August 4, 2010

Sugarcoating the Truth

Photo by janamidala, Flickr.

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My favorite part of the latest government claim is that as much as a quarter of BP’s oil has dissolved in the warm Gulf waters. Like sugar. How benign is that? Sounds like a little leftover oil sweetens the ocean.

Dissolved oil is still oil. Just like dissolved sugar still tastes like sugar. Ever tried to dilute the taste of sugar out of your cup of coffee? Not possible.

That’s how it will taste to marine life too. Oily.

Dissolved oil is not benign. It’s still lethal. Particularly to small life, like plankton, a community that includes the larval and juvenile stages of almost all marine life. It may prove fatal to those who eat contaminated plankton, which is everyone in the ocean one or three links along in the foodweb.

NOAA has released a report devoid of data or methods, which has not been peer reviewed—meaning it meets none of the requirements for scientific publication.

Today’s mainstream headlines say: Most of the Oil is Gone. But 53.5 million gallons of oil remain at large. Unspin this report and it ought to read: Five Exxon Valdez’s Still Foul Gulf. At least.
 

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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