In some news accounts, the Gulf Oil spill is already being described, in passing while moving on to other things like domes to catch the stuff, as a sure-enough established calamity. Other stories examine the chance of that with more care. Here are some  heds and ledes in the last few days on the potential environmental havoc, and the wide range in possibility of what will happen, as the seabed continues to leak.

• AP – Seth Borenstein: This oil spill ‘the bad one’ – recipe for disaster ; What makes an oil spill really bad? Most of the ingredients for it are now blending in the Gulf of Mexico.
• Wall Street Journal – Robert Lee Hotz : Threats to Wildlife Often Linger Long After Accidents ; Driven deep into Gulf Coast waterways by wind and seasonally high tides, the spreading oil slick from the Deepwater Horizon accident could cause serious ecological and wildlife-health consequences long after signs of surface damage have been erased.
• New York Times – John M. Broder, Tom Zeller, Jr.: News Analysis / Gulf  Oil Spill is Bad, but How Bad? ; The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is bad – no one would dispute it. But just how bad?
• Washington Post – Michael E. Shear, Steven Mufson, William Branigin: La. Gov. Jindal demands U.S. government, BP uphold pledes to avert environmental disaster ; As a massive oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico threatened the US coastline Friday, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) expressed alarm that prevention effort so far have been ineffective, and he demanded that the federal government and oil gian BP uphold their commitments to help avert an environmental disaster.

Personally, being a equivocal sort, I go for the Times’s head scratcher. It’s also the most recent, running in the paper this morning and meaning that Broder and Zeller had time to give it a thoughtful spin, a news analysis. So far so bad, it seems to say, but whether we get to awful is yet unclear. All  four have – to borrow the recipe metaphor that Borenstein used in his, ominous version – the same elements blended and baked differently. Hotz’s at the journal has the longest view. I’d have put an “If” at the front of that lede, but he has on his mind Exxon Valdez and its lesson that once in the sediments, oil stays a long time with measurable impact on benthos and perhaps more. The Post piece I selected takes the potential catastrophe as a given and, for its policy-intent town and readership, plays up political blamesmanship.

The extremes here are the AP’s story of a few days ago, and the Times’s today. This is seen in the first sources selected for quote. The wire service’s Borenstein has batting lead-off a professor saying, without qualification, “…this is the bad one. This is just a biggie that finally happened.” The two at the Times selected at the top of the lineup President Obama’s boilerplate observation of a “potentially unprecedented environmental disaster,” only to counter it immediately by paraphrasing one expert saying, “This is the first inning of a nine-inning game. No one knows the final score.” They then point out that so far this is a merely big spill – not even coming close to far larger ones that have occurred (and none of which permanently destroyed any extensive, fragile ecosystems or wiped out any species that we know of).

Just goes to show the advantage of having a lot of experienced reporters on a big breaking story, competing for quotes and angles, moving too fast to give much account to press releases.Diversity in news is a good thing.

A few more eco-impact reports, from endangered species to endangered policies:

• AP (Video) Sofia Mannos: Worries Grow Over Spill’s Impact on Marine Life ; (Link goes to AP video page, put ‘oil spill’  in search) Lots of images of dead dolphin, sea turtle, jellyfish, and skimmer and boom boats. None of the dead critters, it appears, can yet be deemed victims of the spill.

• E&E ClimateWire (via NY Times) John J. Fialka, Christa Marshall: Gulf Oil Spill Threatens to Rearrange Washington’s Climate Agenda ; First quoted source – an environmental activist declaring flatly that “The moment we hoped we would never see has happened.” Pithy and to the point, she’s publicly sure this is a mega-disaster. One must at the back of one’s mind wonder whether in the larger view her organization did, and in a perverse way that no doubt it must deny, welcome precisely such a thing as this in hope that further and greater risky behavior, not to mention further delay toward a low-carbon economy, will now be eased by policy shifts.
• and this just in …AP – Harry R. Weber, Vicki Smith: Gulf Coast watches, waits for path of oil spill ; And for now, things are lookin’ a bit better.

Just Wondering Dept: The good news for BP that is (sensibly for the moment) getting little or no attention: THEY FOUND OIL. If this was an exploration program, just about to be replaced by a production platform, it clearly was a winner until the fireball. It took hard work drilling in water nearly a mile deep and penetrating more than three miles into the seabed. One recalls no stories explaining whether this means a significant new field had come into play, or not, or what. Accidents like this are arguments against such exploration. Finding a nice new pool of domestic crude is a vindication. What’s the upshot from those two competing perspectives?

- Charlie Petit

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