe for consumption? This is a key for the local economy in any affected area.
Land based spills are not considered. Most commentators state industry spills way more on land every year in Nigeria alone than was released in Florida. Persistence on land is a bigger problem for the industry and local population - a lot less dilution.
Wind farms kill 10,000 - 40,000 birds per year in the USA. By way of comparison 4 million domestic cats in Wisconsin kill an estimated 40 million birds per year (http://wildlife.wisc.edu/extension/catfly3.htm). There are an estimated 40 million cats roaming around outdoors in the USA, so potentially 400 million birds being killed annually in the USA.
The article is a poor attempt to diminish the environmental impact of oil spills. It does this by trivializing it as being not much different than other environmental impacts to nature induced by humans. Oil spills, in reality, are just one more assault on the ecosystem by the fossil fuel consumption we humans continuously crave.
The last paragraph is somewhat disingenuous in that it references an article written almost 5 years ago about an outdated wind farm. New wind generators are far less likely to impact birds than the older designs. House cats, a human introduced predator, kill millions of song birds each year, not to mention power lines, other man made structures, habitat loss and pesticides. Wind power is way down on the list.
Being glib is not a virtue, as far as I am concerned, and the author would benefit from a little more humility.
"This spill has already killed tens of thousands of birds. Your flip comparison to bird killing makes me suspect this entire article is full of crap."
Got a source?
But wind farms kill birds of prey far more effectively than cars or cats of windows ever do. Besides, by the same logic one would argue that oil spills are nothing to worry about: that's not my point. My point is that per joule of energy, wind farms kill more birds than oil spills and single out the rare raptors. Matt
Perhaps Gary Baxley must accept humility with feelings before something goes wrong with the "eco-dogma" I mentioned earlier.
Undobtedly, new wind power generators are safe for birds while ensuring a stable energy supply, but there is no guarantee of providing social & economic development as well as protecting and conserving the environment, and many more. I say it is rather complex indeed.
Please refer to any source for explanation. Think wisely and, please, play it safe.
It is time for ordinary people in the U.S. to take action in challenging the ideological, philosopical notions of environmentalism while undertake a cleanup drive that will going to be a long process.
Time for work cut out, OK?
Have you considered the risk associated with drilling from a floating rig to a point a mile deep? The complexity of such a task is pretty enormous. To assume, as everyone did, that everything was under control, is not rational. Accidents happen because humans can calculate only so well and the unexpected occurs whether they like it or not. This may be hubris, but I don't call it incompetence. In competence is not knowing how to do your job. They seem to have a much better idea of how to do it that anyone else so far.
For you to call their actions "cavalier incompetence" is cavalier arrogance. It seems that an arm-chair quarterback is not required to accept that fact that not everything can be controlled and that the inability to assert absolute control of the uncontrollable is grounds to demonize the humans who were merely human.
I believe BP has gone above and beyond the call of duty in working to rectify this accident and its consequences. I think you should give some thought to crediting them for their efforts. They may be risking their existence to "do the right thing." I would agree with demonizing them if they tried to avoid responsibility but they have not and it's past time for you and others to note that.
- Patrick Crawford
Ridley's arguments that cleanup frequently does more harm than good, and that environmental damage from spills is minimal, is refuted by the very supporting evidence he cites. From the Exxon Valdez spill Wikipedia entry *cited by Ridley*:
"Thousands of animals died immediately; the best estimates include 100,000 to as many as 250,000 seabirds, at least 2,800 sea otters, approximately 12 river otters, 300 harbor seals, 247 bald eagles, and 22 orcas, as well as the destruction of billions of salmon and herring eggs."
Almost 20 years after the spill, a team of scientists at the University of North Carolina found that the effects are lasting far longer than expected.[24] The team estimates some shoreline Arctic habitats may take up to 30 years to recover.
Despite the extensive cleanup attempts, less than ten percent of the oil was recovered and a study conducted by NOAA determined that as of early 2007 more than 26 thousand U.S. gallons (22,000 imp gal; 98,000 L) of oil remain in the sandy soil of the contaminated shoreline, declining at a rate of less than 4% per year.
That sounds like a freaking disaster to me. Is Ridley being funded by the oil companies now?
"According to the most recent data, wind operations in the Altamont Pass kill approximately 7,300 to 9,600 birds each year, including as many as 94 golden eagles, 477 American kestrels, 433 red-tailed hawks, and 718 burrowing owls. Species such as the golden eagle, red-tailed hawk, and the burrowing owl are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which makes any killing of the birds a violation of federal law."
http://www.wind-watch.org/news/2010/02/05/wind-turbines-continue-to-kill...
Quite amazing really.
So far so good. It is excessive politics over oil spill, especially concerning BP's fate of its operations in the Gulf of Mexico, that have gone too far - or worse, some people are straying away from what the Hippocratic Oath says: "First, do no harm."
Sadly, I guess they never learn from the Oath. Maybe they are misunderstanding the point to where it began a few months ago in the US.
It is better for them to maintain humility, for as long as anyone else can take action to tackle the troubling aspect of the ideological and philosopical meaning of an altruist motive (and bias) towards environmentalsm.
Some people will have their work cut out. Otherwise, the meaning of such a disaster will arouse misunderstanding among us ordinary people.
It's time for someone to tell the truth to rest of the people what is on his or her mind. It is far from perfect, I would say, but it is important to stay calm and keep the tension down. Can they agree with anybody else? It is up to them.
Let's begin by recognizing one point of agreement seemingly held in common by all commenting here, human activities measurably, quantitatively, impact our eco-system. The scale and concentration of a given activity (cat ownership, off-shore oil drilling) result in different balances between positive and negative effects; they often require different cost/benefit analysis. Here is where disagreements arise and apples are mistaken for oranges.
If I landscape in a way that encourages and supports small birds and animals with food, water, and shelter materials and my cat kills a few chickadee and chipmunks each year has my impact been positive or negative? Is it possible to know whether the food and water resulted in more successfully hatched offspring such that the cat merely moderated the level of gain? Taken on a case-by-case basis attempting to understand a homeowner's impact on the environment may seem hopelessly silly. But the aggregate results of millions of us making such decisions about cat ownership ... or using petrochemical pesticides and herbicides on our lawns ... make these important areas for considered discussion.
Then, there are those human activities that achieve their impact importance through concentration, like BP's deepwater well leak and the subsequent human activities taken to mitigate the leak's negative effects. Is the BP spill simply yet another specific case of offshore drilling activities releasing oil and gas into the waters of the planet, which goes on all the time, if less dramatically and with smaller individual (if not aggregate) impacts? Well, yes. Do various natural forces (microbes, sunlight) act in ways that, over time, serve to somewhat reverse certain observable negative effects caused by man-created oil pollution being introduced to a given eco-system? No doubt. Are the BP leak and the various efforts to mitigate (or hide) the effects on the Gulf, therefore, getting too much attention? I don't think so.
The Gulf "dead zone", largely the result of home use of lawn care petrochemicals, may well be as great, or greater, a threat to the Gulf's eco-system and the region's economy. Yet, the BP leak (which remains on-going, if finally under some semblance of control) and the use of highly toxic dispersants to "moderate" it are on a scale and in a location that makes this an unprecedented event. Anyone claiming to know what the full range of effects are going to be, how long they will last, and how far from the point of origin the effects will reach is merely speculating. Is it prudent to assume there will be little or no long-term negative effects on the eco-system and regional economy given what we know about similar past events? Absolutely not!
Count me among those who think it is extravagant folly to put unlimited faith in the resiliency of nature as man persists in introducing ever more petrochemicals, plastics, and other un-natural waste into the system. We must learn to respect the limits of the natural system and work within them, rather than adopting the hubristic attitude that anything man can devise must, by definition, be an improvement on nature or is somehow apart from nature. This essay is little more than a plea to ignore common sense, and our own five senses, and instead accept some highly Irrational Optimism about how, if we'd all just ignore what is taking place in the Gulf and get back to the business of filling our gas tanks and shopping then BP could let the currents take the problem "away" and get back to making obscene profits.
<a href="http://www.googlestore-tshirt.com/">google tshirt</a>
Please respect common sense on your own merit, too, CWW. Otherwise, it may lose hope on anything it can to protect & conserve the environment in the event of a tragedy like what happened to the Gulf of Mexico a few months back.
Respecting the limits of the natural system and work with them? Fine!
Accepting common sense? Also fine, I say!
But be careful what you are wish for, CWW, and be wise (and respectful) to ordinary people around the world such as me.
And be warned of too much politics, for goodness sake! It's hurtful and even unfair to think what is going to happen.
Now be safe (and be sane, too).
Matt and Matt's readers -
Not to dismiss the tragedy of tens - or hundreds - of thousands of birds dying via oil spills and wind turbines (as most reports seem to say), but there is some evidence that even those tragic numbers are dwarfed by the tens or hundreds of *millions* of birds that are killed by buildings, power lines, cars and communications towers in the US each year.
(This 2001 report from the National Wind Coordinating Committee which has a lot of those numbers - http://www.west-inc.com/reports/avian_collisions.pdf - has a bias of its own to be sure, but it's pretty well researched - and the American Bird Conservancy seems to agree with at least some of its harrowing numbers.)
As has been commented, birds do die in collisions with wind turbines and with quite visible effect if you happen to be near the wind turbine. Birds also die due to air pollution emitted by coal and other power plants. Considering these effects, Benjamin Sovacool estimated "wind farms and nuclear power stations are responsible each for between 0.3 and 0.4 fatalities per gigawatt-hour (GWh) of electricity while fossil-fueled power stations are responsible for about 5.2 fatalities per GWh."
See http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2009.02.011
Hi, Matt,
It is very nice post, Matt; I couldn't agree more.
Do you remember me, I am Jeff, we met at NY, but
now I have moved to Seattle and start a new business
http://www.googlestore-tshirt.com
Good luck, Matt, miss you very much.
Jeff
the cool to see your article again.
Matt Ridley, it is grateful to see your article again. But be warned of growth skeptics and other sworn enemies who are threatening to brainwash against ordinary people, including me.
It is time to get things started in challenging those philosopical & ideological idiots in lab coats, tie-and-jackets, military unforms, etc.