Thursday, April 4, 2013

Lies lies and more lies


(This is going to leave a stench that won't go away for years. Exxon get off my lawn!)

Watching some lame stream news sources you'd think somebody knocked over a quart bottle of oil in the driveway and not the extent of the actual damage. As I mentioned in an earlier post I've cleaned up oil spills and even a spill as small as 50 gallons takes days to clean up especially when it gets into a water supply.

The extent of the spill has been lied about as well. First reports by the company itself were at over 10,000 barrels (which by the way amounts to 420,000 gallons and not the 80,000 reported. There are 42 gallons to a barrel, you do the math).
So as time has passed the 10,000 figure has magically changed to between 3,500 and 5,000. Videos from any main stream media source would have one believe that such a spill could be cleaned up in a couple of days. Looking at the initial photos and videos this will take an army of haz mat workers months to clean up.

The airwaves are now being flooded about how the oil sands (tar sands really) will provide great jobs for the future and how this XL pipeline is such a necessary project for our future. Nothing could be farther from the truth. After some research it was discovered that this is not a good use or resources. The amount of energy extracted after costs is on the order of 3 joules for tar sands while regular drilling amounts to 10 joules. Tar sands according to the EPA are 82% more toxic than regular oil.

Too busy to post much need to get things done sans the rain if ya know what I mean.

5 comments:

BBC said...

Nature will clean everything up after we are gone.

BBC said...

Looks like some rain is on the way.

Roger Owen Green said...

Yeah, NBC noted it was nothing like the BP spill. Which is like saying a category 2 hurricane is nothing, because it wasn't a 5.

Randal Graves said...

BBC's right.

The Blog Fodder said...

What I would like to know about the pipelines with the spills is when were they built and what pressure were they being operated at when the broke? There is a huge difference between pipelines built in the 50s and being run at high pressure and pipelines built today with x-ray and ultrasound checks on the seams.