Looming ‘Clean’ Energy Disasters Off Our Coasts, by Paul Driessen

When government mandates something, it’s always something stupid, because the smart things people mostly do willingly. From Paul Driessen at lewrockwell.com:

One broken wind turbine blade shut down Massachusetts beaches. What would hurricanes do?

Photos of oil-covered seals and birds from California’s 1969 Santa Barbara blowout helped launch the environmental and stop-oil movements. Some 90,000 barrels polluted ocean waters and yet, when I was scuba diving beneath it two decades later, the same production platform support structure once again hosted a magnificent ecosystem with millions of anemones, mussels, starfish, crabs and fish.

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon drillship disaster killed eleven workers and blasted 3-4 million barrels of oil and enormous amounts of natural gas into the Gulf of Mexico. Yet within a surprisingly short time after the runaway well was capped, wave action, oil-dispersant chemicals, dust-covered oil droplets slowly sinking to the seafloor, and other natural forces had cleansed the waters of oil.

Those other forces were hydrocarbon-degrading microbes that are always present in ocean waters worldwide – but rapidly reproduce when they sense oil in their environs. After depleting the hydrocarbon food sources, the microbes die off to normal numbers, and new organisms degrade the byproducts the initial foragers created, until those nutrients are also gone. Then their populations also plummet, in a newly clean ocean.

The disasters spurred industry to implement better blowout prevention technologies and procedures.

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