1. The ending is already being written, with those culpable planning their exit, a means of stripping what is valuable from BP into some new company, leaving a shell behind to absorb the ire and bounce checks to the aggrieved:

The idea that BP might one day file for bankruptcy, particularly as part of a merger that would enable it to cordon off its liabilities from the spill, is starting to percolate on Wall Street. Bankers and lawyers are already sizing up potential deals (and counting their potential fees).

I predict this is precisely what will happen, perhaps sometime shortly after August when the relief wells will be completed, and the wealth of oil now spilling into the gulf can be profitable recovered in a new name. (This scheme should sound familiar to you.)

2. The slicked shores and fauna are only a part of this catastrophe. The worst damage, as I feared when this spill started, is happening beneath the surface.

The tests, the first detailed chemical analyses of water from the deep sea, show that some of the most toxic components of the oil are not necessarily rising to the surface where they can evaporate, as would be expected in a shallow oil leak. Instead, they are drifting through deep water in plumes or layers that stretch as far as 50 miles from the leaking well....

But scientists outside the government noted that the plumes appeared to be so large that organisms might be bathed in them for extended periods, possibly long enough to kill eggs or embryos. They said this possibility added greater urgency to the effort to figure out exactly how sea life was being affected, work that remains in its infancy six weeks after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded.

3. This spill is not the first, and potentially not the worst insult given by humans to the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf was well on its way to dying before, thanks to irresponsible industrial agriculture:

Dead and dying mangrove trees lie like fallen soldiers all along the shore. The mangroves carry a warning, Leonard believes, one of ocean death. “Nutrients flowing into the gulf are killing life here, creating red tides and a huge dead zone where nothing can live. The water has next to no oxygen. Every summer, the dead zone grows, snuffing out more fish, crabs, and other animals. And we're the perpetrators of the crime, with our excess fertilizer and untreated sewage and other waste flowing into the gulf. The dead zone, once unheard of, is starting to kill everything in its path. In spring when I'm in the water tending my clam beds, I can almost feel it coming.”
....

The phrase “dead zone”—coastal waters too low in oxygen to sustain life—is almost synonymous with the Gulf of Mexico. But a similar situation now exists in many other places, says Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Studies in Cambridge, Maryland. “There's a dead zone right outside my office window every summer in Chesapeake Bay,” says Boesch. “Since the 1970s, this lifeless zone has become a yearly phenomenon, sometimes affecting 40 percent or more of the bay.”

Boesch says that the expanding dead zone could be changing the entire ecosystem of the Chesapeake. Animals tolerant of hypoxia are becoming more common in the bay's waters: jellyfish may be displacing oysters, crabs, and finfish like striped bass.

Worldwide, there are now some 146 coastal dead zones. Since the 1960s, according to a report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Global Environment Outlook Year Book 2003, the number of dead zones has doubled with each passing decade. Most are seasonal, but some persist year-round. Where did these killing fields for fish and other marine life begin?

The complex chain of events begins not in the sea, but on land. Farmers often overfertilize their fields. The excess fertilizer, laden with nutrients like nitrogen, washes into creeks and rivers, where it's eventually carried into coastal bays and the open sea.

4. The total costs for our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq just turned over $1 trillion. Take a moment with me to imagine if that scale of money was invested, starting back in 2001, in alternatives to petroleum-based energy. Some are starting to change their thinking.