BP Vows to Pay for Oil Cleanup

BP vowed on Monday to pay “all necessary and appropriate cleanup costs” for the oil leak devastating the Gulf Coast, including “legitimate and objectively verifiable claims for other loss and damage caused by the spill.” The Washington Independent, meanwhile, flags a chilling report from a market analyst on the three possible scenarios. The best-case scenario, which has containment chambers catch the outflow, “will take until June to complete” and “has never been done before,” with damages in the tens of billions and a cleanup that takes years. The worst-case scenario damages the Gulf for “a generation,” has oil entering the Gulf Stream and traveling up the East Coast, and has monetary damages in the hundreds of billions of dollars. And don’t tell the Tea Partiers, but no matter what, “Federal deficit spending will certainly rise by tens, and maybe hundreds, of billions” and “a ‘double-dip’ recession probably has been made more likely by this tragedy.”