Drill Baby Drill

The Gulf Oil Spill in Perspective Rep Joe Barton presiding

“ I want to put this in perspective, Mr. Chairman, before I have to yield back my time. This accident as far as we know is releasing 5,000 barrels a day into the Gulf of Mexico. It has been doing so for approximately three weeks so that’s a little bit over 100,000 barrels. The largest spill in the Gulf of Mexico to date was a spill off the coast of Mexico. It produced 90,000 barrels a day for nine months, 90,000 barrels per day for nine months. Exxon-Valdez was a tanker that ran aground in Alaska, that was a supertanker that was three to four hundred thousand barrels of oil. So far this spill has produced a little over a hundred thousand barrels. Now that in and of itself is a significant spill and it is a non-trivial incident, but it is nowhere near yet the order of magnitude of other accidents that have happened around the world. There is a natural seepage in the oceans around the United States on an annual basis of four million barrels a year. There is an annual seepage worldwide of over forty million barrels of oil per year. So this, while it is an accident that is non-trivial, it is not of the catastrophic consequences that some in the mainstream media have made it out to be. [full C-Span video] ” Thanks to anonymous for directing this to our attention.  Identify yourself and allow Samurai A/G TFV take you to dinner and a movie.