I read the source

> Available evidence rules out natural phenomena as likely drivers, suggesting a large-scale pollution event and its associated mitigation measures most likely precipitated the declines...That the declines began shortly after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill points to that event as the most parsimonious explanation. These findings suggest that despite its immense size the deep-pelagic biome is vulnerable to human-induced disturbance and possesses limited resilience to facilitate recovery.

This means "the oil spill caused the declines". That is what this means in English.

I think you're reading the wrong motivation into this and reaching the wrong conclusion.

This behavior, being skeptical and precise, is the very thing that makes scientists more trustworthy than the average Joe with his motivated reasoning.

I'm confident that the people working on this would have made the causal claim if they had been able to collect enough data to support it. They may well be working on gathering data to support the causal claim right now.

Scientists are - rightfully - reluctant to assign causal relationships when the data does not support it.

Scientists should not change the scientific method so morons can continue to ignore or cherrypick their studies.

Because they're scientists and not activists.

TMI hadn't even entered my mind while typing out that comment which just goes to show how political the historiography of this stuff is.

There are so many open wells left behind from the 50's on. The federal gov't pays to fix them, but they can't do anywhere what they need to do. They should charge the fees upfront with drilling permits

The American economy didn't yet rely on nuclear power, we're long deep into oil brain.

Essentially how most businesses (big and small) handle this situation. Multi pronged approach.

Sold a bunch of assets to raise funds (about 38b apparently), cut the dividend, borrowed the remaining (you'd think after such an event it's 'hard' to raise capital but in reality BP has a great financial record and there's a chance they had prior agreements in place) and then spread cost out over ~10 years.

BP share price was over $100 the month before the disaster. They sold $45B in global assets and subsidiaries (including most of their refinery business and land holding 6 billion barrels of proven reserves) and cut their dividend to fund the damages and fines.

The stock price fell by 50ish percent, and they've spent 16 years recovering.

We are already massively investing into renewable energy... to the tune of about $1trillion since 2020 in the US. In 2024, 95%+ of all new electricity capacity was solar/wind/batteries.

Seems like you believe the current system is not conducive to clean/sustainable infrastructure, but the world I think you want is actually the one we're already in.

> What can I or you possibly do that can wreak havoc on this scale?

Build a bunch of drones that carry explosives and leave them outside chemical plants, refineries, and nuclear plants across the world and then launch a simultaneous attack on infrastructure.

Budget $1000-$2000 per drone and then whatever your costs of transportation for the road trip are.

Sure. In the same way that flying is far safer than driving. There are massive amounts of safeguards in place to keep it as safe as possible. The problem is that when something goes wrong, it goes very, very wrong. This is why some people fear flying and nuclear power.

K, global oil demand is expected to keep rising towards 120m bpd between now and 2050. We are not plateaued, much less reducing reliance on fossil fuels. We are actively leaning into our use of it every day of every month of every year. The production and retailing of the computer you used to type that message above and the energy demand to power it makes you complicit in that. In all of it. So you can talk all you want about dreams and fantasies, but every aspect of your life is impacted by society's capacity to meet energy demand. We almost drove whale species to extinction and nearly deforested many states for biomass fuels before we discovered how to refine fossil fuels at scale and employ them. Hardly a world I want to return to. Fossil fuels are here, they're queer, and not going anywhere without massive tradeoffs that the global population is not willing to accept. The choices to back off energy demand are so bleak they're unrealistic. Sorry I don't have solutions that haven't already been thought of (resilient solar, nuclear), but really all you and I can do that's effective is vote for new energy generation and storage solutions and the policies that enable them and lead the way. The talking part doesn't do much except use more energy.

Even if it was enormous enough in fines to put them out of business, the industry as it is with all its inherent risks will still exist because that is still legally allowed. Forget a fine; outlaw the behavior that lead to the issue. Incentivize new emergent behavior instead of just hedging.

I don't understand what you're implying.

So detergent?

How much oil would they have to burn for fuel to do that? Neither option sounds good for the environment.

Well TMI didn't kill anyone and the environmental contamination was minimal. It was just a scary few days because of the theoretical worst case outcome.

We definitely didn't need the nuclear power activists just like we definitely don't need teh data scenter activists today

Statements of certainty can be weaponized even more. That same rhetorical opponent would be just as happy to point out some exceedingly rare edge-case counter-example (no matter how dubious) and crucify the entire study (or worse, haul you in front of Congress and try to pepper you with "gotcha" questions in the hopes of catching you in a "lie" so they can make an example out of you). You rhetorical opponent is not going to argue in good faith either way and their audience are not people who will care.

Scientists write for other scientists who already know why they use the language they use. Compromising that language to try to cater to fools who couldn't care less about the truth would just make the scientist a greater fool for trying.

I doubt you're implying that scientists should "say for certain" even when they aren't certain, or that they shouldn't say anything at all. So I assume you're just saying "misleaders gonna mislead", which is true.

But as long as we're bringing up general social woes, I'll point out that those misleading statements are pretty tame by today's standards. The more popular strategy now is to just lie outright.

I mean we can't know where they'd be in the counterfactual scenario. Glancing at Shell and Exxon shows BP is probably underperforming similar companies. How much of that is due to this event vs. other factors? I don't know. We wouldn't tend to expect the same extent of up-and-to-the-right behavior from dividend producing shares but BP seem to be failing to capitalize on the current oil price spike.

My point is merely that reasonable people can disagree if there was a suitable consequence to the event. Sure they're out 140 billion, but to a company like this that's not as grand as it sounds and not at all fatal. You provided your view, I am providing mine, which is that they did not suffer sufficiently.

In places with absolutely no zoning whatsoever, people still drive cars, motorcycles, mopeds, etc.

People like fast, on-demand transportation they're in control of. The answer is electric vehicles.

I'm not sure it's so cut and dry.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute says that dispersants caused a drastic reduction in surface volatiles, allowing the cleanup crew to work longer and more efficiently.

> The model showed that, without dispersants, the atmospheric concentration of benzene would have been about 6,000 times higher. Benzene concentrations in the air two meters above the sea surface would have been 13 times higher than the levels considered acceptable to breathe during a 10-hour working day or a 40-hour work week, based on guidelines by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). However, the model showed that with the dispersant injection, atmospheric benzene concentrations were typically about 500 times lower than acceptable NIOSH levels.

https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/did-dispersants-help-du...

It's always sad to me the atrocities that can be committed if you do them behind a corporation that makes people a lot of money.

The problem is sometimes the lessoned learned is don’t be responsible.

So no longer own oil tankers and instead each ship is owned by its own LLC so just that piece goes down and the liability gets capped to its insurance contract.

I don't condone corporate negligence or violations of environmental protection laws, but some kind of ecosystem damage is an inevitable consequence of humans existing with an advanced industrial civilization. We're going to have an impact.

Is it? Because at the very least, modern life involves the mass production of plastics, mining of various minerals, and the use of copious amounts of energy. That last one is only kind of solved (as long as everything works and nothing breaks), but I have yet to see any convincing evidence that there is any feasible substitute for the first two.

Scale matters. When you have the scale that we do, you will have accidents because of the sheer number and the lack of oversight due to cost pressures. These accidents aren't going anywhere. They have been around since industrial times and will continue to be so. Please tell me how you would ensure 0 accidents - the world would be interested to know since it hasn't been discovered yet. Now please explain who's position is baseless.

How would we know such a society is possible? There's zero proof of that to date. Errors and inevitable catastrophes are part of the cost of a highly complex technically advanced society run by humans.

Not with humans.