Oil Recovery

The oil that was leaking was light crude so a lot of it just evaporated. A lot more was gobbled up by bacteria. Now people are trying to put a spin on this. From the London Daily Mail:

Disaster that never was: Why claims that BP created history's worst oil spill may be the most cynical spin campaign ever
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.

A bit more:

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.

His anguish was understandable.

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.

And a bit more:

But, of course, after a �catastrophic� oil spill, a spotless beach doesn�t make dramatic viewing and who wants to know?

Certainly not the politicians, nor the green-lobby tub-thumpers, nor the compensation claimants and their mega-bucks lawyers.

Until this week, it didn�t fit with the White House�s British-bashing script, either. In recent days, though, we have witnessed an extraordinary U-turn in America�s attitude towards the great spill.

It began when a respected Time magazine environmental writer voiced the near-heretical proposition: that the effects of the Deepwater Horizon disaster on April 20 had been massively hyped.

His article was largely based on the opinions of Professor Ivan van Heerden, a brilliant but controversial marine scientist fired by Louisiana State University after publishing a book about Hurricane Katrina that said cataclysmic flooding was inevitable because the protection given to the coast was wholly inadequate.

He said: �There is just no data to suggest this is an environmental disaster - although BP lied about the size of the oil spill, we�re not seeing catastrophic impacts.�

Very interesting -- I Googled Professor van Heerden and the story behind his being fired is quite curious. His book: The Storm looks interesting -- a copy is on its way. Like I said before, if the Gulf Coast had voted strongly Democrat, this would have been handled in a completely different manner.