Finding Sure Footing on Slippery Ground

Our conversations go something like this. Me: “It’s unprecedented! The worst oil-spill ever!” Him: “I hate when people use the word ‘unprecedented’. During World War II more tankers lost more oil in more spills over a larger area.” Me: “Those spills happened at different places on different days. Completely different scenario. And all the spills took place in shallow water. The deep water impacts are entirely unknown. It's a feeble comparison.” And so on.

My friend says he can not trust most environmental reporting, that it is tinged with hysteria and marred by bias. I am equally for dispassionate, rigorous, science-based environmental reporting, and by extension, environmental policies. Are there sources out there to bolster my case that the Deepwater spill is enormous and unprecedented?

In a post on The Oil Drum, Cutler J. Cleveland compares rates of release between naturally occurring oil “seeps”, the man-made spills, including Deepwater and others. The article is backed up with references to scientific literature (hooray!). But is the author a screaming environmentalist?

Cleveland is a professor of geography and the environment at Boston University with joint appointments in the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies and the Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer Range Future. He is also the author of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill entry in the Encyclopedia of Earth, an initiative that is backed by the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE). NCSE’s board includes a mix of corporate, environmental, and current and former government officials. It's not full proof, but a promising indicator that my friend would entertain Cleveland's analysis.

Highlights are Cleveland's conclusion (yes, it’s bad), references, and a compelling line graph on the “Estimates on the quantity of oil released from the Deepwater Horizon accident, from natural oil seeps in the entire Gulf of Mexico, and from some notable historic U.S oil spills.”

Alas, Cleveland does not use the word “unprecedented”, but I stand, sadly, sadly hopeful.