14-year-long oil spill in Gulf of Mexico may be worst in U.S. history | Hacker News Reader

14-year-long oil spill in Gulf of Mexico may be worst in U.S. history

washingtonpost.com

Yes, oil in water is bad. But there's no scale - how does this 100, 300, or 700 barrels per day compare to natural seeps?

"In the Gulf of Mexico, there are more than 600 natural oil seeps that leak between one and five million barrels of oil per year, equivalent to roughly 80,000 to 200,000 tonnes." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_seep with reference)

I think we really need to figure out where all this oil goes.

For another yardstick, deepwater horizon was estimated at 210 million barrels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill.

Even if it is 1000 barrels per day, Taylor has a while to go (575 years...)

But why add to it?

Not saying we should add to it on purpose, but if an artificial leak is only the equivalent of 1% of the natural leaks, then it's probably not going to have any serious impact on the environment.

Still, if a company drills a hole, they should allocate the funds to cap it properly. Making that mandatory would sure help with situations like this.

Right, but claiming a thing is a planet/ecosystem defining disaster when in context it's just a bad thing from which the world will inevitably recover is just scaremongering

I think it's more like I'm trying to teach my 5yr old. When you make a mess, you get to clean it up. Simple as that

It was estimated at 210 million gallons, not barrels.

The natural oil seeps are larger than Deepwater Horizon, every year.

Yes, thanks for the correction - 210 million gallons, or 4.9 million barrels. That estimate puts it at the top of the range of estimates I saw for natural seeps within the gulf of Mexico.

And that does put the upper range of Taylor estimates approaching the range of deepwater horizon total estimates.

We should charge oil companies an extra environmental tax and use it to pay for the cleanup. It should increase the price of oil, something more inline with the actual cost. The earth is our only home we cannot afford to f—k it up.

Instead we have federal maximums and corporate structures that prevent responsibility.

Not familiar with the details but that's too bad. Taylor Energy should be paying for all of it. And if that makes them insolvent, so be it. I can see maximums to put sanity around things like slip and fall lawsuits putting mom and pop operations out of business, but not something like this.

> slip and fall lawsuits putting mom and pop operations out of business

A sufficiently bad slip and fall can put the falling person out of employ-ability.

I've had the pleasure of slipping and falling, when a neighbourhood restaurant was cleaning their floors... In near-freezing weather. The soapy water ran out onto the (highly inclined street), and as soon as I stepped on it, I fell flat on my ass.

Now, since I'm a healthy twenty-something-year-old, I got up, cursed for a few minutes, and kept going. If I weren't, and were a manual laborer, that one fall could have left me seriously injured, and destitute.

I don't care that the perpetrator in question was a mom & pop shop. Negligent behavior can destroy a life.

I generally watch where I'm walking, particularly on highly inclined streets, and would recognize a soapy water covered slope and know that it might be slippery.

Are you saying they should have put up a sign to advise you that the street was wet and might be slippery? And it was their negligence that caused your fall, not your negligence to properly observe your surroundings?

> I generally watch where I'm walking, particularly on highly inclined streets, and would recognize a soapy water covered slope and know that it might be slippery.

> Are you saying they should have put up a sign to advise you that the street was wet and might be slippery? And it was their negligence that caused your fall, not your negligence to properly observe your surroundings?

Dumping water on a street in freezing weather without a sign is negligent. Would we be having this conversation if a kid slipped and fell in the same place? If you are making a place hazardous, it's generally on you to provide warning and failing to do so is negligent.

Dumping water in the middle of a street in freezing weather is different than your first post in which in near freezing weather, soapy water ran out into the street due to floor cleaning. Regardless, I can't subscribe to that line of thinking in either instance.

Every normal person is capable of assessing their environment and plotting a safe course through it. If you tripped over a curb, it wouldn't be the person that put the curb there's fault. You can't expect someone else to make your world safe for you. Your line of thinking is how a thief can sue when he gets injured breaking into your house -- you failed to make it safe for him [1][2]

Parents are responsible for the safety of their children, not random shop owners.

IANAL but I believe the legal standard that would be applied is reasonableness. Is it reasonable for a person, traversing a highly-inclined street, in freezing weather, to expect the street not to contain any frozen patches of water.

My stance is known -- I'm responsible for my and my children's safety, but I concede that your line of reason seems to be prevalent in society today.

There is a line of reasonableness that could be cross in which I would blame the other party. Ice on a street in freezing weather could be expected. A land mine would not be expected. Nor would a chunk of ice falling from an airplane. Those are situations in which I could reasonably find fault with another party.

[1] http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1985-11-17/news/03403900...

[2] https://www.overlawyered.com/2006/09/the-burglar-and-the-sky...

> Every normal person is capable of assessing their environment

I've walked up and down that sidewalk hundreds of times, in dry, wet, and cold conditions. I have never thought twice of walking down it in the rain.

From visual inspection, the water was not obviously soapy. All it looked like was a wet patch of sidewalk. It looked just fine to step on.

> IANAL but I believe the legal standard that would be applied is reasonableness. Is it reasonable for a person, traversing a highly-inclined street, in freezing weather, to expect the street not to contain any frozen patches of water.

It wasn't an ice slick, it hasn't rained or snowed in the past week, so the street was otherwise bone-dry. There was no indication that the situation was dangerous. I've never seen anyone else, before, or since, be stupid enough to dump a bunch of soap on that sidewalk, either, so its not exactly a common hazard.

It's not that bloody hard to run your business without creating a hazard to the public. I don't care if your revenue is a million, or a billion dollars a year. Get it right, and don't hurt people.

> It's not that bloody hard to run your business without creating a hazard to the public. I don't care if your revenue is a million, or a billion dollars a year. Get it right, and don't hurt people.

You mean make everything near you as safe as humanely possible so that people don't hurt themselves on it. Create so many rules and policies that it takes 3 days and 50 pages of documentation(in case you get sued anyways) to clean up a spill on isle 6.

What kind of sidewalk becomes slippery with soapy water? Most sidewalks are concrete and would not be slippery unless a very viscous substance were poured on them, and even then not for a long time. Sounds like maybe a defect in the finish of the sidewalk. The entity that installed a sidewalk with a surface that might become slippery, on a highly inclined grade, appears to be negligent as well. That's why I assumed ice, as it's the only thing that made sense.

Some people just can't accept that when bad things happen it isn't always someone else's fault.

But I know that a good portion of people hold your point of view, including my 12-year-old who is never at fault for anything. I pass no judgement on you and will just agree to disagree.

What's the evidence that would change the behavior of the oil companies? Like you said, it would just be passed on to the consumer as an increase in price. Which may result in a decrease in consumption, true, but in reality I feel like it would just hurt the poor.

The problem right now is that oil is artificially cheap because its costs are externalized to society at large. If you charged oil companies in line with the social cost of their product, two things would happen:

1. They would try and run cleaner than their competitors to reduce their margins.

2. Whatever costs are passed on to the customer would affect customer behavior, reducing energy usage or making low impact energy more attractive.

Yea, just another consumption tax, all of which is always paid by the consumer. And since the price doesn't discriminate by an individual consumer's income, it becomes in practice regressive. It would be great here if the individual companies could be better held liable as opposed to an across the board tax.

Consumption taxes are paid by declining demand (due to a price point movement) but in the case of an inelastic good that ends up being forced on the consumer. So in this specific case I think a tax would be a mistake and end up being regressive in practice, but adding a large tax on automobiles might be a good alternative, with the aim of slowly decreasing the demand side and encouraging alternate transportation...

Honestly though, the US could just start funding public transit properly so that the alternative isn't so dismal.

Individual companies will set up bankruptcy remote subsidiaries for each oil platform. Instead, they should be required to purchase insurance. Yes, this will increase the cost to produce where it is most risky. But isn't that the point?

The “It will be passed on to consumers” argument is debatable. Price is set at what the market will bear. If oil companies today could be more profitable by raising prices they would, regardless of their tax cost.

That assumes there is no competition. I don't know the oil market well enough, but if there is competition then you can't necessarily just raise prices to the maximum the market will bear. I'd assume there is some competition because when oil dips low enough they stop drilling new sites in ND as it is just more expensive to extract here (fracking).

Might I ask what do you think would change the behavior of any corporate bad actor effectively yet also preserving the legal cornerstone of the accused being innocent until proven guilty?

Require them to carry insurance instead. Companies with safer practices would pay less.

How about we just shut them down and seize their assets? There’s virtually no more capacity left for additional CO2 production as it is.

Who is this "we" that you refer to?

We, the people of the world, acting democratically through our governments via legislation, courts, and law enforcement.

No need to wait for elections. We can all agree to stop driving gas cars tomorrow.

hmm do u really know how eff'd up it is?

US Oil gets income subsidies some as great as 95% of income taxes not paid but given tax credits instead..no big Oil in US pays over 5% in income taxes

> The earth is our only home we cannot afford to f—k it up.

IMO this ship has sailed. It’s pretty clear society enjoys cheap stuff quite a bit more than anyone anticipated. The cost of the way we live is insane but we just like it too much.

That plus the fact we’ll all be dead in < 100 years and someone else is going to pay the price means that nothing meaningful is going to change.

I'm as disappointed in the Coast Guard as anyone in the story. I also don't understand why they were monitoring the spill instead of the EPA.

The USCG is charged with coordinating oil spill response under a law passed as a result of the Exxon Valdez disaster.

These days I’d trust the the coast guard more to be less political.

I had no idea there are over 3000 active oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico!

It's one of the reasons why US and mexico are major oil producers.

The BP oil spill released more total oil in just a few months, it was a real disaster (estimated @ 4.9 million barrels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill#Vo...). And the dispersants that they used to hide/sink some of the spill were even more toxic then the oil itself.

Any fish that come from that area? Slightly sketched out about the fish I'm eating now.

Man, I live here and feel bad for the people of Louisiana. The gulf is turning into a giant wasteland/superfund site. Such a corrupt state.

Businesses in the U.S. that don't want to be regulated often speak of the benefits of capitalism. But actually these businesses are not capitalistic at all. They are only profitable because of socialism: They are keeping the profits, and socializing the losses.

Brilliant and so true.

Im to the point with Americans and their voting Republican and pro-business and anti-environment and anti-socialism.... where I think the government should not fix anything and just let it destroy the place where the disaster happened.

After a few places got absolutely destroyed people would start paying attention.

Dumb people are incapable of learning unless they get burned on the stove a few times.

They were talking in the article about the Atlantic being the next target of the oil companies....

> Dumb people are incapable of learning unless they get burned on the stove a few times.

I'm having a hard time not applying your statement to the entire human race. Not that I think we're all "dumb people", but we all seem to be exhibiting a serious lack of concern for the environment and the planet's future.

Also called "learning the hard way." Maybe we do need to get burned a bit to learn how to take better care of ourselves.

i think the problem is, as intuitive as that sounds, people are good at finding scapegoats and blaming others instead of looking in the mirror, and issues as large as those are so abstract at some point idk... i don’t know what the answer is exactly but i think it starts with ‘edu’ and ends with ‘cation’... just my observation....

but maybe you are right... i just shudder at how bad it would have to get for people to notice.

[edit] misspelling (thanks ipad)

Sad but true. What a f* up situation where corruption and legal bribery enables this. Don‘t get me wrong, i still think some form of capitalism is still the best to make human endavour possible, but the human nature on the other hand cripples it to nothing but moneymaking for a selected few and misery for the rest.

I don't think I've ever met a socialist who would define socialism in that way.

To be clear, I agree with you about the fact that many businesses (especially in the energy extraction industry) can only make my by externalizing many of the real costs of production.

Why feel bad for people that choose their own fate?

Because its the rich who choose; the masses of normal people are stuck

You say that as if the people of Louisiana would have actually had a say in it or been able to stop this if only they would have voted differently. Unfortunately, most of this stuff is coming from federal agencies. Even if all of louisiana voted on a unified front against this, it would matter little.

Louisiana has 8 electoral college votes. 6 seats in the house and 2 seats in the senate.

This isn't enough to get any change done on its own. It doesn't take much to overpower Louisiana's voice.

Not to mention that they can't control the entire gulf to protect its share of the shore, nor does the state have the resources to actually do much about it (IIRC, there is a lot of poverty in the state).

They don't choose their own fate. Gerrymandering and voter suppression is very real. That's very true in the southern states, where minority rule is the norm.

This is an important comment. Also ignorant populace easily influenced by propaganda.

They don’t - the state environment regulator goes to the oil and gas lobby industry dinner and says “Jump? How high?” With a Democratic governor.

Every time the people have tried to choose a fate other than deference to the extractive industry, they are overruled.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-oakland-port-coal-2018...

And beaten and arrested and ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_Access_Pipeline

Paywall. What does the article say?

It says "use incognito mode."

Between 300 and 700 barrels of oil per day have been spewing from a site [...] since 2004, when an oil-production platform owned by Taylor Energy sank in a mudslide triggered by Hurricane Ivan. Many of the wells have not been capped, and federal officials estimate that the spill could continue through this century. [...] The company has argued that there’s no evidence to prove any of the wells are leaking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfhZB7rQ7iA

Archive.is to the rescue:

https://archive.is/EcCkU

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