The Bad Oil
‘Deepwater Horizon’
Considering the oxymoronic name for the ruptured oil well head that’s converting the Gulf of Mexico and the southern US coastline into a filthy, tarry sump pit I wondered how the good folks at BP penned the perished platforms moniker. Of course, at that depth in the ocean there is no light, so no horizon could possibly be seen. Pedantic, maybe but IMHO this aptly sums up the myopic petroleum end game for me.
Imagine a pipe pumping oil into an official sized olympic pool … Deepwater Horizon is spewing forth oil like a ruptured spleen into our ocean at a rate that would fill a gold meddle pond every 3 days, easily. (Revision: May 14 - 50,000 barrels a day new estimate … that’s more than 3 olympic pools a day)
Put another way, the 5000 barrels a day that BP is pissing into the waters south of New Orleans is equivalent to what Afghanistan was consuming every day in 2006. Same-Same. (Revision: May 14 - 50,000 barrels a day new estimate … that’s how much oil Australia uses a day)
So, obvious ironies noted, this is a tragic event on so many levels and aside from the glib economic metrics touted by media and economists are we any closer to getting a picture on what this catastrophe equates to us ecologically?
Long answer, no. Short answer, no. But to put it into a terrestrial perspective, if the spill occurred in Melbourne this would be its current extent in May 2010.
Image generated courtesy of: http://paulrademacher.com/oilspill/
This is the bad oil, and there seems to be a lot of it getting splashed around these days towards Baton Rouge.
Even Kieren Perkins in his prime wouldn’t have been able to out swim such an expanding black tide and I’ll be first to choke on that dry and chalky pill of hypocrisy and hazard to add …
Deepwater Horizon sucks … big time.
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