So the little ramshackle bayou town of Jean Lafitte, Louisiana has canceled its annual Seafood Festival because of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. You might think they're overreacting, since the festival's not until July 30. Except that Lafitte's less than a 100 miles from this:
That's dark, thick oil in the marshes near Pass-a-Loutre in Plaquemines Parish, which is about 20 miles further north from where the initial reports of oil making landfall about a week ago. That small area of the marsh will be dead in another week, so you can't really fault the town of Jean Lafitte for thinking that, by the end of July, Bayou Barataria will become a viscous, awful dead zone. Damn, the Rude Pundit remembers that being a good festival when he was a kid. Of course, the 2100 people who live in Jean Lafitte will probably miss the tourist dollars a great deal more. You think BP is gonna pay for the loss of income?
The Rude Pundit can't get his mind around the fact that the well is still pouring out oil a month later. He can't grasp how BP executives haven't been arrested for, at the minimum, criminal negligence, if not manslaughter, and the well blown up and sealed. He can't understand why BP is even involved in any decision-making here, why any notion of protecting profits and shareholders has had any effect on the solution, why the Obama administration, the Army Corps of Engineers, fucking NOAA hasn't told BP to go fuck itself, that the well's not theirs anymore. And then order the Coast Guard to shoot on sight anyone from BP who gets near it.
BP has wasted so much time on efforts to save the oil and its investment in the well that it is just now getting around to attempting to seal the well. It's pretty simple. Fuck BP. Fucking blow it up. Fucking collapse the earth around it. And be fucking done with the spill and get to the clean up.
Why the desperate sound? Because everything we have been told by anyone in supposed authority on this crisis has been proven wrong, and the spill has turned out to be far worse than BP or the Obama administration has been admitting. BP CEO Tony Heyward, who should be set adrift on a flaming raft in the middle of the spill, had assured Louisiana officials that the dark crude wouldn't hit the marshes, that it would be chemically dispersed. That was wrong. The chemical dispersants were supposed to help, but they've turned out to be too toxic to the environment and, by extension, to people. What's next? The methane released in the ocean accelerating global warming? The oil becoming a sentient blob that eats boats?
Meanwhile, the coral reefs are fucked. The deep water is fucked. The fishing industry has already had a fifth of its area closed. Governor Bobby Jindal is trying to get the Corps to approve a plan to dredge near the marshes and create barrier islands to protect the wetlands. It's a plan from the Dutch. Why not? They actually seem competent when it comes to dealing with protecting their wetlands and their nation.
