Quantity of Oil Spilled (tonnes)

Wow, a lot of oil spilled in the 80's! We still need to work to bring the amuont spilled noe down to zero tonnes!

The amount of wasted oil is incredible. Think what the price of gas might be if we had never spilt any oil.

It's good we're cutting down on oil spills. Walter, gas prices are 3 times higher now than they were in 1980, when the most oil was spilled.

Even though the amount of oil spilled has dramatically decreased in recent years, gas prices are still skyrocketing. It's great that oil spills have decreased, but do the high gas prices go to show that we will never really recover from the indelible effects of the years when oil was spilled and wasted excessively?

I agree with Walter in that we waste an exorbitant amount of oil, but I don't really see the correlation between oil spills in the 1980s and the price of gasoline today. An oil spill no doubt affects the price of oil right after the accident, but I don't think it really lingers for 10, 20 years after the spill.

Although this is undoubtedly a good trend, I wonder where the oil is being spilled. Nearshore spills and arctic spills are more environmentally damaging than deepwater spills, and it's possible that most current spills occur in congested shipping lanes near the coast. If this was the case, then the environmental damage would be decreasing at a slower rate.