Forgive me if I appear to be uncharacteristically curmudgeonly, but IMHO (and it is of course only an opinion, YYMV) there are some events which are just too horrendous to write songs about, and the BP disaster is one of them.

I am reminded of the Dunblane (Scotland) horror of some years ago, when a man flipped and shot many schoolchildren dead in the town school). A local songstress wrote and performed a song about the affair which I found absolutely excruciating (not the quality of the song, just the fact that it had been written at all).

Tom Paxton's brave attempt regarding 9/11 falls into the same category IMO.

And while on the subject, one thing that bugs the hell out of me is the way in which the media keep calling this ecological nightmare an "oil spill". An oil spill is what happens when a tanker engineer forgets to close the valve and losses a few hundred gallons into the sea. This is no "oil spill" this is an oil "ERUPTION" and the nightmarishly unpleasant after-effects will be with us for decades to come.

Sorry to spoil the party ...