Part 1:
"The saddest sight this week has been of America's first family taking a quick one-day holiday in Florida. Crashing visitor numbers and plummeting fish sales have devastated the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. There is talk of an 80% drop in revenues in some resorts. Yet figures show just 16 of the state's 180 holiday beaches are at all polluted, while the bulk of the spill appears to have dispersed, or be dispersing out at sea. Having hyped the disaster for political purposes, the president is now frantically trying to play it down.

The spill has been another classic of state terror in which incident and response are wholly out of proportion to one another. As the oil leak began back in April, Obama declared a disaster, banned fishing in 37% of the Gulf and ordered a halt to underwater oil exploration, putting some 27,000 jobs at risk. Columnists screamed it was "Obama's 9/11" and demanded he "harness the nation's outrage". He was attacked for playing golf within 58 days of the disaster. With dial-a-quote scientists howling blue murder, any who might have looked at previous spills and thought it might not be so bad would have been unpatriotic disaster-deniers.

Hardly a day passed without the president castigating BP, the hated "British Petroleum" – never its American site operators, Transocean and Halliburton, or his own regulators. It was a field day for xenophobes. The president used the sort of language normally visited on global terrorists. He was going to "get BP" and make them "pay for this". It was another Hurricane Katrina, but one that could thankfully be blamed on foreigners. A Louisiana seafood supplier declared: "If I had a bomb, I would put it on London" – which would have him in Guantánamo Bay if he were Muslim and speaking of New York. Foreigners had raped America. It was they, they, they …

Now, mysteriously, Obama speaks of we, we, we … who "have this thing under control". His environment adviser, Carol Browner, says "the vast majority of the oil appears to have gone". Less than 10% of coastline saw any oil at all. There have been no sightings of dead fish floating in the sea and most fishing will soon be "back to normal". The Gulf is apparently "clean, safe and open for business", and a lovely place to take the kids. It is OK, everyone. Disaster has turned to triumph, so let us all think about the midterm elections.

So whose fault really was the collapse in the local economy? It began with a failed oil well, responsibility resting with BP, but blame still not apportioned. Yet as every terrorist knows, it is not the bomb that does the real damage, it is the publicity multiplier given it by the media and politics. The bomb causes the bang; the target is then relied on to supply the megaphone.

So it has proved in the Gulf. Competing scientists have had a field day. While some kept up the hysteria this week with such declarations as "We don't know the long term yet", those with links to the administration or fishing for BP's $500m offered to Gulf environmental research are suddenly optimists.

Most of the oil has mysteriously evaporated, like that from the biggest similar disaster, the dumping of oil into the Persian Gulf in 1991 by Iraqi forces. America did not turn a hair, any more than it did about the Union Carbide explosion that killed 15,000 Indians in Bhopal in 1984, with only trivial compensation paid.

The issue is apparently no longer the number of "barrels" spilled but the sort of oil, the location of the spill and the temperature of the ambient water and air. Contamination of most wildlife appears to have been minimal. Even crustaceans recover fast, while the ban on fishing has boosted fish stocks.

Part 2:
"The great conflation of fear – often egged on by "the science" – is the result of government gladly allowing itself to go mad for a day, to raise a fear, glean a headline or win a budget rise. Obama grotesquely exaggerated the oil threat to advance his personal and party cause. He is now struggling to downplay it.

The US Travel Association is suing BP for $500m in promotional compensation. Why not sue the president? It was he who led the charge in disaster rhetoric, with a daily stream of negative publicity for the Gulf of Mexico, before trying, somewhat pathetically, to make up for it. He and others were surely accessories after the fact."

The above by Simon Jenkins, not someone I normally agree with, taken from the Guardian of 17th August, 2010 in an article entitled:

Oil spilled. But hysteria did the real damage in the Gulf