We're killing ourselves with pollution

From Crooks and Liars
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Mayflower Subdivision Still Vacant 2 Months After Exxon Tar Sands Spill

Two months after Exxon's Pegasus pipeline ruptured and spewed tar sands oil into an Arkansas subdivision and nearby lake...life in Mayflower is still far from back to normal.

Arkansas Matters:

    "You can see it's just nasty. It was never like this before," said Robin Lang as she pointed to green, turbid water in her backyard.

    Two days before the two-month anniversary of the Mayflower oil spill, folks like Lang who live on "The Cove" section of Lake Conway are still wondering when life will be back to normal.

    Oil collecting boom stretches across her lake view, and an airboat patrols daily collecting remnants of the spill.

    Lang says wildlife is nowhere to be seen.

    "It's like a desert area," she said. "Everything just left. I mean what would want to be in this water?"

While Exxon paid the residents of The Cove $2,500 each for their troubles, there is no agreement to protect their property values. There is also no one cleaning the properties in The Cove as they are in Northwoods subdivision.

But life in Northwoods subdivision still hasn't returned to normal. All 22 of the homes evacuated on March 29th still remain vacant. Heavy equipment is still present, yards are still torn up. Seven of the homes were so deeply impacted by the spill that there are no plans to return those families to their homes, Exxon is instead looking for "long-term solutions" for them.

BP still screwing America

From The Political Carnival

Headline: BP still hasn't paid billions of dollars in fines, other payments to Gulf Coast, environmental groups

Click the link to read the article. The title says it all, for the most part, but details are provided in the article.

Oil and the people...

Maybe it's just me, but wouldn't you think that oil companies would want to go out of their way to keep people safe, alive and well, so that there would be a bigger consumer group using their products? But, no. So why are they so callous about their operations and the damage they do?

From The Tampa Bay Times

The oil that spewed into the Gulf of Mexico during the Deepwater Horizon disaster three years ago killed off millions of amoeba-like creatures that form the basis of the gulf's aquatic food chain, according to scientists at the University of South Florida.

The die-off of tiny foraminifera stretched through the mile-deep DeSoto Canyon and beyond, following the path of an underwater plume of oil that snaked out from the wellhead, said David Hollander, a chemical oceanographer with USF.

"Everywhere the plume went, the die-off went," Hollander said.

The discovery by USF scientists marks yet another sign that damage from the disaster is still being revealed as its third anniversary looms. Although initially some pundits said the spill wasn't as bad as everyone feared, further scientific research has found that corals in the gulf died. Anglers hauled in fish with tattered fins and strange lesions. And dolphins continue dying.

The full implications of the die-off are yet to be seen. The foraminifera are consumed by clams and other creatures, who then provide food for the next step in the food chain, including the types of fish found with lesions. Because of the size of the spill, the way it was handled and the lack of baseline science in the gulf, there's little previous research to predict long-term effects.

Describing why there is a protest against the Keystone Pipeline.