"BRITTANY WILL BECOME A DESERT"

At the time of writing, half the ship's 80,000 tons (1 ton of crude is about 300 gallons) of oil is still on board, but even assuming that all of it is eventually spilled, it is not one of the major spills (as you can see in the figure); it is only about twice as big as that by the much publicized, but minor Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989.

The figure is arranged by size, not date; the earliest spill was that by the Torrey Canyon off Land's End (England's most south-westerly point) in 1967, with all the ecologists and virtually all of the US media screaming that Cornish beaches would be devastated for centuries if not for ever. Needless to say, it is difficult to find any evidence for the spill anymore; any serious consequences of such spills last only for a few months.

Yet bigger spills were to come. The Amoco Cadiz spilled almost twice as much as the Tom? Canyon off the French coast (Brittany, Bretagne) in 1978, but the Greens had learned nothing and once again claimed that "Brittany will become a desert."

As an animal lover, I feel a lot sorrier for the oil-soaked birds than do the Greenpests, for my distress has no political or ideological motives. But as pointed out in the editorial, feelings are not facts, and the facts of the matter are that you lose a few birds in the short run, but you gain a lot of them, and especially of fish, in the long run. The sea is starved for nutrients, and it has its own bacteria that (eventually) break down petroleum products and other hydrocarbons. These oil-ingesting microorganisms at the bottom of the food chain are themselves ingested by the predators along the chain all the way up to fish, which are themselves eaten by sea birds and humans at the top of the chain. And all of these predators, including man, prosper after an off spill. In fact, there are chemosynthetic ecosystems (there was once a science called ecology before it degenerated into a pseudoscience of superstitions spread by malicious nuts) that are based on petroleum seeping naturally into the sea. One such system based on deepwater seeps is located on the Texas continental slope east of Galveston.

In 1990, but a single year after the Valdez spill in Alaska, the salmon catch topped the previous 1987 record by no less than 38% [AtE Oct 90], and it is my understanding that the catch has been above the pre-1989 average every year since. So you lose a few birds (not counting the more than 100 birds dipped into oil and thrown to their deaths into Prince William Sound by the Fish & Wildlife Service by order of the Justice Dept. in a "study" to prosecute Exxon [AtE May 91]) and some other wildlife, but all species come back stronger than before. Can anyone believe that Greenpest is genuinely for biodiversity?

Some of the information above comes from a CRS (Congressional Research Service) Report, no. 90-356 SPR of 7/24/1990, Oil in the ocean: the short-and long term impacts of a spill by James E. Mielke, Ph.D, a specialist in marine and earth sciences working in the Science Policy Research Division of CRS (itself a division of the library of Congress). CRS reports are not available to the public, but only to members of Congress; however, they are not secret, and your Congressman may be willing to get it for you.

Just two years ago [AtE Feb 1991] I appealed to the Princes of Exxon to spend a tiny fraction of what they pay (quite futilely) as protection money in contributions to the Sierr Club, Greenpests and other sham-environmentalists; spend it on reprinting this report (which is not copyrighted) to defend themselves against the false accusations in the Valdez spill. But the Exxon wimps would rather continue their unsuccessful attempts to ingratiate themselves with their enemies than spread the truth. Once more I appeal to them and other oil companies to reprint this sober report in the interest of truth, even if they are also the interests of this sorry bunch of corporate wimps.