rational optimism about the BP spill?

Over at Time magazine, Michael Grunwald argues that the environmental effects of the BP spill in the gulf have been greatly overstated, while his colleague Bryan Walsh replies, in effect, that it's too soon to tell. The last part of my interview for Canadian Business magazine with Matt Ridley seems relevant:

CB: The two big public crises right now are the sub-prime crash and its downstream economic consequences, and the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Economist Richard Thaler has argued that this is a symptom of a very modern problem, where neither the public nor the private sector seems to know what to do about it.

MR: I would put a slightly different slant on it, and instead of saying that neither public nor private sectors seem able to cope, I would say that public opinion doesn't seem able to cope. I'm terribly struck by the fact that there was an equally big, and certainly longer-lasting spill, in the Gulf in 1979 called the Ixtoc, and I'd never heard of the thing!

The bottom line from it, like from nearly all oil spills, is how quickly the system recovers once it is stopped. I hate saying that, because it makes me sound complacent now, and of course it hasn't stopped yet. And the thing about oil spills is that they are dreadful for the people in the localities. But I have actually covered a number of oil spills in one way or another over the years, from Exxon Valdez to a couple of British ones in Wales and Shetland, and the story is always the same: the media struggles to find the oiled bird, and when the media is gone you get a complaint from the local people saying that everyone thinks their beaches are ruined when it fact they are fine, six months on. So I have a feeling that it is the public perception that is getting worse. Fifty years ago you could get away with much worse. People didn't make as much of a fuss.

And that's no consolation; that's a good thing! That's a sign of how much better we're getting at being intolerant of bad things.