it at this point. i guess i m sort of oil cleanup. in the meantime. but i really don t want to or have i ever had to think about doing anything else. it s what i ve been doing, this is all i thought i d be doing. yeah. until i wasn t doing anything anymore. this is all i want to be doing. and that s a big thing that we re all concerned with is being forced to change our lifestyle and being not able to do the things we love to do. and that we re lucky enough to call a job. yeah. in terms of the prospects here, you think about a landscape like this, which is the type of this is the type of landscape that could be inundated with oil if the spill goes the way they think it s going to be. this type of marshland will get hit first. right. if that happens, i mean, i can t imagine being out there trying to clean that if there was oil there. i try to imagine how long a disaster like this affects the fishery once that stuff comes
environmental disaster in our nation s history. joining us is larry shweiger, president and chief executive officer of the national wildlife federation. thanks for being here. great to be here. we don t even know the short-term magnitude, but what do you think of the long-term. last summer i returned to the prince williams sound and the scientists actually dug in the sand and found oil in half the oils they dug, so the oil is still in the sound from the exxon valdes. one third of the wildlife have fully recovered, two thirds are still in recovery 20 years later. when you have an oil spill of this magnitude, if it gets into the wetlands, if it does the damage we fear it will do, it would have long-term consequences to the resources of this region. is there a telltale sign at the wildlife federation when
earlier today. yeah, you know, i think that one of the things we have to remember is that there s some things that bp has some expertise on and oil companies have expeer tees on, in your earlier segment you talked about the fact that this is cutting edge technology. i would agree with all of that. there are other things the government s pretty good at. for instance, the estimates of the spill, the original knowledge that we had too low an estimate coming from bp came from the government. the air monitoring that the epa is doing, the work we re doing to get mobilized for shoreline response through the coast guard, i think there the government can and must take the lead to give some assurances to citizens. how can any company get government approval to drill in water that is deeper than they know how to clean up? i mean, that sort of seems like the fund mental government issue here. the approval for this type of drilling in the first place. we know that what s happened here in the gu
the bottom line is to create liability to the amount we re talking about of $10 billion is not going to ultimately hurt them that badly, if they have a spill, and secondly, you know, oil is really controlled on the marketplace with opec. so at the end of the day, it s not going to see a spike, necessarily, in oil prices simply because we hold the polluter to be responsible for their actions. and you know, i heard the bp executive there, and i you can try to shift blame and just try to be responsible. at the end of the day, it s $75 million liability, yes, you know, we keep hearing the president say bp s responsible for all the cleanup and all the effort, but at the end of the day whenever this disaster finishes, and you have those ecosystems and those fishermen and you have those coastal communities and you have the estuaries ultimately affected, who are they going to turn to? and the spill fund, which only
you re trying to assess things, is there a telltale sign you looked for? i think for me on saturday, i overflew much of the area that was covered with oil. you could see the water was unhealthy. you could see there was not a shine the way water would normally have. the scale of this is so large, it s hard to describe to people if you don t see it firsthand, but that oil sitting on that water is also mixing in the water calm, will be taken up by the fish, the shellfish, oysters, for example, take up oil 1,000 times what s in the water calm. if there s 1 part per million in the water calm, they ll have 1,000 times in the oyster. they hold them in their tissues action and biomagnify up the food chain. do you think it s possible to effectively clean a spill like this. we ve talked already about accountability, how to spirited exchange at the environment protection administrator, lisa