Just a quick follow-up on a post I wrote earlier this month about offshore drilling in the Arctic, which so far has been one disaster after another ever since Shell launched its project off Alaska this past summer. Recently, the feds who've signed off on this unholy venture have told the public that in a worse-case scenario, authorities or contractors could deploy dispersants like Corexit, the chemical used widely in the Gulf in 2010, to avoid the worst consequences of a spill. In Louisiana, we know better than that. We've already seen how down here how the dispersant actually made things worse, making clean-up workers and other Gulf residents sick and harming our once-thriving fisheries. But now we learn even more from a study funded by another arm of the federal government -- that these toxic chemicals are likely to stick around for a mich longer time if ever deployed in frigid waters like Arctic, or in deeper sections of the ocean:
EPA oil spill expert Albert D. Venosa, working with academic researchers, wanted to better understand the degradation of Corexit 9500, the main dispersant used during the spill. They ran tests on artificial seawater at 5 ºC, about the temperature ...
