Posted on 04/23/2002 4:48:26 PM PDT by visagoth
Edited on 09/03/2002 4:50:21 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
I agree. I read an article ( I believe on FR ) about a month ago describing this process. I didn't understand it but it seemed reasonable.
What's the difference between an enviro doomsday scenario and an NRA doomsday scenario? They all start to sound the same don't they.
Before any oil drilling or shipping (when I was a kid) the beaches from Los Angeles to Mexico were covered with tar that was comming from a hugh oil seepage on the horseshoe kelp about 7 miles off Los Angeles and when they drilled Long beach harbor and off Seal Beach it relieved the high gas pressure and greatly reduced the amount of seepage. There would still be a lot of tar on the beaches today if it wasn't for the fact that for the last 30 years they have machine cleaned the beaches every day.
As for Santa Barbara and especially Golita, I can remember when you couldn't hardly walk on the beaches because of the massive ammounts of tar. The envirowhackos seem to not remember that the Spanish named Golita and that is where they beached their ships to tar the bottoms with the tar on the beach!
Carpinteria is a little town on the Santa Barbara - Ventura County line. There are numerous seeps there, all along the coastline and offshore. The Chumash Indians collected the tar they found there to caulk and waterproof their ocean-going canoes (called tomols). The early Spanish explorers called the Chumash settlement La Carpinteria, meaning "the carpenter shop" because of the boat building activity.
It is less-widely known that there are also active seepages of oil of the coast of Los Angeles and Orange Counties. Besides the ones you mention off of Long Beach, San Pedro, and Huntington Beach, there is a very active line of oil seepages following the Palos Verdes Fault zone into Santa Monica Bay. Back in the early 1970's, the State of California estimated that the Santa Monica Bay seeps leaked about 10 barrels of oil per day. Anybody who surfed or swam along Hermosa, Redondo, or Venice beach would know that. Some people might even remember the oil derrick on Venice Beach in the 1960's, not too far away from the old Pacific Ocean Park.
I believe that it was 3 years after the Valdex accident, that the Salmon run in the oil spill areas was a record run. In fact so good, the salmon was really sold at a very cheap price. Of course the lying media never uses any of this a balance to the "End of the World" screams by the enviral Nazis.
The point being is that crude oil is a natural substance and readily broken down through chemical, biological, and mechanical means by nature. I am not saying that one should be cavalier about spilling oil. The federal agency that oversees and regulates offshore oil production off of California has run the cleanest operation in the world since 1969. The reason is, after the 1969 platform drilling accident in the Santa Barbara Channel, they tightened up the way things are done and have seen over one billion barrels produced with less than 1,000 barrels spilled in over 30 years. The amount spilled from industrial operations is less than 1 weeks worth of natural seepage there.
See http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/ and then decide how many SUVs you should buy.
Thomas Gold rocks! This article backs up many of his observations.
You must have missed this part of the article:
"Analysis of the ancient oil that seems to be coming up from deep below in the Gulf of Mexico suggests that the flow of new oil "is coming from deeper, hotter formations” and is not simply a lateral inflow from the old deposits that surround existing oil fields..."
If new fracturing occurs, or an old seal is broken, existing oil from a formation below the existing field, or downdip from it, could leak oil into the depleted field.
The fact that this can occur does not in any way suggest that it is new oil that is being manufactured in deeper formations. In fact, it would be my position that it is actually older oil which has found a way to migrate up to a younger formation.
A couple of thoughts. First, when oil is placed in a tanker has it already been refined to some extent? This might make it different than seepage on the ocean floor. Second, tanker spills near shorelines cause problems for wading birds which are definitely not adapted to oil. It also makes for better pictures and news coverage. Millions of fish could die on the ocean floor and we'd never know.
Al Gore Begone? Do they sell that at Home Depot? :o)
Nope. It's completely unrefined.
But the premise is wrong, anyway. We don't have oil spills the size of the Exxon Valdez in the Gulf of Mexico. We haven't had a significant spill since a Mexican oil well blew out about 20 years ago.
The truth is that spilled oil is a problem for wading birds and any sea mammals that might swim through it. But it happens so rarely that it's not even ecologically significant. If so much as a teaspoon of oil is spilled from an offshore rig, you have to report to the Feds and clean it up immediately. Motor boats cause more pollution that oil production platforms, yet California and Florida have this irrational paranoia about them.
ROFLMAO. Yeah they do. it's called RAID RAT & ROACH KILLER.
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