Can you imagine how much of a bigger deal this would be if a private entity was responsible for the spill
Obama would be calling for banning gold
Ha.
I still read the local liberal rag where where I lived because whereas it used to get my blood boiling, it's now kind of amusing since I'm not in the middle of it.
We had an oil spill on the CA coast a couple of months ago. Some people were actually calling for the death penalty for the oil company execs. Also life in prison, bankrupting the oil companies, etc. Some of the "egregious" activity that is still being talked about in the comment section even today is: They underestimated the size of the spill (liars!), they took six hours to notify response authorities, the response was slow, etc. People who had planned on going to the beach or whatever for any days during the spill response were being paid thousands of dollars in "inconvenience" fees by the company. Not to mention the millions in lawsuits that are in the queue right now. Plus they had the nerve to say they were sorry and would do whatever it takes to fix things (How dare they, and also, liars!).
The pipeline is still shutdown, and local authorities have refused to let three oil companies that were transferring oil through that pipe move their oil by train or truck. Their holding tanks are all full (facilities were shutdown over a month ago), and the fed.gov is fining them for the full tanks because inspections and maintenance are due and not being completed because the tanks are full.
In the meantime, news on the EPA spill shows that it's much larger than the EPA initially said; the EPA waited a full day before notifying local authorities; they said they're sorry. Pretty similar to the oil company. The difference is that there was a full response active within eight hours of notification of that spill. Hundreds of people were on scene and cleaning up (an estimated 21K barrels) oil. So far the EPA has been dragging its feet and it seems there is little outcry from the enviros (not even being mentioned by those "death to oil" locals), at least in comparison to the much, much smaller spill by the oil company. I'm guessing any payouts will be much less than what the oil company will have to pay out on the smaller spill.