Because insomnia has turned me into a pessimistic creature filled with vile loathing...

[gremlingirl]

Occasionally, I go on Wiki hunts of Doom. Here is tonight's: What happens to large quantities of crude coming to shore and sitting in the humid sun of the Gulf Coast?

PetroleumAn oil well produces predominantly crude oil, with some natural gas dissolved in it. Because the pressure is lower at the surface than underground, some of the gas will

Comments

[amp23]

oil plus dispersant is 11 times more toxic than oil alone. the dispersant being used is 4 times more toxic than oil by itself. aside from making the oil more toxic, the dispersant also magnifies the problem of the oil spill by breaking it up into thousands of little spills that are then harder to contain and deal with. it seems BP has been dumping the stuff to try and hide the magnitude of the problem.

here's the US Emergency Management and Response document on the hundreds of hydrocarbons found in oil and what they do to the human body:

http://cryptome.org/0001/oil-kill-tph.htm

basically the gulf coast is dead for a good while, and the eastern seaboard is pretty fucked too once that stuff gets kicked up into storms. Much of the US is going to see first-hand the devastation the oil companies used to keep hidden in the third world (africa, india, indonesia)

not much we CAN do aside from getting away from the devastation. BPs money pretty much guarantees nothing will be done (just like nothing was done to the banks that destroyed our economy for their personal gain) and with no real push to go back to regulating industry plus the tea party actively resisting any government action and taking down incumbents, this is a situation that seemingly can only get worse.