A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [135]
“But in rough water you can disperse,” Allen points out, “and the motion helps mix the dispersant and oil so it’s not just laying on top of it.”
“Oil is toxic and nasty,” Lubchenco says. “There are no choices that are risk-free.”
“No right choices,” Allen agrees. “Nothing good happens when oil gets into water.”
“Skimming and burning were just very ineffective. That wasn’t getting us very far,” Lubchenco says.
“The Hobson’s choice was,” Allen says, “accept the fate of the oil in the ocean, or accept the fate of the oil along the shore. There was no easy answer.”
“So,” Lubchenco says, “the decision was made—not by me; on the advice of our scientific support people—that, on balance, using dispersants was the right thing to do.”
But the thing that sticks in people’s ribs, I say, is this: dispersed oil is still oil. And it’s still in the waters of the Gulf.
“Agreed,” says Lubchenco.
“The dispersants don’t make the oil go away,” Allen acknowledges.
“And that’s problematic,” Lubchenco points out. “So let me continue. Now, the thing is, dispersed oil is available to be biodegraded much, much faster.” That’s because the crude’s surface area gets vastly increased, facilitating microbial attachment, basically cutting it into little pieces that bacteria can more easily eat. “And that’s the whole rationale for using chemical dispersants,” she says.
“But,” she adds, “twice as much was dispersed physically as chemically. When such hot oil, being shot out under pressure, suddenly hits such cold water, it fractionates into microscopic droplets. ‘Dispersed’ doesn’t mean it hasn’t had impact. I think it has likely had. Early on we got ships out there to get baseline data of things like plankton and bluefin tuna larvae—as much as possible. When this disaster happened, just-spawned shrimp and crabs and fish were in the drifting plankton. The plankton, I think, could have been very seriously affected. Something like eighty to ninety percent of the economically important fish populations in the Gulf depend on the marshes and estuaries for part of their lives; they move back and forth. For them, this could not have come at a worse time. But it’s next to impossible to document—so far—what’s happened to them.”
“So,” she sums up, “1.25 million barrels of neutrally buoyant chemically and physically dispersed oil ended up drifting in the water at depths between thirteen hundred to forty-three hundred feet. And that—that’s not good. I mean, oil is inherently really toxic. We won’t know for a while—we really won’t know for decades—but it’s likely it’s had very serious impacts.”
I’m surprised that Lubchenco seems to think things will likely turn out worse than I’m betting they will. And that she’s saying so. I might have expected her to downplay the long-term effects while I insisted that things were likely worse. How odd that we’re not following that script. It’s in her best professional interest for the long-term effects of this to be minimal. Because the results won’t be in for a long time and some damage may never be known, Jane’s got the option of hiding behind uncertainty to make herself look better. She could easily put on a game face and say she thinks the Gulf will bounce right back. That she’s not doing this suggests both admirable integrity and a cool hand on the tiller.
“Even if the oil degrades pretty rapidly,” Lubchenco says, “and is gone in, like, a year, its impact on populations may already be very, very substantial. I have very grave concerns about impacts this has had for populations that were already depressed and longer-lived species.”
“So,” adds Allen, “since Kemp’s ridley turtles don’t start breeding until they’re twelve years old, we won’t know for twelve years what happened with this year’s hatchlings.”
Kemp’s ridleys were probably the most at-risk of the Gulf’s wildlife. “This was a critically endangered population finally coming back because of turtle excluders in fishing nets and better protection of their nesting beaches in Texas and Mexico,” Jane