Last week as 210,000 gallons of oil continued to gush daily into the Gulf of Mexico, my son coincidentally happened to be studying "Ocean Pollution" in his 6th grade Earth Science class. It's been sobering to read how devastating and even unprecedented this disaster may well be when it's over...if it's ever truly over...especially for the environment, wildlife, and those who live and work along the shores of the Gulf. It's even hard to fathom just how much oil that is pouring into the sea at one time. Even today BP CEO Tony Hayward was quoted on NPR as saying that the massive leak may still not be shut off for weeks or even months...unbelievable. With that fresh in my mind, I was taken aback by a pie chart in my son's text book showing a breakdown of where most of the oil that pollutes our oceans actually comes from. It goes like this:
51.4% Runoff from land
19.4% Routine ship maintenance
13.0% Air pollution
8.8% Natural seeps
5.2% Oil spills
2.2% Offshore drilling
(Holt California Earth Science 2007)
If these figures are correct, then the kinds of devastating spills like the one in the Gulf make up only about 5% of oil pollution in the ocean. The rest is mostly caused by us consumers, which is a reminder that even as we may be tempted to wag our fingers at BP and proponents of off-shore drilling, we are not innocent in all this. If a majority of the oil polluting our oceans stems from non-point sources such as oil and gasoline from cars that washes from streets into storm sewers and eventually to sea, the underlying issue is not just how to prevent platform disasters from happening, but our entire nation's dependence on oil.
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