BP's been holding out on the whole truth...
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/06/ … neath.html
http://www.southernstudies.org/2010/05/ … aster.html
"Who is in charge of stopping the oil leak and the cleanup in the Gulf of Mexico -- BP or the Obama administration? If you have a hard time answering the question, it probably is because the president has told us the 'buck stops' with him and officials of his administration say they are 'in charge.' Yet the administration also tells us that BP has the responsibility for stopping the leak and for the cleanup -- but the company's every action has to be approved by the government. If you have noticed a lot of ambiguity in the statements of the government officials, that is because they want to be able to position themselves to take credit for whatever success occurs (no matter who is responsible for the success) yet be able to blame others for failure (if even their own). ... One, among several, major reasons government agencies tend not to perform as well as private ones is because often there is little or no accountability. Those in favor of bigger government are using BP as an example of why the private sector cannot be trusted and why we must have more government. However, they conveniently overlook the fact that everything BP did was overseen and approved by the U.S. government and that the reason BP and the other big oil companies are off drilling in mile-deep water is because this same government will not allow them to drill in closer-in, shallower water or on much of the land where large quantities of oil are known to exist (e.g., the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) and where accidents could be handled quickly and with little damage. BP stockholders are being severely punished because of the failure of BP's management to prevent this crisis -- and you can bet many heads will roll at BP. Yet how many heads will roll in the U.S. government, which had the responsibility to make sure BP operated safely and that the beaches and marshes were protected?" --Cato Institute senior fellow Richard W. Rahn
And someone is talking about using a nuclear blast to stop the leak
We are witnessing our greatest fears...that all the incompetence would come together at once and bite someone in the _ss! That someone is us, nature, and eventually the planet. Meanwhile they keep pointing fingers, talking and talking, having meetings, and flying to places to have meetings. Maybe they are hoping that the thing will just tap out...while they are talking. Then they can start all over again with how to fix the mess! IDIOTS!
LOL, Rahn needs to make up his mind.
Big government is bad...
but it was the government's responsibility to make sure BP operated safely!
Did he reread his own words, or just write something stream of consciousness and hit "post" without bothering to check if he was making sense?
Regardless, he's conveniently overlooking the fact that the government agency responsible for overseeing the safety of BP's offshore drilling was gutted and stocked with industry apologists by Bush and co. Obama didn't reverse Bush's policy or clean up the agency, and that's his bad, but the government failed in its responsibility to protect the beaches and marshes not because it's big government and has no accountability and ruins everything it touches, but because it was deliberately prevented from doing its job.
Among other things (directly relevant to Rahn's non-point about protecting beaches and marshes), "MMS had little way to assess the risk to wildlife, since a new policy instituted under Bush scrapped environmental analysis and fast-tracked permits. Declaring that oil companies themselves were "in the best position to determine the environmental effects" of drilling, the new rules pre-qualified deep-sea drillers to receive a "categorical exclusion" – an exemption from environmental review that was originally intended to prevent minor projects, like outhouses on hiking trails, from being tied up in red tape. "There's no analytical component to a cat-ex," says a former MMS scientist. "You have technicians, not scientists, that are simply checking boxes to make sure all the T's are crossed. They just cut and paste from previous approvals.""
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ne … how_page=2
You can't destroy the government's power to oversee the safety of offshore drilling and then complain that it didn't do a good enough job of overseeing things when something goes wrong!
Gulf Oil Spill ‘Could Go Years’ If Not Dealt With
By F. William Engdahl, author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order
June 10, 2010
The Obama Administration and senior BP officials are frantically working not to stop the world’s worst oil disaster, but to hide the true extent of the actual ecological catastrophe. Senior researchers tell us that the BP drilling hit one of the oil migration channels and that the leakage could continue for years unless decisive steps are undertaken, something that seems far from the present strategy.
In a recent discussion, Vladimir Kutcherov, Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and the Russian State University of Oil and Gas, predicted that the present oil spill flooding the Gulf Coast shores of the United States “could go on for years and years … many years.” [1]
According to Kutcherov, a leading specialist in the theory of abiogenic deep origin of petroleum, “What BP drilled into was what we call a ‘migration channel,’ a deep fault on which hydrocarbons generated in the depth of our planet migrate to the crust and are accumulated in rocks, something like Ghawar in Saudi Arabia.”[2] Ghawar, the world’s most prolific oilfield has been producing millions of barrels daily for almost 70 years with no end in sight. According to the abiotic science, Ghawar like all elephant and giant oil and gas deposits all over the world, is located on a migration channel similar to that in the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico.
As I wrote at the time of the January 2010 Haiti earthquake disaster,[3] Haiti had been identified as having potentially huge hydrocasrbon reserves, as has neighboring Cuba. Kutcherov estimates that the entire Gulf of Mexico is one of the planet’s most abundant accessible locations to extract oil and gas, at least before the Deepwater Horizon event this April.
“In my view the heads of BP reacted with panic at the scale of the oil spewing out of the well,” Kutcherov adds. “What is inexplicable at this point is why they are trying one thing, failing, then trying a second, failing, then a third. Given the scale of the disaster they should try every conceivable option, even if it is ten, all at once in hope one works. Otherwise, this oil source could spew oil for years given the volumes coming to the surface already.” [4]
He stresses, “It is difficult to estimate how big this leakage is. There is no objective information available.” But taking into consideration information about the last BP ‘giant’ discovery in the Gulf of Mexico, the Tiber field, some six miles deep, Kutcherov agrees with Ira Leifer a researcher in the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara who says the oil may be gushing out at a rate of more than 100,000 barrels a day.[5]
What the enormoity of the oil spill does is to also further discredit clearly the oil companies’ myth of “peak oil” which claims that the world is at or near the “peak” of economical oil extraction. That myth, which has been propagated in recent years by circles close to former oilman and Bush Vice President, Dick Cheney, has been effectively used by the giant oil majors to justify far higher oil prices than would be politically possible otherwise, by claiming a non-existent petroleum scarcity crisis.
Obama & BP Try to Hide
According to a report from Washington investigative journalist Wayne Madsen, “the Obama White House and British Petroleum are covering up the magnitude of the volcanic-level oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and working together to limit BP’s liability for damage caused by what can be called a ‘mega-disaster.’” [6] Madsen cites sources within the US Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA, and Florida Department of Environmental Protection for his assertion.
Obama and his senior White House staff, as well as Interior Secretary Salazar, are working with BP’s chief executive officer Tony Hayward on legislation that would raise the cap on liability for damage claims from those affected by the oil disaster from $75 million to $10 billion. According to informed estimates cited by Madsen, however, the disaster has a real potential cost of at least $1,000 billion ($1 trillion). That estimate would support the pessimistic assessment of Kutcherov that the spill, if not rapidly controlled, “will destroy the entire coastline of the United States.”
According to the Washington report of Madsen, BP statements that one of the leaks has been contained, are “pure public relations disinformation designed to avoid panic and demands for greater action by the Obama administration., according to FEMA and Corps of Engineers sources.” [7]
The White House has been resisting releasing any “damaging information” about the oil disaster. Coast Guard and Corps of Engineers experts estimate that if the ocean oil geyser is not stopped within 90 days, there will be irreversible damage to the marine eco-systems of the Gulf of Mexico, north Atlantic Ocean, and beyond. At best, some Corps of Engineers experts say it could take two years to cement the chasm on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. [8]
Only after the magnitude of the disaster became evident did Obama order Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano to declare the oil disaster a “national security issue.” Although the Coast Guard and FEMA are part of her department, Napolitano’s actual reasoning for invoking national security, according to Madsen, was merely to block media coverage of the immensity of the disaster that is unfolding for the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean and their coastlines.
The Obama administration also conspired with BP to hide the extent of the oil leak, according to the cited federal and state sources. After the oil rig exploded and sank, the government stated that 42,000 gallons per day were gushing from the seabed chasm. Five days later, the federal government upped the leakage to 210,000 gallons a day. However, submersibles monitoring the escaping oil from the Gulf seabed are viewing television pictures of what they describe as a “volcanic-like” eruption of oil.
When the Army Corps of Engineers first attempted to obtain NASA imagery of the Gulf oil slick, which is larger than is being reported by the media, it was reportedly denied the access. By chance, National Geographic managed to obtain satellite imagery shots of the extent of the disaster and posted them on their web site. Other satellite imagery reportedly being withheld by the Obama administration, shows that what lies under the gaping chasm spewing oil at an ever-alarming rate is a cavern estimated to be the size of Mount Everest. This information has been given an almost national security-level classification to keep it from the public, according to Madsen’s sources.
The Corps of Engineers and FEMA are reported to be highly critical of the lack of support for quick action after the oil disaster by the Obama White House and the US Coast Guard. Only now has the Coast Guard understood the magnitude of the disaster, dispatching nearly 70 vessels to the affected area. Under the loose regulatory measures implemented by the Bush-Cheney Administration, the US Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service became a simple “rubber stamp,” approving whatever the oil companies wanted in terms of safety precautions that could have averted such a disaster. Madsen describes a state of “criminal collusion” between Cheney’s former firm, Halliburton, and the Interior Department’s MMS, and that the potential for similar disasters exists with the other 30,000 off-shore rigs that use the same shut-off valves. [9]
Silence from Eco groups?... Follow the money
Without doubt at this point we are in the midst of what could be the greatest ecological catastrophe in history. The oil platform explosion took place almost within the current loop where the Gulf Stream originates. This has huge ecological and climatological consequences.
A cursory look at a map of the Gulf Stream shows that the oil is not just going to cover the beaches in the Gulf, it will spread to the Atlantic coasts up through North Carolina then on to the North Sea and Iceland. And beyond the damage to the beaches, sea life and water supplies, the Gulf stream has a very distinct chemistry, composition (marine organisms), density, temperature. What happens if the oil and the dispersants and all the toxic compounds they create actually change the nature of the Gulf Stream? No one can rule out potential changes including changes in the path of the Gulf Stream, and even small changes could have huge impacts. Europe, including England, is not an icy wasteland due to the warming from the Gulf Stream.
Yet there is a deafening silence from the very environmental organizations which ought to be at the barricades demanding that BP, the US Government and others act decisively.
That deafening silence of leading green or ecology organizations such as Greenpeace, Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club and others may well be tied to a money trail that leads right back to the oil industry, notably to BP. Leading environmental organizations have gotten significant financial payoffs in recent years from BP in order that the oil company could remake itself with an “environment-friendly face,” as in “beyond petroleum” the company’s new branding.
The Nature Conservancy, described as “the world’s most powerful environmental group,”[10] has awarded BP a seat on its International Leadership Council after the oil company gave the organization more than $10 million in recent years. [11]
Until recently, the Conservancy and other environmental groups worked with BP in a coalition that lobbied Congress on climate-change issues. An employee of BP Exploration serves as an unpaid Conservancy trustee in Alaska. In addition, according to a recent report published by the Washington Post, Conservation International, another environmental group, has accepted $2 million in donations from BP and worked with the company on a number of projects, including one examining oil-extraction methods. From 2000 to 2006, John Browne, then BP's chief executive, sat on the CI board.
Further, The Environmental Defense Fund, another influential ecologist organization, joined with BP, Shell and other major corporations to form a Partnership for Climate Action, to promote ‘market-based mechanisms’ (sic) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Environmental non-profit groups that have accepted donations from or joined in projects with BP include Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club and Audubon. That could explain why the political outcry to date for decisive action in the Gulf has been so muted. [12]
Of course those organizations are not going to be the ones to solve this catastrophe. The central point at this point is who is prepared to put the urgently demanded federal and international scientific resources into solving this crisis. Further actions of the likes of that from the Obama White House to date or from BP can only lead to the conclusion that some very powerful people want this debacle to continue. The next weeks will be critical to that assessment.
Endnotes:
[1] Vladimir Kutcherov, telephone discussion with the author, June 9, 2010.
[2] Ibid.
[3] F. William Engdahl, The Fateful Geological Prize Called Haiti, Global Research.ca, January 30, 2010, accessed in http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? … ;aid=17287
[4] Vladimir Kutcherov, op. cit.
[5] Ira Leifer, Scientist: BP Well Could Be Leaking 100,000 Barrels of Oil a Day, June 9, 2010, accessed in http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/9/sc … be_leaking
[6] Wayne Madsen, The Coverup: BPs Crude Politics and the Looming Environmental Mega Disaster, May 6, 2010, accessed in http://oilprice.com/Environment/Oil-Spi … aster.html
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Tim Findley, Natures’ Landlord, Range Magazine, Spring 2003.
[11] Joe Stephens, Nature Conservancy faces potential backlash from ties with BP, Washington Post, May 24, 2010, accessed in http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co … 02164.html
[12] Ibid.
by James L 14 years ago
Is anyone else seriously worried about the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico?I've been staying on top of all the news reports and findings as well as researching the effects of previous oil spills and it seem the more I learn the more unsettling this whole situation becomes.
by CMHypno 14 years ago
Obama's attacks on BP are increasingly being viewed in the UK as signs of his anti-British stance. Or is he just trying to pull attention away from his own administration's failures?http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article … itain.html
by SparklingJewel 14 years ago
World Affairs Brief, June 18, 2010 Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World.Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen's World Affairs Brief ( http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com ) BP GULF DISASTER--EXTINCTION EVENT OR MEGA-SPILL?Getting to...
by SparklingJewel 14 years ago
http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2010/0 … capping-2/ Scroll down on above site and look at these ! GREAT YouTube's on Oil Spill. 1. Please Check it out. . . 2. ARTICLE by Dr. James...
by Jack Lee 7 years ago
It has been almost a year since he left office. Though he seems to stick around DC and make his comments occasionally about policies...The question I have for all is this - what is your opinion of this President in his 8 years in office...?Overall, has he been good or bad for America?Please use...
by theirishobserver. 14 years ago
Good afternoon,President Obama just returned from his fourth trip to the Gulf Coast region since the BP Oil Spill began in April. Tonight at 8 p.m. EDT, he will address the nation from the Oval Office on the oil spill and his Administration's plan to address this crisis going forward.Immediately...
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