Anchor-handling tugboats battle the blazing remnants of the off shore oil rig Deepwater Horizon.

If it is capped, we have 85 days of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico.  We're not sure what impact we'll see on Texas, but we know it’s bad.  For a comparison, look at the oil spill from the Exxon Valdez from 1989. It’s 10.8 million spill still has an impact. The gusher, estimated by the quasi-official Flow Rate Technical Group to be flowing at 35,000 to 60,000 barrels of crude oil per day, is an amount equal to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill every four to seven days from the explosion on April 20, 2010 to July 15, 2010.  

Disaster finishes off some businesses.  Disaster injures what before had been healthy companies.  But disaster also resets the timing for many industries that stumbled, wounded by the down economy.  Opportunities abound. Oil rigs are moving from the Gulf to Egypt and elsewhere as uncertainty reigns on what can and cannot be drilled in the gulf.  Wind energy companies and politicians moving in to grab money from Congress. Luminant's Comanche Peak actively is maneuvering loan guarantees set up through Congress as it moves to double capacity.  Some truculently bemoan the lack of coordination among industries as they ajust their business plan. Some long for an absolutely free, free market with pangs of mysticism and whine about government handouts.

We saw through the last two years that economic forces released do eventually compel corrections, painful though they are.  We saw due to the BP oil spill that technology sometimes can blind us to what we thinks is within our control.  Here's to your ox not being gored.