The Deepwater Horizon Certainly Killed about 1300 Birds, Maybe a Few More

Matt Ridley discusses regulatory biases here:

"Affect heuristic'" is a fancy name for a pretty obvious concept, namely that we discount the drawbacks of things we are emotionally in favor of. For example, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill certainly killed about 1,300 birds, maybe a few more. Wind turbines in America kill between 75,000 and 275,000 birds every year, generally of rarer species, such as eagles. Yet wind companies receive neither the enforcement, nor the opprobrium, that oil companies do.

But the best illustration of regulatory bias is the statistic itself:  1300?  Is that all?  (This piece was published in the WSJ and such a stunning data point surely was fact checked out the wazoo).  The news media must have been filming the same dying bird over and over again.  I'm a cynic, believing that the news media lie constantly and even I was taken in by this so called 'catastrophe'.  It turns out that if the Gulf were the Superdome filled with water to the very top, then total amount of oil spilled would have equalled two beer cans full.  Did you know that? Imagine the environmental catastrophes occurring at every Saints game.

So long as our so called 'news' media can't rationally report news but hype it to hysterical levels, we will struggle to govern ourselves.  For if we don't know the truth, can't get any perspective, how can we make good decisions?  

Driven by dishonest media narratives that present every event as a 'problem' that must be 'fixed' we persist in this grotesque fantasy that political lawyers are able to order our lives better than we can through markets.  And it's killing us.