Did it really not occur to you folks that your first and last guests' comments were directly opposed to each others'? Mr. Wohlforth was warning against "saying it’s a catastrophe before it is a catastrophe" when "we really don't know how bad it is yet. ... [I]n the Exxon Valdez you had an enormous amount of oil that was, within three days, completely *coasting* a inland sea, essentially. And here you have oil that’s pretty far *offshore* , and it gets significantly degraded before it gets to *shore* . ... [I]t’s just nowhere near on a scale of the Exxon Valdez, yet." Yet Dr. Savitz was criticizing exactly the fact that so much of the coverage is about whether the spill reaches the shore, when the spill is *already* wreaking substantial damage onto marine ecosystems and wildlife out in the gulf, irrespective of whether and how much of it hits the coast.

Isn't a "spill" the accidental emptying of as much as all of a known quantity of liquid from a container? Tea can be said to "spill" from a cup. Even a disaster like the Exxon Valdez can be described as a very bad "spill" (although, of course, this trivializes that accident). Those who use the euphemism "spill" to describe the exploded drilling operation, the ruptured deposit, and the on-going flood of oil into the Gulf capture the notion of an accident, but they distort its nature. Calling this a "spill" is at best unwitting PR for BP (et al).

I think the real story on the Gulf spill is how little attention the oil industry gets when it's not about accidents, fuel price, CO2 or getting beyond petroleum. The hard fact of the matter is that we will need oil for a very long transitional time, so: How many double-hulled tankers have been built since Valdez? How many heavy liquid plugs and BOP's fail every quarter? How deep is Chevron's new offshore well near Newfoundland where the weather is routinely much nastier than the Gulf? How many new ultra deep wells are in development? Who trains our petroleum engineers? How is ultra-deep drilling technology tested? The Gulf event is like the Financial Meltdown: Everybody blathers about it now, but nobody saw it coming.

I heard one of your guests saying that the news played up the Gulf oil spill too much too soon. Trying to compare it to the Exxon Valdez spill. It is a disaster, at 200,000 gallons of oil a day, that's 199,999.9 gallons too much to be spilling into the Gulf any old time...

We're paying a price for using oil at the scale we do.

The press has gotten this 'fair and balanced' reporting out of whack.

You should call the situation for what it is, not by comparing it to some other situation.

Thanks,
Richard

The biggest head spin to me was when the Coast Guard announced there was no leak and 24 hours later announced that there was one.

Where's the back story on that deal?