BP and others have been referring to the oil spill with quaint little words like "top hat" and "junk shot." They've been referring to the oil as resembling everything from salad dressing to chocolate milk.
And now Nalco is trying to compare its chemical dispersant, Corexit 9500, to ice cream.
Nalco’s chief technology office, Mani Ramesh, has claimed that “Corexit’s active ingredient is an emulsifier also found in ice cream,” and that it is not harmful to marine life.
Delicious! It's like a DQ Blizzard. And comparably as toxic!
Unfortunately, the ice cream quote is only a small chunk on an otherwise disturbing article at Climate Progress about Corexit. Briefly, as I've been theorizing here, the dispersant doesn't make the "chocolate milk" vanish. It merely spreads it all around. In the spirit of using stupid food analogies, it's like a finicky eater spreading his or her food all around the plate to make it look as though it's been eaten.
And as the oil is spread all around, it becomes easier for the oil to find its way into all varieties of animal life, rather than just the animals that live in or swim through the path of the slick.
Plus:
The dispersants can lead to far greater accumulation in living organisms of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) — oil-derived toxic compounds that were found in mussels 19 months after one spill in which dispersants were used. After the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, a study found PAHs had an impact on the developing hearts of both Pacific herring and pink salmon embryos.