They're all dying. And the blame falls entirely upon British Petroleum's 'sloperation', aided and abetted by Halliburton, and criminally facilitated by the George W. Bush administration in general and Vice President Richard B. Cheney in particular.
The dolphins are dying. Black is an appropriate color for the icons and older eyes like mine have trouble with this, but they're finding bodies washed up from the Texas/Louisiana line clear over to Panama City, Florida.
The sea turtles are dying on the same stretch of beaches from Port Arthur to Panama City.
But what no one will ever talk about are the beach mice. These guys don't turn up rotting in the sun and drawing enough residents filming them that our corrupt corporate media are forced to report. They just vanish. And extinction is forever.
The orange patches are the territory of the Choctawhatchee Beach Mouse and the bright green around Panama City is the even more limited range of the St. Andrew Beach Mouse.
These little guys were already endangered by wetland loss due to nutria, beach development, and larger, more frequent hurricanes.
Most screwed of all are the Alabama Beach Mice. Mobile Bay is already awash in oil. If the fouling of their environment hasn't done them in already a single hurricane, with storm surge dragging British Petroleum's Beach Polluter's oil onshore , will finish them off.
The story of British Petroleum's Bird Poisoner's black tide is far from over. The red lines are closed fisheries, the black outline is the rough trajectory of the oil patch, and the pretty blue green is nasty, oily gunk headed right for the Florida Keys. The Loop Current is going to take this stuff up the Atlantic seaboard, too.
I suppose since I'm awake mourning the Gulf of Mexico's beach mice at 5:30 eastern this diary just might make the wreck list, but I don't want to be a glory hound. The map data is right here and you'll have your own chance to play Speaker for the Dead if you care to take the time to use the Environmental Response Management Application. There are other endangered species that are now likely doomed, I just picked the tiny, cute ones for my diary.
There's another endangered species in this story, and it's one we should terminate with prejudice.
93% of oil resources in the world are sovereign. Only sleazy banana republics like Nigeria and George W. Bush's United States permit the unsupervised looting for national resources and this is always attended by environmental messes of epic proportion. The independent operating companies (IOCs) like British Petroleum are generally performing on behalf of a government that will kick their asses if they screw up. That British Petroleum of America has long term leases to our oil fields is an oddity and one that our Congress should terminate with prejudice.
Need more proof than the 11th largest ocean in the world forever changed by sloppy pursuit of a fuel source that's wrecking our climate?
British Petroleum is only drilling two relief wells
That isn't fixing the problem, that's more cost cutting antics, as one can see from the very detailed analysis from The Oil Drum.
Barack Obama. He can't show how he feels because he'd be the Angry Black Man. He can't exercise his executive power because that would be a Government Takeover. He can't let the mess continue because the anti-government cracker contingent of the Tea Party will take time out from their anti-government rhetoric to stage incoherent protests about the government's failure to take over the oil companies impinging their liberties, or something like that. (I can't even write their word salad when I try really hard. I haz #fail)
Now I'm so white as to be reflective, and I've been hanging around campaign managers for a while, so I don't give a fuck. I'm mad as hell – but our corrupt corporate media would never put someone like me on television. That's OK. Government takeover, did you say? It's about GOD DAMNED TIME. Only we're not going for this corporate media narrative bullshit – if our government has to take on this mess we liquidiate the sources of the trouble. And their executives who made the decisions leading to this?
Eleven humans dead directly in the blowout, a whole lot more who are going to be subtly poisoned as they live in the mess, thousands of suicides as people's livelihoods are wiped out and they lose hope, and dozens of already endangered species gone forever?
Lock them up. Then throw away the key.
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