BP - Nothing To See Here, Move Along As Deepwater Horizon Impacts Go On And On

[hatrack]

EDIT

As we honor the life and career of the just-departed former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, we should mark this groundbreaking advance in Washington journalism: a corporate advertisement presented as "opinion." It's not evident that BP paid for its placement in Politico, but whether it forked over nothing, a little or a lot, it scored well: as we write, Morrell's piece is demurely sharing space on Politico Magazine's home page with reported articles on Ebola policy, the Supreme Court's influence on election rules, and the fall of Atlantic City.

But it's not Politico's credibility that's at issue here; it's BP's. Let's examine whether the oil company has any. Morrell begins by posing an overarching question: "What impact did the spill actually have on the Gulf Coast environment?"

The answer, if you study the findings of experts, is that the spill has had massive impacts. These include immediate effects on sea fowl, marine mammals, and coral; and long-term effects on dolphins, sea turtles, fish and wildlife populations, and the gulf food web. Moreover, many effects are still imponderable at this time, because no one has studied an oil spill of this magnitude in a unique ecosystem such as the gulf. Assessing the damage may take decades, covering generations of animals.

BP sidesteps that point. Morrell mentions several predictions that were made in the immediate aftermath of the spill, and that were manifestly conjectural -- "tar balls...all the way to Europe," "a permanent end" to the gulf seafood industry, tourism revenues depressed for years. "None of those things happened," Morrell states, as if that proves that there were no major effects. The only effects he acknowledges are short-term--11 workers killed, birds, fish and wildlife killed. "And with a camera trained 24/7 on the wellhead," he writes, "a sense of alarm was understandable while the well was flowing." (Yes, durn that camera -- if only the spill unfolded without witnesses, things would have been so much better.)

EDIT

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-bp-offers-a-lesson-20141022-column.html

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. Remember that BP was caught doing a loop feed of that camera!

Thousands of us watched the feed online, and a few sharp eyed folks proved that it was a loop feed, not a live feed.

Plus, there was much talk of how the drilling had caused fractures in teh sea bed ( Gulf floor) and methane was pouring out,
then suddenly there was no info. on that forthcoming.

The marsh grass was killed by the oil, whole areas of marsh are STILL contaminated, so birds are not nesting there and water is rising in those areas.

Down here we watched almost every moment of what was going on, much of it never made national news.