Question: What do you get when you cross a ton of money from BP with marine "research" on the impact of their oil spill? Answer: Great news for the Gulf of Mexico!
That might have been a marginally funny joke if it weren't true. Case in point:
Impact of Gulf spill 'quite small': expert
(AFP) NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana — Louisiana's fragile marshes should recover from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in a matter of months and the environmental impact will be "quite small," a leading expert said.
The upbeat assessment of the damage from the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster came from geologist Ed Owens, a world authority on protecting shorelines from oil spills contracted by BP to lend his expertise to the response effort.
Owens, who was the technical advisor to Exxon's clean-up teams on the Exxon-Valdez oil spill in Alaska from 1989 to 1993 and has been involved with oil spill response and research since 1970, has worked in Louisiana's wetlands before.
"It's a very, tiny, tiny fraction of what's spilled has actually reached any of the shorelines in the area, which means that the environmental impact in terms of the coastal side of it is quite small," Owens told AFP.
Owens claims that the impacts of the spill will have completely disappeared within a few months to a year, at most. His entire argument seems to be that most of the oil didn't actually reach the shore, but that ignores (among other things) the fact that we still don't know what the impact will be of the dispersants or of the oil that has been suspended in the water column. If BP were actually interested in figuring out the true impact of their spill, they'd fund independent scientists and grant them complete freedom to conduct their research. But BP isn't interested in the truth, they are interested in their own profit. I guess that isn't surprising -- BP is a company, after all. But wouldn't it be nice if they could at least leave us alone and refrain from trying to flood the debate with "scientific" propaganda?