[chaboud]

When I was a kid growing up in Texas, our ocean visits were to the Gulf of Mexico, off the Texas coast, and you would grab little alcohol wipes for when you got out of the ocean, to wipe the oil off.

Years later, swimming in Hawaii, I found myself looking for wipes. I mentioned it to a snorkel-outfit operator, and she looked at me like I was insane. They didn't even put damaging sunscreen in the water, and there was no expectation of little 1-2 inch sticky spots of oil.

The good old days, in the 80's, where we swam in oceans filled with slow-motion natural disasters. I wonder how much of it was place (Hawaiians seem to have a stronger relationship with the land and nature surrounding them) and how much of it was the time (20 years later).

[jandrewrogers]

Crude oil floating in the ocean used to be a big nuisance in parts of California. It is a natural phenomenon, created by oil deposits on the ocean floor leaking into the environment. Santa Barbara was particularly famous for it.

Extraction of that oil via commercial wells greatly reduced the natural seepage, which is why there is so little crude oil floating in that ocean water today. Oil drilling actually made the water cleaner.

[cryptoneo]

To me this "drilling is good for the environment narrative" sounded a bit misleading.

And not far down the rabbit whole one finds: The author of the study often cited by oil companies for above narrative, felt impelled to publish a clarifying statement: https://luyendyk.faculty.geol.ucsb.edu/Seeps%20pubs/Luyendyk...

Maybe stricter guidelines against operational "routine" spills led to a reduction of the sticky spots, plausible?

[jandrewrogers]

Per NOAA and USGS, ~20 million liters of crude oil naturally seeps into that part of the California ocean each year. That is more crude oil each year than the worst oil spill in California history[0].

You are projecting your biases. There was no "drilling is good for the environment" narrative. I was recounting an interesting fact about the environment there.

Many of these seeps are under considerable pressure as there is substantial natural gas mixed in. The seepage rate of each has been mapped and studied for many decades. It has long been observed that the introduction of drilling appears to substantially reduced the seepage rate at many of these underwater sites. Drilling wells significantly reduces natural pressure in these reservoirs, likely leading to the observed reductions in seepage.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_Santa_Barbara_oil_spill

[Merovius]

> There was no "drilling is good for the environment" narrative.

…

> Oil drilling actually made the water cleaner.

[jandrewrogers]

For it to be a "narrative", there would need to be an additional claim that this specific case and context, which is factual, generalizes to most unrelated cases. That is not in evidence. Thinking that this was an attempt to create a narrative is a failure of reading comprehension.

This insistence that acknowledgement of facts has an ideological narrative is a pernicious strain of anti-science thinking.

[Merovius]

To be clear, I have no skin in the game here. I thought the point you made sounded plausible and as I have zero experience or expertise, I wouldn't argue against it.

I just thought it's ridiculous - and kind of funny - to deny making the claim you literally made. I'm not sure you have a lot of legs to stand on, accusing others of "anti-science thinking" and a "failure of reading comprehension" when asking us to ignore the clear, textual evidence of that contradiction.

> For it to be a "narrative", there would need to be an additional claim that this specific case and context, which is factual, generalizes to most unrelated cases.

Says who? That seems a very narrow and unusual definition of what makes a "narrative", bent to your purpose. It seems to me, a "narrative" in common parlance just means "telling a story" or "relaying a sequence of events". I honestly have never seen someone use the word to imply generalization (doesn't mean no one ever did, of course).

In any case, given that you responded to a comment talking about the two examples of Texas and Hawaii with an example about California and an "actually", it seems pretty fair to me to say, that you even fulfilled this artificially narrowed definition.

I mean, come on, you have got to admit that you have at least been unclear, if you didn't intend to make this argument. Instead of just defensively flinging insults.

[chrisg23]

"This insistence that acknowledgement of facts has an ideological narrative is a pernicious strain of anti-science thinking."

That is very well put. This should be added to the general list of fallacies in argument, and like the other ones (the slippery slope, hasty generalization, Post hoc ergo propter hoc, etc.) more general awareness should exist about these.

The current wave of anti-science, anti-logic, rejection of objective data, etc. is like nothing I've experienced in my lifetime. This is a subjective observation, maybe it has always been this way and I never paid attention because I was caught up in whatever I used to be caught up in.

[ta9000]

So you’re saying drilling destroyed crude oil’s natural habitat?

[peterlada]

To this day if you walk on the beach your soles or the soles of your shoes will get sticky tar spots. You need baby oil wipes to clean them up before entering your home.

And some of it, if not most of it is not natural seepage but early environmental catastrophes in the 50s and 60s, particularly around Summerland.

(Source ex-resident)

[mikkupikku]

Wtf I love Exxon now.

[pentamassiv]

How did the wildlife adapt to that? There must be some cool species there

[jandrewrogers]

I don't know much about it but I have read that the local ecosystem is well-adapted to the oil seep environment.

That area has been like that for something like 100,000 years, which is a considerable amount of time in evolutionary terms.

[dawnerd]

I remember swimming in Santa Barbara growing up (well closer to the Ventura side really) and having to dodge oil on the sand and water.

[gamblor956]

Natural seepage is still just as big of an issue now as it was back then in those areas, including Santa Barbara.

[annoyingnoob]

There is still tons of tar on beaches in Santa Barbara county, mostly all from natural seeps.

[jayrot]

For what it's worth you still need the alcohol wipes (mineral oil works well too) when swimming off the coast of Santa Barbara. It's naturally occurring oil that gets all over your feet in little annoying sticky spots.

[chasd00]

yeah same for the Gulf Coast, oil just seeps right out of the ground at some beaches or at some times. There's plenty of man-made pollution to go around though.

[colechristensen]

Half-ish (don't get hung up on being exact, they are at least of similar orders of magnitude) of the oil that makes its way into the ocean is natural. That is, leaking out of the ground into the water not at all as a result of human activity. Obviously enormous anthropogenic oil spills make this a very spiky statistic one way or the other.

Oil production and natural oil seepage happen in the gulf of mexico because there's oil there, there's not much oil around Hawaii.

So there's likely both a human and non-human reason for this in Texas.

[faster]

Growing up on the Atlantic coast of Florida, we kept a can or Renuzit solvent in the garage to wipe tar spots off our feet after coming home from the beach. I'm sure that stuff was toxic. The tar was everywhere for a few weeks, then gone for a while.

Hawaii has other problems. When I lived there, I went through a lot of Neosporin because every scrape you get from a reef pushes in bacteria that got into the ocean from the leaking sewer pipes.

[anonymousDan]

Ha, yeah I remember the Galveston beaches as a kid. Left when I was 9, I can't imagine things have improved much since then...