The Gulf Oil Spill: Brought to You by BP, with a Special Appearance by Barack Obama
The Gulf Oil Spill, according to lots of sources, isn't quite the disaster we were all promised. From the Miami Herald, about Mississippi:
The best-case scenario for Mississippi and the region is that once BP's busted well is plugged, the warm waters and bacteria of the Gulf will dispose of the oil quickly, breaking it into its main components of carbon and water, and normal life and commerce on the Coast can resume.
Gov. Haley Barbour, and the chiefs of the state's two main environmental agencies — the Departments of Marine Resources and Environmental Quality — have proposed that this natural cleanup, along with some relatively minor scouring of tar off the beaches by BP workers, can be handled in a matter of weeks or a few months, not years.
From the Christian Science Monitor:
even for those who use past experience to foresee the Gulf's recovery, it's a cautious optimism.
"There's going to be a big damage-assessment study of this spill over the next 10 years," says LSU's Overton. "But if my assessment is close to right, it means our environment will come back fairly quickly and people's lifestyles will not be wiped out, that they'll be able to make a living off the northern Gulf and enjoy the recreational benefits of this body of water. We'll have to see."
So what's been the biggest damage? Looks like tourism. In a great column by Paul Mulshine from the Newark Star-Ledger:
A simple apology would have been in order.
I’m talking about President Obama’s visit to the Gulf Coast over the weekend. Obama was a co-conspirator in the effort to hype the BP oil disaster out of all proportion. The effects of that spill were supposed to linger for years. But it’s already gone without a trace, or at least a trace visible to me as I visited the coast in two states...
There was not the slightest indication the Gulf has just gone through what the president termed “the greatest environmental disaster in American history.”
Far more economic damage was done by the alarmism than by the oil, several merchants told me. At a surf shop called Blonde John’s, owner John McElroy, who was appropriately blonde, blamed the media for driving the tourists away.
“The media sacrificed us, man,” McElroy said. “Everybody wants to focus on the negative. We only had one bad week of it.”
And then there's this, from Time Magazine. Brace yourself:
The obnoxious anti-environmentalist Rush Limbaugh has been a rare voice arguing that the spill — he calls it "the leak" — is anything less than an ecological calamity, scoffing at the avalanche of end-is-nigh eco-hype.
Well, Limbaugh has a point.
Limbaugh has a point? For Time Magazine, that's close to an unconditional surrender.
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Jul '10
Re: The Gulf Oil Spill: Brought to You by BP, with a Special Appearance by Barack Obama
So, can We get back to using oil for global warming? Or is it too soon?
Jul '10
Re: The Gulf Oil Spill: Brought to You by BP, with a Special Appearance by Barack Obama
There's room for blame on both sides here.
When things get politicized, perspective is lost. .
The Left wanted to use the spill to demonize oil and push its agenda.
The Right reveled in using the spill to highlight the administration's incompetence.
Blonde John - and hundreds of thousands of workers in oil and tourism - got caught in between.