Replies to post #654149 on Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[brightness]

Nah. I have been consistently taking the position that the spill is an environmental disaster in the short-run, most significantly to the tourist industry. If we had private ownership of parcels of the gulf sea floor, the owner would never have allowed BP to do what it did; it's the government that allowed BP to take those high risk activities, with a government imposed damage cap of $75million per incident, a figure probably entered prominently into the bean counters' calculations on just how little precaution they had to take.

In the long run, yes, the spill will be a non-issue in terms of damage to the environment. The impact on business and home owners in that region however would be different story if debt payments are missed.

[Taxmantoo]

My problem with that is the loss of 'fixed sealife'.

Living reef organisms, especially coral, recover very slowly. Coral harvested for souvenir and aquarium purposes is a major problem, an entire coral reef flooded with crude would be a calamity. You can reseed the coral after the oil is gone, but we won't see recovery in my lifetime, it just plain grows too slow.