[classicman]

Until this week, it didn’t fit with the White House’s British-bashing script, either. In recent days, though, we have witnessed an extraordinary U-turn in America’s attitude towards the great spill.

It began when a respected Time magazine environmental writer voiced the near-heretical proposition: that the effects of the Deepwater Horizon disaster on April 20 had been massively hyped.

His article was largely based on the opinions of Professor Ivan van Heerden, a brilliant but controversial marine scientist fired by Louisiana State University after publishing a book about Hurricane Katrina that said cataclysmic flooding was inevitable because the protection given to the coast was wholly inadequate.

He said: ‘There is just no data to suggest this is an environmental disaster - although BP lied about the size of the oil spill, we’re not seeing catastrophic impacts.’



Emboldened by the academic’s willingness to go against the accepted wisdom, other leading scientists have concurred, with similar views being expressed in influential U.S. newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post.

It was against this background that the Obama administration made its own dramatic U-turn this week.

In a humiliating climb-down, it conceded in an official report from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that the ‘vast majority’ of the spilled oil had already gone.


The rest, it said, had probably diluted and didn’t appear to pose much of a threat.

According to 25 leading U.S. government and independent scientists, the feared catastrophe to the coast’s fragile ecosystem had been averted.

The cynical spin from Washington suggested that Obama had successfully browbeaten BP into mopping up its mess - with Mother Nature lending a helping hand.

Read more: