The biggest environmental disaster in history … never, uh, existed?

No one ever suggested that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was a fraud, like, say manmade global warming. The oil was actually leaking in the Gulf of Mexico, it was the largest amount of oil ever spilled, and the oil was going to poison the Gulf and wreak havoc on the fisheries and beaches of the southeastern U.S. And now we’re told that the problem is, well, gone.

And what about the universally despised Tony Hayward of BP? He seemed like the biggest nitwit in history. And now he turns out to have been, well, right, when he said the spill wasn’t that big a deal.

I’m hoping someone will make sense of this. But I don’t think that that’s going happen.

The New York Times reports:

The government is expected to announce on Wednesday that three-quarters of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak has already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated — and that much of the rest is so diluted that it does not seem to pose much additional risk of harm. A government report finds that about 26 percent of the oil released from BP’s runaway well is still in the water or onshore in a form that could, in principle, cause new problems. But most is light sheen at the ocean surface or in a dispersed form

Also see comments at Lucianne.com.

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James P. writes:

I especially liked this part from the NYT article:

“The report calculates, for example, that about 25 percent of the chemicals in the oil evaporated at the surface or dissolved into seawater in the same way that sugar dissolves in tea.”

You are kidding me, right? Oil in seawater dissolves like sugar in tea? That’s gotta be news to all those sludge-covered birds and turtles.

Methinks the administration is tired of getting lambasted for being slow on the cleanup, and is now anxious to make the whole political problem go away. At the very least, if Bush were still in office, the press and all the environmental dot orgs would be pushing back a hell of a lot harder against this “problem solved, everybody go back to bed” conclusion than they seem to be right now.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 04, 2010 12:19 PM | Send