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December 08, 2004
Snake oil and other unnatural things . . .
According to today's Philadelphia Inquirer, the culprit responsible for the recent Delaware River oil spill has been identified as a large (3-4 feet wide and 15 feet long) submerged pipe, possibly a sewer pipe. The Army Corps of Engineers seems to have missed it during inspections last summer, and if that turns out to be the case, they'd be liable. A rusty pipe did it.I'm sure further investigation will find out. Liability is complicated by strict liability statutes passed by Congress after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, however: Under a federal law passed in 1990 after the Exxon Valdez disaster that had fouled Alaska the previous year, tankers that carry oil and their insurers are responsible for damage, whether or not they caused it, said Brian O'Neill of Minneapolis, lead lawyer for groups suing Exxon Mobil Corp. in the Valdez legal fight, which has dragged on for 15 years.In other words, we're all ultimately paying for it! (Which is in divine accordance with Nature's Laws. As pointed out in previous posts, we are adjudged evil and unnatural goose-despoiling drivers of SUVs.) Strict liability, of course, is just the legal picture. To the extent that there's actual, specific responsibility, the lion's share of the blame would appear to be with the U.S. Army. Whether this is fair or not depends on how broad and how general a view one wishes to take of these things. Considering that environmentalism appears to be a man-made morality doctrine, it might be fair to examine the big picture of oil spills generally. I think we are somewhat programmed and conditioned to see oil as "unnatural" and hence, profoundly immoral. What might the laws of nature and of nature's god have to say in this regard? What is crude oil? Geologists generally agree that crude oil was formed over millions of years from the remains of tiny aquatic plants and animals that lived in ancient seas. There may be bits of brontosaurus thrown in for good measure, but petroleum owes its existence largely to one-celled marine organisms. As these organisms died, they sank to the sea bed. Usually buried with sand and mud, they formed an organic-rich layer that eventually turned to sedimentary rock. The process repeated itself, one layer covering another.There's lots more technical detail about methods used to separate and refine the crude oil into gasoline, kerosene, heating oil, etc., but the bottom line is that the source material -- the stuff that leaked from the Athos I into the Delaware River -- appears to be as "natural" as, say, the Grand Canyon. Whether it is "unnatural" to have something otherwise natural in an inappropriate place at the wrong time is another matter. That's where moralists like environmentalists and religious leaders enter the picture. How very odd that crude oil was itself the original "snake oil": There were few takers of the 19th century elixir that came to be called "snake oil." It was one of the less successful uses of petroleum, but not the first to claim healing properties. Ancient Persians, 10th century Sumatrans and pre-Columbian Indians all believed that crude oil had medicinal benefits. Marco Polo found it used in the Caspian Sea region to treat camels for mange, and the first oil exported from Venezuela (in 1539) was intended as a gout treatment for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.Sheesh! Did they really have to drag poor Cicero into this debate? I mean, sometimes I go out of my way to avoid dragging the classics into these posts lest the writing appear contrived, but here I was just trying to be all naturalistic and everything, and Cicero seeped in (along with the ancient Egyptians and the Babylonians). Back to nature. I was shocked to discover that like many activities subject to conventional moralistic judgments, oil spills themselves occur in (GASP!) nature! The following chart comes not from another amoral petroleum-based web site, but from the vaunted Smithsonian Institute (the numbers represent "how many millions of gallons of oil each source puts into the oceans worldwide each year"): Gee.... 62 million gallons worth of oil spills occur in nature? (This is even worse than the Kinsey Report, folks....) For those wishing to see nature in action, here's a satellite photograph of a large oil spill (can a spill be a called a "seep"?) triggered by the the eruption of the Lewotobi laki-laki, just off Flores Island. (A place where "hobbit men" went extinct for reasons unknown.) Well, just because something occurs in nature, that doesn't mean it's natural! As pointed out in a previous post (and as a Eugene Volokh reader made clear): what nature does is no guide for how humans should act! Perhaps the Smithsonian should burn that heretical chart! UPDATE: The Smithsonian can go ahead and burn their chart; the National Research Council has one that's even worse: AND MORE: I left some interesting links on the possible renewable nature of petroleum in the comments below. Are the Russians and Ukrainians right? (If so, is there a possibility that American science is, um, tainted?) posted by Eric on 12.08.04 at 09:04 AM
Comments
Thanks. I have read about that theory, and I hope it's true, because it would mean that oil resources are renewable! Of course, it does not change what I said about petroleum being as natural as the Grand Canyon. It strikes me as idiotic to claim that something which occurs in nature is not natural. Eric Scheie · December 8, 2004 06:02 PM Fascinating thread here, btw: http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=41426 AND here: http://www.infowrangler.com/phpwiki/wiki.phtml?title=Talk:Fossil_fuel And Russian-Ukrainian abiotic oil theories are discussed here. Eric Scheie · December 8, 2004 06:14 PM Eric... When the hell do you do all this research? I mean, awesome job, but...are you sleeping enough?? CodeBlueBlog · December 8, 2004 08:53 PM Thanks CBB! And no, I am not sleeping enough. But I tend to blog in the mornings to make up for my lack of sleep. This may sound nutty, but if you like the blog, my loss is your gain! Eric Scheie · December 9, 2004 11:02 AM |
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Re: Oil and gas from marine deposits.
There's a contrarian geological theory that oil and gas also is continually created at great depths within the Earth from carboneous rock and water/hydrates as the result of tectonic-geology; and that it slowly percolates up and is stored in underground reserves, in some cases replentishing previously-tapped fields....especially gas-fields. The old Soviet oil industry had remarkable sucess with this petrology-model...and there are now some petrologists in the West that are re-examining old fields. The theory also implies that there are vast reserves farther-down in geology that is unrelated to ocean-beds.
Basically, it posits that petroloeum and gas are not fossil fuels nor of organic-origin, and are renewable in geologic time. Coal and Lignite though are definitely fossil-based.
While it may be a quibble it means that other terrestial planets without "life" could still have oil and gas reserves if they have an active tectonic-geology.