I remember the Santa Barbara oil spill. It was 1968 or so and I had just moved to Los Angeles. An offshore oil rig was losing oil into the Pacific and the news was flooded with pictures of spoiled beaches and gummy gulls. It was sad and tragic at the same time.

Thanks to that spill and a few subsequent events, the United States has curtailed offshore drilling along the Pacific Coast and elsewhere. Because of an accident 40 years ago, today we are paying over $4.00 per gallon of gasoline…as if technology has not been developed that could prevent a recurrence of the same thing 40 years after the fact.

Nobody wants to see oil spills. Not democrats, not Republicans. I certainly don’t. I enjoy visiting a pristine beach and watching the sea life and waterfowl living in happy health. But where did we come up with this idea that an oil spill is the end of civilization?

When the Exxon Valdez dumped its black, liquid cargo into Prince Edward Sound in 1989, the environmental-conscious went into hysteria. Millions were spent on cleanup, and even more millions on anti-capitalist propaganda. Capt. Joseph Hazelwood became the most hated man on the planet, even slandered in the forgettable Kevin Costner movie Waterworld. Predictions of environmental doom ricocheted across the airwaves; environmental science expert Ted Danson (taking a break from his bartending) was quoted as publicly predicting that we had only about ten years left before all life on earth would end. (The end came in 2002, but I’m sure you remember when the world ended.)

As if the planet’s ecology isn’t robust enough to dispose of a few million gallons of crude oil!

I think most of these people mean well, but most of them simply don’t know what they are talking about, and the vast majority don’t use what brains they have. In 1975 I talked to a man who grew up in Maine. He was a boy during World War II, and he told me that in 1940 the beaches of Maine were awash with crude oil that was released when German U-Boats torpedoed merchant ships off the Atlantic Coast. Have none of these environmentally concerned people ever heard of World War II?

Maybe not. Let’s talk briefly about the war at sea.

In both the Atlantic and the Pacific, hundreds, maybe even thousands, of ships were sunk during the six years that the war lasted. Merchant ships, especially oil tankers, were favorite targets of German and American submarines. Warships of all kinds were targets of submarines, surface ships, and dive bombers. From September 1939 until August 1945, ships went down just about every day. And what were those ships carrying? Regardless of the ship type, purpose, or cargo, they all had one thing in common — fuel oil.

Except for submarines, which generally ran on diesel, the vast majority of these ships used crude oil as fuel. When these ships were sunk, that oil was released into the ocean. (At Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, even today, one can still see oil floating to the surface around the wreck of the USS Arizona.) I have no idea how much oil was released, but it would have been many thousands of tons. Exxon Valdez, a supertanker, spilled nearly 11 million gallons, and everybody panicked. Eleven million gallons wouldn’t even have been noticed had anyone been keeping track of crude oil spilled in World War II.

And the planet survived. If the ocean can handle all those thousands of tons of crude oil, it can handle 11 million gallons. It can also handle an accidental spill from an offshore oil rig. The planet is not in danger of extinction any time soon, even though Nancy Pelosi says she is trying to save it by blocking offshore drilling.
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