Oil-Spill News

I got this from a guy in an email. i'm posting it here. It's about why the oil mess in louisiana is nothing most of us ever need to concern ourselves with.

"Actually, my first college degrees were in chemistry and geology and I
have had a life long interest in fishing, hunting, and the environment.

Petroleum is a naturally occurring part of the environment. It naturally
flows freely from the earth in many areas of the world both on and off
shore. These are generally called seeps for a couple of important reasons. The
volatile part of the mixture soon evaporates and eventually oxidizes to
water and CO2 and causes no harm. The less volatile part of thick oils and tar
do not flow far or fast and are gradually oxidized or eaten by microbes.

When I was a young officer the Prudhoe Bay reserves on the North Slope of
Alaska were just opening up. We used to take visiting congressmen up there.
They were stunned to see that the natural seeps grew by far the greenest
grass and were very popular with the Caribou.

Between natural seeps, WWI and WWII, other tanker sinkings, and well blow
outs, you would expect horrible ocean and beach contamination to be common,
world-wide. In fact any significant contamination is always concentrated
in a few areas and quickly evaporates, oxidizes or is consumed by microbes,
making the general area richer in nutrients.

The Gulf War I oil spill in the Persian Gulf caused by Saddam Hussein is
the largest spill on record by a factor of 10-100 times any other. Occurring
in a near closed and shallow sea, it was forecast by environmentalists to
destroy the ecology of the Persian Gulf perhaps forever. It turned out not
to be a very big deal.

The next largest was the Ixtoc 1 Mexican spill in 1979 -1980. It dumped
about 7,500,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Just as now,
irrecoverable damage was forecast for the Gulf but everything was back
to normal in
fairly short order.

The vastly smaller Exxon Valdez spill of about 8,000,000 gallons in Prince
William Sound, Alaska does not even register as a major spill but the
leftist loonies went nuts. Again, we were told that due to the cold, the
pristine wilderness would never recover. In fact it recovered quickly and was
only slow in the areas where the most cleanup was done which only stirred
things up and added harsh cleaning chemicals that are not natural.

Do natural and man made petroleum spills kill some wildlife? Yes, but so
do natural forces like predators, disease, algae blooms, drought, flood,
hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanos, and on and on. And some of these kill way
more than petroleum ever has. When I was a kid growing up on the West Coast
of Florida, every few years we would have horrific "Red Tide" blooms of
algae that generated poisons that killed all the fish and turtles that swam
through it. There would be literal windrows of fish on the beaches for weeks
at a time. Just as now, we would hear that there would be no more fish
forever but they always came back very rapidly.

A common thing that is overlooked in all this is the size of the spill
compared to the surrounding surface area and in the case of ocean spills, the
volume of water not directly contaminated. The horrible pictures are all
from the worst areas which are tiny compared to the whole.

Bottom line, oil spills are just another opportunity for leftists to blow
the damage and danger all out of proportion and demand that you put them in
charge of your life. At 200,000,000 killed and counting, leftists are the
champion killers and environment destroyers (think eastern Europe, Soviet
Union, and China under Communism) of all time.

Hope this helps,"