You’d think after the paper’s recent whopper on the magnitude of the BP oil spill, folks at the New York Times would be extra careful.
Apparently not.
Back in May the paper suggested the BP spill wasn’t nearly as bad as Iraq’s 36 billion gallon spill at the end of the Gulf War. That number was way off; the actual tally was somewhere between 250 and 350 million gallons, as the paper eventually noted (blaming the error on someone else).
On Saturday (6/26/10), Times business columnist Joe Nocera argued against a proposed moratorium on deepwater drilling. One of his main points was that deepwater drilling–except for, you know, that current problem in the Gulf of Mexico–is remarkably clean, and that other drilling methods were worse:
Which also leads to a great irony: importing more oil via tankers will actually create more risk, not less. Between 1964 and the Deepwater Horizon accident, a grand total of 1,800 barrels of oil were lost from rig accidents–an average of 45 barrels a year. That is an astonishing record. Ken Arnold, an expert who consulted with the Interior Department right after the BP spill–and a big critic of the moratorium–told me that much more oil is spilled in tanker accidents annually than from drilling rig accidents.
A mere 45 barrels a year is indeed astonishing. It’s also way, way off the mark, as a Times correction today admits (emphasis added):
The Talking Business column on Saturday, about the effect of a moratorium on deepwater drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, misstated the record of oil spills in the Outer Continental Shelf. From 1964 to 2009, 532,000 barrels of oil were lost as a result of spills, not 1,800 barrels. (The lower figure refers to oil lost as a result of blowouts from 1971 to 2009, not to the overall amount of oil lost in accidents.)
One thousand, five hundred thousand–thepoint’s still valid, right?
last year a nyt sales guy asked me to purchase a subscription. i said i’ll make you a deal when the slimes
starts reporting the news again i’ll buy one. he said fair enough and walked away saying understood
my position.
NYT: The paper of corporate record!
Wait a minute…
What about the Ixtoc I blowout in 1979?
Good point about Ixtoc. 3 million bbl in the Gulf of Mexico before the blowout was fully contained 9 months later. However, NYT might dodge that one on a misleading technicality. Nocera’s statement (according to the NYT correction, referred to the Outer Continental Shelf. Was Ixtoc located on the Outer Shelf? If yes, NYT faces another correction. If not, they should issue an apology for misleading “facts”. If the oil pollutes the Gulf of Mexico, does it make a material difference as to whether or not it originated on or off the Shelf? More importantly, perhaps Mr Nocera would revisit the issue in light of these numbers?
hey, they were only off by a factor of 300, cut ’em some slack….
“the point’s still valid, right?”
Well, is it? That seems to be the real issue. If more than 13k barrels/year were lost from tanker accidents, then the point is still valid. Without that data, we don’t know if the correction is meaningful or not.
We had over 20,000 oil spills in 2009 alone, according to the EPA website. In my opinion, you get ONE DISASTER, and then you should be OUT OF BUSINESS. Exxon and BP have had several. Apparently, “fines” have no effect. Stiff prison terms should be in play now, or guess what, you’re to stupid to be involved in the business. I don’t think any of us could get away with spilling toxic fluids everywhere, blowing people up, trashing the planet, and just walk away with “oops, its a risky business.” These criminals still have stocks on the stock market and making PROFITS!!!! When someone can earn so much money to the point of owning and controlling entire governments…in my book…you’re just too bloody rich. You need to be taken down a notch. Nationalize the oil and make it a non-profit utility, it’s the only way to weed out the criminals lacking a conscience.
I must have missed it; there’s so much to read and digest these days. But I have read nothing in the NYT regarding the punching of holes in the natural gas-bearing Marcellus shale rock formation underlying much of NY, PA, and parts of WV, OH and MD. And how about the broader query: We, as a society, just can’t stop punching holes in Earth, and what happens when the “natural resources” run out, as fossils eventually do?