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"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."
- Noam Chomsky
BP is warning Congress that if lawmakers pass legislation that bars the company from getting new offshore drilling permits, it may not have the money to pay for all the damages caused by its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The company says a ban would also imperil the ambitious Gulf Coast restoration efforts that officials want the company to voluntarily support.
Holy crap...! Even OPEC thinks the U.S. should at least temporarily ban offshore drilling
when opec makes a statement like this, it would behoove us to pay attention...
OPEC called Monday on the United States to reconsider a ban on new deep-water drilling that could hold back oil supplies — despite safety concerns in the wake of the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Abdalla Salem El Badri, secretary-general of the 12-member Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, says offshore drilling is an important source of oil and any ban would be too hasty when the cause of the Gulf of Mexico spill is still unclear.
"We should not really ban it and we should not jump to conclusions," he told reporters after meeting European Union officials in Brussels.
President Barack Obama last month imposed a six-month ban on Gulf of Mexico drilling after an April 20 explosion at a BP oil rig killed 11 workers and blew out a well 5,000 feet (1,525 meters) underwater — spewing out hundreds of millions of gallons (liters) of oil.
A federal judge last week overturned the ban as rash and heavy-handed. The White House has appealed, saying continued drilling exposes workers and the environment "to a danger that the president does not believe we can afford."
as long as we have elected officials and judges wholly bought and paid for by the oil industry, we're going to keep digging our own grave...
Naomi Klein: BP cannot plug the hole in the earth that it made
a very sobering reflection on what surely must be the most horrific environmental disaster in history...
If Katrina pulled back the curtain on the reality of racism in America, the BP disaster pulls back the curtain on something far more hidden: how little control even the most ingenious among us have over the awesome, intricately interconnected natural forces with which we so casually meddle. BP cannot plug the hole in the Earth that it made. Obama cannot order fish species to survive, or brown pelicans not to go extinct (no matter whose ass he kicks). No amount of money – not BP's recently pledged $20bn (£13.5bn), not $100bn – can replace a culture that has lost its roots. And while our politicians and corporate leaders have yet to come to terms with these humbling truths, the people whose air, water and livelihoods have been contaminated are losing their illusions fast.
"Everything is dying," a woman said as the town hall meeting was finally coming to a close. "How can you honestly tell us that our Gulf is resilient and will bounce back? Because not one of you up here has a hint as to what is going to happen to our Gulf. You sit up here with a straight face and act like you know when you don't know."
This Gulf coast crisis is about many things – corruption, deregulation, the addiction to fossil fuels. But underneath it all, it's about this: our culture's excruciatingly dangerous claim to have such complete understanding and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and re-engineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us. But as the BP disaster has revealed, nature is always more unpredictable than the most sophisticated mathematical and geological models imagine. During Thursday's congressional testimony, Hayward said: "The best minds and the deepest expertise are being brought to bear" on the crisis, and that, "with the possible exception of the space programme in the 1960s, it is difficult to imagine the gathering of a larger, more technically proficient team in one place in peacetime." And yet, in the face of what the geologist Jill Schneiderman has described as "Pandora's well", they are like the men at the front of that gymnasium: they act like they know, but they don't know.
In the two months since the Deepwater Horizon explosion, millions of litres of oil have gushed out of BP's well into the water each day, slowly encroaching on the coastline. Fault Lines' Avi Lewis travels to the drill zone, and learns about the erosion in the wetlands from industry canals and pipelines, the health problems blamed on contaminated air and water from petrochemical refineries.
i don't know what these guys understand "leadership" to mean but one of the cardinal principles is that appearances are everything... i don't think anybody would begrudge mr. hayward some downtime to recuperate from the incredible pressure he's been under but the bastard also needs to understand that the entire world is watching his every move... the last thing he needs is to have an article highlighting his tony, elite, leisure pursuits with his very well-heeled fellow elites while an entire ecosystem and the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of people are being destroyed thanks to his company's greedy heedlessness... otoh, i doubt if he really gives a shit... just let those "small people" eat cake...
BP chief executive Tony Hayward, often criticized for being tone-deaf to U.S. concerns about the worst oil spill in American history, took time off Saturday to attend a glitzy yacht race off England's Isle of Wight.
Spokeswoman Sheila Williams said Hayward took a break from overseeing BP efforts to stem the undersea gusher in Gulf of Mexico to watch his boat "Bob" participate in the J.P. Morgan Asset Management Round the Island Race.
The one-day yacht race is one of the world's largest, attracting hundreds of boats and thousands of sailors.
In a statement, BP described Hayward's day off as "a rare moment of private time" and said that "no matter where he is, he is always in touch with what is happening within BP" and can direct recovery operations if required.
That is likely to be a hard sell in Gulf states struggling to deal with the up to 120 million gallons of oil that have escaped from a blown-out undersea well.
what this says to me is just how incredibly far-removed from ordinary people's reality guys like tony hayward really are... to tony hayward, "getting his life back" means he can continue his extraordinarily privileged lifestyle unfettered by the concerns of the peasantry... it also tells me that he was removed from the front lines of the crisis because he's a walking public relations disaster... evidently, the strategy isn't working so well...
What eventually will happen is that the blow out preventer will literally tip over if they do not run supports to it as the currents push on it. I suspect they will run those supports as cables tied to anchors very soon, if they don't, they are inviting disaster that much sooner.
Eventually even that will be futile as the well casings cannot support the weight of the massive system above with out the cement bond to the earth and that bond is being eroded away. When enough is eroded away the casings will buckle and the BOP [blow out preventer] will collapse the well. If and when you begin to see oil and gas coming up around the well area from under the BOP? or the area around the well head connection and casing sinking more and more rapidly? ...it won't be too long after that the entire system fails. BP must be aware of this, they are mapping the sea floor sonically and that is not a mere exercise. Our Gov't must be well aware too, they just are not telling us.
All of these things lead to only one place, a fully wide open well bore directly to the oil deposit...after that, it goes into the realm of "the worst things you can think of" The well may come completely apart as the inner liners fail. There is still a very long drill string in the well, that could literally come flying out...as I said...all the worst things you can think of are a possibility, but the very least damaging outcome as bad as it is, is that we are stuck with a wide open gusher blowing out 150,000 barrels a day of raw oil or more. There isn't any "cap dome" or any other suck fixer device on earth that exists or could be built that will stop it from gushing out and doing more and more damage to the gulf. While at the same time also doing more damage to the well, making the chance of halting it with a kill from the bottom up less and less likely to work, which as it stands now?....is the only real chance we have left to stop it all.
It's a race now...a race to drill the relief wells and take our last chance at killing this monster before the whole weakened, wore out, blown out, leaking and failing system gives up it's last gasp in a horrific crescendo.
this nightmare scenario is hinted at in this clip from keith olbermann's countdown program on msnbc...
jeebus h. freakin' keee-rist on a surfboard...! can you believe it...? if obama had any semblance of cojones and/or really had the common good of the citizens of this country at heart, he would have kicked bp's ass out of the picture after the first week, commandeered all available resources, and put together a crack team of the world's top experts to mount an all-out effort to mitigate this unprecedented disaster... he would have followed up by declaring a moratorium on any new offshore drilling permits and announced a national effort to develop alternative, clean energy resources in a program that would rival and even surpass the race to put a man on the moon...
what's the matter with this man...? nothing less than the survival of the environment of the gulf coast is at stake, to say nothing of the future of the planet, and barack is afraid of hurting widdle ol' bp's feelings...? grow a pair, mr. audacity of hope... you're working for US, you son-of-a-bitch...!
sigh... not that this wasn't a critical issue, but i wish it had been something less along the lines of traditional pork...
President Bush suffered the first veto override of his seven-year-old presidency Thursday as the Senate enacted a $23 billion water resources bill despite his protest that it was filled with unnecessary projects.
[...]
The bill funds hundreds of Army Corps of Engineers projects, such as dams, sewage plants and beach restoration, that are important to local communities and their representatives. It also includes money for the hurricane-hit Gulf Coast and for Florida Everglades restoration efforts.
The House voted 361-54 to override the veto Tuesday. Both votes easily exceeded the two-thirds majority needed in each chamber to negate a presidential veto.
maybe this will give 'em a shot of courage...? < ponders > nah...
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