Will the Gulf of Mexico recover in our lifetime?

I’ll go out on a limb and say, partly. If we live a long time and oil stocks go into decline and the price per barrel becomes much more expensive than it already is.

Let’s take a quick look at the current situation.

Hundreds of thousands of liters (800,000 - 1,000,000) of crude oil still spew into the Gulf each day from a blown-out well one mile below the surface. No solution yet.

The spill threatens the environment because booms are relatively ineffective against high winds and waves. So, the environmental disaster looms large now, and will grow.


[Guardian UK]

The Gulf’s US fishing industry (“the heartbeat of the region’s economic life,” says Pres. Obama) and tourism dollars and other industries are gravely threatened.

Still, there will be a slow turn around, because, as we’ve seen elsewhere, some fixing up can be done.

Money will be poured into the region after well owner BP America is successfully wrestled to the ground by the US government. Odds are it will go a few rounds but Obama can be persuasive.

Admittedly, spilled oil is a big problem, even bigger when we add in the massive amounts of chemical fertilizer residue (a by-product of the fossil fuel industry) that are washed into the Gulf each year from vast stretches of mid-America farmland.

I read the following recently from The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan (please visit Read This, side margin):

“The ultimate fate of the nitrates (e.g., applied to vast cornfields in Iowa) is to flow down the Mississippi into the Gulf of mexico, where their deadly fertility poisons the marine ecosystem. The nitrogen tide stimulates the growth of algae, and the algae smother the fish, creating a hypoxic or dead zone as big as the state of New Jersey and still growing.”

Ironic, isn’t it? Crude is bubbling up from the seabed (bad enough in itself) and uniting with ammonia nitrates, a first cousin so to speak, and creating an even more lethal stew.

But if conditions are right (e.g., higher oil prices, for one) and our fossil-fuel powered lifestyles grow smaller, the Gulf will one day partly recover.

I might be 105 years old at the time but I’ll still pop a balloon.

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