Per NOAA and USGS, ~20 million liters of crude oil naturally seeps into that part of the California ocean each year. That is more crude oil each year than the worst oil spill in California history[0].
You are projecting your biases. There was no "drilling is good for the environment" narrative. I was recounting an interesting fact about the environment there.
Many of these seeps are under considerable pressure as there is substantial natural gas mixed in. The seepage rate of each has been mapped and studied for many decades. It has long been observed that the introduction of drilling appears to substantially reduced the seepage rate at many of these underwater sites. Drilling wells significantly reduces natural pressure in these reservoirs, likely leading to the observed reductions in seepage.
For it to be a "narrative", there would need to be an additional claim that this specific case and context, which is factual, generalizes to most unrelated cases. That is not in evidence. Thinking that this was an attempt to create a narrative is a failure of reading comprehension.
This insistence that acknowledgement of facts has an ideological narrative is a pernicious strain of anti-science thinking.
To be clear, I have no skin in the game here. I thought the point you made sounded plausible and as I have zero experience or expertise, I wouldn't argue against it.
I just thought it's ridiculous - and kind of funny - to deny making the claim you literally made. I'm not sure you have a lot of legs to stand on, accusing others of "anti-science thinking" and a "failure of reading comprehension" when asking us to ignore the clear, textual evidence of that contradiction.
> For it to be a "narrative", there would need to be an additional claim that this specific case and context, which is factual, generalizes to most unrelated cases.
Says who? That seems a very narrow and unusual definition of what makes a "narrative", bent to your purpose. It seems to me, a "narrative" in common parlance just means "telling a story" or "relaying a sequence of events". I honestly have never seen someone use the word to imply generalization (doesn't mean no one ever did, of course).
In any case, given that you responded to a comment talking about the two examples of Texas and Hawaii with an example about California and an "actually", it seems pretty fair to me to say, that you even fulfilled this artificially narrowed definition.
I mean, come on, you have got to admit that you have at least been unclear, if you didn't intend to make this argument. Instead of just defensively flinging insults.
"This insistence that acknowledgement of facts has an ideological narrative is a pernicious strain of anti-science thinking."
That is very well put. This should be added to the general list of fallacies in argument, and like the other ones (the slippery slope, hasty generalization, Post hoc ergo propter hoc, etc.) more general awareness should exist about these.
The current wave of anti-science, anti-logic, rejection of objective data, etc. is like nothing I've experienced in my lifetime. This is a subjective observation, maybe it has always been this way and I never paid attention because I was caught up in whatever I used to be caught up in.
The play store ID process is ridiculous, their AI is making up BS why it wouldn't let your documents pass, clearly no human in the loop.
In the EU we can report this to: comp-market-information@ec.europa.eu
State that:
Google is abusing its dominant position on the market for Android-app distribution by “denial of access to an essential facility”.
Google is not complying with their "gatekeeper" DMA obligations (Article 5(4), Article 6(12), Article 11, Article 15)
Attach evidence.
Financial penalty is the only way to pressure this company to abide law.
> [...] the Digital Markets Act (‘DMA’) obliges gatekeepers like Google to effectively allow the distribution of apps on their operating system through third party app stores or the web. At the same time, the DMA also permits Google to introduce strictly necessary and proportionate measures to ensure that third-party software apps or app stores do not endanger the integrity of the hardware or operating system or to enable end users to effectively protect security. [...]
They seem to be on it, but no surprise: it's all about Google's claims for "security" and "ongoing dialogue gatekeepers".
If there is such good evidence it shouldn't be hard to get nuclear plants insured. Insurance companies usually don't decide based on ´emotional reactions to incidents that were not that serious´ but look at the facts.
As long as the cleanup cost is externalized and paid for by my tax dollars you're damn right I'm reacting emotional. Wouldn't you, if they set up the plant in your backyard (think Europe's population density)?
The sun gives us 10,000 times earths energy demand, so maybe we stop discussing nuclear industry marketing blogs and shift focus on energy storage technology.
Insurance companies work typically by sharing risk between insurers. Against risks that are relatively common in aggregate, so that you can calculate a reasonable price for the risk.
The occurrence of nuclear accidents is so rare and the potential cost so high that a typical insurance company business model can't accommodate that risk.
You could try develop some kind of insurance bond scheme where nuclear power plant needs to raise a capital buffer to protect against accidents, and in case of an accident, bond investors lose their money. But even this kind of a scheme would be pretty difficult to pull off in a scale that would cover all potential losses, and someone (government) would need to take the tail risk.
And just to be clear, even now, nuclear plants do not go completely uninsured.
The problem is that the cost of an accident is also not driven by facts but by politics and emotion.
And that makes the cost of an accident not just much higher, but also essentially incalculable. "How irrational are the public and the pandering politicians going to be this decade?" is a difficult variable to price into your models.
And since the costs are, in fact, largely driven by the politics and irrational public fears, it actually makes sense to have the public bear those costs...in a weird way.
Witness Fukushima. The correct answer was to stay put. No food production in the area but the city was fine. All the Fukushima deaths were due to the evacuation.
The cost is poisoning a large swath of land for centuries to come. It's not just politics and emotion, it's transforming a large area of a country into a completely unproductive land, for centuries, where no one can live or work at...
How can you not be a afraid when the potential damage is so large? And I'm an advocate for nuclear power, I believe we should've invested in it decades ago to avoid the worst of climate change to come, I just can't agree that the whole issue is "politics and emotion", that's just shoving the real problems with nukes under the rug. Cost of maintenance, cost of decommissioning, baseline factors required for safe operation (including the socioeconomic and political environment of the country a reactor is at), sourcing of fissile material, permanent deposits for nuclear waste, etc.
> The cost is poisoning a large swath of land for centuries to come.
No it's not. For example, the vast majority of the soil "cleanup" in Fukushima is completely unnecessary, as was most of the evacuation. Another example: the fishermen of the Fukushima prefecture are suffering. But not because there's anything wrong with the fish, it's that people are afraid.
Fear of nuclear kills far more people than nuclear does.
Even the Chernobyl "red zone" has been shown to be net beneficial to the wildlife there. Hardly a sign of "poisoning".
Again, you are speaking from emotion, not fact.
> It's not just politics and emotion
Not just, but mostly.
> How can you not be a afraid when the potential damage is so large?
Because the potential damage is not actually "so large", as has been amply demonstrated by now, see in particularly Fukushima, but even Chernobyl. Never mind non-events like Three Mile Island.
And fear is never a good reaction, because it leads exactly to the distortions of perception that you are demonstrating.
> For example, the vast majority of the soil "cleanup" in Fukushima is completely unnecessary, as was most of the evacuation.
Can you provide sources for this claim?
> Even the Chernobyl "red zone" has been shown to be net beneficial to the wildlife there. Hardly a sign of "poisoning".
There's still no scientific consensus about the effects of radiation on fauna in the CEZ [0]. You have an opinion but we still haven't figured out how damaging the radiation there is for animals or not. I'd rather not have humans living around a potentially dangerous poisoned area until the effects are understood.
The basis of the cleanup and evacuation requirements is the Linear No Threshold model, which assumes that even the tiniest amount of radiation has adverse health effects. There is no empirical basis for the LNT model at very low doses, so it's essentially made up.
And in fact, the LNT model greatly overestimated the casualties from Chernobyl, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
"It is believed that the health effects of the radioactivity release are primarily psychological rather than physical effects. [..] However, people who have been evacuated have suffered from depression and other mental health effects."
The same was true in Chernobyl, check the WHO reports that came out every decade. Each subsequent report reduced the estimated number of casualties linked to radiation by an order of magnitude, while the psychological impact increased.
> There's still no scientific consensus about the effects of radiation on fauna in the CEZ
While there is no scientific consensus on the details, there is consensus that the red zone is not the poisonous wasteland you claimed. The wildlife has absolutely thrived.
Wildlife has thrived due to a lack of humans, not because radiation isn't dangerous. There are mutations abound in animals from the CEZ.
A question I'd have for you would be: are you willing to live with your family an extended period of your lives in a place with a radioactive event like the CEZ?
> A question I'd have for you would be: are you willing to live with your family an extended period of your lives in a place with a radioactive event like the CEZ?
Straw-man.
"This is not my preferred place to live" ≠ "This is place is uninhabitable".
For example, there are tons of places in my city where I wouldn't want to live. And yet tons of people do live there.
And I am sure there are tons of people who wouldn't want to live where I live. Even though I think it's pretty nice.
If the place is cheap, green, slightly hilly but not too much, with water nearby and excellent transportation options but no noise: sign me up! Certainly if the radiation is at levels of some of the stuff they're removing from Fukushima Prefecture (less than the background radiation in Denver and many other places).
Most of the exclusion zone is back down to what is considered safe levels--and that by the LNT numbers which almost certainly overstate the risk. (The basic problem is that while we have many data points that suggest LNT is wrong to derive better data requires a *very* large test that would be extremely expensive.)
Don't grow food, take care when messing with the soil. There are areas you certainly don't want to be digging as the orcs found out the hard way last year. It's like asbestos--harmless in place, dangerous if messed with.
Coal has already poisoned the entire world for centuries to come.
Consider the advice about not eating too much in the way of predator fish. That's because of contamination, mostly from coal plants.
Chernobyl is as bad as a nuke plant accident can be. Whether the core actually went prompt critical or destroyed itself just before doing so we will probably never know, but that's the worst that can happen. You simply can't shift the multiplication factor fast enough to make a bigger boom. Chernobyl is a drop in the bucket compared to what coal has been doing for ages. You can't get a China Syndrome accident, a molten mass digging it's way down will change shape as it goes--either going subcritical and quickly running out of heat, or going prompt critical and destroying itself.
And not far down the rabbit whole one finds: The author of the study often cited by oil companies for above narrative, felt impelled to publish a clarifying statement: https://luyendyk.faculty.geol.ucsb.edu/Seeps%20pubs/Luyendyk...
Maybe stricter guidelines against operational "routine" spills led to a reduction of the sticky spots, plausible?
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