Decaying Tanker Has 4 Times the Amount of Oil as the Exxon Valdez | Hacker News Reader

Decaying Tanker Has 4 Times the Amount of Oil as the Exxon Valdez

scitechdaily.com

188 pointssamizdis72 comments

It’s interesting that the article does not attribute responsibility. Ultimately, that tanker was under the control of a group of decision-makers and liability should be attributed. I say this, because what pollution is in economic terms is the movement of cost from one person’s balance sheet to another’s - whether by hook or by crook. We do ourselves a disfavour when we don’t identify how liability moves.

According to an article in the current edition of Private Eye (a UK magazine):

The Safer has sat off our [Yemen] coast, abandoned and rapidly decaying, for the last five years. Our government-in-exile ... claims ownership of the vessel."

Private Eye is one of the few publications which identifies this type of detail. I’m a regular buyer. Thanks for sharing.

I'll add some more from the article, then, repeating the initial quote in full and then carrying on.

The Safer has sat off our coast, abandoned and rapidly decaying, for the last five years. Our official government-in-exile, led by the useless President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, claims ownership of the vessel but is squabbling with the Houthis over who gets its load of rapidly degrading crude, estimated to be worth $30m. To make matters worse, Donald Trump is thinking of officially declaring the Houthis as terrorists, just as they were on the verge of allowing UN access to the ship.

(This was from PE No. 1537, cover date 18 December 2020.)

My impression is that the decision makers have become very good at creating ambiguity for this exact purpose, there is even a wiki article for 'diffusion of responsibility"

For instance McLaren company has a couple thousand kegal entities sprincled around the world, and its is a relatively recent phenomena

I’ll look up that Wikipedia page. Thanks.

The wikipedia article [1] provides the history. It was used for storage by the government and then fell into the hands of Houthi forces before deteriorating.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSO_Safer

Presumably it’s not hard to read the second paragraph, read that access is controlled by Houthi fighters and Google the name

It’s a science website not a political one

There’s a difference between “control” and “ownership”. And attributing causation is not a political point, it’s a point of fact.

In the midst of a civil war, there's not much difference between the two.

Fair point.

Who controls property is not a political point?

Isn’t that exactly what the legal system is for?

I mean, while I somewhat agree with you, whether you conclude the owners are the Houthis or the Yemeni government, it doesn't really matter that much if a giant spill occurs, the damage will have been done, and trying to get something out of either the Houthis or the govt will be squeezing blood from a stone.

I don't think the goal would be to identify liability for this one scenario, but to establish a pattern of identifying liability for similar scenarios.

stop buying from them then

If you don't, someone else will.

Source: Iran

The damage will be beyond a balance sheet

Agreed, it just comes across as callous and inhumane to abstract the suffering of our fellow humans and other sentient beings out as merely a business cost.

A sadly common motif through, particularly on HN.

It was my comment and I’d like to reply to that specific point, elaborating my initial comment: a true balance sheet is beyond the purely financial. It covers natural capital and social capital too. It’s only the narrow contemporary understanding of balance sheet that means that so many costs (and gains) are hidden to us and therefore ignored. Part of society’s problem is the phoney baloney system of financial accounting that leaves so much unaccounted for. To refine my initial point: there will be many horrific costs to this mess. Some poor sod will end up paying the cost. If owners think they can escape full liability, they will continue to take risks because they can privatize the profit and socialize the costs.

> A true balance sheet is beyond the purely financial. It covers natural capital and social capital too.

> To refine my initial point: there will be many horrific costs to this mess. Some poor sod will end up paying the cost. If owners think they can escape full liability, they will continue to take risks because they can privatize the profit and socialize the costs.

Thank you for elaborating, I entirely concur with the sentiment of the above, even if we differ on terminology.

To refine my original my point too, please consider it a comment on the unfortunate connotations of using the term 'balance sheet' for this concept - without further information, it's unclear if it's being used in a purely business financial context or not.

Every man has a balance sheet associated with his person: a sum of all his assets and liabilities, burdens and obligations. It captures one’s true wealth (or poverty). A large part of its content can only be settled in the political realm. If it’s not a balance sheet, I don’t know what else to call it.

Sounds like poetry for accountants.

Which "owners" are you referring to? It appears that the ship was seized from the legal owners. There is no functioning government or court system there.

The responsibility is ours. The net downside of such a spill is so extreme that essentially any non-military action necessary to effect a successful extraction of the oil is likely to be worthwhile.

Given the tensions in the region, anything is risky. Perhaps the only ones who could pull it off are the Swiss, but that doesn't solve the question who will pay for the effort, and who will get whatever remains when the salvaged cargo and ship is sold off.

My personal wild guess: nothing will happen, the ship will break apart, no one will dare and try to contain it for fear of getting targeted by someone's warship or drone, and only the nations who can afford it will clean up their coasts.

The Swiss? They don't even have a navy as far as I know.

Realistically the only one who could do this is the US. But the US may not want to fight the Houthi, which would probably be necessary.

The US paid the Russians to help them secure their nuclear material in the greatest masterstroke of nonproliferation of all human history, we can do a similar thing with the Houthi. Everyone wins.

If a major food supply fails in the Middle East, we might see another mass-migration like that driven by the Syrian conflict.

Whether we like it or not, everything today is global.

Why is this a US responsibility? The UK, France, India, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Russia, and China are all closer and have significant naval forces which could reach that tanker.

Because we live on the planet and others haven't yet stepped up.

So on that basis you're willing to sign up US military personnel to risk their lives, and US taxpayers to foot the bill? The Yemeni littorals are an active combat zone.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/5497/us-destroyer-atta...

Agreed. And the owners billed.

Who are the owners?

Even military action to affect successful extraction is worthwhile.

Every thing has a cost. Everything. Its very simple calculus really. What will be the short-term, medium-term, and long-term damage in dollars and lives of allowing this ship to break apart?

What will be the equivalent of using military action - if necessary?

Either decision will cost dollars. Either decision will cost lives. We either pay up front, or we pay down the road, but we will pay. We need to determine the cheaper cost and steel ourselves to pay it.

And which countries should conduct that military action?

WTF was an oil tanker 7km out to sea being used as a storage facility for land oil? And downstream from a coral reef! This is not about offshore oil platforms. This is about oil from land wells pumped out for storage at sea. This should be illegal at an international level. Keep such oil on land where a spill is vastly less damaging and far easier to clean up.

This whole thing reads like a Captain Planet episode.

Remember when front month oil futures went negative? This is why.

We pumped too much oil and there is nowhere for it go. Eventually infrastructure fails

Then pump it back down to where we found it.

Probably can't do that. If it was fracked, the area where it was found is now full of a denser slurry of water and minimally-regulated hazardous chemicals[1].

1. https://www.fractracker.org/resources/oil-and-gas-101/fracki...

and even for oil that's not extracted by fracking, oil is still mostly leaving the reservoir on its own (though you have then to pump it to the surface)

it is cheaper to just move around a FSO than build up the necessary infrastructure. And once the wells have dried up, the FSO could have been moved elsewhere at least

The article is based on the following two lines in the paper/article Science, Diplomacy, and the Red Sea’s Unique Coral Reef: It’s Time for Action [1]

> The reefs are also threatened by potential oil spillage from oil pipelines and offshore storage facilities. In the southern-most section of the Red Sea the SAFER tanker, a floating oil storage and offloading unit (FSO) anchored off the coast of Yemen, holds 1.1 million barrels of oil and has begun to leak its cargo, a consequence of political and military conflicts in the area which hamper remediation and international intervention (World Maritime News, 2019).

FSO Safer [2] "is a floating oil storage and offloading vessel that is moored in the Red Sea north of the Yemeni city of Al Hudaydah."

> In March 2015, in the early days of the Yemeni Civil War, Safer fell into the hands of Houthi forces when they took control of the coastline surrounding her mooring.

> In late November, the United Nations and Houthi leadership reached an agreement to allow a UN-led team access to Safer by January 2021 for purposes of inspection and repair.

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2020.0009...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSO_Safer

This is where an international navy staffed by blue helmets comes in and grabs the vessel, right? Right??

Does the UN still exist?

This is why we should work to transform the UN Peacekepeers into a militarized world police, composed of volunteers from countries all over the world. While simultaneously drawing down and disarming the world’s militaries.

UN inspectors would be allowed into any member country, to inspect potential human rights violations, nuclear and chemical weapons development, and large environmental hazards. They need to have teeth to enforce things.

The Peacekeepers should be a decentralized organization with only three main rules:

1. Your only job is to defuse existing conflicts and violence, and force warring sides to resort to using courts and diplomacy.

2. Anyone in the organization found breaking the first rule (using force to take sides or escalate a conflict, like Norriega) will be put on trial and executed if found guilty.

3. Any alumnus of the organization breaking the first rule is likewise hunted down, captured and put on trial. The only difference is, if they are not on active duty, they aren’t even empowered to carry out Rule #1 fully but must call on-duty reinforcements.

Don’t like it - don’t join the peacekeepers. Every cadet would be trained in these three rules, so no one can take over the peacekeepers and rule the world.

And there is a set of rules that all countries can abide by:

4. If there is a sectarian conflict between groups A, B and C in a region, only peacekeepers from countries and backgrounds with no serious stake in who wins can intervene. Others are sanctioned / excluded from that conflict etc.

5. The peacekeepers wear a specific and unmistakable white-themed uniform. Anyone in any country caught impersonating their uniform would constitute a criminal offense, like impersonating a police officer.

6. They all wear body cameras, they present themselves and warn any armed combatants or terrorists to put down their weapons or they will shoot to kill. They are also able to pre-emtively kill in certain situations where they can prove massive harm (eg a bomb) and that a warning could have allowed it to happen.

This monopoly on force would probably lead to a net reduction in harm, assuming it can’t be taken over or corrupted.

>> This is why we should work to transform the UN Peacekepeers into a militarized world police, composed of volunteers from countries all over the world. While simultaneously drawing down and disarming the world’s militaries.

It’s honestly terrifying to me that anyone thinks that this is a sound idea that would lead to a better world in the long run.

If there is anything that human history has proven, it’s that you cannot prevent corruption and that the centralization of power only further incentivizes corruption.

Also, how would one effectively verify that militaries were disarming? History is littered with examples of militaries not actually doing so when they said they would.

While I am likewise enthralled by this general idea, it hinges on rule 2 and 3 being executed in practice. My prediction is that that part would either never happen or deteriorate quickly. Instead we'd get strong internal loyalty above all else, as we are seeing with the police in many countries.

Upvoted but disagree strongly.

My feeling is it will be corrupted, and the only thing worse than multiple dangerous governments is one single dangerous government.

In fact I'd probably rather have every country introduce 2nd amendment rules than accept this.

I don't get why you're downvoted, I agree with your idea. It's where we should and must move towards anyway, the time of nations squabbling is over if we want to tackle the crises of the future: climate, water access, food access, poverty, droughts, space exploration, and if they're turning out to be real, dealing with non-terran species.

The only open question I have - who decides upon engaging? The UN Security Council which should deal with issues is effectively gridlocked as the Russians and Chinese veto everything.

The UN General Assembly isn't that much trustworthy either, given how many countries would vote an instant Yes on the question if Israel should be sanctioned.

In the end we need some form of "global democracy" with strong protections of individual rights.

Well, in my vision (after going many rounds with a friend designing this), the whole enterprise would be decentralized, and as much as possible rules #2 and #3 would be drilled into the new recruits, and there would be term limits etc. To make it as hard as possible to take over the organization.

As for who makes a decision to go into a country ... well, if you're squads of people from Peru and Japan etc. and there's escalating sectarian violence in Iraq, then you are welcome to go there. It's all decentralized. It's sort of like "actors" in Erlang, each running their own program and enforcing on others.

The only thing that's sort of more centralized would be the due process for those peacekeepers or groups of peacekeepers who violate rule #1. Besides this, peacekeepers would try to screen out peacekeepers who travel to an area where they are found to have a significant stake in the outcome.

Of course, this force would not need any weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons, etc. All those could be gradually destroyed by the various nations. They would, however, have crowd control non-lethal weaponry.

My point is that from a utilitarian point of view, it's even better to kill all the belligerents early (after warning them) than let the thing escalate into, say, the Russian Revolution where 20 million people died in fighting. Just the chilling effect alone that "violence only backfires" (analogue of "crime doesn't pay") will deter many from joining the escalation. As opposed to now where the US "world police" merely takes one side and arms them to demolish the other.

I don't know that I agree with your idea, but I find it intriguing, thanks for giving me something to think about.

What a horrible, stupid idea. No powerful country would ever go along with it.

> What a horrible, stupid idea. No powerful country would ever go along with it.

The fact that, currently, the powerful countries of the world would not go along with it does not make the idea stupid / horrible.

For what it's worth, something like the UN even existing and many nations having signed arms control treaties was unthinkable prior to WW2.

So what you are saying is that to win a conflict a country must simply be sneaky and fast. And then accuse the other side of resorting to violence when they protest?

For example Russia and Crimea - Russia took it over with little violence, but to undo that requires violence, which your rules do not permit.

1. Where would this military police force take its legitimacy from ? The only legitimacy there is is when people get together and agree to institute a force to police them. That means democracy. Since the UN is currently very far removed from the will of the individual citizen of the World, I think your proposal would require a deep change of governance of the UN to include more democratic processes.

2. This proposal assumes that there is a single set of values and rules that can be applied to everyone. I don't think this is actually true. The world currently allows several value systems to exist simultaneously, which can all be valid. Your proposal would raise a single value system above all others. How do we chose which one ?

3. The further the government is removed from the citizens, the less it cares about their actual needs. Special measures would need to be taken to make sure that police force actually serves the interests of the people. I don't think the current forms of democracy actually work in that case, when so many people and cultures are involved, you can't be satisfied with a majority rule.

The idea of concentrating more power into one set of hands right now strikes me as absolutely insane.

This is a hilarious post. A pipe dream that has nothing to do with the topic at hand

You are basically describing a global empire, under false pretenses, but you are not exactly explaining who you are and where you are coming from. It's important for people to know who rules over them.

Not an empire. Just a world police force that is used to defuse any flares up of violence and force people to use their local courts and diplomacy. It doesn’t set any rules globally for other countries.

I can think of nothing worse than rewarding the UN peacekeepers with more power and weapons after they've been repeatedly exposed as child sex abusers.

A UN blue hat more often than not means they're coming to your poor country to rape children and trade food aid for sexual favors, not that they're there to help.

If anyone was as curious as me to see pics, here's a condition report from 2019.

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/energysource/onboard-t...

Deepwater Horizon spilled over 10 times as much oil as the Exxon spill and the affected ecosystem is more comparable to what’s at risk here than the one in Alaska. Most people reading this may be too young to even remember the Exxon spill. Deepwater seems like a better comparison.

This is a fascinating article on that:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/bp-oil-sp...

It appears that this is the ship on Google Earth: https://earth.app.goo.gl/?link=https://earth.google.com/web/...

Article in Frontiers in Marine Science cited in the SciTechDaily piece.

"A Closing Window of Opportunity to Save a Unique Marine Ecosystem"

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2020.6157...

Tankers need to be equipped with external ports on each side for easy ways to drain them in the event of shipwreck.

So more potential leak points? You're really optimizing for the wrong problem there.

Houthis (backed by Iran) control it. Good luck.

FTA: "The New York Times reported on November 24 that the Houthis will grant permission to a United Nations (UN) team to board the Safer to inspect and repair the vessel in the near future."

So the inspection hasn't actually been granted. And while the ship is floating in the open sea loaded with flammable cargo it's nearly impossible to conduct the sort of structural repairs that would be necessary to stop the oil spills.

From the article it seems like they're allowing a UN team to come in and investigate/repair, and I hope they'll be allowed to do what is necessary. This would be a good moment for the UN to demonstrate its value when it is often criticised as ineffective.

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