"This much is well accepted: dispersants don't make all that streaming oil vanish. As the science journal Nature reported, "they help large globs of oil 'disperse' into smaller pieces -- hence their name -- which are easier for sea-living microbes to break down."
"Their use is a trade-off decision," Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said during a telephone press conference earlier this week.
The important question, which has gone unanswered, is are we minimizing the damage to our planet by using these dispersants, or are we adding to the mess?
It is inexcusable that we do not know the answer to this question and have decided to make the Gulf of Mexico an enormous floating science experiment. After all, we've been dealing with oil spills from the moment we started pumping oil. According to a 2005 National Research Council report titled, Oil Spill Dispersants: Efficacy and Effects , 3 million gallons of oil and refined petroleum are spilled annually in around U.S. waters, mostly in smaller batches."
Thanks to Jacob Turner for the article.
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