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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

There are some extremely sensitive habitats up north. A spill could be a disaster for some endangered species.

This might be true in an absolute sense, but I'm really skeptical that it's true in a meaningful relative sense, because nobody has ever listed (to my knowledge) environmental habitats or biomes which are not sensitive.

Like, if someone said "the Aleutians are extremely sensitive, but the Marianas are an OK place to have an oil spill all things equal" I'd grant the former more weight.

And if the the counter is "all environments are sensitive" well OK, great, but that doesn't really help us make decisions in the real world.

It certainly can be meaningful (whether or not it is in this case). Obviously oil spills are devastating to any habitat, but some habitats are home to a wider variety of (and more critically) endangered wildlife and fauna than others. An oil spill in the Gowanus Canal, while terrible, would be far less meaningful than an oil spill in a much more pristine environment because the place is already mostly toxic (although not nearly as bad as it was in the past).

I think that's a cop-out.

Of course environments which we've already denuded of all ecology are more expendable. Can you name a pristine (or at least, not-sterilized) natural environment which it's relatively OK to destroy relative to the polar arctic?

On land, I guess we would agree that an oil spill in a pristine rain-forest is worse than a pristine desert.

If you need a quantitative measure, one can use e.g. the number of difference species per area (biodiversity) to know the area where an accident has the least impact. Or maybe the number of endangered species.

Granted, computing these metrics are however quite difficult. However, what is easy to measure from space is the amount of chlorophyll in the surface water of the ocean. Besides coastal areas, the Arctic stands out as relatively chlorophyll rich.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AYool_SEAWIFS_annual...

> On land, I guess we would agree that an oil spill in a pristine rain-forest is worse than a pristine desert.

Doubtful depending on which desert. Many deserts have very unique and endangered wildlife.

But tropical rainforests have way more biomass per square km.

> If you need a quantitative measure, one can use e.g. the number of difference species per area (biodiversity) to know the area where an accident has the least impact.

The arctic ranks very low by this measure.

The parent comment said:

>This might be true in an absolute sense, but I'm really skeptical that it's true in a meaningful relative sense, because nobody has ever listed (to my knowledge) environmental habitats or biomes which are not sensitive.

I listed a habitat which was, "not sensitive" in response to his comment that, "because nobody has ever listed (to my knowledge) environmental habitats or biomes which are not sensitive." You could list thousands of habitats and biomes around the Unites States that are "not sensitive" without doing much research at all. It is a falsehood that has to be debunked because the implication is that industry should be able to build pipelines and send ships through any area that they want because all of these ecosystems are equally important, so that the risk of a spill is all the same regardless of the location. The truth is that some pristine areas and ecosystems are much more important than others (even ones that haven't been polluted and denuded). Suggesting that it is okay to despoil some of the most untouched, pristine and diverse ecosystems in the country just because it is also bad to despoil other areas is the worst sort of false equivalency.

> The truth is that some pristine areas and ecosystems are much more important than others (even ones that haven't been polluted and denuded)

OK, so which ones (that haven't been polluted and denuded) are less important?

I'm genuinely looking for an answer here. Nobody has ever been willing to volunteer one to me.

> This might be true in an absolute sense, but I'm really skeptical that it's true in a meaningful relative sense,

It's thousands of (square) kilometres of land virtually untouched by humans. Even in the skies. I'd wager that other enormous remote areas (Sahara, Amazon, Himalayas, etc) have significantly more human intrusion. Even Antartica, due to its various research stations.

The only other place that I can think of that is equally sizeable and equally untouched is around the Northeastern Passage. Basically, the only parts of the planet that are almost impossible for humans to get to.

So that is quite different from just about every other possible habitat on this rock.

I think you might be mistaken about Antarctica. It's a whole continent, 40% larger than Europe, there are bases on its edges, and Amundsen-Scott at the pole, but the rest of the continent is basically empty and unvisited, and the interior is extremely hostile to life, the penguins make it look easier than it is to survive there. So unlike, say, New Zealand, where when humans arrived they brought rats which decimated the wildlife [and then white people brought even better rats which made it even worse] our impact is very limited.

In July, mid-winter, there's a skeleton crew for the entire interior. Only the Americans, with too much money and a prime research facility (the only place on Earth that is "dry" land and effectively not spinning) operate a winter base here, the Russians used to have one at a less interesting location but they decided that it's too expensive and of too little value and so they only staff it during the summer now.

Different levels of sensitivity?

Don’t ship oil through it then, ship food and consumer goods. Demand for oil is going to drop a lot in 20 years anyway.

Cargo ships carry their own fuel, which can still leak.

They run on some really nasty shit too.

There's multiple orders of magnitude in difference between the amount of fuel a ship carries, and the amount of oil a tanker can hold. Think measured in hundreds of thousands versus tens of millions of gallons.

If we start accounting for every single externality for every solution for a problem we come up with, we might as well stop leaving the house at all.

The Fremantle Highway was burning and at risk of sinking in the Wadden Sea, off the Dutch coast of just a week ago. This would have severely damaged the entire habitat - and that was a car carrier only. Spills from minor incidents are a concern as well, especially in habitats that are important, slow to recover and already under a lot of pressure.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66393507

A fuel oil spill from a cargo ship is not a trivial externality to be ignored! Yes, it's a smaller order of magnitude than an oil tanker. But it's not de minimis.

Long term the industry seems to be moving toward ammonia fuel.

https://spectra.mhi.com/how-ammonia-will-fuel-the-ships-of-a...

Algae: “please spill your ammonia fuel k tx”

That's really a throw away answer. Is there something concrete you want to share? As written it just sounds like a lazy excuse for not engaging with something, which could have been done by not commenting. I don't understand what the point of even writing it was.

The irony.

You seem frustrated with the environmentalist perspective. I think it's a common sensibility to just want to engage with engineering problem and theory craft solutions, don't let ant pesky things like conservation slow the discourse down, it's ballast!

The fact is we're all playing at our ideals here. This is a message board, we dont decide policy. Consider having some more empathy for people who prioritize different things than you do.

I don't see how it's a perspective. It's the equivalent of "that's probably like, bad for the environment or something", which is the exact opposite of "curious conversation". If people want to have an adult conversation about the environmental negatives of a northwest passage shipping, cool. A shallow dismissal like the post I replied to isn't that, it destroys intelligent conversation. People are entitled to their opinions of course, I can see people didn't like my comment.

If you go on the attack immediately, that shuts the door on most intelligent conversations. If you re-read what Sp332 said, and your response, do you think there's much incentive for Sp332 to "share something concrete"? Do you believe that, in a vacuum, your comment looks like it came from someone who would engage with an alternative opinion in good faith?

The fact that you're talking to me now makes me think you might engage in good faith! Ya built a wall to climb with your opener though. Every word of it reads like you're telling them to shut up.

It's annoyingly content-free, but since I didn't have time to look up details at the time, I thought I could at least bring up some of the stakes involved. I didn't try to convince anyone that shipping up there was a bad idea. It's just a nudge so interested people have a direction to look in.

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