Oil In Gulf Is Degrading, Becoming Harder To Find

by Marc Kaufman - July 27, 2010 - Washington Post

Oil from the BP blowout is degrading rapidly in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and becoming increasingly difficult to find on the water surface, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Tuesday.

"The light crude oil is biodegrading quickly," NOAA director Jane Lubchenco said during the response team daily briefing. "We know that a significant amount of the oil has dispersed and been biodegraded by naturally occurring bacteria."

Lubchenco said, however, that both the near-[term] and long-term environmental effects of the release of several million barrels of oil remain serious and to some extent unpredictable.

"The sheer volume of oil that's out there has to mean there are some pretty significant impacts," she said. "What we have yet to determine is the full impact the oil will have not just on the shoreline, not just on wildlife, but beneath the surface."

In other words, the impact is no where near as bad as the environmental extremists wanted it to be so they could claim it as "the world's worst disaster". The claims for how much oil was escaping were always exaggerated. One report says that only THREE birds have died as a result of this spill. If the coast had been protected the damage would have been almost non-existent. The federal government dithered in protecting the coast because they wanted all those dead birds on TV. If Obama had; suspended the Jones Act instead of protecting the unions, demanded that the Army Corps of Engineers help build the sand islands instead of block their construction, and aggressively worked to organize the army of boats skimming the oil instead of insisting BP had to do that without any official power, most of the little damage that occurred could have been avoided.

Again and again the environmental extremists refuse to allow the media to remind people of one important fact; huge quantities of oil are spewing from the ocean floor naturally every single year. The oil eating microbes exist naturally because of that fact. Mother nature always cleans these so-called disasters like the Exxon Valdez faster than anyone suspects, especially the environmental extremists with ulterior motives. The scientists hired by the lawyers always portray the damage as much worse than it is so that they can jack up the extortion payments. And by the way, they have to send scientists out because the visible damage disappears so fast that only super sensitive instruments can even FIND the damage after a short period. Those microbes that Mother Nature uses to clean up the naturally occuring seepage are really good at their jobs.

What you have to do is understand what the last sentence in the quote from the article above means. The environmentalists say "What we have yet to determine is the full impact the oil will have not just on the shoreline, not just on wildlife, but beneath the surface." What they mean is "We will claim a disaster no matter what we find."