Keep Drilling, Baby, Drilling

Jillian Bandes | June 14, 2010 8:50 AM

Steven Hayward's piece, "How To Think About Oil Spills," is worth a read in full. The costs of the spill are still far, far less than the potential benefits of continued offshore oil production.

A recent study of seven basic ecosystem types, and their most typical perturbations, found that of ecosystems that make a recovery from various catastrophic events (and, it must be noted, not all do), ocean ecosystems disrupted by oil spills were the fastest to recover, often within a span of one to four years. ...By contrast, forest lands disrupted by fire or deforestation can take more than 40 years to recover.