Income property owners in Gulf Coast states have been worried (rightly so) about the value of their investments, a concern which began in April of this year when a BP rented oil rig blew up, killing 11 workers and rupturing an oil well one mile below the surface of the ocean.
As was expected, the foaming-at-the-mouth mainstream media developed an immediate obsession with the prospect of catastrophic environmental damage, little of which has come to pass. The dramatic drop in beach town tourism and the subsequent financial reaming of Gulf Coast business owners can be directly attributed to media hysteria. Thank you all. Idiots.
Yes, the tourists are staying away and who can blame them when every newspaper and television story paints an image of a festering petroleum wasteland? You can count a tar ball here and there, and the marshes and estuaries of Louisiana have taken a sizable hit but now, in the early days of August, with the oil flow all but stopped, crews are having trouble finding anything resembling renegade oil to cleanup. Apparently the worry about massive property value devaluation of your investments was another example of raving J-School graduate hysteria.
We’d like to apologize for them and the mounting evidence that journalism no longer requires a brain.
The larger issue brought up by Jason on The Creating Wealth Show #176 is why the heck is an oil company drilling so far down below the reach of modern technology to fix problems when they arise? That makes no sense. It’s fine and dandy for BP to drill a mile below the ocean surface in search of product, but they have also aptly demonstrated their inability to repair what breaks. And why are they out there on the fringes doing their best to ruin your investments?
In a word or four: tree-hugging, environmentalist wackos. Thanks for the oil spill, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, and more. Thanks for the oil.
The Creating Wealth Show
Flickr / David C. Foster
