More context on oil spills — VOICES for REASON

As an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism and a champion of America’s abundant oil use, it is rare that I get taken to task for being too tame in my defense of oil and in my expose of oil’s anti-industrial opponents.

But a superb letter to the editor in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal by Paul Gilmour does just that. Responding to my point in my op-ed last week that oil spill hysteria ignores that “large amounts of oil enter the ocean every year through naturally occurring oil seeps,” he writes:

the situation is even more idiotic than the one Mr. Epstein describes.

Most of the oil in the Santa Barbara Channel and on nearby beaches comes from natural leakage of buried reservoirs, not man-made spills. Europeans who visited the area in the 16th century reported the sea was covered by a “sheen of oil, visible for as far as the eye could see,” and that local Indians waterproofed baskets and canoes with tar collected on beaches. It is estimated that, yearly, these seeps release the equivalent of one third of the oil spilled by Exxon Valdez.

Seeps of oil are common in coastal California, having given rise to such place-names as Oil Creek, Oildale, Brea (Spanish “tar”) and Coal Oil Point. By far the best known is the La Brea Tar Pits, located in downtown Los Angeles.

Wouldn’t it be nice if reporters actually told us this stuff, instead of only reporting things that reaffirm to them that oil is an “addiction”?