Inevitable
As long as we continue to move vast amounts of petroleum products acorss the earth's surface, oil spills and leaks will be inevitable. This time it's inside San Francisco Bay. Dead animals, slimed beaches, piers, boats. We've seen all this too many times in too many places. It's inevitable, even if you believe we've passed Peak Oil. Oil is at the heart of much of the modern global economy. I bought a tank full of gasoline just this week. You probably did, too. My laptop has many parts made from petroleum derivatives. So does my mobile phone, and yours.
The San Francisco morning paper had a single word headline, "Heartbreaking." Online it was more prosaic but described the damage being done by a spill that is about one percent of the Big One. This spill was simply the fuel for the cargo ship, it wasn't a oil tanker which could have been many times worse.
The Big One was the Exxon Valdez spill eighteen years ago. Of course, the science and the spin on that one are still going. Wikipedia had problems with Exxonians altering the description of the spill. High in the Google search results is this site on the science of the "Valdez" spill. The site has no obvious owner but it smacks of a fine PR job by some pro-oil folks. Government publications on the spill's effects abound and work continues to figure out what the lingering effects are. Oil in liquid form still remains beneath the water and the beaches in Prince William Sound.
Even a decade after the '89 spill there were disagreemetns among scientists about what to do and how to study the effects. Much about the long-term toxicity of oil spills is still unknown. Even though I've yet to hear of the first solar spill, I hope as we inevitably transition from oil and coal to whatever comes next, we think about the consquences, the potential environmental damage. Our oil-drilling forefathers didn't care about that, but now we know better. With wind, nuclear, solar, biofuel, solar, tidal, even mule power, there are consquences. There will be accidents. It's inevitable.