John Vidal of The Observer reports on the effect of oil drilling in the Nigerian delta, where activists claim that oil leaks are common and cleanup and compensation are rare. “There are more than 300 spills, major and minor, a year,” said Nnimo Bassey, the Nigerian head of Friends of Earth International. “It happens all the year round. The whole environment is devastated. The latest revelations highlight the massive difference in the response to oil spills. In Nigeria, both companies and government have come to treat an extraordinary level of oil spills as the norm.” (HT: Chris Blattman) [%comments]
Where Oil Spills Happen All the Time
TAGS: environment, oil
and 
. You can also watch it on 
(Recalculated from figures I sent Dube:)
Try to look at the bright side….50,000 barrels of petroleum per day = 0.0000038 cubic mile per day (the high estimate). So in 60 days the BP well could spill 0.000114 cubic miles–Or in round numbers about 1/10,000 of a cubic mile. Imagine a one-mile-square meat loaf pan filled up to your ankle with crude. This is not a good thing, but there you are.
A lot of oil, but compared to the Gulf, only a tiny amount.The gulf contains 583,948 cubic miles of water. So the spill is 1 part in three billion so far–worst case.
Environment disasters are unequal in developed and developing countries. If the BP Oil Disaster had affected Afghanistan then media hype would not have been even 1% of the current hue and cry being seen.Its an unequal world
The oil companies in the Niger Delta get away with it because they’re only affecting ethnic minorities who live in the delta region (like the Ogoni) and the government doesn’t care.
i think that the oil spill is outrages it is bp falet and stop fighting over and do something about this i thnk that the goverment should wake up and take responsiblity about this very hudge promblem
@1
Clearly, the effect of the oil spill is insignificant when you consider how much it would take to become toxic in the 85 million cubic miles of the Atlantic or even more importantly the 310 million cubic miles that comprise the world’s oceans!
People should realize the same thing about nuclear weapons as well. Why should it matter if a nuke detonates in New York and irradiates everything in a 5 mile radius? It is still only a fraction of 1% of the 1 billion cubic miles of atmosphere of the entire Earth
Unless you can find some way to magically diffuse the oil over the entire Gulf, diminishing the severity of the spill by arbitrarily picking a volume to compare it to is irrelevant and intellectually dishonest.
Re Eric @ 1.
10 parts per million of petroleum can extinguish most sea life. You wouldn’t want 10 parts per billion of benzene circulating in your plasma or even your beer.
Your mathematics and probablility argument cannot stand up to a dead fish.
this is why BP has been so casual in their public remarks – they are used to spills, this seems like business as usual to them..I remember when the first tar starting blackening the beaches of Beirut in the sixties. That was fifty years ago, fifty years of pollution of the Mediterranean by spilled oil. We have to move on to another form of energy, oil is way too costly – for who can put a price on a species going extinct?
Every so often an issue crops up that makes or should make people think twice about the double standards with which world issues are treated. One such issue is the global or rather Western coverage and response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico – USA. Do Oil spills in Africa not matter?
http://www.myweku.com/2010/06/do-oil-spills-in-africa-not-matter/