A view of the room at TEDxOilSpill. Image courtesy kk+/flickr

[I'll be adding updates to this post during the day. Scroll down the page a bit to see the latest. -- EJG]

Today's TedxOilSpill conference in Washington, D.C. assembles a lineup of top-notch thinkers and doers who are finding creative, often solutions-oriented responses to the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster.

Some takeaways from the first block of speakers are around community-oriented, crowdsouced approaches to gathering and distributing info about the spreading oil:

A coordinated, grassroots Gulf oil spill mapping project is using diverse methods to crowdsource views of the spill, from easily accessible kites-with-cameras, to small inflatables, to the more gear-intensive and typical aerial flights. The results are timely, geo-referenced images of the oil spill at present, as well as building a record that monitors change over time. It's also catching wildlife patterns.

OilReporter mashes up submission of data from the oil spill in real time. Then makes it available to the public. It's a mobile app for both iPhone and Android. The results are online for anyone to see at oilreporter.org. On Twitter, Andy Carvin points to this as a good demo: http://oilreporter.org/map

In classic TED Conference style, most speakers get only 10-15 do-or-die minutes onstage. TED presentations are practically an art form unto themselves: adroit speakers are focused and concise, while others flounder. Some become legendary.

Either way, the quick turnover keeps the audience alert.

UPDATE, 1:22 pm ET: 

TEDxOilSpill's second morning session kicked all kinds of posterior. Every presentation was good; a couple were great; and the boffo finale was Francis Beland's announcement of a USD 10 million "XPrize Challenge" to create real solutions for cleaning up the oil in the Gulf. Email him at francis ==a== xprize.org with your ideas.

Here are my notes from the presentation by Oceana's Andrew Sharpless, who offered answers to the "ten smartest, critical objections" people are currently making to the notion that we give up oil as an energy source:

Q: "Isn't this Deepwater Horizon drilling disaster just like an airplane crash? We don't shut down aviation when air planes crash."

A: No -- in crash most of victims are on airplane. In this case, most of vicitms are innocent bystanders: ppl who live around Gulf. Like person who builds fire in a nat'l forest during dry season, and burns down all the towns around him. All you need is one out of control fire to know why no one should set fires during dry season.

Q: "But there are 3,600 platforms in Gulf, only one blew out."

A: Not calling for closure of drilling platforms; once the well is drilled, risks decrease. Fact is that the risk isn't tolerable to continue allowing new drilling projects.

Q: "Isn't this just a deepwater drilling problem? Can't we continue in shallow water?"

A: Two words: Igstock Ixtoc and Montara. Ixtoc, one of the greatest oil spill disasters, was in hundreds of feet of water. Australia's Montara blowout (last summer) took 11 weeks to contain, in hundreds of feet of water.

[1979's Ixtoc oil spill, on the Mexican coast, dumped about 139 million gallons of oil into the Gulf. In September 2009, the Montara oil platform in the Timor Sea, off the northern coast of Australia, blew out.  The gusher pumped (a contested estimate of) over six million gallons of crude into the ocean before it was plugged, 74 days after the blow out.-- EJG]

Q: "Okay, then: don't we need to keep drilling in oceans to keep gasoline affordable? Don't like risks, but don't want $6/gallon gas."

A: No: We import 60% of our oil. When BP or any other oil co. discovers oil off coast of USA, does US public get special discount? No, they sell it at the market price, which is set on world market. If we're at 60% of oil now, we'll always be importing. Oil in US waters will be sold at market price. People who chanted "Drill Baby Drill" to solve $4/gal gas were Wrong. We need to tell them, educate them that they were wrong.

Q: "Don't we need it for energy independence?"

A: Path to energy independence is not thru oil drilling. No matter how we get it, we consume 20% of world oil prodcution; we get 2% thru US sources. We cannot become oil independent, we can become energy independent.

[Independent confirmation -- It's true: Prices for oil and petroleum products are set on a global market. Domestic drilling does not affect consumer prices in the US one way or the other. I reported this for Scientific American in 2008: "Can Drilling Make the US Oil Independent?" -- EJG]

Q: "Don't we need oil drilling for jobs?"

A: This blowout proves that ocean oil drilling is biggest job killer of all time: 300K jobs lost in Gulf so far. Clean energy investments provide 3x jobs per dollar invested than fossil energy investments.

Q: "If we don't drill here, won't we displace demand to less stable places?"

A: America should lead. If we can't clean up and manage our oceans until lowest, slowest, most corrupt gov'ts do it [Chad, Nigeria...], that shouldn't be a path we want to take.

Q: "If ocean wind such a good idea, why isn't it happening?"

A: Who has authority to approve ocean wind projects? MMS, the Minerals Management Service, the same agency as approved the Deepwater Horizon drill rig, with its safety plan that talked about saving walruses.

Q: "Won't ocean wind farms hurt the oceans?"

A: No -- if you do it right they won't. Norway experience shows it can be done w/very little impact.

Q: "I don't use electricity in my car."

A: I think you will, someday.

Update, 2:50 pm ET: 

Famed oceanographer Sylvia Earle began her presenation by saying she would not show the audience images of agonized, oiled birds and sea turtles on the Gulf of Mexico, but rather images that show the potential for hope.

I've spent weeks myself working with these images -- so awful that they numb a person out, but only after you've progressed from anger through depression. So, nice not to see them here. 

Still, I wonder about this strategy on Earle's part. In my experience, when it comes to nature photography and video, for the public out of sight is out of mind.

But Earle has a recognized talent for popularizing marine science; she's even a recipient of the high-profile (and lucrative) TED Prize for her work. She may know what she's doing, particularly in the doggedly optimistic environment of the TED conferences.

The Gulf's Ewing Bank is a siren song for whale sharks, she has recently learned. Last week she spent all day in water with a friend/researcher studying the Gulf whale sharks. She rolls a video clip of that day in the water, shot by someone involved with "The Cove." Her colleague is tagging them to figure of if they're avoiding the spilled oil, which overlaps with a whale shark feeding ground, or going into it. "It's an ocean full of whale sharks," says Earle from the deck of the boat. "I can't even begin to count the fins."

The whale sharks are amazingly beautiful: deep grey on top with an even pattern of soft white spots, and pale bellies. I would say they were like something out of the movie "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou," except that the creatures in that movie were 100 percent  products of imagination. These are real.

Seeing them cruise underwater begins to convey a small taste of the wonder of the undersea, while Earle's narration tries to do the rest.

 But, as she notes, these Gulf whale sharks are "on death row" due to the oil spill.

Image: Whale shark in Australian waters. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Update, 5:41 pm ET: 

TEDxOilSpill is running behind, so the last group of speakers seem to be really attentive to brevity. First up is Mike Tidwell of Chesapeake Climate Action, who kicks off with this observation:  Five months after the Deepwater Horizon oil right exploded, he has realized that most Americans are still "fuzzy" on the scope of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

How many platforms are in the Gulf, he asks the audience.  No one seems sure.  4,000 platforms, Mike says.  Stacked end to end they'd stretch from DC to Philadelphia, 40 stories tall, as wide as an aircraft carrier.  It takes around 40,000 people to staff them, which Mike says is twice as many as work in the US space program.

These platforms tap into a galaxy of wells -- around 32,000 -- and themselves form a galaxy. While reporting in the Gulf several years ago, Mike hitched a ride on a boat running supplies (food, water, equipment) to an oil platform.  The captain showed him a map of the platforms. Mike says it was like seeing a new universe, with so many platforms in the Gulf that they seemed to group themselves into constellations.  The supply boat captains navigated by constellations tagged with names like "the barbeque" and "the bunny ears." (Playboy bunny ears, natch.)

As the boat neared a platform, it loomed overhead like a skyscraper, gushing with lights and noise.  Mike said he wondered how he could have been totally ignorant of this enormous galaxy for 35 years.  "This is our addiction.  This is what it looks like."

Mike's an advocate of offshore wind. He notes that generating energy using offshore wind, along just a small segment of offshore Virginia, could power 3.6 million electric cars. And this is the state that's led the push to expand offshore drilling.

Mike winds up: "We need windmills, not oil spills."