Troubled Waters

A report by American government scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, those notorious enemies of all that is good, virtuous, hard-working and profitable in global pollution, says that the Exxon Valdez disaster, "the worst single incident of pollution in US history" before some fool introduced George W Bush to the English language, is still causing pollution after eighteen years. There are still over twenty-six thousand gallons of oil below the water's surface at Prince William Sound, which Exxon Mobil spokesbeing Mark Boudreaux paraphrased as "some small amounts of residual oil in Prince William Sound on about two-tenths of 1% of the shore of the sound". Despite some imprudent but anonymous souls having predicted that the pollution from the 1989 oil spill "would have disappeared by now", Boudreaux said that the presence of these few drops of residual oil "is not a surprise, is not disputed and was fully anticipated". According to Boudreaux, "Exxon has supported more than 350 independent studies whose scientists have found no evidence of significant long-term impact". Just who the studies were independent of is, alas, not made entirely clear.