Corporate greed was one of the many things that led to the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster that registered as the largest marine oil spill in the history of the world. The fallout from the spill is still being felt today, because that’s what happens when you pollute the earth. However, conservatives want the world to move on. In fact, Former Lt. Gov. Jeff Kottkamp wants you to believe that all of that terrible stuff that happened during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was mostly fake news. A couple of weeks ago it was reported that Kottkamp, now an oil industry spokesperson and co-chair of Explore Offshore Florida (which is exactly what it sounds like), told a group of reporters in Tallahassee that the 2010 oil spill “didn’t even reach the shores of Florida.” Which, besides not being true, is also a straight-up insane thing to say.
After Kottcamp (sic) made the statement, a reporter asked about it again, and Kottcamp said “tarballs are naturally occurring.”
Oh, I’m sorry. “Tarballs are naturally occurring” is even more insane. The responses to the statement were justifiably sharp.
“Anyone who would say that the BP disaster did not reach Florida’s shores is either lying for personal profit reasons, or has no knowledge about the event at all,” said Linda Young, Executive Director of the Florida Clean Water Network and a resident of the Panhandle coastal community of Navarre Beach. “They should not be anyone’s spokesperson.”
Now, according to the Tampa Bay Times, Kottkamp is trying to walk back his statement by lying some more.
"I guess I overstated it," said Kottkamp, now leading a group seeking to open the eastern Gulf of Mexico to oil exploration, said in an interview this week with the Tampa Bay Times.
[...]
"Obviously, yeah, we had some oil, but nothing like what was being reported," said Kottkamp, who was lieutenant governor at the time of the spill. "You would have thought that the entire state was covered in oil."
This rhetorical technique of lying on top of lying is something I like to call “a Republican lying.” It also has a little mix of exaggerating something that no one said, and in doing so, arguing against a fake position. It’s like saying, “Hey, you would have thought the Statue of Liberty in New York City was covered in oil because of BP. And let me tell you, it was not!”
No one said Florida was covered in oil. But the fucking water was! The marine life was! And it washed up on a lot of Florida beaches, you prick. In fact, there are scientific papers about oil still being buried under Florida beaches—from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
The Republican Party and conservatives everywhere are leaning in to the brave new fascism that Donald Trump has shown them. The new tactic is just telling people that what they saw was fake. The history they read and watched and heard was generated by alarmists, which include even the people in their own party that forget to lie about it. Republican Rep. Charlie Crist was Kottkamp’s boss back when he was governor, and even he couldn’t bring himself to unsee what he had seen.
"It did hit the state," Crist said. "I saw it myself. … It was frightening."
This is one of the lasting results of the executives in the Deepwater Horizon case being able to thwart justice. It didn’t make them innocent, but they were not punished; and it definitely doesn’t imbue anyone with faith that any lessons were learned. Oil spills will continue to happen as long as we drill for oil. The people who promote the most difficult and therefore unsafe oil extractions also seem to be the same political operatives that don’t believe in regulating and strictly enforcing safety requirements for the companies doing the drilling.