“But plastic soda straws are going to be the final ... straw to kill off all life as we know it.”
Perspective. In World Wars one and two thousands of tankers were torpedoed, burned and sank. Entire cities were burned to the ground. Yet a year after World War Two, there was little evidence of that. But one oil well leak will destroy life as we know it. Hence there is no drilling off Florida. Yet other countries have thousands of wells in and around the Gulf of Mexico, but not many for the US. There is so much hysteria about the environment and so little perspective.
I think it took more than a year to rebuild the cities of Germany and Japan that were laid to waste by the Allies.