I happened to pick up a dead trees copy of the New Yorker this week and found in it a massive article on the BP oil spill written by Raffi Khatchadourian. I wouldn’t be surprised if he were working on a book on the same subject. In it, he brings the perspective that only the passage of time can give to a situation that was very hard to judge at the time.

Not only did the public not really understand the full scope of what was going on, but neither did anyone who was actively involved in the response to the spill. Khatchadourian’s article is what you might call the first revisionist history of the spill response.

As a liberal and an environmentalist, I found the article really valuable because it caused me to take a hard look at some of my biases and the role they played in my reaction to the response to the spill. A huge portion of the article is devoted to the role dispersants (like Corexit) played in the spill response.

Heavy use of the dispersants was highly controversial for a number of reasons, some good and some bad. The bad reason was that many people reported that Corexit was highly toxic and worse for the environment than the oil itself. That turns out not to have been true — Corexit is the most widely tested chemical dispersant available, and in the aftermath the EPA has found that it is less toxic than the oil being spilled. Fears (mostly unfounded) about the toxicity of the Corexit prevented it from being used as widely as it could have been.

The spill response team also started using Corexit at the wellhead to break up the oil as it was emerging from the blowout in addition to applying it using sprayers from the air. This had never been tried before and thus caused a lot of worry about what would result.

And also, nobody has used dispersants in the amount that they were used in the BP spill response. These last two fears were better founded. It’s important to look at the risks when you’re trying something new.

Ultimately, the dispersants were the most effective measure used by the spill response team, and the disinformation that was passed around about the dispersants probably reduced the effectiveness of the spill response.

Fundamentally, a lot of the negative impression of the use of dispersants resulted from people seeing the use of them as something that BP was for and the EPA was against. In truth, the spill response was coordinated by the most experienced and knowledgeable oil spill experts in the world, and the scientists working on the response ultimately agreed that using the dispersants made more sense than not using them.

That’s just one example of how people’s realtime impression of who was calling the shots affected public opinion, in turn making it more difficult to clean up the spill.

The article covers only one aspect of the spill — cleanup of the oil that spewed into the Gulf of Mexico. It didn’t cover the events leading up to the spill or the efforts to contain the blowout. It makes a powerful argument that in the end, technocrats and experts are our best bet at getting the job done, and that public opinion and politicians mostly tend to make things worse.

I’ve been reading stories about the government at every level blocking access to areas affected by the oil spill pretty much since the oil spill started. Just this weekend, Duncan Davidson reported on new restrictions on journalists documenting the effects of the spill in, Should it be a Felony to Cover the Oil Spill? Glenn Greenwald rounds up news of law enforcement officers working with BP personnel to prevent journalists from covering the spill. He also notes that this pattern of behavior precedes the spill — law enforcement previously detained a freelance photographer for photographing a refinery in Texas City, Texas. The reasons why the government might not want people to see how bad it is on the Gulf coast these days are obvious, but the calculus is depressing. The government sees the costs of harassing journalists who are trying to document the spill as being lower than the costs of people seeing the effects of the spill.

I think this is true:

Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades. This is the stark conclusion of James Lovelock, the globally respected environmental thinker and independent scientist who developed the Gaia theory.

At one time, nuclear proliferation was the greatest threat facing mankind. A very short series of bad decisions could have quickly led to the extinction of the human race. I think that the global warming is the single most serious existential threat to humanity right now. It may not wind up bringing down modern human society, but I think of all the threats we face, it’s the likeliest one to do so. And yet, at a political level, few people treat it with that level of seriousness. That’s stupid.