I created a little oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Well, what do you want to do?

So while the oil spill, the leak, the eruption, is a catastrophe,

I got a little grease in this lining.

After all, you didn't personally drain the gasoline tank yourself.

Other programmes focus on development of the subregional contingency plan for oil spills.

An American Oil Spill

Drilling a release well finally did the job of stopping the flow of oil. Deepwater Horizon is still spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, even though BP has succeeded in inserting a smaller pipe into the main leakage to suck off part of the flow.

When the BP oil spill happened, I was working at MIT, and I was in charge of developing an oil spill cleaning technology.

They're very important in oil spills.

It also makes it very viscous.

A brandnew engine. Not a drop of oil!

The platform where that accident happened, called Ixtoc 1, was operated by Pemex, the state owned Mexican oil company. The two accidents and the spills they caused have a number of similar features, although marine oil spills in general have profoundly changed in character in the three decades between the two events.

Nothing's leaked out.

After telling ourselves for so long that our tools and technology can control nature, suddenly we were face to face with our weakness, with our lack of control, as the oil burst out of every attempt to contain it top hats, top kills and, most memorably, the junk shot the bright idea of firing old tires and golf balls down that hole in the world.

So oil and petrochemicals are not just a problem where there's a spill they're a problem where there's not.

I think this latest oil spill in the Gulf is a reminder.

Now, in the Exxon Valdez spill, about 30 percent of the killer whales died in the first few months.

So I'm going to talk to you about you about the political chemistry of oil spills and why this is an incredibly important, long, oily, hot summer, and why we need to keep ourselves from getting distracted.

One of the things that happened with the two previous oil spills was that we really worked on some of the symptoms.

Probably the housemaid's cupboard slops, mops, dripping taps.

Get some butter.

If you go to the site of the blowout, it looks pretty unbelievable.

The global companies operating in the delta have spilled oil and flared natural gas for decades, without regard for the natural environment and the communities impoverished and poisoned by their actions. One estimate puts the cumulative spills over the past 50 years at approximately 10 million barrels twice the size of the BP spill.

On the top line, this is the BP oil spill billions of barrels of oil gushing in the Gulf of Mexico.

People got very upset when the BP oil spill happened for very good reason.

I mean, we've essentially been exporting oil spills when we import oil from places without tight environmental regulations.

These places, these origins, represent governance gaps.

Carl Safina The oil spill's unseen culprits, victims

This is why these moments of these oil spills are so important.

And so, cognitive dissonance is part and parcel of the way that we deal with oil, and it's really important to dealing with this oil spill.

If it sank, it would be a whole different story as far as an oil spill.

So the thing about water oil spills is that they are very politically galvanizing.

Luckily still, it seems to be out of harm's way of the recent oil spill.

Go get them some oilskins.

Needs a little oil.

For kerosene.

Tank washing gave rise to a huge number of small spills, and tanker accidents such as those involving the Torrey Canyon, Exxon Valdez, Metula, and St. Peter resulted in huge, concentrated spills. Blowouts were not infrequent, but most occurred on land or in shallow water, and most could be stopped relatively easily.

They were all on the Gulf in May, while oil was starting to come ashore in certain places.

But I think we have to understand where this leak really started from.

So I think that the oil blowout, the bank bailout, the mortgage crisis and all these things are absolutely symptoms of the same cause.

Mas suerte!

I mean, these pictures this is from the Santa Barbara spill.

Gambling site lets users bet on which species will go extinct because of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

We're either going to have an absolutely unmitigated catastrophe of this oil leak in the Gulf, or we will make the moment we need out of this, as many people have noted today.