I am still listening.

How long will it take for an ecosystem this ravaged to be “restored and made whole” as Obama’s interior secretary has pledged to do? It’s not at all clear that such a thing is remotely possible, at least not in a time frame we can easily wrap our heads around. The Alaskan fisheries have yet to fully recover from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill and some species of fish never returned. Government scientists now estimate that as much as a Valdez-worth of oil may be entering the Gulf coastal waters every four days. An even worse prognosis emerges from the 1991 Gulf war spill, when an estimated 11m barrels of oil were dumped into the Persian Gulf – the largest spill ever. That oil entered the marshland and stayed there, burrowing deeper and deeper thanks to holes dug by crabs. It’s not a perfect comparison, since so little clean-up was done, but according to a study conducted 12 years after the disaster, nearly 90% of the impacted muddy salt marshes and mangroves were still profoundly damaged.

British Polluters are still crapping on us a month later. You can still watch the Macondo spewing when British Polluters trains a camera on it. They are not, as congress requested, keeping a 24 hour video of the spill going, due to various issues (i.e. they don’t want to send a sub down there and pay just to expose their shame, they want it doing other work too).

This is, so far, the 3rd largest spill in history, with a Valdez-worth coming out every 4 days. For almost 3 months now. All British Polluters can see is leaking dollarsigns.