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‘Scientists’ hold mock press conference about Irving oil spill – Metro US

‘Scientists’ hold mock press conference about Irving oil spill

“Scientists” from the Ecology Action Centre announced diesel fuel is as harmless to marine environments as sugar at a mock press conference Wednesday.

“All this fretting, all these fines, all this concern about bilge water, it kind of goes out the window. It’s really a paradigm shift,” admitted policy director Mark Butler in downtown Dartmouth.

The EAC’s findings come after the Irving barge Shovel Master sank in rough seas 80 kilometres south of Yarmouth on Nov. 22, taking 70,000 litres of fuel to the ocean floor.

Last week, Environment Canada and other federal officials told Irving there’s no need to pump out the diesel as a slow leak into the water would pose no risk.

The EAC tried to duplicate the findings yesterday by slowly mixing a dark liquid labelled “diesel” with water and feeding the results to passing lobsters and fish, with apparently fatal results.

“From preliminary observations, it looks like they’re sleeping. They’re fine,” Butler assured observers as the fluffy animals stacked up.

“April Fool’s is almost over and the Ecology Action Centre is really hoping that Environment Canada will tell us that their decision to allow Irving to leave the barge on the ocean floor … was really a bad joke,” Butler concluded. “If it’s okay to leave 70,000 litres on the ocean floor and watch it leak out, why would a fisherman with 10 litres of diesel in a bucket on his boat worry about putting that over the side?”