burn on

[willoweyes]

"Oh the Lord can make you tumble, the lord can make you turn, the lord can make you overflow, but the lord can't make you burn.

burn on, big river, burn on."

Cuyahoga River by Randy Newman.

We all heard this Earth Day, "At least our rivers aren't catching on fire anymore."

No, the Gulf of Mexico is.

[JCCamp007]

All this and there's two thousand more wells out there.
Who's guarding them?

[suebee]

and the potomac river in wash dc is still so polluted with hormones its making fish change sexes. it was just on the news again.

[willoweyes]

I hope we all recall how they haven't a clue how to cap this well, next time "They" assure us Nuclear energy is FAILSAFE. foolproof.

Proof you are a fool, if you believe it.

[suebee]

and 11 more die to feed 'our' insatiable pacman psyche.
and 5 times (5000 gallons not 1000) the per day spill bp initially admitted. now 45 x 100 miles long.

think it was eco-sabotage?

[willoweyes]

No way ms. bee--not only do Greenies not have the guts, brains or will--why would they want to destroy two major wildlife sanctuaries right as the chicks are hatching? I don't think so. Even tho if Cheney were still in charge, i'm sure that theory would be advanced, and maybe even cultivated into a Kryastallnatch. . . . .

because they don't want to admit that they fucked up. royally. and they will fuck up again and again, until there is no place left for life to make a stand. because they worship death, not life.

[suebee]

my bad, its 210,000 gallons a day. 5000 barrels. it would cost bp $500,000 (a pittance) to put in a remote control shut-off valve. norway and brazil require them. usa usa doesnt. oil, gas and coal RULE. bp hasnt ever cleaned up anything. remember the 30 million gallon spill in greenpoint new york?

[sidecross]

I have read Bill McKibben’s new book Eaarth (yes, with two ‘a’s’) and this book is a definitive reply to the “drill baby drill” people.

Below is his web site. We currently live on a planet with 480 ppm of CO2 and if our species is going to exist for future we need to be not having more than 350 ppm.

Even if we stopped today using fossil fuels, it would take 200 years to clear out our current rise in CO2.

http://www.billmckibben.com/

http://www.350.org/

[JCCamp007]

Give me a house partially underwater any day.
Filter out the shit and let the goldfish take care of themselves.

Better sell out and head this way SB.
You could get a pretty piece of gold for that lair of yours or are you chicken?
Sherman is a great place to get chicken near.

[willoweyes]

I'm looking at this disaster, and the lame response from almost everyone, (But we need the oil! Waah) and Im feeling very tired this morning. It's spring--the world goes forward without me. Perhaps I'll just crawl back into bed. . . . .


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-mo..._b_561796.html

[sidecross]

Yes willow this is very bad news indeed.

Our leaders are acting like 'junkies' who would rob their own children for another 'fix' of oil.

[sidecross]

U.S. exempted BP's Gulf of Mexico drilling from environmental impact study

By Juliet Eilperin

Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, May 5, 2010; A04



The Interior Department exempted BP's calamitous Gulf of Mexico drilling operation from a detailed environmental impact analysis last year, according to government documents, after three reviews of the area concluded that a massive oil spill was unlikely.

The decision by the department's Minerals Management Service (MMS) to give BP's lease at Deepwater Horizon a "categorical exclusion" from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on April 6, 2009 -- and BP's lobbying efforts just 11 days before the explosion to expand those exemptions -- show that neither federal regulators nor the company anticipated an accident of the scale of the one unfolding in the gulf.

Rethinking the rules

Now, environmentalists and some key senators are calling for a reassessment of safety requirements for offshore drilling.

Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), who has supported offshore oil drilling in the past, said, "I suspect you're going to see an entirely different regime once people have a chance to sit back and take a look at how do we anticipate and clean up these potential environmental consequences" from drilling.

BP spokesman Toby Odone said the company's appeal for NEPA waivers in the past "was based on the spill and incident-response history in the Gulf of Mexico." Once the various investigations of the new spill have been completed, he added, "the causes of this incident can be applied to determine any changes in the regulatory regime that are required to protect the environment."

"I'm of the opinion that boosterism breeds complacency and complacency breeds disaster," said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) on Tuesday. "That, in my opinion, is what happened."

Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, said it is important to learn the cause of the accident before pursuing a major policy change. "While the conversation has shifted, the energy reality has not," Gerard said. "The American economy still relies on oil and gas."

While the MMS assessed the environmental impact of drilling in the central and western Gulf of Mexico on three occasions in 2007 -- including a specific evaluation of BP's Lease 206 at Deepwater Horizon -- in each case it played down the prospect of a major blowout.

In one assessment, the agency estimated that "a large oil spill" from a platform would not exceed a total of 1,500 barrels and that a "deepwater spill," occurring "offshore of the inner Continental shelf," would not reach the coast. In another assessment, it defined the most likely large spill as totaling 4,600 barrels and forecast that it would largely dissipate within 10 days and would be unlikely to make landfall.

"They never did an analysis that took into account what turns out to be the very real possibility of a serious spill," said Holly Doremus, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley who has reviewed the documents.

The MMS mandates that companies drilling in some areas identify under NEPA what could reduce a project's environmental impact. But Interior Department spokesman Matt Lee-Ashley said the service grants between 250 and 400 waivers a year for Gulf of Mexico projects. He added that Interior has now established the "first ever" board to examine safety procedures for offshore drilling. It will report back within 30 days on BP's oil spill and will conduct "a broader review of safety issues," Lee-Ashley said.

BP's exploration plan for Lease 206, which calls the prospect of an oil spill "unlikely," stated that "no mitigation measures other than those required by regulation and BP policy will be employed to avoid, diminish or eliminate potential impacts on environmental resources."

While the plan included a 13-page environmental impact analysis, it minimized the prospect of any serious damage associated with a spill, saying there would be only "sub-lethal" effects on fish and marine mammals, and "birds could become oiled. However it is unlikely that an accidental oil spill would occur from the proposed activities."

Kierán Suckling, executive director of the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity, said the federal waiver "put BP entirely in control" of the way it conducted its drilling.

Agency a 'rubber stamp'

"The agency's oversight role has devolved to little more than rubber-stamping British Petroleum's self-serving drilling plans," Suckling said.

BP has lobbied the White House Council on Environmental Quality -- which provides NEPA guidance for all federal agencies-- to provide categorical exemptions more often. In an April 9 letter, BP America's senior federal affairs director, Margaret D. Laney, wrote to the council that such exemptions should be used in situations where environmental damage is likely to be "minimal or non-existent." An expansion in these waivers would help "avoid unnecessary paperwork and time delays," she added.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill were talking Tuesday about curtailing offshore oil exploration rather than making it easier. In addition to traditional foes of offshore drilling such as Democratic Sens. Robert Menendez (N.J.) and Bill Nelson (Fla.), Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and centrists such as Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) said they are taking a second look at such methods.

"It's time to push the pause button," Baucus told reporters.

Staff writer Steven Mufson contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...404118_pf.html

[sidecross]

We Need a Road Map to a Coal Free Future

Declaration of Clean Energy Independence

by Stephanie Pistello, Ben Evans, and Jeff Biggers

In the wake of the worst coal mining disaster in 40 years, compromise and political machinations this spring have resulted in a regulatory crisis of failure; workplace safety in the mines, including the black lung scandal, has emerged as a national tragedy; toxic coal ash remains uncategorized as hazardous waste; mountaintop removal operations and devastating strip mining in 24 states continue under regulatory plunder, not abolishment; billions of taxpayers' dollars pour down the black hole of carbon capture and storage boondoggles, increasing coal production; climate legislation hangs in the balance of political games.

In 1776, Thomas Paine challenged our country to embrace the cause of independence over compromise. In a moment of crisis, he declared: "We have it in our power to make the world over again."

Our modern-day Paine, James Hansen at the NASA Goddard Center, has issued a similar clarion call: "Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet. Our global climate is nearing tipping points."

It's time to envision a coal-free future. It's time for clean energy independence.

We need a road map for a coal-free future. Not a hodge-podge collection of new regulations.

Coal mining, which provides 45 percent of our electricity, will not end tomorrow. Every coal miner deserves a right to a sustainable livelihood; given the legacy of our coal miners, we also believe no coal miner should be displaced from his or her job until we develop clean energy alternatives. This means that coalfield residents, like all Americans, deserve a road map for a feasible transition to clean-energy jobs -- including a Coal Miner's GI Bill for retraining and a massive reinvestment in sustainable economic development in coalfield communities -- before we reach a point of no return.

The coalfields should be ground zero for President Obama's clean energy initiatives, Al Gore's Repower America, and all green jobs projects.

All coal mining communities know that the first time in 25 years, utilities coal stockpiles have increased during the summer; absentee coal companies are cutting jobs and idling higher-cost mines to keep their stock holders happy in a period of slumping demand; recent U.S. Geological Survey estimates place "peak coal" production as early as 2020.

As grandchildren of black-lung-afflicted coal miners from Kentucky, Illinois, and southwestern Virginia, we honor our families' sacrifices in recognizing, not denying, the true cost of coal. Our grandfathers benefited from a transition to mechanization to improve mine safety. The time has come for a transition to clean-energy jobs.

Coal is not cheap nor clean; coal has been killing us -- for over 200 years. Over 104,000 Americans have died in coal-mining accidents; three coal miners die daily from black-lung disease. Millions of acres of forests and farmlands have been strip-mined into oblivion; pioneering communities have been plundered. Half of Americans live within an hour of a toxic coal ash dump.

The Physicians for Social Responsibility recently found that coal "contributes to four of the top five causes of mortality in the U.S. and is responsible for increasing the incidence of major diseases."

The National Academy of Scientists totaled costs of coal at more than $62 billion in "external damages" to our health and lives. A West Virginia University report noted the coal industry "costs the Appalachian region five times more in early deaths than it provides in economic benefits." In Kentucky, according to a Mountain Association of Community Economic Development study, coal may provide $528 million in state revenue, but costs $643 million in state expenditures.

Nothing has motivated our commitment for clean energy more than the tragedy of mountaintop-removal and nationwide strip mining in 24 states. We have seen the devastation of clear-cutting our nation's great forests and carbon sink of Appalachia and blowing up its oldest mountain range. We have met the casualties of absentee commerce; grieving parents who have lost loved ones to coal slurry-contaminated water; veterans and elderly who endure blasting, fly rock and silica dust; families who have seen their homes washed away in floods caused by erosion; streams poisoned with mining waste; boarded-up communities, strangled by a boom-and-bust single economy.

The plunder of Appalachia and all coalfield communities must end.

More so, with coal-fired plants contributing over 30 percent of our CO2 emissions, everyone's fate is connected to the coalfields now.

"Clean coal" carbon capture and storage plans are not only chimeras for Big Coal profit, but will ultimately increase coal production by 20-30 percent.

In the end, our fiduciary responsibility to our children demands a new way of generating our electricity in Kentucky and the country. It also affords us a great opportunity for economic and social revitalization

Clean energy independence, not coal, will bring more sustainable jobs.

Wind, solar, hydropower and turbine manufacturing, along with weatherization, retrofitting appliances and homes, could create jobs. The Appalachian Regional Commission found that "energy-efficiency investments could result in an increase of 77,378 net jobs by 2030" in the region.

For us, such a clean energy revolution began with the proposed Smith # 1 coal-fired plant [1]in eastern Kentucky, which was recently set aside. Instead of a costly coal-fired dinosaur, a recent study found that a combination of "energy efficiency, weatherization, hydropower and wind power initiatives in the East Kentucky Power Cooperative region would generate more than 8,750 new jobs for Kentucky residents, with a total impact of more than $1.7 billon on the region's economy over the next three years."

Ultimately, this clean energy independence would meet the energy needs of EKPC customers and cost less than the proposed coal plant.

A coal-free future began in Kentucky, in the heartland of our nation's coalfields. Now it's time to imagine a coal-free future for the rest of the country.

The writers are co-founders of the Coal Free Future Project [2].

http://www.commondreams.org/print/55748

[sidecross]

Published on Thursday, May 6, 2010 by the Associated Press

Feds Let BP Avoid Filing Blowout Plan for Gulf Rig

by Michael Kunzelman and Richard T. Pienciak

NEW ORLEANS - Petrochemical giant BP didn't file a plan to specifically handle a major oil spill from an uncontrolled blowout at its Deepwater Horizon project because the federal agency that regulates offshore rigs changed its rules two years ago to exempt certain projects in the central Gulf region, according to an Associated Press review of official records.

The Minerals Management Service, an arm of the Interior Department known for its cozy relationship with major oil companies, says it issued the rule relief because some of the industrywide mandates weren't practical for all of the exploratory and production projects operating in the Gulf region.

The blowout rule, the fact that it was lifted in April 2008 for rigs that didn't fit at least one of five conditions, and confusion about whether the BP Deepwater Horizon project was covered by the regulation, caught the attention of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

Following a tour of a boom operation in Gulf Shores, Ala., Salazar said Wednesday that he understood BP was required to file plans for coping with a blowout at the well that failed.

"My understanding is that everything was in its proper place," said Salazar.

But an AP review of government and BP documents found that the company had not filed a specific comprehensive blowout plan for the rig that exploded April 20, leaving 11 workers dead and spewing an estimated 210,000 gallons of oil a day.

Instead, a site-specific exploration plan filed by BP in February 2009 stated that it was "not required" to file "a scenario for a potential blowout" of the Deepwater well.

When questioned about the exemption claim, BP spokesman William Salvin said provisions for handling a blowout incident were actually included in the firm's 582-page region oil spill plan, though he had difficulty pointing to specific passages.

He later maintained that the Deepwater location was not subject to the blowout scenario requirements because it triggered none of the conditions cited in the MMS's April 2008 notice to operators about a loosening of the rules.

Still, Salvin insisted the company was prepared to handle a blowout and catastrophic spill at the project through provisions included in its regional plan.

"We have a plan that has sufficient detail in it to deal with a blowout," Salvin said, while acknowledging that the ongoing crisis at the Deepwater site is "uncontrolled."

The lack of a specific plan for the Deepwater project raises questions about whether BP could have been better prepared to deal with the ongoing disaster and whether MMS is fulfilling its regulatory oversight.

Robert Wiygul, an Ocean Springs, Miss., environmental lawyer, said the lack of a blowout scenario "is kind of an outrageous omission, because you're drilling in extremely deep waters, where by definition you're looking for very large reservoirs to justify the cost."

"If the MMS was allowing companies to drill in this ultra-deep situation without a blowout scenario, then it seems clear they weren't doing the job they were tasked with," he said. "The MMS can't change the law just by telling people that they don't have to comply with it. I think it really indicates that somebody at MMS was asleep at the switch on this."

Brendan Cummings, a Joshua Tree, Calif.-based lawyer for the Center for Biological Diversity, said the exploration plan submitted by BP for Deepwater Horizon failed to adequately analyze the project's oil spill risks. Cummings has filed a notice of intent to sue the government over another offshore drilling operation, by Royal Dutch Shell in Alaska.

"The technology used on the now-sunken Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf was supposed to be the most advanced in the world, including various mechanisms to prevent or cap a blowout," Cummings wrote in the filing. "None of these mechanisms worked, and the state-of-the-art technology completely failed to stop the spill."

In its 2009 exploration plan for the Deepwater Horizon site, BP strongly discounted the possibility of a catastrophic accident. Similarly, Shell's environmental impact analysis for its Beaufort Sea drilling plan asserts that the possibility of a "large liquid hydrocarbon spill ... is regarded as too remote and speculative to be considered a reasonably foreseeable impacting event."

The Deepwater Horizon disaster is not the first time MMS has been criticized as being too close to the oil industry.

In 2008, the Interior Department took disciplinary action against eight MMS employees who accepted lavish gifts, partied and - in some cases - had sex with employees from the energy companies they regulated. An investigation cited a "culture of substance abuse and promiscuity" involving employees in the agency's Denver office.

MMS workers were given upgraded ethics training.

Associated Press Writer Richard T. Pienciak reported from Atlanta; AP Writer Jay Reeves reported from Gulf Shores, Ala.

http://www.commondreams.org/print/55747

[willoweyes]

In today's New York times, the link between cancer and petrochemical-based substances is top news, yet we still sigh, "Our lifestyle would be impossible without them--our lifestyle is non-negotiable.

there was a great article (see below), but another article in the same edition spoke winningly of the 3,000 rigs now in the gulf, and how fishermen "knew to fish by them, because they acted like reefs" so harmless. this while the oil is still belching. Imagine, as Egan asks us to, what will be the outcome of all this ("But soon enough, we’ll go back to planting trees on Earth Day, feeling good about recycling — Hooray for us! We’re green and cool — while resuming the old routine. That is: a nation with five percent of the earth’s population consuming about 23 percent of the world’s oil output, glug, glug, glug"):

MAY 5, 2010, 9:00 PM
Groundhog Day for Oil

By TIMOTHY EGAN

Wish it weren’t so, but I fear my lasting memory of many trips to Prince William Sound will be of hunched-over workers with toothbrushes, trying to scrub black tar from shivering birds and sea-worn rocks in the Alaska spring of 1989.

All the images were staggering: The birds looked lost and stunned, their coats of warmth matted black, their wings greased by hydrocarbons that would eventually kill most of them. The inlets of that most Edenic of sheltered seas had a sickening sheen, with a smell that made you nauseated and stayed with you through sleepless nights. Harder still was the sight of fishermen — tough, independent, weather-callused men — weeping for their loss.

But what stayed with me were those hundreds of workers with toothbrushes. They would labor all day, and maybe clean a rock or two — Sisyphus on the sound. After a while it was all public relations theater paid for by Exxon,
whose tanker went aground and spilled at least 11 millions gallons into one of the richest marine cornucopias in the world.

Here now is the sad replay in the Gulf of Mexico, with that life-killing choreography. Then, as today, an oil company deployed booms and dispersants, tried to buy off fishermen with quicky legal settlements, and made resolute promises about restoration and doing the right thing.

In Alaska, we saw how that turned out: after nearly two decades of legal foot-dragging, Exxon got exactly what it wanted: a Supreme Court that consistently backs the powerful and well-connected reduced punitive damages from $2.5 billion to $500 million — in a good year, just a single week’s profit for the company.

It’s a waste of hope to wish that BP will be any more responsible or effective than Exxon was. And maybe it’s not their fault, in one sense: oil spills are acts of blunt-force trauma, and the remedies for cleanup remain primitive. The toothbrush brigade will soon be out, trying to save those nesting brown pelicans, symbols of a delta made rich by sediment carried from the Heartland.

The immediate reactions — a pause to President Obama’s short-sighted plan to open vast areas of coastal waters to offshore drilling, and maybe a requirement for automatic shutoff valves on deepwater wells — will make most of us forget and move on. The summer driving season is just around the corner and no one wants to pay more than $3 a gallon for gas.

On energy, amnesia is the American way. Things lumber along, 300-million-year-old fossil fuels are pulled from deep inside the kingdoms of desert despots and shipped to our shores. It’s slow-motion suicide, of sorts, to the planet — and I’m no worse or better than anyone else who uses oil for everyday comforts — but we don’t see the wounds until a spill brings it all home.

Suddenly, alarms are sounded. Brows are furrowed. Promises are made. This time, with fears that the Gulf spill will be even larger than the one in Alaska, lessons will be learned, yesiree. But soon enough, we’ll go back to planting trees on Earth Day, feeling good about recycling — Hooray for us! We’re green and cool — while resuming the old routine. That is: a nation with five percent of the earth’s population consuming about 23 percent of the world’s oil output, glug, glug, glug.

Not all hope has to be sworn off. We can wish that “drill, baby, drill” will be retired as a slogan and as the energy policy of one party. When crowds of mindless zealots shouted those three words at campaign rallies headed by Sarah Palin — whose husband was once a real fisherman in Alaska — I thought of Homer Simpson calling for more beer while thinking it was a good way to lose weight.

Here was a chant, inspired by arsonists and rioters in the 1960s, posing as a political solution. The only thing more mindless than “drill, baby, drill” was the latest self-serving distraction to spill from Newt Gingrich’s bag of cynical ideas. He called his movement: Drill Here. Drill Now. Pay Less. Because, of course, it’s all pain-free, and very uncomplicated.

If you go on Gingrich’s Web site, you can still sign a petition demanding more drilling — now! — and through links, buy a t-shirt with the same brain-dead slogan. And then there’s also a curious last-minute call by Gingrich for, um, an independent investigation into the, uh . . . tragic oil spill in the gulf.

He’s right on two points. We can drill here. We can drill now. But pay less? No, we always pay more, though the full tab takes a while to show.

[suebee]

but i thought the oil that comes out of usa! usa! is sold on the open market to dubai, argentina, anyone. ?? it doesnt make us less dependent on foreign oil cuz we don't get it. the oil cos. lease the field, pay a %, and waltz off to the highest bidder. so whats this c about drilling here giving us independence?

[sidecross]

The oil mess in the Gulf will be a even bigger mess because the legal liability for BP is only 75 million dollars!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?hpid=topnews

[suebee]

darth cheney's name is coming up a lot in connection with this mess.

yeah sidey lets see if congress will retroactivate some kind of 10 billion liability law. even that is a drop in the bucket for bp. and what about oil subsidies? huh? HUH?

[willoweyes]

Now, researchers (not BP researchers) are saying the oil let loose on the Gulf is 7 to 10 times more than has been reported. IE: another Exxon Valdez every four days. . . .

[suebee]

im just saying...

i never thought 2000 would bring any problems, i never really gave 2012 much thought, really, but im just saying i got a bad feeling about this 5 mile long (ex) oil pipe.

yes yes, the sheer chutzhpah of the engineering - the 5K feet of water is just a swan dive, they then bored 18,000 feet down through rock (!) and then sideways to reach the oil, putting in a pipe the entire way. i was just reading about drilling - the 40' diameter nuke drill that is boring tunnels from one military base to another (thanks to drew! ) like some methed-out mole......i digress.....we have all seen the video of the oil blossoming out of that pipe, it looks like death, that black tar texas tea, but i have now heard all these experts....oh, how to say it?....hinting about armageddon.

im just saying.

[sidecross]

Scientists Find Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf

By JUSTIN GILLIS

May 15, 2010

Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.

“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.”

The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes.

Dr. Joye said the oxygen had already dropped 30 percent near some of the plumes in the month that the broken oil well had been flowing. “If you keep those kinds of rates up, you could draw the oxygen down to very low levels that are dangerous to animals in a couple of months,” she said Saturday. “That is alarming.”

The plumes were discovered by scientists from several universities working aboard the research vessel Pelican, which sailed from Cocodrie, La., on May 3 and appears to be the first scientific expedition to gather extensive samples and information about the disaster in the gulf.

Scientists studying video of the gushing oil well have tentatively calculated that it could be flowing at a rate of 25,000 to 80,000 barrels of oil a day. But the government, working from satellite images of the ocean surface, has calculated a flow rate of only 5,000 barrels a day.

The undersea plumes may go a long way toward explaining the discrepancy, suggesting that much of the oil emerging from the well could be lingering far below the sea surface.

The scientists involved in the Pelican mission, which is backed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that monitors the health of the oceans, are not certain why that would be. They say they suspect the heavy use of chemical dispersants, which BP has injected directly into the stream of oil emerging from the well, may have broken the oil up into droplets too small to rise rapidly.

BP said on Saturday at a briefing in Robert, La., that it had resumed undersea application of dispersants, after winning approval to do so the day before from the Environmental Protection Agency.

“It appears that the application of the subsea dispersant is actually working,” Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, said Saturday after flying over the area above the oil well. “The oil in the immediate vicinity of the well and the ships and rigs working in the area is diminished from previous observations.”

Many scientists had hoped the dispersants would cause oil droplets to spread so widely that they would be less of a problem in any one place. If it turns out that is not happening, the strategy of using the chemicals could come under greater scrutiny. Dispersants have never been used in an oil leak of this magnitude a mile under the ocean, and their effects at such depth are largely unknown.

Much about the situation below the water remains unclear, and the scientists stressed that their results were preliminary. After the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, they altered a previously scheduled research mission to focus on the effects of the leak.

Interviewed on Saturday by satellite phone, one researcher aboard the Pelican, Vernon Asper of the University of Southern Mississippi, said the shallowest oil plume the group had detected was at about 2,300 feet, while the deepest was near the seafloor at about 4,200 feet.

“We’re trying to map them, but it’s a tedious process,” Dr. Asper said. “Right now it looks like the oil is moving southwest, not all that rapidly.”

He said the group had managed to take water samples from areas that had not yet been reached by oil, and would be able to compare those to later samples to judge the impact on the chemistry and biology of the ocean.

While they have detected the plumes and their effects with several types of instruments, the researchers are still not sure about the exact consistency of the plumes. They are almost certainly not solid bubbles of oil, Dr. Joye said, but are likely to be a mix of oil and water that could resemble salad dressing.

Dr. Joye is serving as a coordinator of the mission from her laboratory in Athens, Ga. Researchers from the University of Mississippi and the University of Southern Mississippi are aboard the boat taking samples and running instruments.

Dr. Joye said the findings about declining oxygen levels were especially worrisome, since oxygen is so slow to move from the surface of the ocean to the bottom. She suspects that oil-eating bacteria are consuming the oxygen at a feverish clip as they work to break down the undersea plumes.

While the oxygen depletion so far is not enough to kill off sea life, the possibility looms that oxygen levels could fall so low as to create large dead zones, especially at the seafloor. “That’s the big worry,” said Ray Highsmith, head of the Mississippi center that sponsored the mission, known as the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology.

The Pelican mission is due to end Sunday, but the scientists are seeking federal support to resume it soon.

“This is a new type of event, and it’s critically important that we really understand it, because of the incredible number of oil platforms not only in the Gulf of Mexico but all over the world now,” Dr. Highsmith said. “We need to know what these events are like, and what their outcomes can be, and what can be done to deal with the next one.”


Shaila Dewan contributed reporting from Robert, La.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/us...gewanted=print

[sidecross]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

May 14, 2010

An Oil Spill Grows in Brooklyn

By ALEX PRUD'HOMME

WITH an estimated 210,000 gallons of oil spilling from the Deepwater Horizon site every day — for a total of some 3.3 million gallons, so far — the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico may eventually prove to be the largest oil spill in American history.

But New Yorkers forget, or don’t know, that a much larger oil spill sits in our own backyard: an estimated 17 million to 30 million gallons of oil, benzene, naptha and other carcinogenic chemicals pollute Newtown Creek and a swath of soil roughly 55 acres wide and up to 25 feet deep, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

People don’t often think of urban creeks as biodiverse waterways, but Newtown Creek was once a rich tidal estuary popular among hunters and fishermen. Starting in the 1870s, however, Standard Oil and other refineries began spilling or dumping excess fuels and toxic chemicals into the water or onto the soil, slowly poisoning the ecosystem. For years, people who hung their clothes out to dry found them darkened by chemical fumes. Today, Newtown Creek is a dead zone: when a dolphin was spotted in the creek in March, experts did not rejoice. They worried about its health.

Despite an underground explosion fed by accumulated oil and gas in 1950, as well as persistent health problems among the creek’s neighbors, it wasn’t until 1978 that officials recognized the problem. That summer a Coast Guard helicopter on a routine patrol noticed a huge black oil plume spewing from the side of Newtown Creek, heading into the East River and New York Harbor. A containment boom was set out, and workers collected 200,000 gallons of degraded gasoline, fuel oil and chemicals, some of which dated to 1948.

Today a viscous rainbow sheen floats on its surface, and the area around it is redolent of hydrocarbons. Although Greenpoint has a lower overall cancer rate than much of the city, it has one of the highest incidences of certain cancers, like leukemia in children and stomach cancer in adults. The creek was designated a Superfund site in 2009.

The spill has also rendered the Brooklyn-Queens Aquifer, once a valuable store of freshwater, undrinkable. The aquifer serves as a recharge zone for the groundwater stores in southeastern Queens that could provide an important backup supply for the city in a drought.

Documents unearthed by local activists show a history of regulators looking the other way to protect oil companies from liability for poisoning the creek. Fortunately, pressure from citizens’ groups and city and state lawsuits have wrung a certain amount of compensation from BP, ExxonMobil and other companies accused of being behind the spill. In 2009, a federal jury found ExxonMobil liable for contaminating the groundwater near the creek, awarding the city $104.7 million.

Yet that’s nowhere near enough to clean up the site or compensate Greenpoint residents. Nor is the Superfund designation likely to bring immediate improvement in the creek: years of study will be needed before any action can be taken, and the Superfund money can be used only to remove toxic material from the shore and sediments; other water-quality problems aren’t eligible. In the long run, the only real solution may be to excavate the entire polluted zone and replace it with clean fill.

As President Obama condemns the “cozy relationship” between federal regulators and Big Oil, we might question why New York regulators and the companies charged with polluting Newtown Creek took so long to acknowledge the problem.

We tend to think of oil spills as dramatic events — a sinking ship, a burning rig. So it’s easy to forget that across the country, hundreds of spills, many left over from a less regulated time, continue to poison groundwater and leak toxic fumes. Instead of letting the Gulf spill divert our attention yet again from slow-moving disasters like Newtown Creek, we should take it as an impetus to address problems much closer to home.


Alex Prud’homme is writing a book about the future of the use of freshwater.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/op...gewanted=print

[sidecross]

Published on Monday, May 17, 2010 by TruthDig.com

BP and the 'Little Eichmanns'

by Chris Hedges

Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction. The oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, estimated to be perhaps as much as 100,000 barrels a day, is part of our foolish death march. It is one more blow delivered by the corporate state, the trade of life for gold. But this time collapse, when it comes, will not be confined to the geography of a decayed civilization. It will be global.

Those who carry out this global genocide-men like BP's Chief Executive Tony Hayward, who assures us that "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume''-are, to steal a line from Ward Churchill, "little Eichmanns." They serve Thanatos, the forces of death, the dark instinct Sigmund Freud identified within human beings that propels us to annihilate all living things, including ourselves. These deformed individuals lack the capacity for empathy. They are at once banal and dangerous. They possess the peculiar ability to organize vast, destructive bureaucracies and yet remain blind to the ramifications. The death they dispense, whether in the pollutants and carcinogens that have made cancer an epidemic, the dead zone rapidly being created in the Gulf of Mexico, the melting polar ice caps or the deaths last year of 45,000 Americans who could not afford proper medical care, is part of the cold and rational exchange of life for money.

The corporations, and those who run them, consume, pollute, oppress and kill. The little Eichmanns who manage them reside in a parallel universe of staggering wealth, luxury and splendid isolation that rivals that of the closed court of Versailles. The elite, sheltered and enriched, continue to prosper even as the rest of us and the natural world start to die. They are numb. They will drain the last drop of profit from us until there is nothing left. And our business schools and elite universities churn out tens of thousands of these deaf, dumb and blind systems managers who are endowed with sophisticated skills of management and the incapacity for common sense, compassion or remorse. These technocrats mistake the art of manipulation with knowledge.

"The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else," Hannah Arendt wrote of "Eichmann in Jerusalem." "No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such."

Our ruling class of technocrats, as John Ralston Saul points out, is effectively illiterate. "One of the reasons that he is unable to recognize the necessary relationship between power and morality is that moral traditions are the product of civilization and he has little knowledge of his own civilization," Saul writes of the technocrat. Saul calls these technocrats "hedonists of power," and warns that their "obsession with structures and their inability or unwillingness to link these to the public good make this power an abstract force-a force that works, more often than not, at cross-purposes to the real needs of a painfully real world."

BP, which made $6.1 billion in profits in the first quarter of this year, never obtained permits from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The protection of the ecosystem did not matter. But BP is hardly alone. Drilling with utter disregard to the ecosystem is common practice among oil companies, according to a report in The New York Times. Our corporate state has gutted environmental regulation as tenaciously as it has gutted financial regulation and habeas corpus. Corporations make no distinction between our personal impoverishment and the impoverishment of the ecosystem that sustains the human species. And the abuse, of us and the natural world, is as rampant under Barack Obama as it was under George W. Bush. The branded figure who sits in the White House is a puppet, a face used to mask an insidious system under which we as citizens have been disempowered and under which we become, along with the natural world, collateral damage. As Karl Marx understood, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force. And this force is consuming us.

Karl Polanyi in his book "The Great Transformation," written in 1944, laid out the devastating consequences-the depressions, wars and totalitarianism-that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that "fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function." He warned that a financial system always devolved, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism-and a Mafia political system-which is a good description of our corporate government. Polanyi warned that when nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market, then human beings and nature are destroyed. Speculative excesses and growing inequality, he wrote, always dynamite the foundation for a continued prosperity and ensure "the demolition of society."

"In disposing of a man's labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man' attached to that tag," Polanyi wrote. "Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society. Undoubtedly, labor, land, and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance as well as its business organizations was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill."

The corporate state is a runaway freight train. It shreds the Kyoto Accords in Copenhagen. It plunders the U.S. Treasury so speculators can continue to gamble with billions in taxpayer subsidies in our perverted system of casino capitalism. It disenfranchises our working class, decimates our manufacturing sector and denies us funds to sustain our infrastructure, our public schools and our social services. It poisons the planet. We are losing, every year across the globe, an area of farmland greater than Scotland to erosion and urban sprawl. There are an estimated 25,000 people who die every day somewhere in the world because of contaminated water. And some 20 million children are mentally impaired each year by malnourishment.

America is dying in the manner in which all imperial projects die. Joseph Tainter, in his book "The Collapse of Complex Societies," argues that the costs of running and defending an empire eventually become so burdensome, and the elite becomes so calcified, that it becomes more efficient to dismantle the imperial superstructures and return to local forms of organization. At that point the great monuments to empire, from the Sumer and Mayan temples to the Roman bath complexes, are abandoned, fall into disuse and are overgrown. But this time around, Tainter warns, because we have nowhere left to migrate and expand, "world civilization will disintegrate as a whole." This time around we will take the planet down with us.

"We in the lucky countries of the West now regard our two-century bubble of freedom and affluence as normal and inevitable; it has even been called the ‘end' of history, in both a temporal and teleological sense," writes Ronald Wright in "A Short History of Progress." "Yet this new order is an anomaly: the opposite of what usually happens as civilizations grow. Our age was bankrolled by the seizing of half the planet, extended by taking over most of the remaining half, and has been sustained by spending down new forms of natural capital, especially fossil fuels. In the New World, the West hit the biggest bonanza of all time. And there won't be another like it-not unless we find the civilized Martians of H.G. Wells, complete with the vulnerability to our germs that undid them in his War of the Worlds."

The moral and physical contamination is matched by a cultural contamination. Our political and civil discourse has become gibberish. It is dominated by elaborate spectacles, celebrity gossip, the lies of advertising and scandal. The tawdry and the salacious occupy our time and energy. We do not see the walls falling around us. We invest our intellectual and emotional energy in the inane and the absurd, the empty amusements that preoccupy a degenerate culture, so that when the final collapse arrives we can be herded, uncomprehending and fearful, into the inferno.

© 2010 TruthDig.com
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/05/17-3

[suebee]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwat...izon_oil_spill

[willoweyes]

A friend reports millions of small baitfish washing up dead on shores of LA. 156 dead Ridley's sea turtles have been found. "They can't say" what caused their deaths--.

I'm numb.

[willoweyes]

In a NYTimes story today re the slick:

"Gov. Charlie Crist said he had secured $25 million from BP, which was leasing the oil well, to fund the tourism advertising campaign after an initial $25 million went to disaster preparation and response."

that's great. Tourism advertising campaign rates as much as disaster preparation & response, and I'll bet a lot of "Disaster Preparation and Response" was spent on: "how are we going to spin this!!".

America today in a tidy little container--like a nutshell.

[sidecross]

Originally Posted by willoweyes

A friend reports millions of small baitfish washing up dead on shores of LA. 156 dead Ridley's sea turtles have been found. "They can't say" what caused their deaths--.

I'm numb.

I am numb too because BP and the government are so dumb.

The idea to drill beginning at a depth of 5000’ without any understanding of how to handle a problem is beyond stupidly.

It is an arrogance of self righteousness to obtain what it wants, just as what a junkie would do for their next fix without regard to others and their own well being.

[JCCamp007]

Where is Crazzy when you need him?
It all makes raising inland shrimp in Mexico more attractive to me.
If only I had the money bubba.

[suebee]

well jc, your county is criss-crossed by so many yellow and red trapezoid triangle diamonds (12 at last count) you are at at the center of the weather channel action. seriously im taking a picture of the mass of warning shapes on my tv. i even got out my OK map.


money [for nuthin] is a drug.

[JCCamp007]

Well SB,it may all only be a reflection of what is happening in my lawsuit.
I'm trying-and you know how that goes re coming up with Motions to file-to get some work done on it today and hopefully get some sort of settlement offer.
I have them on the ropes if all goes well June 9th and nothing happens to my experts in the meantime.
Went to Philadelphia for depo 2 wks ago.
Sure wish you would get out of California and buy a piece of this paradise for part time living.

Yes the weather here is sometimes crazy.But what do you expects?
Texas blows and Kansas sucks and we're in the middle.