These spills are never put in proper perspective to the trillions of gallons of oil shipped safely. If the media showed nothing but car crashes you'd think every time someone got in a car they were doomed. Life is not for sissies. Mistakes are bound to happen.

Over the past 40 years a lobby led by a guy named Nader successfully pushed and pushed manufacturers to make their vehicles (and countless other consumer products) safer. Which has been effective, from seat belts to removing hazourdous chemicals from things we use every day.

If only there were the same sort of force to push those who harm the environment to similar standard of betterment.

The onus should be on industry to demonstrate that their actions are low-risk - which, while rare, are clearly not without disastrous consequences.

>> ^quantumushroom:

If the media showed nothing but car crashes you'd think every time someone got in a car they were doomed.

Americans buy ten thousand gallons of gasoline a second, without giving it much of a thought. All this gas takes a one-hundred thousand mile journey from local gas stations to oil fields half a world away. From the most off-limits places on earth: the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the New York Mercantile Exchange’s crude oil market, oil fields from Venezuela, to Texas, to Chad, and even an Iranian oil platform where the United States fought a forgotten one-day battle, the story is at once surreal and alarming, as lonely workers on a Texas drilling rig, an oil analyst who almost gave birth on the NYMEX trading floor, Chadian villagers who are said to wander the oil fields in the guise of lions, a Nigerian warlord who changed the world price of oil with a single cell phone call, and Shanghai bureaucrats who dream of creating a new Detroit are pieced together in the mammoth economy of oil, and these stark warning signs for American drivers.