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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (29199)	6/12/2010 10:20:27 PM
From: average joe	Respond to of 36917

All the oil spills you’ve never heard of scribd.com Published On Thu Jun 10 2010 Denise Balkissoon Staff Reporter Perhaps some Canadian accidents stick in the mind. There was the 41.8 million gallons that leaked from the American tanker Odyssey off Nova Scotia in 1988, and the 42,000 gallons that gushed from the Petro Canada-owned Terra Nova platform in 2004. That’s about it, though, right? Based on the massive reaction to the current Gulf of Mexico spill, it might seem like big oil accidents are rare. Actually, our attention spans are short. Oil from Exxon Valdez still lingers in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, 21 years after the tanker spilled 11 million gallons. Now that Deepwater Horizon is partially capped — after releasing roughly one million gallons a day for weeks — it might fade from notice too. But lots of oil spills happen with scant notice, particularly in the Third World. Cleanup efforts in such cases frequently have been minimal. “There’s a double standard,” said Richard Steiner, an environmental scientist and frequent critic of the oil industry. “Double Standard” is the title a report he wrote last fall about the neglect that he says has led to one of the world’s worst cases of oil pollution, the fouling of the Niger Delta. The repeated spills and lack of adequate cleanup there have led Amnesty International to single out the Niger Delta as a human rights disaster. “There’s what we do in the U.S. (the Deepwater Horizon reaction) versus what we’re willing to import from overseas,” says Steiner. Nigeria may be the worst of humanity’s oil sins, but the number of spills that make only brief headlines then disappear is extensive. Amounts are always in question — there’s no international reporting protocol, so companies, governments and environmentalists proffer wildly different numbers. The word “spill” connotes an accident, but it happens so often it hardly seems like a mistake. Until we stop guzzling oil, maybe we should start calling them “pours.” thestar.com