Sadly, I'm afraid that the only real hope for cleanup is to rely on natural processes. From the reading I've been doing about past oil spills and the efforts they've taken so far with this one, the dispersants and other chemical measures used to stop the spread of the oil may be more toxic than the oil itself. Although millions of gallons of oil leak into the gulf each year naturally, they are certainly not all at once and in so contained an area. We will feel the impact of this for a long time into the future.
This might be the event that finally drives home the long-term consequences of our actions as a species.
The problems we're creating today have no immediate solutions. We are fucking things up in ways that will take hundreds or thousands of years to fix.
Of course, that only seems like a long time because we measure things in terms of human lifespans. 500 years is nothing to a 4 billion year old planet.
And earth's seen much worse. A single supervolcanic eruption would do more damage than all the man-made disasters of the last 500 years combined.
Unfortunately I am cynical about this. We thought the Exxon Valdez disaster might be a turning point as well, but it wasn't. Some incremental change may come of this, but probably nothing revolutionary.
No doubt, you'll soon hear folks trying to put the public at ease about the long-term consequences of this spill. Something about how it's not too important in the big scheme of things, nature will have the place perfectly restored in about a decade, and so on. That's what they said about the Valdez. At the time I thought it was a reasonable argument. Then I pretty much forgot about it and went on my merry way. It wasn't until this spill that it came to my attention that the Puget sound still hasn't recovered ecologically from the spill.
I fuzzily remember a quote about either the hot-air balloon or the gatling gun; something to the effect that it would make war so terrible that it would no longer be waged. It doesn't matter how terrible the consequences of something are to everybody else; if it profits someone who's powerful enough to get it done, it'll get done.
> dispersants and other chemical measures used to stop the spread of the oil may be more toxic than the oil itself.
There are less toxic ones out there but I've read that BP has a deal with one of the producers of the most toxic dispersant (Nalco Co.) so big surprise, that's what they are using.
