The worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, the Gulf oil leak, appears to itself be history, and its impact on the environment looks to be relatively minor compared to what was feared. For this we can thank mother nature which evidently gobbled up the oil via rapidly reproducing carbon-consuming microbes.
On the other hand the economic damage wrought by the Obama administration's reaction to the leak may haunt the Gulf for a long time. The moratorium he declared on American oil drilling in the Gulf, according to the Wall Street Journal, is believed to eventually cost as many as 23,000 jobs, many of which will never return.
Deliberately putting thousands of people out of work seems an odd way to create jobs during a recession, (so, by the way, does this), but that's what the wise men in the White House chose to do. One wonders which will turn out to have been the bigger disaster, BP's leak or Mr. Obama's handling of it.
