At yesterday’s TEDxOilSpill, a daylong event in Washington, D.C. trying to find solutions to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Oceana CEO Andrew Sharpless took the time to answer ten questions about oil and energy usually asked by "people who don't support policies that could create something good out of this catastrophe." (Oceana is a nonprofit ocean conservation organization calling for an end to offshore drilling.)
Sharpless busts 10 myths about the spill — so use these answers when arguing with your cynical uncle:
1) Isn't this Deepwater Horizon drilling disaster like an airplane crash? And we don't shut down aviation when planes crash. A) No, this is not like an airplane crash. In an airplane crash, most of the victims are those who were on the airplane. The victims here are the millions of people living in the Gulf. This is more like the guy who built a campfire in the dry season, against regulations, and burned down the national forest. That's why we have regulations against building campfires during the dry season: Not because every camper burns down his campsite, but because all we need is one.
2) There are 3,600 drilling platforms in the Gulf. Are you going to shut them all down? A) We're not calling for a shutdown of the platforms, just of drilling. Once you've drilled, the risks decrease.
3) Isn't this just a deep-water problem? Can't we continue in the shallow water? A) Ocean drilling in shallow water is very risky. One of the top three oil drilling disasters of all time, Ixtoc 1, was in just hundreds of feet of water. [Sharpless added that last summer, a blow-out on the Montara rig off the coast of Australia spilled millions of gallons of oil in over 10 weeks before a relief well stopped the flow. Montara was just 240 feet underwater.]
Full list of busted myths at NationalGeographic.com