The Redhunter

After all, the article makes clear that the reason why this isn't an eco-tragedy was due to reasons that won't be replicated elsewhere; the type of oil was a lot lighter than what came out of the Exxon Valdez, it's hot in the Gulf of Mexico so oil evaporates faster and there's more bacteria to eat it, and finally, a constant influx of water from the Mississippi River washes it away.

But still, there are two lessons here.

Keep Drilling

The BP spill is no reason to stop drilling. It is simply inexcusable for the Obama Administration to go to court to try and put a moratorium on drilling.

As soon as the scale of the leak became known, the anti-oil left went into overdrive, hyperventilating about how this "proved" that off-shore drilling was dangerous and must be stopped immediately. All this would achieve, though, is to increase drilling in other countries who have less environmental scruples and who hate us anyway, like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

So let's be cognizant that not all spills are the same, and some areas are safer to drill in than others for various reasons. It looks to me that the Gulf regions is one of the best, so let's step it up down there.

Blind in One Eye

Abe Greenwald of Commentary (both articles in this post h/t TWS) asks ""Where is the outrage?" ... but not about BP:

In 1991, Saddam Hussein dumped 8 million barrels of oil into the Persian Gulf. Two years later, an international team of scientists determined that there was little if any evidence of environmental damage to show for it. The BP spill, by comparison, put an estimated 5 million barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. It is not, and should not be, surprising to learn that the area's wildlife is already testing clean and fishing restrictions are steadily being lifted.

The Saddam comparison raises an additional thought. If BP's accidental spill had the left-wing enviro-catastrophists calling for Tony Hayward's head and for a million-man protest to bring down the global denialist superstructure, why did Saddam's intentional and more egregious act of ecological sabotage (which was the least of his heinous crimes) elicit nothing of the sort? After all, when the time came to depose that polluter, the left got its street marches -- in favor of leaving him be. But then, no one should look for moral direction from a movement that cares more about the potential damage done to seaweed than the actual deaths of human beings.

"This should be a rocket-boost for the environmental movement, a time to finally put to rest the notion that environmentalists are misguided alarmists," wrote Daou, the misguided alarmist, back in May. Now, with the half-summer of self-righteousness behind us, the environmentalists will begin composing their own narratives of denial. Thomas Friedman and others are cautioning that the real danger lies in what we cannot detect, see, or test for. This is faith inverted and misapplied -- believing in the existence of unseen material evidence and calling it science. Let's do as the great drilling proponent Sarah Palin advises and refudiate it.

I'm not familiar with what Sarah Palin advises but Greenwald's certainly got the rest of it right. The BP Deepwater Horizon and Exxon Valdez spills were at least accidents, whereas Saddam's were deliberate. Yet the left, which demands criminal charges in the cases of the BP Deepwater Horizon and Exxon Valdez spills, ignored Saddam's deliberate actions. Why?