Time For Chicken Little to Make an Appearance

How bad is the oil leak off the coast of Louisiana? Pretty bad, some say much worse than the infamous Exxon Valdez. So we are now hearing great alarm from the environmental religion, using this as a cause célèbre for attacking off-shore drilling for petroleum.

In May 2009 researchers with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the University of California, Santa Barbara released a study that found that natural leaks of sub-oceanic petroleum off the coast of Santa Barbara release as much crude oil into the ocean as up to 80 Exxon Valdez disasters. Each day the natural seafloor seeps near Santa Barbara, California release 20-25 tons of oil, and have done so for several hundred thousand years.

Not only do seeps such as these occur naturally throughout the oceans, but there are scores of other similar phenomena on both land and sea. These include land seeps of crude oil and tar, oceanic asphalt volcanoes, natural gas seeps, and land-bound tar sands. Some of the natural gas bubbles so change the density of the water, that ships sailing into them immediately sink; this is known to happen off the coast of Indonesia, and is thought to happen the Sargasso Sea (mid-Atlantic), which could account for mysterious disappearance of ships in the “Bermuda Triangle".

Taken together, these leaks amount to many times the volume of all human produced petroleum, gas, and refinery by-product “releases” into the environment. So while environmentalists decry the petroleum industry, their residue is only a drop in the ocean compared to natural geophysical releases. Amazingly enough nature has figured out how to take care of this problem. Bacteria and other sea and land life forms eat it, starting it up the food chain.

So from a temporary, cosmetic relatively small area (few thousand miles), this can legitimately be viewed an environmental problem. But the real disaster is the loss of human life, highly technical, highly expensive equipment, and the oil itself. With or without man, nature would take care of the spill to its liking, whether man likes it or acknowledges the fact. If it makes it to shore, it will be more serious, because it affects fishing and other livelihood activities, and usually really stinks, besides being harmful to wildlife.

Man is part of nature. We do what we do and nature takes advantage of our castoffs in its own way and time. Most of the religion (not science) of environmentalism that is rampant today does not understand this. Man’s concern should be with conservation of resources and not messing up our own nest. If we do this nature will be happy.