Margaret Wente of the Globe and Mail has a good piece on the condition of the Gulf of Mexico one year after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Despite the media’s doom and gloom predictions, and insistence on portraying every aspect of the spill as “disaster,” that’s not what happened. In some ways, in fact, the Gulf is better than it was before the spill. Certain fish populations have exploded because of the temporary ban on fishing. [bolded portions are marfdrat emphasis]
Carl Safina is a renowned marine ecologist whose new book, A Sea in Flames, is unsparing in its apportionment of blame for the
disaster. He thinks our oil addiction will be the ruin of us because of global warming. But he also writes that the Deepwater Horizon spill didn’t do much environmental harm. After the well was capped, the oil slick quickly shrank. The chemical dispersants didn’t make the oil go away, but they speeded its natural decomposition. Photo oxidation and biodegradation – i.e., nature – did the rest. At the time, Tony Hayward, BP’s CEO, was reviled for saying that the amount of oil leaked was “tiny” compared with the “very big ocean.” But he turned out to be right.
Nor did the dispersants cause widespread marine deaths, as environmentalists had feared. This year, according to Kevin Anson, a biologist with the Alabama division of Marine Resources, the shrimp, crabs and fish appear to be developing normally. The only species really hurt was oysters. They were devastated, not by the oil, but by all the fresh water sent through the delta to keep the oil outside the marshes.
None of this excuses the blowout. Oil is a toxic, nasty substance, and nothing good happens when oil gets into water. The multibillion-dollar penalties imposed were richly deserved. And questions remain about the longer term effects on plankton, and on species such as the ridley sea turtle.
Still, in light of the facts, it’s worth asking why we’re so determined to cling to the narrative of catastrophe. I think it’s because we saw the spill as a giant morality tale: evil versus good, rapacious oil interests versus the environment, greedy consumers (that’s us) versus oil-soaked pelicans and the unspoiled natural world. The visuals were devastating, and the coverage was relentless. The media took turns hyping the disaster. They had a lot invested in this storyline and, when it took an unexpected happy turn, they couldn’t handle it. They couldn’t even see it.
As for Wente’s question in the last paragraph -why we’re determined to cling to the narrative of catastrophe- it is a big morality tale for the left-bent mainstream media. It’s a fantastic opportunity for our boy-king president, who is working determinedly to bring our economy to second-world status. The spill provided him with the chance to ban drilling in the Gulf for the foreseeable future – because it’s too dangerous for the environment. I don’t think he cares one whit about the environment – this is about fulfilling his promise that energy prices will “necessarily skyrocket under my administration.”
So, even though things are nearly normal in the Gulf of Mexico, that’s news you won’t hear from the government-run MSM. It’s just too convenient to keep using the disaster narrative as a means to achieve Obama’s (*DfOaLG) Utopian scenario of a 19th century economy run on windmills and solar panels. Oh, and rainbows, too.
Read the rest at The Globe and Mail
*Descended from Olympus and Lightworker Genius, on the order of Wile E. Coyote
