Ever Hear of the Ixtoc Spill?

Some background:

Amidst the thick mangroves, under the turquoise tranquil waters and along the shoreline of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, the world's worst peacetime oil spill once hit here and more than 30 years later, there are still a few signs of Ixtoc.. . .

If the aftermath from Ixtoc is any indication, the environment and its recovery process will surprise many worried about the future. Marine biologists feared the Gulf would be ruined from the oil, but much of it repaired itself within two or three years. Even with the positive signs, the surprise and the good news of Mother Nature's strength, there are still signs.

Nevertheless, I don't want to hear Obama EVER discuss the size of anybody else's carbon footprint. I'm beginning to believe he is dragging his feet on cleaning this up. Never waste a good crisis.

The AP reports that nobody learned a lesson from Ixtoc:

While oil companies have spent billions of dollars to drill deeper and farther out to sea, relatively little money and research have gone into finding new, improved ways to respond to oil spills in deepsea conditions like those in the Gulf of Mexico.

Experts say the massive Gulf spill has exposed a failure by the industry
and the federal government to commit adequate resources to oil cleanup and response technology.

"Why they didn't start working on it after the (Ixtoc 1) Mexican spill in 1979 is beyond me," said Gerald Graham, president of Worldocean Consulting, an oil spill prevention and response planning firm in British Columbia. "Now they're trying to catch up."

If this one ends up costing BP $20 billion or more, this might change. The federal government's response to this also begs the question: why bother spending more in research on remediation if nobody's going to use it? At the very least, the government could accept offers from other countries to send help.