OIL TANKERS AND OIL SPILLS

This is utter nonsense.

With the vast amounts of oil now passing over the oceans it would be unreasonable to expect total elimination of all oil spills. But their number and severity can be reduced. The prevention "in depth" is to go nuclear and change to electric cars ("1 nuke = gas for 500,000 cars," says a bumpersticker by Citizens for the Breeder), but much can be done by improving technical safeguards such as electronic anti-collision devices, and by better training of captains and navigators. Once the oil has been spilled, it can be contained by booms, soaked up by sorbents, removed by skimming devices, dispersed by chemicals, and perhaps most fascinatingly, eaten up by bacteria genetically engineered to consume hydrocarbons (AtE Nov.75).

But even if nothing is done, the idea of "destroying the oceans" smells of megalomania. A spill such as the Amoco Cadiz' 1,500,000 barrels (the biggest to date), which may happen perhaps once a decade, is about 25 percent of the oil that seeps into the oceans year-in, year-out courtesy of Mother Nature (though, of course, not all in one place). The sea is quite literally starved for hydrocarbon and other food; and experience has repeatedly shown that the sea knows how to preserve its ecology and environment after an oil spill.

People like Thor Heyerdahl and Jacques-Yves Cousteau get into all the Sunday supplements and TV shows because they cater to the currently fashionable demand for horrendous disasters and for the heart-warming feeling of guilt ("I repent, but the rest of you are despicable sinners!"), but they do not really understand the sea. Cousteau, seven years ago, put the demise of the sea within the next 10 years, and recently gave it another 20; then he died, and the sea lives on.

Among the genuine scientists condemned to having to listen to the baloney of the ecolo-megalomaniacs is oceanographer Dr John D. Isaacs, director of the University of California's Institute of Marine Resources at La Jolla, who recently gave an outstanding interview to Omni (Aug.79). We highly recommend looking it up in any Public Library, as it gives excellent insights into the true issues connected with sewage effluents, the Marine Mammal Act, and many other problems that are being "colonized" (as Isaacs calls it) as sources of profitable existence for some researchers and bureaucrats. "Much effort is spent in cultivation and refurbishment of the problem," says Isaacs, "so that it continues to appear fresh, important and worthy down through the fiscal years."

Isaacs also gives brief, but persuasive reasons why he thinks sub-seabed storage of nuclear wastes feasible, safe, and advantageous. One of the reasons why it is not often considered, he adds acerbically, is "that there are no fresh groundwater supplies to protect."

In a recent debate in Chicago between this writer and Prof. E. Sternglass, the latter was carried away into horror fantasies on how a meltdown would kill millions of people and forever devastate thousands of square miles, whereupon the anti-nuclear part of the audience broke into wild applause and cheers as if they had just been told the best news of the century.