That oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico

On April 20, soon after it first began, I made a few remarks in this blog about the oil spill off the coast of Louisiana near the Mississippi delta. Today for the first time it seems possible that the unending flow into the formerly rich seas of the Gulf of Mexico has been stopped. It has done horrendous damage, from which the local and regional ecosystems will take decades, perhaps centuries, to recover. The blow-out occurred at a depth of about 1.5 Km below the sea surface, so deep that only robot miniature submarines can operate and the water temperature is zero C or even below zero. The sea remains liquid only because of the immense pressure. But human stupidity and greed are even deeper, indeed bottomless: this ecological catastrophe has not daunted the oil companies that intend to go ahead with undersea oil drilling at even greater depths in the far stormier north Atlantic ocean on the edge of the continental shelf off the coast of Newfoundland; and plans are well advanced to drill in the Beaufort sea off the north coast of Alaska and the frozen tundra of far northern Canada. Will this insanity never end?