“It’s the breadth and complexity of the disaggregation of the oil” that is now posing the greatest clean-up challenge, the commander, Adm. Thad W. Allen, said at a news conference at the White House. ...NYT
Later in the press conference, Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen also described the latest efforts at the gushing oil well as increasing production.
Finally! An optimistic outlook! Allen was also careful to refer to the well as "Deepwater Horizon" and not "BP's well," showing that the parallel efforts of BP to put some distance between its name and bad news is even more successful than efforts to contain the oil spill.
The point is, there is cause for optimism. The events of the past eight weeks are being reframed. Language is everything. For example, yesterday they attached a hose to the side of the riser pipe and are producing a good deal more oil than before.
This oil, which could continue to do tremendous damage to the ocean, is now being loaded into tankers and hauled off to refineries where transfer and processing will disperse some of it, in the normal way, into the air and not the water. Then, in a clever move, yet more will be dispersed into the air across both hemispheres as the refined product is used by industry, planes, trucks and cars here and abroad.
Remember: the aim is to make sure less oil is lost to BP flowing into the water from BP's busted drill Deepwater Horizon. That can be seen as a definite plus. Above all, there's a plus for democracy: Americans are given a choice. We can choose where to disperse the products of future deep-water drills: water or air.
I'd call that a win-win for BP, the Coast Guard and, of course, all of us. It's important now to end the scare tactics used by environmentalists with their doctored photos of phantasmal sea creatures. BP has its communications team working on that very issue even as we climb into our cars this morning.
