Tag: clean up

BP Now Admits It’s A “Catastrophe”

Well, that sure didn’t take long.  We’ve had more than a month of watching oil gush from a broken pipe a mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico.  We’ve watched BP, which has Ken Salazar’s foot on it’s hydra-headed neck, take every possible step to save oil it could sell while it dithered about blocking the leak and invented sci-fi machines to capture oil.  And we’ve watched in horror while enormous amounts of oil flow into the sea and onto beaches and through marshes, and we’re seeing pelicans covered in oil and drowned turtles and fishing bans and devastation in the tourist industry.  And now, after all of that, as if we don’t already know that we’re watching something that foreshadows the impending death of the Gulf of Mexico, BP has revised its characterization of the spill from having a “modest” environmental impact to being an “environmental catastrophe.”

What a sickening development.

CNN has the story and video. So does Crooks and Liars:

And the result is that while the Gulf of Mexico is being ruined everyone is now officially “frustrated.”  The President. You. Me.  We’re frustrated because all of the smart people in the world in convocation apparently cannot put this Humpty Dumpty together again.  Or haven’t.  So at long last, according to TPM, DFA is now calling for a boycott of BP.  What else, I ask, can we do to express ourselves?

There are really two issues.  The first is the leak.  But the second, and over time it might be the more important, is collecting, containing and then cleaning up the mess.  That process is sadly long overdue and it does not depend on stemming the flow.  It depends on the government mobilizing the resources necessary to contain and clean up the oil.  And if you think that blocking the leak is/was a challenge, the clean up is a far larger one.

Can we please get going on that?  Every day that we wait on this is a day of more suffering and death in the Gulf.

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simulposted at The Dream Antilles