Oiled birds desperately wanted by green carpetbaggers

For the sake of clarity here, nobody likes to see any animal covered in oil and suffering a terrible death. So I am including the photo Andrew Bolt used with his blog post. It's horrible. And with the current spill there will be effects on life and the environment. The trouble is the effects of such things are always over hyped by the media and environmental groups. SBS news the other night carried a report from an excitable American reporter who clearly wanted the person he was interviewing about oil reaching some wetlands to say it was a disaster. Her honest answer that we really don't know what the long term effects of such things will be was simply ignored by him. That's not what he wanted to hear and he was just as clearly determined not to let such inconvenient uncertainty get in the way of his narrative of looming ecological destruction.   Green groups hungry for cash just love those iconic pictures of sea birds covered with oil - the classic image of Nature vs Man. But, as I’ve written recently, oil spills turn out to be less dangerous to wildlife than is usually hyped, even when the spills are as big as the Exxon Valdez disaster. Which proved embarrassing for Barack Obama: Barack Obama’s media advisers were quite distressed when the President travelled down to the Louisiana coastline last week to make his first on-the-spot statement about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Their distress was caused by what they didn’t discover, rather than what they did. Despite their frantic requests, no photogenic dying oil-covered birds could be found to form a backdrop for the Presidential tirade as he weighed into BP. Even a month after the great Gulf of Mexico spill, the wildlife toll is pathetically small: Government officials said Tuesday that they have documented 156 dead sea turtles, 12 dead bottlenose dolphins, and 35 oiled birds—23 of them dead—since the spill. The number of dead sea turtles is significantly above historical levels, they said, though they haven’t yet determined whether the deaths resulted from the oil spill, which started April 20. How disappointing for the usual suspects: In a region teeming with wildlife, so far there have been few signs of significant animal die-offs attributed to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.. Federal officials acknowledged in a conference call Tuesday that the numbers of affected wildlife appeared low so far, with the exception of sea turtles.

Posted via email from Garth's posterous