Sixteen years after Deepwater Horizon, deep sea life shows few signs of recovery

Out of all fossil fuel extraction methods, deep-sea drilling is the worst.

Heck man, give Stamets a shot with his oil-eating mushrooms; I thought that was an interesting suggestion.

For long distance heavy transport, alternative fuels or battery-electric is not feasible yet.

The transition will take decades.

Ain't dictating anything. You're the ones with the guns all over who's doing that (and shaping said instability in the first place).

Surely you mean the price, because we're not nearly done paying the cost of gas and other fossil fuels we use.

The area is still bad for humans; but not terrible for the ecosystem.

The problem is that bad-faith actors weaponize this language to fight against science, facts, and reality. At some point, the evidence is strong enough that it's fine to just plainly say "x caused y" even if there is a 0.0000000000001% probability that by random chance, y would have happened regardless.

Humans don’t operate at a scientific level in our day to day.

Politicians need to make decisions about the economy with little to no data, and the legal system convicts people at a much lower standard than that science requires us to meet.

And we run our lives at an incredibly lower standard than what science needs to maintain.

It’s fairly easy to see that the Deep Horizon incident should have easily met any of those non science standards (it may have possibly fallen short of the legal standard), to actually enact changes in terms of regulations, or punishment.

Unfortunately, on one side you have an indifferent public that largely depends on activists that it maligns to protect its interests, and on the other side you have billion dollar industries that can buy out the decision makers.

When a company fucks up like that, it should die, and the people deemed responsible should go to jail. And if we cannot find who is responsible, then the top-level executives should go to jail. They are paid so much because they are "responsible", aren't they?

"But think about the normal employees losing their job when such a company fucks up", I hear. Well, think about the employees who lose their job when a normal company bankrupts "normally", who cares? And maybe, just maybe, there would then be whistleblowers from the inside because they would actually risk their job by just not contributing to preventing the company from fucking up that bad.

The assets and people will go elsewhere? Saddle them with the debt.

Financial risks should go with the benefits.

If damages and cause a bankruptcy, that also means the damaged party is getting paid.

The implication was they could have contained it at the surface, sucked it up and treated it to remove oil from the water.

>But that would be incredibly difficult, and possibly so expensive as to bankrupt the companies responsible!

feigned gasp

Oh no.

Related, but the American gov recently invaded a country to take its oil while simultaneously shutting down funding for green energy projects. Exhausting.

That's more than their current market cap ($127B), and the stock price right now is not that far from where it was just before the spill ($49 now, around $59 just prior to the spill).

I'm just curious how that was accomplished, given that it would not have been a great time for them to be borrowing or issuing new shares, for obvious reasons. Maybe if it was spread out over like 10 years it could be more doable, but still that seems like a lot.

Not enough stakeholders are terrified enough.

If the upside is profit and the maximum downside is losing money, corporations will happily rape the Earth.

The system is working as designed.

To get people off of fossil fuels, remove oil subsidizes and tax fossil fuels a lot. Otherwise moving to renewals will take a very long time.

And yes, we can put up solar panels on your house, but that cost $ which people do not have. Solar Panels should be subsidized in an easy manner for people to get funds for installation.

But the real danger is that we have given certain members of our species superhuman abilities to unilaterally make decisions, where these then go on to cause harm on a scale that would never be possible as just 1% of our species operating within the scope of what 1% of our species can reach with their two hands. We've creating living gods essentially. We've even created nonliving gods: pools of capital people are beholden to grow that they themselves do not even own or control, but are enslaved to them nonetheless. Decisions are what is good for the nonliving god: what grows the money pile in the quarterly time frame, not what is good for our species or even what is truly individually good for the people believing themselves to have any control over these pools of capital.

This is a completely baseless claim. It is entirely possible to have both a technologically advanced civilization and simultaneously one that doesn't have catastrophic industrial mistakes like this.