Max Roser, at the site “Our World in Data,” reports some encouraging news on oil spills. Their frequency has fallen over the last few decades and the amount of oil spilled has fallen dramatically over the last few decades.
The graph above shows volume of oil spilled on the vertical axis and year on the horizontal. The big spikes are in the late 1970s, early 1980s, and early 1990s.
HT2 Tyler Cowen.
READER COMMENTS
Chase
Oct 15 2021 at 12:45am
This appears to only be tankers. While good news it is likely very incomplete. BP was an offshore oil rig and others can be pipelines or drills. So, I don’t think we can conclude oil spills are down just because tanker spills are down.
Alan Goldhammer
Oct 15 2021 at 9:34am
I was an undergrad at UC Santa Barbara back in the late 1960s when the Union Oil off shore platform suffered a blow out. At the time this was one of the biggest spills Lots of us volunteered to help in the clean up, particularly helping wash sea birds that were covered with oil. It was a horrific environmental catastrophe.
I was taking Constitutional Law as part of my political science minor and the professor thought it would be good to switch the class over and research all the legal and political issues related to off shore drilling. I interviewed former Governor Pat Brown under whose administration the leases were granted and his interior secretary. All of us ended up contributing to a book Professor Nash wrote, ‘Oil Pollution and the Public Interest: A Study of the Santa Barbara Oil Spill.’
While the blow out was awful, I would note that there was natural seepage of oil resulting in tar deposits on the beach. I was still an occasional surfer and beach volleyball player back then and we always had to clean our feet before entering our dorm or apartment. There was always a bottle of some type of organic solvent outside the buildings for this purpose. This was an incredible nuisance as getting tar stains out of carpet was almost impossible and you would lose the security deposit as a result.
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