The Specious Notion of a "Clean Up"

What this means, I don’t know.

Will BP pay for every minute of the thousands of hours of personnel time the government, in all its forms, has used to respond to this catastrophe? I highly doubt it. Will it pay for every resource, every bit of money the government uses, whether “coordinating” with BP or actively assisting in the clean-up? This is to say nothing of BP’s laughable mewling about spending “6 million a day” on it, which is something around .1% of their YEARLY PROFITS.

Honestly, if the government had any balls they would treat BP like no-bid contractors treat the defense department. And if BP doesn’t like the bill they can kindly leave the continental shelf and befoul some less self-respecting nation’s coastline thank you.

But here’s the larger issue. I’m not an expert on oil clean-up. But when tens of thousands of barrels of oil, and possibly much, much more, spills across hundreds of square miles of open water and hundreds of miles of coastline, there is no such thing as a “clean up”. You don’t clean that up. Maybe, with tens of thousands of man hours and god knows how much money, you succeed in removing a high percentage of the oil. But let’s not have any illusions about what is left. The area is not “clean”. You’ve just gone from large scale habitat annihilation to very thorough and intractable habitat degradation. That’s not “clean”.

Here’s the basic fact: even if you allow that there could be such a thing as a “total cost” for the clean-up, like some kind of enormous bill for services rendered, all of which BP is paying for, BP most definitely will not be paying for the incalculable environmental damage of this or any other oil spill. We all pay for that, and not this year but forever.