by MICHAEL KLARE
It took President Obama 24 days to finally get publicly angry and “rip” into BP and its partners for the catastrophic oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. What was he waiting for? The pattern has been obvious enough: however bad you thought it was, or anyone said it was at any given moment, it’s worse (and will get worse yet). Just take the numbers.
In the first days after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20th, reports from the Coast Guard and BP indicated that no oil was leaking into the Gulf from the damaged well. Then, the oil giant reported that, actually, about 1,000 barrels a day were coming out of it. Almost immediately the federal government raised that figure to 5,000 barrels, which remained the generally accepted estimate until, under pressure, BP finally released a dramatic 30-second clip of the actual leak at the wellhead. By then, according to ABC News, both the company and the White House had had access to the video for three weeks and obviously knew that the gold-standard estimate was wrong by a country mile. Since then, estimates by scientists viewing the video clip (who have been prevented by BP from visiting the site itself, looking at more material, or taking more accurate measurements), run from 25,000 barrels to a staggering 70,000 barrels a day or more — up to, that is, 3.4 million gallons of oil daily, which would mean an Exxon Valdez-sized spill every few days.
Tom Dispatch for more