Where Has All the Oil Spill Gone?

Long time passin'...

Disaster that never was: Why claims that BP created history's worst oil spill may be the most cynical spin campaign ever (David Jones, 8/6/2010 Mail Online)

"The warm, white sand stretches for miles as clean and flat as a freshly laundered bed sheet.

"The turquoise sea is so clear that I can see silvery fish playing around my toes as I take a cooling paddle.

"If there is any more pristine resort in which to spend a summer holiday than Pensacola Beach, on the Gulf Coast of Florida, I would like to find it.

"And yet, at a time of year when usually there is barely room to unfold a deckchair, the shore is eerily deserted.

"Ask Pensacola’s fretfully quiet seafront traders why the tourists have all stayed away and they angrily recall one chaotic day back in late June.

"Then, hungry for dramatic TV footage to support Barack Obama’s announcement, that the BP - or, as he preferred, ‘British Petroleum’ - oil spill was ‘the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced’, news networks descended on their town.

"They quickly found what they were looking for: shocking images of Pensacola’s famously white beaches thickly-coated with sticky, black crude oil and apparently beyond salvation.

"The apocalyptic message was reinforced in doom-laden interviews with locals. ‘It’s damn near biblical. This place is done for!’ lamented 36-year-old Kevin Reed, whose family have swum and sunbathed in the area for generations.

"Yet, as I saw this week, nothing could be further from the truth. Strolling along the beach for an hour, I found just one, pea-sized tar-ball which crumbled to nothing between my fingers.

"When, as a young boy, I played on Morecambe beach in Lancashire, worse things often washed up from the nearby ICI refinery.

"Moreover, if the U.S. TV news crews had returned just three days after their original visit, they would have seen that the black morass had already been removed by some of the 20,000 clean-up workers hired by BP.

"The workers are still there - only now they are using toothbrushes to sift out even the tiniest particles of oil."

The article continues, to discuss "the disaster" on the ecosystem and the Obama administration's "response" driven by political considerations; you can also view the pictures of a pristine white beach and of marsh grasses with new green growth.

Well, it's not just Brits wondering out loud where the dratted oil has gone. People (not just hard-core environmentalists) attribute this lack of oil to the "toxic oil dispersant", "spraying of bleach on the beaches at night", or "massive importation of white sand to replace the soiled sand on the beach".

Yes, it could be any of those, or it could be that what some sites and some scientists have been saying all along is correct - that the spill is really a tiny drop in the bucket, and the ecosystem is more robust than portrayed and will recover.

(And cleaning the oil soaked birds is just for the camera, in case you don't know yet. They break the birds' necks after the camera stops rolling.)

With his scaremongering (deliberate or out of ignorance), President Obama has managed to kill the tourism in the Gulf region for the summer. And since it is a "perception" by the tourists that the beaches are soiled with oil that caused the cancellations, not the actual damage, Obama's Pay Czar Kenneth Feinberg will find no reason to compensate the tourism industry.

My questions at this point are:

What will happen to that $20 billion escrow fund? My guess is that the Obama administration will try to divert that money to pay the public union workers in the region - teachers, firefighters, police, you know, the usual people who benefit from this administration.

What was that story of people dying from internal hemorraging? Or about a medical treatment facility with barbed wire fence in Venice, LA?

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