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Newsweek has created a great slideshow illuminating some staggering numbers about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. I suggest you head over there and read it in full as they include insightful synopses/explanations of each, but these were the few figures I found the most interesting:
Time it would take the United States to use the oil spilled so far: 4 hours, 24 minutes
Number of response workers: 42,000-plus
Percent of the spill that’s natural gas: 70%
Cubic feet of natural gas set ablaze: 1 billion
Number of suggestions received with ideas to stop the spill: 112,000
Along with that last factoid, Newsweek also included the below video of Kevin Costner talking about his invention that can siphon polluted water from the Gulf, extract the oil from it and dump the clean water back into the sea. He came up with this “oil distiller” while filming Waterworld when he — for God knows what reason — partnered with his brother to create an actual, working version of a prop used in the film. Obviously, the device did not need to work in the movie. It’s Hollywood make-believe and we viewers would have just believed that the theoretical physics they discussed worked considering it is, ya know, a movie set in the distant future that featured a plot where the globe was entirely submersed by ocean and “dry land was a myth.” But, nope, Kevin needed realism within his work of fiction, so the brothers Costner fabricated a working model of this centrifuge-based “Ocean Therapy” technology.
And now, hopefully, we will all owe the man a big round of applause. After conducting a few tests, BP purchased 32 of the machines from Costner a few weeks ago and has already begun using them to aid the clean up efforts. The technology is not perfect (as you can learn about here), but it is helping — which means Kevin has almost certainly done more to help the Gulf of Mexico, marine life and affected coastal communities than you have.
Overall, it’s easily the best thing he has done since Thirteen Days.
True, businesses need to make money to stay afloat in the competitive business world. But in this modern marketplace, companies are increasingly focusing on remaining profitable while incorporating sustainability. With evidence that business activities are influencing climate change and companies are depleting the earth’s resources at an alarming rate, environmental risks have become business risks.
Marsh recently released a white paper entitled, “Sustainability – Managing Your Risk” that addresses the risks companies face in trying to manage one of the newest business risks. First, the report stresses companies to look for tangible evidence that their own suppliers have signed up to a sustainability code, saying that not only should your company become sustainable, but your company’s supply chain as well.
With legislation passing, companies are realizing their operations may not be considered environmentally friendly. As an example, the European Union enacted the Environmental Liability Directive, meaning that businesses must now ensure that they do not cause damage to water, land or biodiversity.
But many companies believe “going green” is more costly. Though that may be true in the near-term for some instances, the long-term return is proof that green is good.
“There is evidence that changing business practices to a more sustainable model can reap financial rewards. The Fairtrade movement is an example where consumers are willing to pay higher prices to be reassured about how the products have been produced.”
Among the sustainability issues for businesses and society is water (we ran an in-depth feature on this topic in the June 2009 issue). Water-intensive companies (think Coca-Cola, Nestle, Texas Instruments) are now assessing the risk they pose to the areas in which they operate. In fact, the Carbon Disclosure Project is now asking the world’s biggest companies for the first time to disclose how much water they use. And this is no tree-hugging initiative — major investors “with trillions of dollars in assets have backed this call for such information.”
In today’s business world, people’s view of a company is not based simply on what it does, but how the company does it. As Marsh says:
“With the increasing pressure on depleted natural resources and a greater level of scrutiny concerning environmental performance from policymakers and investors, it makes more sense than ever to fully understand the impact that a business is having on the environment and to make changes to business process that are seen to be having a deleterious effect on the environment and society.”
Lagging behind on the issue of sustainability within business operations will eventually mean lagging behind the competition.
Yesterday, Emily did a post recounting Aon’s list of the top five global hotspots for earthquakes. Given the seemingly relentless seismic activity and destruction wrought by shifting tectonic plates just in 2010 alone, such natural disasters should be high on everyone’s watch list.
But as we are seeing right now in the Gulf, man-made disasters can present enormous perils of their own. And it just so happens that I came across Spike’s list of “The Top Seven Most Bizarre Man-Made Disasters” today.
You can head over there for a full rundown of all the incidents (including Bhopal, the Texas City devastation and the new-to-me Boston “Molassacre”), but these are the three I find most interesting.
3. The Gates of Hell
This pit of fire that has been burning for 40 years looks more like something out or Mordor than Turkmenistan. But the burning crater of natural gas began shortly after a Russian drilling rig collapsed into the Underworld and no one knew what to do.
Having opened this huge poisonous gas cavern up, the atmosphere and the nearby residents in the village of Derweze decided the next logical move would be to set this huge crater on fire, and it has been burning ever since.
Sure, light it on fire. Why not? What could go wrong? Seems logical enough.
Here’s video of some tourists enjoying the incredible, football-field-wide hole to hell (not literally).
Yikes.
2. The Centralia Underground Coal Fire
Our former publisher and Pennsylvanian Bill Coffin used to talk about this one all the time, so I have been familiar with its existence for some time. Nevertheless, it’s completely nuts. Like the Gates of Hell, it has been burning for decades — since 1962 in fact. But unlike the Turkmenistan fire, its genesis is not so clear.
It is suspected to be a blunder by the local fire department in 1962 which had been tasked with cleaning up the local landfill, which itself sat on top of an abandoned strip mine. To accomplish this, they set the landfill on fire, apparently not an unheard of method at the time. However, the theory goes that the fire was not put out properly, and heated up veins of coal underneath the landfill, which began to smolder over time.
Eventually the reaction lit an underground fire which continued to burn, which caused little concern from local authorities until almost two decades later when in 1981, a 12-year-old boy fell into a 150-foot sinkhole which suddenly opened up in the backyard underneath his feet.
“Blunder” seems to be putting it lightly. A “blunder” is forgetting to send out an email before you leave work for the night. A “blunder” is perhaps running into a parked car while trying to do a u-turn. Or a “blunder” may even be leaving the iron on when you run out the door on the way to brunch. Accidentally igniting a 1,200-degree coal fire that has burned for a half century — and is expected to continue burning until around 2260 — is more than a “blunder.”
I think we can all agree that it should at least be considered a “my bad.”
An actual sign in Centralia, PA.
1. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
This is one of the neatest, worst things I have ever found out about. Discovered by chance by Captain Charles Moore some 12 years ago, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is an unfathomably immense, floating, amorphous collection of trash in the middle of the planet’s largest ocean. It is located between Hawaii and California due to the fact that that is where multiple sea currents meet — and there the (mostly) plastic mass churns in the water at twice the size of Texas.
Pretty cool, huh? But sorry, folks, it’s not all beautiful pollution.
There is also a downside.
Over the decades the garbage patch has been developing, much of the debris has been broken down into smaller and smaller particles, comprised largely of various kinds of plastics, which is then mistaken for food by the marine life, which in turn contaminates the ecosystem all way up the food chain.
Since the area is so massive in scale (both in terms of width and depth underwater), many scientists believe it is nearly impossible to cleanup the contamination at sea, and that it would likely do even more damage to the surrounding sea life in the process. When people talk about our need to recycle plastics, this is why.
All cavalierness aside, this is obviously a terrible problem and represents one of the unforeseen — and, until relatively recently, unknown — risks of our modern society. What can be done? Who knows. Perhaps nothing. But it’s just another lesson for all of us about what types of unexpected disasters can compile — little by little, day by day — when you’re no one is paying attention.
Below, Cpt. Moore speaks about the problem with Stephen Colbert.
This morning, BP announced that the Gulf of Mexico oil spill has cost the company $1.6 billion. The London-based company said that included in the $1.6 billion figure were payments of $62 million that have been paid out to 51,000 claims. The figure also includes “the cost of the spill response, containment, relief well drilling, grants to Gulf states” and federal costs.
With several years (or decades, even) of cleanup ahead, the $1.6 billion is seen as a merely an initial cost figure. Credit Suisse actually estimated the total bill at $37 billion.
A majority of the Senate called on BP to set up a $20-billion account, administered by an independent trustee, to pay for cleanup and economic damages from the massive gulf oil spill, “ensuring that there will be no delay in payments or attempt to evade responsibility for damages.”
The letter was signed by 54 senators, almost the entire Democratic caucus. “The damages caused by your company are far reaching,” the lawmakers wrote to BP’s Tony Hayward.
Obama is scheduled to address the nation Tuesday evening in regards to ongoing oil leak.
Though the current situation in the Gulf of Mexico may seem like the worst oil spill in history, it has, so far, been a far cry from the Ixtoc oil spill. The Ixtoc 1, like the Deepwater Horizon, was an exploratory rig that suffered a blowout in the Bay of Campeche (Gulf of Mexico) in 1979. Fast Company created an interesting infographic that compares the world’s worst oil spills. Here is a section from the rather large graphic:
When you look at the Deepwater Horizon oil spill this way, it doesn’t look as bad as you thought, right? Well take a look at the environmental impact of this current spill, compared to the impact of previous, and some larger, spills:
Experts say that this event could become the largest oil spill in the world in terms of amount of oil leaked, money required for cleanup and claims and damage to the environment. If BP doesn’t find a solution soon, there is little doubt the Deepwater Horizon oil spill might make the number one spot — an unfortunate accolade.
