The rapidly shifting oil slick

MSM coverage of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is now noticeable by its absence (as indeed the oil slick itself*), but as you may remember, MSM coverage then moved straight on to the oil spill in the China Sea, which appears to have lasted six days and it's only Greenpeace China who are still bleating about it.

This week's oil spill is off the Mumbai coast - it's interesting that the article refers to an "oil leak" rather than a "pesticide leak", which is probably far more toxic.

I can't even be bothered to work out the relative sizes of these three spills, as some figures are quoted in tonnes, some in barrels and some in gallons (US or Imperial?) - luckily, those nice chaps at Wiki have done it for us. But on Planet MSM there is only one size category for oil spills and that is "gigantic".

What I can be bothered to work out is that as the cost of the damage caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is approx. $6 billion and the USA use approx. 7 billion barrels of oil per year, if the operators of the Deepwater Horizon rig had done a runner, a tax of 0.6 cents for every litre consumed in the USA for one year would have covered the cost.

* The Daily Mail at its finest:

... a leading marine scientist has said the culmination of a fishing ban in the region and swiftly dispersing oil could lead to fish stocks improving. 'The oil may have killed fewer fish than the fisherman would have done,' Martin Preston, senior lecturer in ocean sciences at the University of Liverpool, told the Times, 'Stocks may look better next year but we won't know until then. The big imponderable is the effect of the toxicity of the oil on the larval stage of the fish.'

And he said though young fish were at the mercy of the spill, some of the more mature specimens would have survived by swimming to less polluted areas. 'Dead fish float and there have been no reports of large numbers of dead fish floating around,' he said.

Dr Preston, who studied the impact of a bigger spill in the Persian Gulf after the 1991 Gulf War, said that incident had led to bigger catches in the following years...