Want the Good News First?

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT

Grand Isle, La.

It is pretty much a tossup for me: Who poses a greater long-term threat to America’s Gulf Coast ecosystem: the U.S. Senate or BP? Right now, from what I’ve seen flying over the Louisiana coast at the mouth of the Mississippi, my vote is the U.S. Senate. BP at least seems to have finally gotten its act together and is cleaning up the oil spill. The Senate, in failing to pass even the most modest bill to diminish our addiction to oil and begin to mitigate climate change, has not even begun to do its job.

I have to admit, I was surprised and pleased that it took us an hour of flying in our float plane over Breton Sound and Barataria Bay and across the marshes, bayous, barrier islands and open water that lie about 70 miles from the site of the Deepwater Horizon rig before we spotted any significant ribbon of oil. “There it is,” said our pilot, as he banked the plane for a better view of the small oil slick and as if he were pointing out a pod of whales we had been searching for all day.

Here’s the good news. Thanks to: the capping of the broken oil well; the cleanup efforts so far by a flotilla of shrimp boats converted to skimmers; the currents that have blessedly taken a lot of the spill away from the shore; the weathering process that is breaking down a lot of the crude into different compounds that dissolve, evaporate or get absorbed by microbes in the ocean; and the dispersants that have broken up the biggest oil slicks, there is less and less to see here on the surface. Walking along the beach on Grand Isle, the only inhabited barrier island on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, it appears that our worst fears have not materialized — so far.

So much for the good news. The bad news is what you can’t see that is happening under the ocean’s surface and the stuff you can see — the decades of degradation along the whole Gulf Coast from decades of unfettered development — that no one is talking about.

(More here.)