“By sinking and dispersing the oil, BP can amortize the cost of the cleanup over the next 15 years or so, as tar balls continue to roll up on the beaches, rather than dealing with the issue now by removing the oil from the water with the proper equipment,” McCallister testified earlier this week before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. “As a financial adviser, I understand financial engineering and BP’s desire to stretch out its costs of remediating the oil spill in the Gulf. By managing the cleanup over a period of many years, BP is able to minimize the financial damage as opposed to a huge expenditure in a period of a few years.”

If there’s a competition for most ecologically illiterate proposal of
the 21st Century, the Jindal-Nungesser plan must be a leading candidate.

Outside of Planet Jindal, turns out the shallows of the Gulf Coast are
the anterooms of the Coast’s aquatic nurseries. Digging them up to
protect against BP’s oil volcano makes as much sense as pulverizing
neonatal ICU’s entrances to protect against asbestos in the hospital
walls.

Moreover, what keeps grasses and trees rooted in riparian / tidewater
islets is *soil* – a living ecosystem. Not fill dirt. Jindal’s
proposed barrier islands will have all the viability of mine tailing
mounds sprayed with fertilizer and grass seeds: a combination that
will sprout seeds on your roof, but will never grow a lawn.

Oh – the sediment that eco-idiots Nussgesser and Jindal want to dig up has one other small problem. That sediment that washes down the Lower Mississippi? The sediment that forms the shallows is thoroughly mixed with long-lasting deadly persistent organic pollutants. The very same “shallows” Nungesser and Jindal want to heap up in piles off Louisiana’s already poisoned coast: the perfect mechanism to ensure winds, tides, and hurricanes carry the once-buried toxins inland to the marshes and wetlands these crackpots purport to be saving.