A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [118]
The report explains what “dissolved” means with this line: “molecules from the oil separate and dissolve into the water just as sugar can be dissolved in water.” Just as sugar. Isn’t that nice? Facts aside, that reassuring tone makes many people feel they’re being snowed. And that undermines credibility by keeping people on their guard. It’s not that NOAA’s scientists are giving the wrong information; it’s that they’re striking the wrong tone.
“I think it is fairly safe to say,” remarks White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, “that many of the doomsday scenarios that we talked about and repeated a lot have not and will not come to fruition.”
That’s easy to say if you’re not living it. Psychologically, his statement is a serious miscalculation. Most people in the Gulf want empathy, not reassurance. They want to know that their government cares. That’s an emotion, not a desire for facts or official opinions. And because the most lingering bad taste that the nation had after Katrina was that the Bush administration seemed not to care enough, the Obama people should have understood that it was more important to show concern than to show pie charts.
Gibbs should have avoided the temptation to sound an “all’s well” so early, and waited for academic experts to determine what has or hasn’t come to pass after a relief well does its thing, when the blown-out well is officially declared good and dead. The federal government’s most visible officials are misjudging people’s need to grieve.
Even worse, some of the political folks don’t seem able to read a simple pie chart. High on the list of those needing personal blowout preventers is Carol Browner, director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, who blurts: “The vast majority of oil is gone.”
Just like that. She’s totally wrong. And many people rightly jump all over her. Browner’s glib comment, which rises to the definition of plain stupid, utterly undermines—yet again—public confidence in what “the government” (defined with a broad brush dipped in crude oil) is telling us.
So, for the benefit of Ms. Browner, let’s review what NOAA’s report actually says: “burning, skimming and direct recovery from the wellhead removed one quarter (25%) of the oil.” That means, according to this estimate, that human intervention took only a quarter of the oil out of the system. “One quarter (25%) of the total oil naturally evaporated or dissolved …”
Whoa, wait a minute. Evaporated or dissolved? Those are very different things; evaporated means it went bye-bye in the sky; dissolved means it’s asleep in the deep, still very much in the Gulf. Lumping together two very different categories that collectively account for 25 percent of the oil is another big blunder that helped make this seem very confused.
“… and just less than one quarter (24%) was dispersed (either naturally or as a result of operations) as microscopic droplets into Gulf waters.” The term “naturally dispersed” refers to oil that shattered into fine microdroplets from the sheer physical forces of being shot from a hot well into cold seawater. Twice as much is estimated to have naturally dispersed—if you call that natural—than was dispersed by chemical dispersants.
“The residual amount—just over one quarter (26%)—is either on or just below the surface as light sheen and weathered tar balls, has washed ashore or been collected from the shore, or is buried in sand and sediments. Oil in the residual and dispersed categories is in the process of being degraded.” Here again, the