Help me out here, amateur and professional economists.
We have been hearing that the Gulf Gusher damage may be "beyond human comprehension."
The carnage is iceberg-like, with the hidden undersurface Gulf biosystem likely comprising 80% of the worst. The birds, the seals, the dolphins, the turtles washing up dead will be the mildest hint of the death occurring everywhere beneath the Gulf waves.
If the Gusher continues, there will also be surface carnage as well. Wetlands utterly destroyed. Marsh life wiped out. Bayous with tarballs floating among cypress roots. Beaches rife with dispersant-produced oil mousse. New high-tide marks that are gooey and smelly, and renewed twice a day.
This, along the entire coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, likely down to Miami at least.
If, as I now believe, the oil release is far greater than we're being told, and if they can't stop it quickly, then a lot of dominoes will fall.
Because the natural resilience and beauty of the entire coastline will not just collapse.
It will stink.
Stink in a chemically toxic way. Stink so badly that nobody wants to be near it.
Stink so badly that beachfront homes become worthless. Stink so badly that tourism vanishes.
Western winds will blow stink through Disneyland. The thousands of tourism-dependent industries all along the coast will smell it every morning, and they will open to no vacationers.
Black goo will continuously float in, and continuously emit petrocompounds, which may make small coastal towns practically unlivable.
A dead Gulf, with residual toxins preventing repopulation by plankton, or krill, or coral, or starfish, or shrimp, or fish, as well as a shoreline that will be a wasteland, fostering no substantive life -- this is no playground. It's a toxic waste dump.
If there will be no fishing industry, and no tourism industry, then all coastal real estate will be pennies-on-the-dollar. Mortgage-holders will walk away, leaving the banks holding worthless paper. Commercial real estate -- offices, storefronts, tourism-based commerce -- will also go belly-up, leaving the banks holding even more worthless real estate.
A wave of economic and toxic-waste migrants will move away from that coast, some only twenty miles inland, others far across the country, most broke and no longer with credit.
Thought Katrina was bad?
The poor folk just scraping by will have to leave, because the scrapings are gone, and there'll be no sign of any foreseeable improvement. The middle-class folk will be underwater on their mortgages, with no sign of any foreseeable improvement, and may well have to walk away. Fairly well-off folks with retirement homes on the coast will be suddenly broke, and selling stock to compensate. The very well-to-do will, of course, somehow write it off.
Parents from NOLA to Miami won't let their children outside, and they'll smell poison every time they go out to their cars. In the heat of the summer, a motionless petrochemical funk mixed with 90% humidity will hang in the air.
To lose the Gulf, and to lose all those who depend on the Gulf, as well as lose those who visit the Gulf, or winter in the Gulf.... well, we'll lose the Gulf coastal population too.
That's an economic collapse in the making.
Am I missing something important, economy-wise, in the above analysis? Will the oil actually stop stinking after a few seasons, if it's not renewed by continued gushing? Will the oil all come ashore in one fell swoop, or (having been "dispersed") will it swish around that giant bowl for decades, even if the Gusher were stopped tomorrow?
I don't live there, nor have I experienced an oil spill's stench, but right now there are people 100s of kilometers away from the spill reporting the smell, the headaches, the toxic feel to the air.
This has all the makings of a Dust Bowl-like migration north, away from the toxic stink of the coasts. What will we call them instead of Okies -- Gulfies? BP Refugees? Tarheads?
Lord help us all, and may we learn from this that we must live lightly on the land.
And learn that the lowest price is rarely the lowest cost.