Academic

MARK TAPSCOTT: Time for some oil spill perspective. ?From an environmental perspective, off-shore ?

By Glenn Reynolds

MARK TAPSCOTT: Time for some oil spill perspective. “From an environmental perspective, off-shore oil drilling is far safer than Mother Nature. As the Wall Street Journal noted yesterday, oil that seeps naturally from the ocean floor puts 47 million gallons of crude into U.S. waters annually. Thus far, Deepwater Horizon has leaked about three million gallons. That sounds like a lot of oil, and it is. But the Exxon Valdez leaked 11 million gallons into Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay. Even those figures are dwarfed, according to the Economist, by the amount of oil spilled in man-made disasters elsewhere around the world.”

UPDATE: A reader points out that the oil leaked into Prince William Sound, not Prudhoe Bay.

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on May 05, 2010 (boomark / email).