Slick Information and Slight of Hand

http://www.livescience.com/environment/090520-natural-oil-seeps.html

"During the course of the seven years I played scenes with an oil slick, I played a scene with a grain of rice. Sometimes with indescribable creatures. I remember having a conversation with something which was simply a smell, that's all. It was part of our job."

~Patrick Stewart~

Does the above quote throw you off a bit?  Yeah, me too.  But have you ever done a search for quotes about oil slicks?  The supply is limited my friend.  In sticking to my usual M.O., there is now a group of pictures and a quote that includes the phrase "oil slick" to examine before you read on.  That is, assuming you CHOOSE to read on.

Unless you've been living in a cave or under a rock, at some point in the last few weeks you've seen or read about the oil that is currently spilling (well, ok, LEAKING ) into our Gulf of Mexico.  Our present "disaster" is the aftermath of an explosion on an oil rig located about 40 miles off the coast of Louisiana that resulted in the death of 11 employees aboard the rig.  The Deepwater Horizon was/is owned by BP and they are being held accountable for the financial burden of clean-up, etc.

If you read both government and private reports of the incident, you'll note that the amount of oil leaking into our ocean has already far exceeded that of the 1989 Exxon Valdez.   Estimates are somewhere between 5000 and 100,000 barrels of oil are leaking each day.  In essence, millions of gallons of oil have already leaked into our oceanic ecosystem.  So far, BP has attempted capping the leak with a giant cement box and are now attempting to stick one pipe inside another pipe which will fill a container which can then be pumped to the surface.........all at more than a mile under water!  Child, please!  My brother is a commercial plumber and he's convinced this would be a miraculous union at sea level.  He's right.  They're blowing smoke and expecting us to inhale it.  No way.

So I understand this is going to have an enormous impact on the coastal economy and will, indeed, cause the death of countless marine animals.  Many fishermen will be put out of business and the list goes on and on and on.  It is tragic in that regard.  People are shaking their fists at BP for ignoring some test.  The government is spending hundreds of millions to investigate the cause of the explosion.  Still more business owners all along the coast are lining up at the front door of every lawyer in the South, poised for the lawsuit of the century.  It's true, this is going to cost billions in lost tourist revenue, clean-up, unemployment, lawsuits, ad infinitum.  Some are even calling this a global, life-ending event.  It's a big deal, right?  In one regard.....right.  But not so fast. 

This whole thing has me wondering whether such an enormous event has ever occured naturally.  I conducted an internet search and was inundated with information regarding such events.  If you click on the link at the top of this blog, you'll find just one sample of what I found.

Did you know 20-25 tons PER DAY of crude oil has been seeping from the ocean floor off the coast of Santa Barbara for OVER hundreds of thousands of years?  Experts estimate that to be the equivalent of up to 80 Exxon Valdez spills.  It's happening each and every day.  And that's only in Santa Barbara.  If you do the math, 25 tons is about 50,000 lbs.  If oil weighs an average of 7 pounds per gallon (I looked it up), then just over 7,000 gallons of oil has been leaking into the Pacific Ocean every day for hundreds of thousands of years.  At only 100,000 years, that's approaching 1 BILLION gallons of oil!!!  Surprise!  We're still here.  It turns out a great deal of that oil is eaten by microbes and the rest becomes sediment.  Why the microbes don't eat it all is still under scrutiny. 

My point is this.  I completely understand this spill in the Gulf will impact millions and I feel their pain....I do.  But this isn't some cataclysmic event from which we won't emerge.  This kind of thing has been going on since the beginning of time.  Mother Earth has a mechanism to deal with this.  The only reason it feels so big is because in this millenium, people and their means to make a living are involved.  So I'm asking, before you build a bomb shelter and stock up on canned goods, do a little research.  Tragic as this event is, it's happening every single day.  But the media isn't telling you that part, are they?  That wouldn't make a good story.

And just one more little thing to think about while we're playing the "blame game".  You can blame BP all you want, or our government or anyone remotely tied to the petroleum industry, but the real blame lies with us.  Every single time you get behind the wheel of your car, you create a demand for the very thing BP was searching for when disaster struck.  Sure, sure, I know.  That's the way society is.  We're mobile and we need cars and trains and planes and heaters and plastic and every other thing you can think of  requiring petroleum.  But if that's what we're asking for, we can't really blame the people trying to give it to us now can we?

Read between the lines when you watch the news or read the paper.  You're only getting a fraction of the story.  The rest of the story is right here on Ramblings.  Thanks for stopping by!!!