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You are here: Home / Bike Commuting / Benefits of being a Bike Commuter / What’s with All this OIL Getting Away?

What’s with All this OIL Getting Away?

January 8, 2011 by Average Joe Cyclist

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The past nine months have seen an awful lot of oil getting away. And for the most part, we are still reeling and trying to figure out what happened with all these oil leaks, especially the BP oil spill.

Diver grapples with muck during the BP oil spill
Diver grapples with muck during the BP oil spill

Of course there was the horrific BP oil spill which started at Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig on 20th April 2010, and was not stopped until 15th July. All of BP’s systems could not get this oil spill under control any quicker. And so almost five MILLION barrels of oil flowed into the sea, devastating massive swathes of the environment. One graphic depicted the size of the devastated area as equivalent to Vancouver to Kelowna.

BP oil spill
Wildlife is the first to suffer when an oil spill happens

More recently, on 6th January 2011, a massive explosion on the Horizon oil sands in Northern Alberta injured four employees, and engulfed a 146 metre (480 foot) tall structure in flames. A Fort McKay resident complained: “I’m looking at a huge wall of black smoke that’s filling the sky. We don’t know what is being released right now into the air.” I’m guessing it’s whatever foul pollutant is released when we burn oil – something like what comes out of cars, only more of it.

Alberta oilsands explosion 6 January 2011 -BP oil spill
Alberta oilsands explosion 6 January 2011

And now we learn that Chevron’s North Burnaby refinery has been quietly leaching almost 11,000 litres of oily material into the ground since last spring. Their company spokesman insists that most of that has been recovered. (Of course, he wouldn’t have any motivation to exaggerate that claim, would he!) And the company is not even certain where the effluent is coming from. Which does not bode well for them being able to stop it from continuing to leach! Of course, Chevron has systems in place to prevent this kind of environmental contamination. And just as with BP, the systems failed.

Residents are incensed. One says: “It doesn’t matter how much Chevron says is there. It’s too much because it’s beyond the contaminated sites regulation. They are trying to downplay it, but it’s over the provincial limit.”

I can understand her distress. We very nearly bought a house close to the refinery, and now I am very relieved we didn’t. However, it is interesting to me that people get so upset about oil leaking into the ground, and gobs of oily material showing up on empty beaches – but at the same time blithely pollute the very air we breathe by driving around in pollution-spewing cars.

You’d think people would care more about the air that they have to breathe than a beach they cannot even see.

And you’d think that if the Province was going to regulate the amount of contamination oil refineries can generate, it would also regulate the amount of pollution cars can spew out. I can see it now on Global Morning News:

“If you’re about to get in your car and leave for work – don’t! The BC government has noted that air pollution exceeds regulated limits. All driving is suspended until further notice. Residents are invited to help themselves to the public service bicycles that will be provided in all neighborhoods.”

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Of course, that won’t happen until people are actually keeling over and asphyxiating on the street. Sigh. Although come to think of it, there are already many cities which issue advisories to vulnerable citizens to stay home on days when the air quality is excessively poor. Rather than order the people who are causing the problem (motorists) to stay home, they punish the victims! So I guess it is more likely that when things get that bad, Global will simply caution residents to wear gas masks to get to their cars – and keep those windows rolled up tight!

BP oil spill - gas mask
Now WHERE did I leave my car keys?

I suspect our happy indifference to air pollution stems from the fact that the pollution in our air is invisible. Right now I can look out my window and see a beautiful blue sky, with bright sunshine dappling the green grass and evergreens. You’d swear we were still in the Garden of Eden, and that humans had never done a thing to pollute the planet or destroy the environment. Unfortunately, that is really not the case. If I listen carefully I can hear the omnipresent growl of cars, relentlessly destroying this wonderful planet we have been given.

BP oil spill endangers the planet
Shades of our cycling future to come?

IMO it is the ultimate paradox of humanity that our amazing intelligence, which set us apart from the other animals and allowed us to completely dominate the earth, now threatens to destroy the earth as a habitat for all species – including ourselves. Most people look out on a beautiful day like today and cannot even imagine that we could really destroy it all; but I fear we are doing precisely that, just as relentlessly as the oil bubbled out of the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig in the apparently unstoppable BP oil spill.

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Filed Under: Benefits of being a Bike Commuter, Bike Advocacy Tagged With: Cycling Advocacy

Comments

  1. Richard says

    January 8, 2011 at 10:16 pm

    Don’t worry, it is all “ethical oil”. It won’t harm us or the environment, will it?

    • Avatar photoAverage Joe Cyclist says

      January 8, 2011 at 10:51 pm

      Oh yes, stupid me – I forgot it was all “ethical oil”!

  2. paddyanne says

    January 9, 2011 at 7:01 am

    I’m sure that some of the motorists will blame the new bike lanes on the oil spills. Apparently the new bike lanes seem to be at the bottom of everything thats going wrong in this mad, backwards, world.

    • Avatar photoAverage Joe Cyclist says

      January 9, 2011 at 10:08 am

      Well, if they weren’t caused by the bike lanes, they were doubtless caused by a left wing pinko cyclist. Perhaps Chevron should be alerted to re-direct their search for the cause of the leaching accordingly …

  3. Alex P says

    January 9, 2011 at 9:58 am

    As the conventional sources of oil get used up (or can’t be extracted from at a fast enough rate to match oil consumption), to the ends of the earth we have to go to produce the almost 1000 barrels per second the world uses.

    Some would point at bike lanes as a factor in this I’m sure. I think the argument would go: Bike lane = root cause of traffic congestion, and if we got rid of them, all the cars could sail through using only a tiny amount of fuel since they wouldn’t idle in traffic at all anymore.

    • Avatar photoAverage Joe Cyclist says

      January 9, 2011 at 10:09 am

      Yes, I remember how perfect the roads were in Vancouver in 2008, before the bike lanes – all that sailing along the traffic would do, never a traffic jam to be seen. Like a car heaven, it was.

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