The Devil Monsanto, or Combating Scientific Ignorance: CRISPR Responsibly!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > The Devil Monsanto, or Combating Scientific Ignorance: CRISPR Responsibly!

Preem Palver: Jul 5, 2007

norton I posted:

The MSDS for most surfactant/antifoam compounds look scary, but are written for legal reasons and aren't useful for actual risk assessment. Surfactant in ag chemicals is basically a few drops of oily stuff in each barrel to keep other stuff from clumping. You need very little of it, which is good because that poo poo gets expensive when you buy it by the kg.

It's like when people went batshit about cleanup crews spraying Corexit (primary ingredients including propylene glycol and other surfactants) on oil spills in the open ocean. The MSDS looks scary, but the actual risk of the detergent likely isn't any greater than the dish soap applied directly to baby birds.

DDT is awesome at killing insects and is pretty harmless to animals that are not birds. Persistence makes it horrible for ag spraying, but there is nothing better for keeping mosquitoes out of houses.

People were freaking out about the corexit because all it did was disperse the oil enough to remain under the surface of the ocean, causing dead zones where plumes of dispersed oil settled underwater. It made good PR photos for BP due to the lack of oil on top of the ocean but worsened the environmental impact of the spill overall. People weren't worried about the corexit alone, it was what it would do in conjunction with the oil.

Here is a recent (newspaper) article summarizing the ecological impact three years later.

quote:

One intriguing question is why some oil settled into the sediment on the bottom of the gulf a mile deep and stayed there. Hollander says that may be the work of two factors. One is the dispersant called Corexit that BP used to try to spread the oil out so it wouldn't wash ashore. The other is the Mississippi River.

BP sprayed Corexit directly at the wellhead spewing oil from the bottom of the gulf, even though no one had ever tried spraying it below the water's surface before. BP also used more of the dispersant than had been used in any previous oil spill, 1.8 million gallons, to try to break up the oil.

Meanwhile, the spill coincided with the typical spring flood of the mighty Mississippi, which sent millions of gallons of freshwater cascading in to push the oil away from the coast.

The Corexit broke the oil droplets down into smaller drops, creating the plume, Hollander said. Then the smaller oil droplets bonded with clay and other materials carried into the gulf by the Mississippi, sinking into the sediment where they killed the foraminifera.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2013 04:32

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 06:55

Preem Palver: Jul 5, 2007

Deteriorata posted:

You seem to think the oil would have just disappeared and been harmless if it hadn't been for the dispersant. The oil was going to cause lots of environmental damage somewhere no matter what. The only choice was in which ecosystem you designated to take the hit. The bayous and mangrove swamps of the Louisiana coast are very fragile and would have been almost impossible to clean up and restore. Leaving the oil on the surface would have been disastrous.

Hence, the dispersant was used to get it off the surface and protect the wetlands. The deep Gulf was less sensitive and more resilient, so it would have less impact there. There was no "no damage" option.

I did not state or imply that there would have been no environmental impact otherwise, and in fact said the exact opposite. Note "worsened environmental impact of the spill overall" and "in conjunction with the oil."
And considering that microbial life in the marshes is dying off because of the spill, it seems as if spraying the corexit didn't really help things, and likely made it worse.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2013 04:52

Preem Palver: Jul 5, 2007

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

I wonder how many calories it takes to grow your own food and walk it to your table. Here's an example of what I mean:

I live in Ecuador. I have a big property, and decided I want to grow some of my own food rather than get it at the farmer's market here. I made my own compost to enrich the soil in my yard (extremely easy to do, just put dead grass, cow manure and fruit peels in a pile and wait). I then grew blackberries and tomatoes using nothing but seeds I had laying around. I planted them and in a few months I had more than enough blackberries and tomatoes for my family. Nature did %99 of the work. I didn't even water my plants. I didn't use chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or ship my food across the world. I basically used no energy derived from fossil fuels.

Is this supposed to be an example of sustainable agriculture? Not everyone has a big backyard to grow some fruit plants in, or lives on arable land even if they do have a backyard, and it's not as if you grew enough food to live off of. All you did was supplement your groceries with some home-grown tomatoes and blackberries. I agree that our current agricultural practices are unsustainable, but the solution won't be people growing fruit in their backyard. I have pear, pecan, and fig trees in my backyard; they're a great way to make cheap but delicious desserts(and wine with the pears). I give my neighbors the produce I don't use, but that is not scalable up to a national or global level. Examples of sustainable large-scale grain production would be far more effective in demonstrating your point.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2014 16:46

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