The environment thread

[Balta1701]

Senator Bill Nelson of FL just made a very key accusation on MSNBC...

 

That the integrity of the full well has been compromised, and oil is now leaking directly from the seafloor in the area around the well.

 

 

That means several things. First, that would mean that there is a way for oil to get out that can not be slowed down by any of BP's current containment cap measures. Second, that would be another way for significant quantities of oil to escape beyond whatever BP's count estimate is.

 

Third...and here's the worrisome one...if oil has broken out of the main pipe, and your drill a relief well to try to seal it at a level above the breakout point, you don't stop the leak; it goes around your attempt to block it.

[StrangeSox]

Excellent tearing apart of Christopher Monckton, Monckton's response, Abraham's response, and another article by Abraham laying wood to Monckton's claims.

[NorthSideSox72]

It sure sounds like the actual attempt to build a clean energy economy is going to get stripped out of any energy bill that goes before the Senate this year.

So NSS and others, your grand bargain, where we give up enormous amounts of money to coal, nuclear, and oil interests in order to buy them off so that they won't complain too much about cap and trade of CO2 emissions is likely to be replaced by giving enormous amounts of money to coal, nuclear, and oil interests, so that they won't be too mad if we give much less money to renewable energy companies.

Let's see what happens in the bill that gets passed. If there is little or no work done on alt energy, I'll be upset.

 

 

[StrangeSox]

You'll be upset

[Balta1701]

Let's see what happens in the bill that gets passed. If there is little or no work done on alt energy, I'll be upset.

There will be money put into it, but it seems obvious that's all we'll get; nothing to make dirty energy more expensive.

[Balta1701]

Lindsay Graham says he won't vote for climate bill now because it may include new regulations/restrictions on opening up additional space for drilling.

[StrangeSox]

Can I remove my spoiler tag now?

[southsider2k5]

If the bold sounds familiar, that is because this was a favorite line of attack against the Bush admin of either ignoring, or rewriting hard science for something that would fit their agenda. The full story is at the link.

 

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/...?RS_show_page=0

 

This article originally appeared in RS 1107 from June 24, 2010.

 

On May 27th, more than a month into the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, Barack Obama strode to the podium in the East Room of the White House. For weeks, the administration had been insisting that BP alone was to blame for the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf – and the ongoing failure to stop the massive leak. "They have the technical expertise to plug the hole," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs had said only six days earlier. "It is their responsibility." The president, Gibbs added, lacked the authority to play anything more than a supervisory role – a curious line of argument from an administration that has reserved the right to assassinate American citizens abroad and has nationalized much of the auto industry. "If BP is not accomplishing the task, can you just federalize it?" a reporter asked. "No," Gibbs replied.

 

Now, however, the president was suddenly standing up to take command of the cleanup effort. "In case you were wondering who's responsible," Obama told the nation, "I take responsibility." Sounding chastened, he acknowledged that his administration had failed to adequately reform the Minerals Management Service, the scandal-ridden federal agency that for years had essentially allowed the oil industry to self-regulate. "There wasn't sufficient urgency," the president said. "Absolutely I take responsibility for that." He also admitted that he had been too credulous of the oil giants: "I was wrong in my belief that the oil companies had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios." He unveiled a presidential commission to investigate the disaster, discussed the resignation of the head of MMS, and extended a moratorium on new deepwater drilling. "The buck," he reiterated the next day on the sullied Louisiana coastline, "stops with me."

 

Tim Dickinson blogs about all the news that fits, from the Beltway and beyond on the National Affairs blog.

 

What didn't stop was the gusher. Hours before the president's press conference, an ominous plume of oil six miles wide and 22 miles long was discovered snaking its way toward Mobile Bay from BP's wellhead next to the wreckage of its Deepwater Horizon rig. Admiral Thad Allen, the U.S. commander overseeing the cleanup, framed the spill explicitly as an invasion: "The enemy is coming ashore," he said. Louisiana beaches were assaulted by blobs of oil that began to seep beneath the sand; acres of marshland at the "Bird's Foot," where the Mississippi meets the Gulf, were befouled by s***-brown crude – a death sentence for wetlands that serve as the cradle for much of the region's vital marine life. By the time Obama spoke, it was increasingly evident that this was not merely an ecological disaster. It was the most devastating assault on American soil since 9/11.

 

Like the attacks by Al Qaeda, the disaster in the Gulf was preceded by ample warnings – yet the administration had ignored them. Instead of cracking down on MMS, as he had vowed to do even before taking office, Obama left in place many of the top officials who oversaw the agency's culture of corruption. He permitted it to rubber-stamp dangerous drilling operations by BP – a firm with the worst safety record of any oil company – with virtually no environmental safeguards, using industry-friendly regulations drafted during the Bush years. He calibrated his response to the Gulf spill based on flawed and misleading estimates from BP – and then deployed his top aides to lowball the flow rate at a laughable 5,000 barrels a day, long after the best science made clear this catastrophe would eclipse the Exxon Valdez.

 

Hours after BP’s rig sank on April 22nd, a white board in NOAA's "war room" in Seattle displays the administration's initial, worst-case estimate of the spill — 64,000 to 110,000 barrels a day.

Even after the president's press conference, Rolling Stone has learned, the administration knew the spill could be far worse than its "best estimate" acknowledged. That same day, the president's Flow Rate Technical Group – a team of scientists charged with establishing the gusher's output – announced a new estimate of 12,000 to 25,000 barrels, based on calculations from video of the plume. In fact, according to interviews with team members and scientists familiar with its work, that figure represents the plume group's minimum estimate. The upper range was not included in their report because scientists analyzing the flow were unable to reach a consensus on how bad it could be. "The upper bound from the plume group, if it had come out, is very high," says Timothy Crone, a marine geophysicist at Columbia University who has consulted with the government's team. "That's why they had resistance internally. We're talking 100,000 barrels a day."

 

The median figure for Crone's independent calculations is 55,000 barrels a day – the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez every five days. "That's what the plume team's numbers show too," Crone says. A source privy to internal discussions at one of the world's top oil companies confirms that the industry privately agrees with such estimates. "The industry definitely believes the higher-end values," the source says. "That's accurate – if not more than that." The reason, he adds, is that BP appears to have unleashed one of the 10 most productive wells in the Gulf. "BP screwed up a really big, big find," the source says. "And if they can't cap this, it's not going to blow itself out anytime soon."

 

[bmags]

That must be why people on the left are consistent in their criticism.

[Balta1701]

The one thing that annoys me but doesn't surprise me about that article is that it doesn't point out that every time they tried to put a delay on any sort of drilling, the (usually Republican) local Senators responded by blocking a dozen or so more Obama nominees.

 

Although it is nice to see the Republicans here starting to agree with us that the flow rate has been deliberately set low from the start to protect BP.

[southsider2k5]

The one thing that annoys me but doesn't surprise me about that article is that it doesn't point out that every time they tried to put a delay on any sort of drilling, the (usually Republican) local Senators responded by blocking a dozen or so more Obama nominees.

 

Although it is nice to see the Republicans here starting to agree with us that the flow rate has been deliberately set low from the start to protect BP.

 

I doubt it was to protect BP. It was to protect Obama.

[kapkomet]

I doubt it was to protect BP. It was to protect Obama.

 

 

Exactly.

[bmags]

Of course kap. The capitalist, that has ruined hundreds of capitalist ventures could never be wrong, it must be the president. Hail BP, the most christian and noble of all organizations, they were just trying to make a dollar, and therefore, are closest to jesus. Hail hail hail!!!

[Balta1701]

Of course kap. The capitalist, that has ruined hundreds of capitalist ventures could never be wrong, it must be the president. Hail BP, the most christian and noble of all organizations, they were just trying to make a dollar, and therefore, are closest to jesus. Hail hail hail!!!

 

These are great.

[Balta1701]

Sigh.

Three days after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch government offered to help.

 

It was willing to provide ships outfitted with oil-skimming booms, and it proposed a plan for building sand barriers to protect sensitive marshlands.

 

The response from the Obama administration and BP, which are coordinating the cleanup: “The embassy got a nice letter from the administration that said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,'” said Geert Visser, consul general for the Netherlands in Houston.

 

Now, almost seven weeks later, as the oil spewing from the battered well spreads across the Gulf and soils pristine beaches and coastline, BP and our government have reconsidered.

 

U.S. ships are being outfitted this week with four pairs of the skimming booms airlifted from the Netherlands and should be deployed within days. Each pair can process 5 million gallons of water a day, removing 20,000 tons of oil and sludge.

 

At that rate, how much more oil could have been removed from the Gulf during the past month?

 

The uncoordinated response to an offer of assistance has become characteristic of this disaster's response. Too often, BP and the government don't seem to know what the other is doing, and the response has seemed too slow and too confused.

These are the kinds of failures that deserve to get you thrown out of office.

[Balta1701]

[NorthSideSox72]

Sigh.

These are the kinds of failures that deserve to get you thrown out of office.

Yeah that's absurd. I've been more and more pissed off at ObamaCo for the response to this. Yes, its ultimately BP's fault. But the administrative and managerial immaturity and short-sigthedness being displayed here by the administration is basically just as bad as what we saw with Katrina. The RESULT of that for Katrina was worse in the element of people's lives being more directly at stake... and Bush's nomination of a joke to head FEMA doesn't have an analog here... but other than that, its the same B.S.

 

[StrangeSox]

Hey Balta, please stop ruining my days.

 

There's more and more accusations that BP was rushing through the job and pressuring the rig workers to cut corners.

[Balta1701]

There's more and more accusations that BP was rushing through the job and pressuring the rig workers to cut corners.

Standard operating procedure.

 

Hey Balta, please stop ruining my days.

 

Watch the video. It's good for a laugh.

[southsider2k5]

Yeah that's absurd. I've been more and more pissed off at ObamaCo for the response to this. Yes, its ultimately BP's fault. But the administrative and managerial immaturity and short-sigthedness being displayed here by the administration is basically just as bad as what we saw with Katrina. The RESULT of that for Katrina was worse in the element of people's lives being more directly at stake... and Bush's nomination of a joke to head FEMA doesn't have an analog here... but other than that, its the same B.S.

 

That is about as perfectly said as it can be. Remember being critical of the federal response doesn't mean you are absolving BP, despite the rhetoric otherwise.

[StrangeSox]

Blocked at work. I'll make myself sad again at home.

 

So, what can someone do locally (ie not moving to LA/ AL)?

[Balta1701]

So, serious question for those who know better.

 

I've been holding 20 shares of BP for the last decade that my Aunt gave me when I graduated high school.

 

If BP goes into Chapter 11 to protect it from creditors, what typically happens to common stock shareholders? Is it worth holding those shares or should I look into dumping it and taking the $600 loss now?

[southsider2k5]

So, serious question for those who know better.

 

I've been holding 20 shares of BP for the last decade that my Aunt gave me when I graduated high school.

 

If BP goes into Chapter 11 to protect it from creditors, what typically happens to common stock shareholders? Is it worth holding those shares or should I look into dumping it and taking the $600 loss now?

 

If they do go into bankruptcy, the stock is canceled.

[Balta1701]

Blocked at work. I'll make myself sad again at home.

 

So, what can someone do locally (ie not moving to LA/ AL)?

Use less oil?

 

Write your Senator and ask him or her to support a cap and trade plan?

 

Find a gulf relief fund to give money to.

 

Find a cleanup org that is hiring people to go out and cleanup oil.

 

That's about all I can figure. You can't just boycott BP stations; if their stations sell less gasoline, then BP will just sell their gas to another company, and you just hurt the local dealers. There's no supplies you have that will help in the cleanup effort. There's nothing you can do to help plug the pipe. Basically, if you can't directly aid in the cleanup operation, there's little you can do directly other than helping the people affected.

[Balta1701]

If they do go into bankruptcy, the stock is canceled.

So basically, I'm probably better off figuring out how to take the $600 loss rather than having it all worthless.