quote:Originally posted by MattP: The US consumes 20 million barrels of oil per day. Burning off 5,000-25,000 for each day this goes on would be a blip.
Well, we burn refined varieties of oil. Do you know how much worse crude oil emissions are? Because I have no idea.
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quote:Well, we burn refined varieties of oil. Do you know how much worse crude oil emissions are? Because I have no idea.
It's actually quite a bit worse than the refined stuff, which I hadn't considered at the time I posted that.
Still, I think it would probably be a lesser evil, though the reading I've done since then indicates that it isn't really practical or effective to solve this problem by burning. Some burning may help, but it's clearly not a solution for the bulk of the problem.
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quote:Originally posted by MattP: The US consumes 20 million barrels of oil per day. Burning off 5,000-25,000 for each day this goes on would be a blip.
Well, we burn refined varieties of oil. Do you know how much worse crude oil emissions are? Because I have no idea.
Depends on what you are talking about. If we are talking about CO2 and other important green house gases, there is very little difference between burning crude and burning refined petroleum products.
The questions are bigger for other pollutants. SO2 emissions are a concern but I don't know how big a concern because I don't know if this high or low sulfur crude. That will be oxidized to sulfate aerosol and ultimately end up as acid rain somewhere.
The biggest differences won't be the because of difference between burning crude oil and refined products, but between the very inefficient uncontrolled burning of floating oil and burning in well controlled conditions with pollution controls. We will certainly generate a lot more soot and VOCs which will be a pollution problem but isn't going to make a difference in climate change over the longer term.
The biggest problem with burning oil slicks is that it depletes the surface sea water of oxygen which will kill everything that needs oxygen to survive.
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quote:The biggest problem with burning oil slicks is that it depletes the surface sea water of oxygen which will kill everything that needs oxygen to survive.
So is it better to burn the oil, kill those oxygen-lovers and save the creatures on the shore, or save the oxygen-lovers and kill the creatures on the shore?
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quote:Originally posted by MattP: It's actually quite a bit worse than the refined stuff, which I hadn't considered at the time I posted that.
Also, it would seem to me that we typically don't burn everything that comes out of a barrel of oil either. We make some plastic that we bury, some asphalt, some artificial fibres, etc.
So this is sort of like a fractional gasoline fire, tire fire, clothing fire, etc. occurring as rabbit points out badly without pollution controls.
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quote:Originally posted by MattP: It's actually quite a bit worse than the refined stuff, which I hadn't considered at the time I posted that.
Also, it would seem to me that we typically don't burn everything that comes out of a barrel of oil either. We make some plastic that we bury, some asphalt, some artificial fibres, etc.
The fraction that doesn't get burned is pretty small so that doesn't make much of a difference.
quote:So this is sort of like a fractional gasoline fire, tire fire, clothing fire, etc. occurring as rabbit points out badly without pollution controls.
Not really. Petroleum products are very heavily modified to make thinks like tires, plastics, and polar fleece. Those chemicals aren't in crude oil, they are made using crude oil as a starting material. It just isn't accurate to say burning crude is like burning gas mixed with those things.
[ May 05, 2010, 06:05 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
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I was more concentrating on the fact that we *don't* typically burn these things. (Or if you want to be picky, we don't burn the oil content that goes into these things)
Edit after edit:
quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: The fraction that doesn't get burned is pretty small so that doesn't make much of a difference.
It would seem to me that it isn't just about volume though. The non-fuel products should be more concentrated toward the heavy end of the distillation process. Per unit, the crude oil that was destined for gasoline should burn cleaner than the units that were destined for say the tar in asphalt.
quote:The biggest problem with burning oil slicks is that it depletes the surface sea water of oxygen which will kill everything that needs oxygen to survive.
So is it better to burn the oil, kill those oxygen-lovers and save the creatures on the shore, or save the oxygen-lovers and kill the creatures on the shore?
How close is the oil slick to the Gulf dead zone? Maybe we can burn it and not worry about the oxygen.
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Really? We're just going to operate on the assumption that nothing bad will happen? I especially like this:
quote: When questioned about the exemption claim, BP spokesman William Salvin said provisions for handling a blowout incident were actually included in the firm's 582-page region oil spill plan, though he had difficulty pointing to specific passages.
I'm sorry, but it's not a plan if you don't know what it is. I wondered why it was taking BP so long to come up with ideas to stop the leak. Now I get it.
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posted
Well, from what I've been reading, there IS a mechanism in the well that shuts off the flow, but for some reason it didn't activate and they were trying to use robot subs to activate it. I don't know if this is the same device as the blowout device or not.
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Sigh. I was hoping this wasn't going to turn out to be another disaster that was Bush's fault, but I guess I was wrong. (The article headline is "Feds let BP avoid filing blowout plan for Gulf rig".)
Also, this guy had better be wrong about the oil spill, for our sake. (He starts talking about the spill in the fourth paragraph.)
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quote: I was hoping this wasn't going to turn out to be another disaster that was Bush's fault, but I guess I was wrong.
How is it Bush's fault?
The rule which would have required BP to file a blowout plan for the well was lifted in April 2008 (under the Bush administration). Based on this change of rules, BP claimed did not file a blowout plan for this site.
So it does in fact appear that the Bush administrations cozy relationship with the oil industry and active push to make off shore drilling easier for companies were a contributing factor.
Of course we won't ever know how much of a difference it would have made, but you must admit it looks pretty bad.
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quote: I was hoping this wasn't going to turn out to be another disaster that was Bush's fault, but I guess I was wrong.
How is it Bush's fault?
The article cites changes to the regulations in 2008 that relaxed the requirements of plans related to blowout scenarios. Bush was still the president at the time.
I don't think anyone is blaming Bush though.
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posted
I think more evidence needs to come up before we can blame Bush. But the evidence at hand doesn't really look promising. The MMR and USFS did a lot of things during his tenure that I didn't like, and most of them amounted to giveaways to big corporations that cost taxpayers billions of dollars in unpaid royalties, to say nothing of environmental damage.
I have no idea how that translates to safety regulations, but I wouldn't be surprised either way.
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quote:Originally posted by Omega M.: Also, this guy had better be wrong about the oil spill, for our sake. (He starts talking about the spill in the fourth paragraph.)
This is happening too close to 2012 for comfort...
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posted
Why would people be fighting over bottled water because of an oil spill in the OCEAN? That seems extremely counter-intuitive to me. Either way, that seems like the most extreme of worst case scenarios. He's also making assumptions about what caused the accident when we don't know for sure yet what did it.
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posted
I think you misread it, Lyrhawn. The fighting over bottled water was due to the aqueduct break in New England, unrelated to the oil spill.
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posted
You know, I've been thinking about political philosophy over the last couple of weeks, and I realized that I'm not sure how a true libertarian would handle the externalities here. Can anyone tell me how they'd have private entities address this spill?
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posted
Not possible. We see that sort of thing already with SuperFund cleanup now, at mining sites: once it's time to clean up, they just spin off any assets and let the empty shell declare bankruptcy. For that matter, who's the organization doing the cleanup in that scenario? Does the government in a libertarian model maintain a very expensive emergency response team for environmental crises, only to bill the responsible parties enormous amounts on the rare circumstances it's required?
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posted
For that matter, what sort of regulatory apparatus would a libertarian support to prevent something like this from happening again?
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: For that matter, what sort of regulatory apparatus would a libertarian support to prevent something like this from happening again?
Considering how much oil is drilled for on a daily basis, and how long it's been since a major oil spill, I think a libertarian might argue that we don't need to introduce any new regulatory apparatus to prevent this from happening again.
Any more than we need to introduce new regulations every time a 747 crashes.
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posted
How can you say that before we know specifically what went wrong? What if this is a result of of regulation in the MMR? What if BP lied about something they were supposed to do and that's what caused it?
You seem to be operating from the belief that this was an unavoidable freak accident, and that freak accidents just happen.
Also, the 747 comparison is a bad one. Yes, modern jetliners rarely crash, but the effects are immediate and limited. There's a tragic loss of life, but the effects are limited to the families of the unfortunate victims. Massive oil spills affect millions of people, to say nothing of the environmental damage itself, assuming you find that to be worthwhile.
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: How can you say that before we know specifically what went wrong? What if this is a result of of regulation in the MMR? What if BP lied about something they were supposed to do and that's what caused it?
You seem to be operating from the belief that this was an unavoidable freak accident, and that freak accidents just happen.
Also, the 747 comparison is a bad one. Yes, modern jetliners rarely crash, but the effects are immediate and limited. There's a tragic loss of life, but the effects are limited to the families of the unfortunate victims. Massive oil spills affect millions of people, to say nothing of the environmental damage itself, assuming you find that to be worthwhile.
Of course I consider the environmental damage to be a worthwhile consideration. Why wouldn't I?
The jet comparison is significant from a risk/reward viewpoint. Rewards of taking a specific jet flight (getting to point B faster) are vastly less than the rewards of a specific drilling operation (millions of barrels of oil gained). And yes, the potential danger is also greater.
The question is: Is the reward worth the risk? It obviously is in the case of air travel, but it's perhaps debatable when we look at drilling.
If BP lied about following regulations, how, precisely, would adding more regulations prevent a future catastrophe?
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posted
Our inability to plan ahead just gets more pathetic: Mock drill in 2002.
quote: Many of the problems responders face in today's oil spill were spelled out in the mock disaster staged eight years ago, known as the 2002 Spill of National Significance Exercise. Such exercises include participants from multiple local, state and federal agencies and the private sector.
As for regulation, it sounds like dumb regulation strikes again.
quote: The 2002 drill found that government budget rules and strict regulations "have inhibited research, development, test and evaluation of response technologies," according to the report produced after the exercise.
posted
I'd actually like a response from someone to this scenario: in a libertarian model, how would the response to this oil spill be handled? Who would coordinate it? What company or companies would perform the cleanup? Who would pay them?
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: I'd actually like a response from someone to this scenario: in a libertarian model, how would the response to this oil spill be handled? Who would coordinate it? What company or companies would perform the cleanup? Who would pay them?
In a libertarian model, the best you could hope for is a cabal or organization with significant control or interest in the health of the shoreline and ocean in that region. Without that there would be nothing in the way of an effective response, just a strategic retreat from the fallout by BP.
Of course under a libertarian model there would be no effective management of the sea's resources in general and we would have been overfished to complete collapse in the first place. In that morbid way there would for long swaths of time be much less in the way of industry left to be threatened by the ecological disaster.
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quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank: If BP lied about following regulations, how, precisely, would adding more regulations prevent a future catastrophe?
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: in a libertarian model, how would the response to this oil spill be handled?
Which model? standard-fare natural rights libertarianist model will fare very, very poorly. Consequentialism may do okay. Any model that follows the non-aggression principle as the core moral guidance of governmental limitation (i.e., 'taxation is theft') would fail utterly in a scenario such as this.
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: ... at mining sites: once it's time to clean up, they just spin off any assets and let the empty shell declare bankruptcy.
I don't know if Lisa is representative, but wouldn't she respond that there shouldn't be corporations, let alone "empty shell" subsidiary corporations? Therefore, the equivalent of the owners/shareholders would be all responsible directly.
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quote:Therefore, the equivalent of the owners/shareholders would be all responsible directly.
So the corporation's assets would be sold off at auction, and any remaining bill would be divided amongst shareholders (per share) and sent to some kind of insanely huge collections department? Or are we talking about a truly massive class-action suit?
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posted
I hesitate to speak more for her, but IIRC the last "no corporations" thread, corporations wouldn't exist let alone have assets in the first place. The insanely complex part would be front-loaded in trying to organize the equivalent of what would be a corporation through a whole lot of contracts between owners/shareholders in the first place (IIRC, that was Fugu's objection).
Edit to add: I think these, 1, 2, and 3 are the relevant threads.
Ok, the above summary is not quite right. It's the restriction of what a corporation is versus removing them totally, but the relevant bit might be
quote:2) All debts owed to a corporation or by a corporation shall be owed to or by shareholders of that corporation according to the proportion defined in the bylaws of the corporation. If no proportions are defined therein, debts shall apply to shareholders in direct proportion to their ownership of the corporation.
3) No corporation shall own another corporation. Any corporate ownership of a corporation at the time this article goes into affect shall be transfered to shareholders in the parent corporation according to the bylaws of the parent corporation. If no proportions are defined therein, ownership of the child corporation shall be transferred to shareholders of the parent corporation in direct proportion to their ownership of the parent corporation.
The latter would seem to be aimed at the empty shell problem while the former would allocate the debt.
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posted
So in this scenario, everyone holding BP stock would eventually receive a bill in the mail for their percentage of the cleanup, plus handling charges?
But who would contract with the cleanup company in the first place? If BP refused to do it, would someone need to sue them to force the issue?
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posted
Sue them over what? What sort of liability would theyhave to accept in exchange for opening an oil platform on territory they have rights to? Who is enforcing that liability?
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posted
Presumably, in a libertarian scenario, things like fishing grounds would be owned; damage to those grounds could therefore be ascertained. But it seems like a nightmare.
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quote: The political challenges, in both cases, centered on the inability of the political establishment to acquiesce to the fact that a key source of energy (nuclear power or deep-water oil) relied on technology that was unsafe and prone to catastrophic failure.
My understanding of both Chernobyl and Three Mile Island is that they were attempting risky situations - creating weapons grade material in a commercial plant and deliberately overriding safety protocol, respectively. No other American reactor has ever failed, catastrophically or otherwise.
Like I said earlier, the plant operates on a pyramid theory. If you attack small accidents aggressively, you can remove the fuel needed for larger accidents to occur. The worst accident I ever heard of was a guy deliberately ignoring safety protocol.
Calling that unsafe and prone to catastrophe is deliberatly misrepresenting the track record of the American nuclear industry, in my opinion.
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quote:My understanding of both Chernobyl and Three Mile Island is that they were attempting risky situations - creating weapons grade material in a commercial plant and deliberately overriding safety protocol, respectively. No other American reactor has ever failed, catastrophically or otherwise.
Your understanding is incorrect in both cases. Neither Three Mile Island nor Chernobyl were used to create weapons grade material. The Three Mile Island accident was the result of a faulty valve compounded by operator error. The Chernobyl incident was the result of critical flaws in the reactor design compounded by conditions set up in an shutdown experiment. Neither accident had anything to do with making weapons grade fuel.
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: Presumably, in a libertarian scenario, things like fishing grounds would be owned; damage to those grounds could therefore be ascertained. But it seems like a nightmare.
Its worse than a nightmare, its an impossibility. Even if you divide the ocean into privately "owned" sectors, water, air and fish don't stay put inside a given boundary. We don't even fully understand the oceans and all the things they do. Many of the services provided by the oceans like production of oxygen by algae and uptake of CO2 simply can not be bought and sold in any market system. Even for things like fishing, it is impossible to quantify the precise impact this disaster will have in either the long or short term.
One of the many fundamental flaws with libertarian ethics, is that anything which cannot be exchanged on the market is considered to have no value. And furthermore, any thing which can not buy and sell (say for example manatees or even future humans) on the market has no voice and no rights.
[ May 10, 2010, 02:58 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: The Three Mile Island accident was the result of a faulty valve compounded by operator error. The Chernobyl incident was the result of critical flaws in the reactor design compounded by conditions set up in an shutdown experiment.
Nevertheless, that doesn't invalidate my main point that nuclear reactors are not inherantly unsafe technology.
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quote:Nevertheless, that doesn't invalidate my main point that nuclear reactors are not inherantly unsafe technology.
Wasn't some of the evidence for your main point that two of the worst nuclear disasters in human history, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, occurred because of extremely unusual risk factors in a riskier-than-usual situation in the first place?
If that wasn't the case, then isn't your point if not invalidated at least weakened? I mean, I say that as someone who supports expanding nuclear power in the United States, only because I think the batch of problems that come with it are better than the batch of problems we have with our current power makeup. But it is incredibly dangerous, and when bad things happen, they're s@#t-hits-the-fan bad at best.
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posted
I am pretty sure that the events of three mile island could not be replicated with the technology in place in today's nuke plants. As for chernobyl, I don't think we EVER ran things in such a way that we could pull off that stunt.
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quote:Nevertheless, that doesn't invalidate my main point that nuclear reactors are not inherantly unsafe technology.
Wasn't some of the evidence for your main point that two of the worst nuclear disasters in human history, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, occurred because of extremely unusual risk factors in a riskier-than-usual situation in the first place?
If that wasn't the case, then isn't your point if not invalidated at least weakened? I mean, I say that as someone who supports expanding nuclear power in the United States, only because I think the batch of problems that come with it are better than the batch of problems we have with our current power makeup. But it is incredibly dangerous, and when bad things happen, they're s@#t-hits-the-fan bad at best.
Chernobyl is one thing; but Three Mile Island was a tempest in a teapot. Your average coal plant releases more radiation in a week of ordinary running. (Yes, coal plants put radiation into the air; they burn carbon, which has radioactive isotopes.) If that's your standard of shit hitting the fan, you need to get a grip, calm down, and then panic and demand the immediate cessation of all coal power production.
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
Most of todays currently operating nuclear plants are actually aging and fairly old and need to be replaced, the ones that WOULD replace them however would be perfectly safe (Made in China) but otherwise perfectly safe.
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