No one should take this blog as saying that oil spills don’t cause damage, but green pushers use every spill to justify shutting down products that have greatly improved our quality and length of life. Therefore, oil spills should be put in perspective.

According to a new report from CBS News:

Oil spill could put endangered species at risk in Gulf of Mexico

The U.S. Coast Guard said Monday that an estimated 1.1 million gallons of crude oil has leaked into the Gulf of Mexico near a pipeline off the coast of Louisiana. Officials are concerned about the oil’s potential impact on endangered and threatened species.

(This story reminds me of the 2010 BP oil spill, a spill of 4.9 million barrels that was going to eradicate marine species; but somehow things got cleaned up, and I don’t believe any species went extinct because of the spill.)

The people pushing the green agenda have been trying to scare people, especially children, into believing that humans and our use of natural resources are causing irreparable warming or disastrous climate change, which is in turn causing the loss of thousands of species every year. That number is pulled out of thin air to get people to capitulate.

They started with the lie that polar bears were dying because of warming… but they were dying because of hunting. Today they are thriving with an estimate that there are between 22,000 and 31,000—as many climate “scientists” acknowledge, the population has completely recovered from the unregulated hunts of the 1970s.

If you Google the question, “how many identified species have died in the last 150 years” you get… a whopping “23” !  My guess is most were almost extinct prior to us using oil. 

If you ask, “how many identified species have gone extinct in the last 500 years” you get “869” which includes both flora and fauna. I doubt if they can come up with many that were caused by our use of natural resources, a little warming, or rising levels of CO2.

The people who are concerned about this relatively small oil spill don’t seem as concerned about wind depots, no matter how many whales or other species they kill. 

Now putting a 1.1 million-gallon oil spill into perspective:

The Gulf of Mexico is the largest gulf in the world, covering 617,800 square miles, and averaging over one mile deep. There is an estimated 643 quadrillion gallons constantly churning in the Gulf.

A spill of one or four million barrels is minuscule and immeasurable; fish and animal species that live in the Gulf are smart enough to survive and by and large, will stay far away from the toxic spill.

Here are some interesting things about oil spills:

Oil leaks from the bottom of the seas or Gulf of Mexico naturally all the time, and marine bacteria clean up these oil leaks every day. Isn’t that amazing? From the NOAA:

There are species of marine bacteria in several families, including Marinobacter, Oceanospiralles, Pseudomonas, and Alkanivorax, that can eat compounds from petroleum as part of their diet. In fact, there are at least seven species of bacteria that can survive solely on oil [1].

These bacteria are nature’s way of removing oil that ends up in the ocean, whether the oil is there because of oil spills or natural oil seeps. Those of us in the oil spill response community call this biological process of removing oil ‘biodegradation.’

People, including those developing artificial intelligence, would have trouble replicating these bacteria. The EPA, in all its environmental “progress” also didn’t create the bacteria. 

Of course, none of these people created oil or all the other natural resources in the first place. They also didn’t create all the natural elements in the atmosphere or all the natural variables that affect the climate every day. But somehow these people are so egotistical that they want us to believe they can control temperatures, sea levels, and storm activity forever if we just switch from using petroleum products to using a highly-flammable pollutant, lithium, which is another natural resource they didn’t invent or create.

My experience with our use of natural resources: 

I am 70 years old. My electricity has been provided by a coal-fired power plant my entire life. I have been privileged to have AC for around 60 years. My heat has been provided by natural gas almost all my life. I have lived within one mile of the coal plant, with scrubbers, for 44 years. I raised three children in this close proximity. Not once, that I can remember, did I worry about the air quality or worry about opening the doors and windows. We are all very healthy. 

Our current power plant was updated in 2005, at the cost of several hundred million. It passed all environmental standards yet now, Democrats want to put it out of existence to claim they can change the climate. It is a shame they care so little about the poor and middle classes that still have to pay off the plant, and now a replacement.

The choice for president gets easier every day—either choose the party that wants to dictatorially take away freedom of choice like what kind of car to drive and appliances to use, or choose the party that wants people to have freedom and lower costs.

Image generated by AI.