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Comment by airbreather | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, that's not good, but also for something of that scale 10 years is not much.

Remember, oil is thought to start as the remains of previously living things.

By the definitions some people apply to supplements or medication, it's "natural".

Just too much, all at once in one place, and possibly some elements normally found as traces are excessively concentrated, eg mercury.

Given enough time the localised impact will diminish, as with all hygiene related concepts, it's all about dilution and/or dispersion.

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Congratulations, you have made the most corporate bootlicker post here. And that's saying something.

Not really seeing how you could get that at all from what I said, but sort of typical of the sort of surface thinking prevalent in most "save the planet" crusaders.

There is no way in the world you didn't benefit from use of some kind of hydrocarbons yesterday, most indirectly, but entirely possibly a significant part directly. It's basically unavoidable.

So how would you feel about paying 3 or 5 times for the price to reduce the chance of this happening by maybe a factor of 10? It is basically impossible to remove all risk, other than to not do it at all.

I was actually having more of a dig at the "natural" supplements crowd, maybe it was too subtle for you.

History is also informative, look at the Ixtoc 1 spill, which most people have never heard of before.

BTW, having taken the moral high ground, what are you personally doing or working on to improve the current status quo? You might be surprised what I do.

A pretty simplistic description of the situation, but not wholly untrue. Oil has naturally leaked out of the ground and ocean floor for millions of years [1]. Granted, man made oil spills are still bad for the environment as they release significant quantities of oil at once.

1. https://www.whoi.edu/oil/natural-oil-seeps

Technically not untrue isn’t a great argument. If someone stretched the other way and said its fine to fill the entire ocean with oil because its natural we’d find that equally absurd.

Ten years isn’t much in the scale of the earth, but I’m not the earth, just a human living on it. I’d like manmade problems to not outlast the men responsible for them, even if the earth itself can wait.

I would say you are living earth itself.

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