08.02
I made two posts a couple of weeks ago about Russell Moore’s recent comments on the oil spill. I won’t rehash all of that here, but I thought it would be a good idea to point something out. Here is how he started off his original remarks about the spill:
I’ve left my hometown lots of times. But never like this.
Sure, I’ve teared up as I’ve left family and friends for a while, knowing I’d see them again the next time around. And, yes, I cried every day for almost a year in the aftermath of a hurricane that almost wiped my hometown off the map. But I’ve never left like this, wondering if I’ll ever see it again, if my children’s children will ever know what Biloxi was.
As I pass that sign on Highway 90 telling me I’m leaving Biloxi, I can look out behind the water’s horizon and know there’s a Pale Horse there. A massive rupture in the ocean’s floor is gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, with plumes of petroleum great enough to threaten to destroy the sea-life there for my lifetime, if not forever. Everything is endangered, from the seafood and tourism industries to the crabs and seagulls on the beach to the churches where I first heard the gospel of Jesus Christ.
This is more than a threat to my hometown, and to our neighboring communities. It is a threat to national security greater than most Americans can even contemplate, because so few of them know how dependent they are on the eco-systems of the Gulf of Mexico. This is, as one magazine put it recently, Katrina meets Chernobyl.
–Russell D. Moore, Moore to the Point Blog [em. mine]
Really? Katrina meets Chernobyl? So the oil spill was equivalent to a category 5 hurricane combined with a nuclear meltdown? You think those comments might be a little bit hyperbolic? Well, that’s my point. We now know that since they capped the broken well, most of the oil spill has simply vanished:
The oil slick that was supposed to devastate lives and livelihoods in the Gulf of Mexico region is starting to disappear. The New York Times reports that the once massive spill has all but vanished from the surface waters in the Gulf.
As it turns out, the Gulf of Mexico is amazingly adept at dealing with oil spills.
Naturally occurring leaks have given rise to oil-eating bacteria. Storms also have helped dissipate the oil. And while the jury is still out on the damage from oil that has already washed ashore, and on the impact of chemical dispersants that were used during the cleanup, there’s reason to be optimistic that the long-term ill effects will be minimal.
But the news is being met with some chagrin and stubborn skepticism. Environmental activists are reluctant to lose the spill as a tool to force a radical anti-oil agenda on America. And fisherman and other businesses in the region worry the subsidies promised by the government and BP LLC will dry up.
So, now Dr. Moore looks as if he was just another shill in the cacophony of media overreaction about the oil spill. Let me be clear, I don’t think he’s a shill at all. I just think, and I said it at the time, that he let himself be used by the media(especially that NPR interview) to push their meme’ and then cast aside. That’s what they do. And he fell for it. I don’t know if Dr. Moore knows anything about oil spills or if he was qualified to speak in the catastrophic terms that he did. But, he stuck his kneck out in the media, and that’s always a bad idea.
