It was America’s biggest oil spill in June, but it now appears to have taken the big one: new estimates released this week show that the Deepwater Horizon incident is now the worst accidental oil spill in history. A dubious honour indeed. I say accidental because the Iraqi army released 9 million barrels of oil into the Persian Gulf during the first Iraq war.
Even allowing for a 10% margin of error in the estimates, it’s still a third larger than the previous record, the Ixtoc 1 blow-out off the coast of Mexico in 1979. But is it big enough to make us take our oil addiction seriously?
Not least because, even as the US calls a moratorium on deep sea drilling, BP is due to begin deep water exploration in the North Sea in the autumn, 60 miles off the Shetland Islands.
The Earthbound Report 
Hmm … but not, it seems, nearly as bad as originally claimed: http://tiny.cc/wv4td
No, and what’s interesting is that BP’s Tony Hayward said right at the start that it wouldn’t be so bad. The oil was being released under such pressure that the oil was leaking in a spray of tiny droplets and dissipating through the water, but the media didn’t have much time for his excuses then of course.