Gulf Oil Spill and Mike Thomas, Orlando Sentinel: wrong by twenty million gallons of oil ... by gimleteye

Mike Thomas, Orlando Sentinel columnist, has been dead wrong on the Gulf Oil Spill and offshore drilling as an environmental and economic disaster. Here's a gem from the worst timed editorial of the century: "The image of oil villains despoiling our beaches is simplistic rhetoric aimed at simple minds. It is fodder for political grandstanding and greenie fundraising." That's right: all those environmental groups really got traction against offshore drilling in Florida, with the Florida legislature until disaster struck. And now those "greenies" are just wallowing in cash, right Mike, and competing toe-to-toe with the billions earned every quarter by Big Oil. If you just went to New Orleans Airport, Mike, you could see those corporate jets owned by Sierra Club, NRDC, and Clean Water Action parked wingtip to wingtip. That's a joke for the humor-challenged, but read on:

"Drilling foes don’t have any recent pictures of oily birds to make their case, so they throw out worst-case scenarios that are about as likely as an oil bit goosing Godzilla out of the depths." (Drill, baby, drill, April 23, 2009) On the one year anniversary of that Orlando Sentinel column the BP Deepwater Horizon sank, unleashing the worst environmental disaster in US history. Here's the picture Mike was missing (credit to Alan Taylor, Boston Globe)


It's all fun to write that stuff and, yes, it appeals to the Sentinel's conservative readers and its editors' preferences. (Funny, how all those Gulf Coast conservatives are shouting themselves into a deep shade of blue with oil staining their beaches.) Thomas did write a little mea cupla about "eating crow", but in truth he's swerving a little this way and a little that.

There's a smudgy feeling to "Let's cool overkill reactions to Gulf spill", a recent Thomas editorial (May 6, 2010), he writes: "Naturally, as far as the media are concerned, this is the BIGGEST DARNED DISASTER IN THE HISTORY OF DISASTERS! The oil is going to destroy the Gulf of Mexico, wipe out 40 percent of the nation's fisheries and cripple Florida's tourism industry. Then it will head south and take out the Keys before heading north to Cocoa Beach."

Yeah, it's a joke. Hah hah. We're all yo-yo's. I wonder if Orlando Sentinel editors who let Thomas bloviate believed the BP estimate of 1,000 barrels per day leaking into the Gulf? Or the revised 5,000 number? Or did they even pay attention that independent scientists had calculated the spill was at least four times that volume, two weeks before the government concurred?

Thomas takes a little paw swipe at "giddy environmentalists" and tops it off with a disclaimer that the 1979 spill off the coast of Mexico was worse. Where were you doing your research on the Mexico spill in 1979, Mike? Cancun at spring break? I don't know anyone giddy about what is going on in the Gulf, and I suspect that anyone who would write that is detached from reality. The Gulf catastrophe has already spilled the equivalent of four Exxon Valdez into the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe Mike Thomas is auditioning for Fox News. He'd fit right in.