Fighting Pollution with Pollution

June 18, 2010 by Scientific America

It remains unclear what impact chemical dispersants will have on sea life--and only the massive, uncontrolled experiment being run in the Gulf of Mexico will tell
by David Biello

Roughly five million liters of dispersants have now been used to break up the oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, making this the largest use of such chemicals in U.S. history. If it continues for 10 months, as long as Mexico's Ixtoc 1 blowout in 1979 in the same region, the Macondo well disaster has a good chance of achieving the largest global use of these chemicals, surpassing 10 million liters.

And there is no doubt that dispersants are toxic: Both types of the dispersal compound COREXIT used in the Gulf so far are capable of killing or depressing the growth of a wide range of aquatic species, ranging from phytoplankton to fish. "It's a trade-off decision to lessen the overall environmental impact," explained marine biologist Jane Lubchenco, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), at apress conference on May 12. "When an oil spill occurs, there are no good outcomes."

The trade-off in this case is the addition of toxic chemicals in a bid to protect the marshes of Louisiana and the beaches of Florida. But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for one, has become concerned about the toxicity of the most-used dispersant at the Gulf of Mexico spill-COREXIT 9500-and ordered BP to look at alternatives. (COREXIT 9527 was used earlier during the spill, but it was discontinued because it was considered too toxic.)

The problem? The EPA's industry-generated data is unclear as to the relative toxicity of various dispersants. "If you think the data on COREXIT is bad, try to find any decent toxicology data on the alternatives," says toxicologist Carys Mitchelmore of the University of Maryland's Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, who helped write a 2005 National Research Council (NRC) report on dispersants. "I couldn't compare and contrast which one was more toxic than the other based on that."

Dispersed oil Both COREXIT 9500 and 9527 are produced by Naperville, Ill.-based Nalco, a company better known for its water purification work with the oil industry. "For every barrel of oil produced, 3.5 barrels of water are produced," explains chemist Mani Ramesh, chief technology officer for Nalco. "That needs to be treated before it can be released. That water treatment has been a core area for us."

But at the same time Nalco keeps busy cleaning the oil industry's water, it also provides COREXIT, a product to minimize the impact of any oil that spills into the water. Developed in a joint venture with ExxonMobil, the compound is largely made at facilities in Sugarland, Tex., and Garyville, La. The company expects to sell some $40-million worth of COREXIT as a result of the latest spill. "What the dispersant process enables is to prevent the oil from reaching the shore and converts that oil to easy food for naturally occurring microbes," Ramesh says. "If the oil reaches the shore the decomposition rate of oil is so low it would remain on the shore for probably 100 years."

By last week, the EPA and Nalco had both released the ingredient list for COREXIT 9500 in response to widespread public concern. Its constituents include butanedioic acid (a wetting agent in cosmetics), sorbitan (found in everything from baby bath to food), and petroleum distillates in varying proportions-and it decomposes almost entirely in 28 days. "All six [ingredients] are used in day-to-day life-in mouthwash, toothpaste, ice cream, pickles," Ramesh argues. "We believe COREXIT 9500 is very safe."

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agrees, noting in a document for health professionals that "the dispersants contain proven, biodegradable and low-toxicity surfactants," which are "detergentlike" and "in low toxicity solvents."

However, those solvents-petroleum distillates-are also known animal carcinogens, according to toxicology data, and make up 10 to 30 percent of a given volume of COREXIT. And those same everyday products can be deadly to wildlife. "It's the same products in Dawn dishwasher soap," Mitchelmore notes, which is being used widely to clean up oiled birds and other animals. "I wouldn't want to put a fish in Dawn dishwashing soap either. That would kill it."

As a result, the EPA ordered BP to stop spraying dispersants on the oil slick on May 26. The EPA also ordered BP to look for less toxic alternatives on May 20, and the company responded in a letter dated that same day that "BP continues to believe that COREXIT EC9500A is the best alternative." The dispersant continues to be sprayed onto the ongoing oil spill.

No alternative One reason BP can make such claims is due to a lack of clear data on any of the alternative dispersants. As part of the National Contingency Plan required for offshore drilling, one of 18 EPA-approved dispersants must be on hand to handle spilled oil. Each of those dispersants has been preapproved for use, and each of those dispersants has been tested-by the companies that make them-for toxicity using representative species of estuarine shrimp (Mysidopsis bahia) and fish (Menidia beryllina). Specifically, these animals are exposed to a mix of one liter of dispersant for every 10 liters of heavy fuel oil in water.

Yet, the results of those tests vary wildly, from toxic impacts occurring at levels of just 2.6 parts per million for COREXIT to 100 ppm for another dispersant, NOKOMIS 3-F4. That suggests to experts that the tests which showed lower toxicity may have employedheavy fuel oil that had lost its potency. After all, volatile organic compounds in oil evaporate quickly when exposed to air and can even wash off in water. "These are order of magnitude differences," Mitchelmore notes. "A lot of that can relate to how those tests were set up."

Adds Nalco toxicologist Sergio Alex Villalobos, "If the oil is aged, then the oil loses its toxicity. Using an oil that is not very toxic, if you disperse that oil you are going to get very favorable numbers. Do those numbers really exist?"

EPA, for its part, did not show the best understanding of toxicological data in making its recommendations, urging BP to use dispersants with less than a certain cutoff of toxicity (pdf). Of course, in toxicology the lower the concentration the more toxic a given substance is. "They completely got that wrong," Mitchelmore says. EPA is now undertaking its own toxicology testing of COREXIT and Louisiana crude oil, but results are pending.

Nevertheless, just 20 ppm of COREXIT 9500-or one drop in 2.5 liters of water-inhibits growth of Skeletonema costatum, a Gulf of Mexico diatom, according to toxicology test data presented in the 2005 NRC report. It appears to inhibit the phytoplankton's ability to perform photosynthesis, specifically blocking part of the biochemistry that enables the photosystem II complex, Villalobos says. "Skeletonema seems to fall among the most sensitive ones," he says. "Like many aquatic plants, these are organisms that are resilient, that tend to come back even though you wipe them out in some cases chemically."

COREXIT is also not approved for use in U.K. waters because it fails the so-called "limpet test". That test involves spraying the dispersant and oil on rocks and seeing iflimpets (a type of small mollusk) can still cling to them, a test which COREXIT and many other dispersants with slippery surfactants fail. "This is not a product for rocky shores," Villalobos says. "These are only for open sea waters."

Novel use Of course, in the case of the oil spewing from BP's Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, COREXIT is being used in another unapproved way. A wand from one of theremote-operated robots has sprayed more than 1.5 million liters of dispersants directly onto the escaping oil and natural gas roughly 1,500 meters beneath the ocean's surface. "I don't think anybody knows what would happen by applying the dispersants at depth," Ramesh says. "We do not have any knowledge that would allow us to predict what would happen."

In addition to creating subsurface plumes (and providing a rich feast for oil-eating microbes), it remains unclear what kind of dosage of dispersed oil sea life throughout the water column is facing. NOAA measurements show that levels reach 100 ppm of dispersed oil in the first half-meter of water, dropping to 12.5 ppm at 10 meters and unknown levels even deeper. "There isn't any information on what is the environmentally relevant level of dispersant," Mitchelmore notes. "Dispersed oils are going to be toxic, particularly in the top 10 meters that contains all the sensitive life stages. Anything that has sensitive membranes can be affected by dispersants and dispersed oil."

Sunlight falling on the dispersed oil may make the problem worse through a phenomenon known as phototoxicity. Compounds in the oil act as a catalyst to transfer some of the sun's energy into oxygen, converting the latter to a more reactive state that can literally burn up cells. And as fish and other sea life ingest the dispersed oil, it can be broken down into more toxic by-products. "What do these things break down into?" Mitchelmore says. "In toxicology it's quite often not the original compound that's the toxic entity."

Ultimately, the problem is that too little is known about the dispersants and the dispersed oil. "Given that this is a billion-dollar industry, why were those data gaps not filled?" Mitchelmore asks. "The whole issue regarding limited toxicity data-that's not just common to dispersants, that's common to tens of thousands of chemicals we're putting out into the environment daily."

After all, it was only after decades of using bisphenol A, polybrominated flame retardants and other chemicals that significant concerns began to manifest. In effect, usage replaced safety testing-and that's exactly what is happening with dispersants and the massive spill in the Gulf. Different regulation of chemicals and the chemical industry might forestall toxicological mysteries like those surrounding dispersants-and their thousands of chemical cousins-in the future.

"We're using an awful lot of dispersants," said EPA administrator Lisa Jackson during the same May 12 press briefing on the chemical's use at which NOAA's Lubchenco spoke. "This is going on longer than one might have known on day three or four. We're still dealing with a constant release of fresh oil and we need to continue to disperse."

Obama Officials Still Approving Flawed Gulf Drilling Plans

June 19, 2010 by the McClatchy Newspapers
by Shashank Bengali

WASHINGTON - Despite President Barack Obama's promises of better safeguards for offshore drilling, federal regulators continue to approve plans for oil companies to drill in the Gulf of Mexico with minimal or no environmental analysis.

The Department of Interior's Minerals Management Service has signed off on at least five new offshore drilling projects since June 2, when the agency's acting director announced tougher safety regulations for drilling in the Gulf, a McClatchy review of public records has discovered.

Three of the projects were approved with waivers exempting them from detailed studies of their environmental impact - the same waiver the MMS granted to BP for the ill-fated well that's been fouling the Gulf with crude for two months.

In a May 14 speech in the Rose Garden, Obama said he was "closing the loophole that has allowed some oil companies to bypass some critical environmental reviews."

Environmental groups, however, say the loophole is as wide as ever and that the administration is allowing oil companies to proceed with drilling plans that may be just as flawed as BP's, which concluded that a major spill was "unlikely" and that the company was equipped to manage even the worst-case blowout.

"It's just outrageous," said Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, a conservation organization. "The whole world is screaming and . . . they're just continuing to move this stuff through the system."

The Obama administration has said it's cracking down on the oil industry with a six-month moratorium that prevents regulators from granting new permits for offshore wells deeper than 500 feet underwater in the Gulf of Mexico. That, however, hasn't stopped oil companies from submitting new drilling plans, which, as McClatchy reported earlier this month, routinely underestimate environmental risks and overestimate the companies' ability to respond to a disaster.

According to MMS records, since June 2 the agency has granted environmental exemptions - known as "categorical exclusions" - to three new drilling projects. Of those, an Exxon Mobil site at a water depth of 1,000 feet and a Marathon Oil site at 775 feet are classified as deepwater; the third is a shallow-water project by Houston-based Rooster Petroleum.

Environmentalists say these approvals fly in the face of the June 2 order by acting MMS director Bob Abbey that requires oil companies to submit additional safety information in their development plans. All three drilling plans were submitted to the MMS before Abbey's order.

The MMS also approved two other deepwater drilling plans - for a Chevron site 6,730 feet underwater and for an Exxon site at a depth of 6,943 feet - after subjecting them to environmental reviews, the records show.

When Obama's six-month ban is lifted, experts say these projects could form the basis for new, flawed wells unless the MMS submits them to tougher oversight.

"At no point did any of the moratoriums cease the use of (categorical exclusions)," Suckling said. "They're cueing up all these drilling projects with no environmental review, so they're just sitting at the starting line" until the ban ends.

A spokesman for the Interior Department said the policy on categorical exclusions "is still being studied" as part of a 30-day congressionally mandated review of U.S. drilling policy. The department issued a separate directive Friday that requires oil companies to submit information about the possibility of a blowout, which had been missing from many drilling plans, but made no mention of the waivers.

Suckling's group filed a petition with the department this week to ban the waivers and charged that the MMS violated the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act when it approved a 2007 lease sale - including for BP's blown-out Macondo well - saying it would have "no significant environmental impacts."

The center also has filed suit in federal court in Louisiana to force the MMS to review all 49 exploration plans for the Gulf that were approved with categorical exclusions.

Other environmental groups have brought similar suits, with lawyers charging that the ongoing issuance of the waivers is part of a business-as-usual mentality among the oil industry and the Department of Interior.

Congressional investigators found that, 11 days before the April 20 explosion aboard BP's Deepwater Horizon rig, the company sent a letter to federal officials urging them to continue issuing the waivers "to avoid unnecessary paperwork and time delays."

"The fact that the agency continued to spit them out while oil was pouring into the Gulf is just ridiculous to the extreme," said Mike Senatore, an attorney for Defenders of Wildlife, a nonprofit environmental group.

There are other signs that the BP spill hasn't put the brakes on offshore drilling in the Gulf.

Last week, Defenders of Wildlife and the Southern Environmental Law Center filed suit in federal court in Alabama challenging the MMS's approval of 198 new deepwater leases in the central Gulf since the BP spill began.

The lease sales - an earlier step, before oil companies submit drilling plans - create an incentive to continue offshore drilling despite the risks, attorneys argue. If federal regulators opt to cancel a lease once it's issued, the government must repay the company the fair market value of the lease or compensate it for the cost of its bid plus interest, the lawyers said.

"It immediately puts the U.S. taxpayer on the hook financially," Senatore said.

The lawsuit challenges Lease Sale 213, which covers 36 million acres in the central Gulf off the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and drew $1.3 billion in bids at a March auction at the Superdome in New Orleans, according to MMS records. Of 198 deepwater leases sold, at least 10 are owned by BP and are located over a mile deep, the groups say.

"The moratorium does not stop this process," Senatore said.

Hey, kids! "Oil Spill Jobs Are Better Than ‘Normal’ Ones!"

BP Funds Front Group Claiming Oil Spill Jobs Are Better Than ‘Normal’ Ones, Storm Will Clean up Oil

by Lee Fang  | June 18, 2010

Cross-posted from Think Progress.

Shortly after BP’s catastrophic oil spill in the gulf, the New York Times spoke to Quenton Dokken, the executive director of the Gulf of Mexico Foundation, about the environmental impact. “The sky is not falling,” Dokken told the paper, adding “it isn’t the end of the Gulf of Mexico.” ProPublica dug into the Gulf of Mexico Foundation, and reported that the Times had failed to disclose that Dokken and his group are funded by a consortium of oil companies with business in the gulf, including companies involved in the Deepwater Horizon rig, Transocean and Anadarko. Today, the Times reported that the Foundation has been downplaying effects of the spill, possibly because of its funding from oil companies.

ThinkProgress has obtained more documents and evidence that the Gulf of Mexico Foundation has operated as a front for the oil companies involved in the spill. In addition to Transocean and Anadarko, this 2008 “Guardians of the Gulf” award ceremony hosted by the Foundation shows that BP is also a “CEO council member” of the nonprofit. View a screenshot here:

On May 20 and 21, about thirty days into the BP oil spill, the supposedly pro-”environmental conservation” Gulf of Mexico Foundation hosted a conference with oil industry lobbyists to promote further deep water drilling not only the in Gulf of Mexico, but in environmentally sensitive areas throughout the United States. The Foundation pretends it is just a do-gooder organization, sponsoring learning trips for Middle School students and other positive events. But clearly displaying the Foundation’s true goal of greenwashing the oil industry and suppressing the environmental impacts of oil spills, Dokken spoke at length downplaying the impact of the current BP oil disaster, minimizing the impact of ExxonValdez, boasting that the BP oil spill clean up jobs are better than “normal jobs,” and even “guaranteeing” that a hurricane will clean up any remnants of BP’s spill:

Dokken explaining why the “sky is not falling”: “Oil is not new in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s been entering the Gulf of Mexico for as long as the oil has existed.”

Dokken on how the spill has helped the local economy: “In Alabama, speaking on a sea grant program, the big problem he had was the spill response jobs were paying so much more than the normal jobs, everybody was leaving their normal jobs for spill response.”

Dokken on minimal impact of ExxonValdez: “And don’t forget, it was Governor Sarah Palin who championed the drill, baby, drill slogan, and that was after Exxon Valdez! So apparently, it didn’t scare Alaska away from the spill or the oil and gas industry, and you know I can, say after the smoke cleared and the headlines cleared or the headlines were cleared with another catastrophe, the true and financial impact was not the disaster that was predicted or portrayed.”

Dokken on how a hurricane will clean the oil: “I guarantee you there will be very little evidence that the Deepwater Horizon ever blew out, if its shut off by the time the hurricanes gets here. And it’s not magic, its just dilution. It mixes it up, spreads it out, breaks it down and it’s gone. We still shouldn’t be putting it in there, don’t get me wrong, but storms and nature is what keeps getting us out of these binds.”

Watch a compilation of clips from Murkowski and Dokken’s remarks:

Video link

In reality, the courts struck down ExxonValdez settlement payments, and victimsstill have not been compensated for their losses. In addition to the lives ruined and suicides caused by Exxon’s spill, the environment is poisoned and herring, the prime economic engine of the Prince William Sound, have not returned.

Current oil drilling trade association head Randall Luthi, who previously worked for Dick Cheney on the team that signed off on a vast expansion of dangerous drilling leases and who later served in the Minerals Management Service in the Bush administration, gave a presentation at the conference. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), a close friend of the oil industry who previously said wellhead blowouts are “impossible,” spoke at the Foundation conference, telling attendees “we should be careful and not pass reactionary legislation that hasn’t been fully thought through” in response to the spill. Notably, Murkowski blocked legislation to raise the liability cap for oil companies.

Extended transcript of Dokken’s remarks:

DOKKEN: As I said, my ’sky is not falling’ comment was not well received in a lot of quarters, even a lot of science quarters. [...] Environmental impact of this, oil is not new in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s been entering the Gulf of Mexico for as long as the oil has existed. National Research Council reports estimate 1.1 million barrels of oil and gas enter the gulf through natural seapages. [...]

DOKKEN: It’ll be interesting to see what the average and medium incomes of the folks of Alaska were before the Exxon Valdez spill compared to data taken during the event and after the event. After all the Federal government dollars spent, during and after the spill, the response jobs funded, vessels chartered, and all the personal injury lawsuits settled to the advantage of the Alaskans, what was the true financial impact? I heard today, just came across my computer that a speaker from Alaska was here, er, not here, where am I? In Alabama, speaking on a sea grant program, the big problem he had was the spill response jobs were paying so much more than the normal jobs, everybody was leaving their normal jobs for spill response. And don’t forget, it was Governor Sarah Palin who championed the drill, baby, drill slogan, and that was after Exxon Valdez! So apparently, it didn’t scare Alaska away from the spill or the oil and gas industry, and you know I can, say after the smoke cleared and the headlines cleared or the headlines were cleared with another catastrophe, the true and financial impact was not the disaster that was predicted or portrayed. Alaska wants the oil and gas industry and I bet Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama do too. [...]

DOKKEN: I guarantee you there will be very little evidence that the Deepwater Horizon ever blew out, if its shut off by the time the hurricanes gets here. And it’s not magic, its just dilution. It mixes it up, spreads it out, breaks it down and it’s gone. We still shouldn’t be putting it in there, don’t get me wrong, but storms and nature is what keeps getting us out of these binds.

Republicans Apologize, Grovel to BP

(Seriously, pathetic. I hope these morons are voted out for their anti-American, pro-corporate sentiments.-jef)

***

One after the other, GOPers and conservatives are taking the side of the British company destroying our gulf.
By Brad Reed, AlterNet
June 19, 2010

The BP oil spill has put many Republicans in a precarious position – they’re understandably relishing the opportunity to portray President Obama as feckless and weak, but are worried that the crisis is making their pals in the oil industry look pretty bad.

Most of them have steered clear of this quandary by either solely attacking the Obama administration for its belated and inept response to the crisis or by even acknowledging that BP was a particularly bad apple within the oil industry. After all, smart GOP operatives understand that Americans are just as pissed off at big business as they are at the government and that the GOP will blow its chance to retake Congress this fall if it can’t control its authoritarian impulse to hump corporate America’s leg.

Thankfully, though, not all right-wingers have the message discipline of your typical GOP campaign manager and many of them have dutifully gone to bat for our economic overlords at BP. This Thursday, Rep. Joe Barton actually apologized to CEO Tony Hayward for the White House's arrangement with BP to establish a $20 billion fund to pay for damages in the Gulf. If Democrats are smart they'll put the spectacle of a GOP congressman apologizing for America to a British company to good use. Imagine pictures of dead birds and unemployed fishermen with the following voiceover:

"Joe Barton has apologized to BP, apparently worried that Her Majesty would be upset for criticizing a company of the Crown. Is this what our Founding Fathers fought and died for? So that Republican Joe Barton could bow before the Queen of England?"

Earlier this week, high-profile spillologist and Mississippi governor Haley Barbour said that “It’s just as possible that what happens here will be manageable and of moderate and even minimal impact.” Barbour further went on to caution against “washing our face in it” but said the spill could still render the ocean safe enough to allow “jumping off the boat to ski.” Perhaps Barbour is trying to attract more Satanists to come visit his state, since I’m sure they’re the only ones who would find water skiing amidst dead dolphins appealing.

But wait, it gets worse for our pal Haley! When the Obama administration did something useful and scored the escrow account, Barbour expressed “concern” that the fund could cut into BP’s profits. Hey Haley, that’s sort of the point. As any student of Econ 101 knows, firms respond to incentives. And if we can take away oil companies’ incentives to be reckless buffoons that destroy entire ecosystems, well, that’s a pretty good thing.

(On the plus side, Barbour’s reaction was still saner than Michele Bachmann’s, as the Tea Party star called the escrow account a “redistribution of wealth fund.”)

The Republican Study Committee issued a statement slamming the fund, with Rep. Tom Price accusing the administration of "Chicago-style politics" and seemingly scolding BP for agreeing to sort of take responsibility for their actions. Said Price, "BP's reported willingness to go along with the White House's new fund suggests that the Obama administration is hard at work exerting its brand of Chicago-style shakedown politics. These actions are emblematic of a politicization of our economy that has been borne out of this administration's drive for greater power and control."

Rush Limbaugh somehow managed to make it about ACORN: "Who's gonna get this money? Union activists? ACORN people? Who's gonna get this money?"

The wingnuts have been valiantly defending the poor oil giant for a while now.

Pundit Tony Blankley got the ball rolling at the National Review last month by crying about Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s declaration that he intended “to keep the boot on the neck of British Petroleum.” Blankley found this statement to be disturbingly totalitarian, comparing it to the image of a boot stepping on the face of humanity used in Orwell’s 1984. Such a hostile tone, reasoned Blankley, was not the proper “attitude toward a respected member of the corporate community.”

Never mind that this respected member of the corporate community owns two refineries that accounted for 97 percent – yes, 97 percent – of all flagrant safety violations found in the refining industry over the last three years. Also never mind that BP has blatantly and knowingly lied to the public about the size of the disaster by a factor of more than 14. And finally, ignore the fact that BP has a long history of disregarding even its own safety standards and of pressuring its employees to keep their mouths shut about safety violations. No, none of this matters: in the Randroid world of economic royalism, any company that makes ungodly sums of money must by nature be run by morally superior individuals who deserve honor and respect from the little people who greedily sponge off their productivity.

This “BP Shrugged” attitude was on full display in a recent post by Pajamas Media’s Matt Patterson, who said the BP disaster should not be blamed on the company responsible for causing it but rather on the dastardly environmentalists who put so many terrible restrictions on our free enterprise system in the first place.

“Finding and extracting oil from the earth ranks among the most dangerous of occupations,” he whined on behalf of the world’s 10th-richest company. “And thanks to regulations and pressure from environmental groups, oil companies are largely prevented from seeking new oil reserves near U.S. coasts, forcing them out into deep water where the dangers and complexities of an already dangerous and complex business increase one hundred-fold.”

Patterson concluded his bold defense of the oil giant by acting like an unpaid BP flack in trying to minimize the damage the spill would cost, comically asserting that “we would do well to remember that oil is as natural as water, and regularly seeps into the oceans naturally in quantities many times the size of the Deepwater Horizon spill” and that “the ocean can handle the oil.” You hear that, you crybaby fishermen? Oil is just as natural as the seafood you used to catch! Use your rational self-interest and come up with a way to make oil taste good! If people like eating jumbo shrimp, there’s no reason they can’t love eating globs of petroleum as well!

The Weekly Standard’s Andrew Wilson similarly sought to minimize the damage of the spill by resorting to General Buck Turgidson’s patented “it was just a single slip-up” defense.

“Until the explosion on April 20 that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon rig, oil companies had experienced only one significant spill in drilling hundreds of wells in the Gulf over a period of more than 60 years, including many in ultra-deep water,” he wrote. “It has taken just one disaster to call an exceptionally good safety record into question.”

Yeah, c’mon you guys! BP only destroyed one teensy little Gulf Coast! We’ve still got the whole Pacific Ocean to play with!

What all of these arguments share in common is their bizarre faith that BP is run by beings with superior intellects who are the only people in the world smart enough to plug the oil well they blew up. Harrison Schmidt at Pajamas Media painted BP as a noble group of besieged rugged individualists who could have certainly figured out how to clean up their own mess by now if not for the irrational and angry clamoring of the leaching federal government.

“It has been left to BP engineers and managers and to Gulf state officials to respond as best they can in a regulatory environment that is politically charged, incompetent, fearful, and hesitant,” he fumed. “Rather than allowing BP to stay focused only on solving the problems of the spill, Attorney General Holder now has launched a civil and criminal investigation! And let’s then follow with sending an unsupported bill to BP for $69 million!”

Heaven forbid we cause the people who destroyed the Gulf Coast any discomfort! Similarly, Blankley said that the government had meanly isolated an invaluable “partner” in trying to clean up the Gulf Coast while chiding Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano for “not be able to navigate a dingy across a yacht basin.”Anne Applebaum at the Washington Post accused Democrats of being “downright hostile” to the private sector and said that putting public pressure on BP to do more to clean up the spill was counterproductive since “BP's shareholders have already lost billions of dollars and BP's executives are motivated to find solutions faster than anyone in the White House ever could.”

It’s too bad that this sort of rational self-interest didn’t kick in earlier, back when the company was flaunting its own safety regulations to avoid paying for a protective liner in the well that would have cost a mere pittance compared to what the company will now have to pay for the Gulf cleanup. Why, it’s almost as if rampant greed isn’t producing optimal economic outcomes anymore! Who would have thought that would ever happen!

It was the Weekly Standard’s Wilson who took the “BP-as-Nietzschean-Supermen” meme to hilarious new heights, however, by declaring that the company’s own rational self-interest negated the need for any sort of government regulation.

“Clearly, it does not occur to [Obama] that the oil companies have a powerful motive to self-regulate,” he bitterly complains. “In light of the physical threat to their own workers and the huge potential damage to the long-term viability of their companies that awaits anything less than an exceptional safety performance.”

Ah, yes. If there’s one industry that comes to mind when I think of socially conscious, pro-labor policies, it’s the oil industry.

What these noxious defenses of BP reveal is the true elitism that lurks behind the phony populism of today’s Randroid right. After all, it was none other than Tea Party darling Rand Paul who called Obama’s mildly critical comments on BP “un-American,” since the Founding Fathers would have apparently frowned upon criticizing the actions of British companies. Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, meanwhile, has gone beyond rhetoric and took direct action to block a bill in the Senate. And it’s not at all surprising that BP has desperately reached out to former Bushies to help boost its public image, including Dick Cheney’s former press secretary Anne Womack-Koltan and former chief-of-staff Josh Bolten.

In other words, all the angry populism espoused by the Tea Party over the past two years cannot cover up an eternal political truth: When the rich say, “Hump!” the GOP says “How hard?”

Senior Senate Dem to unveil plans to overhaul offshore drilling

By Ben Geman - 06/19/10

Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) plans to unveil legislation next week that would overhaul federal oversight of offshore oil-and-gas drilling and impose new safety standards.

Bingaman is readying the bill ahead of plans by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to bring wide-ranging energy legislation to the floor as soon as July.

Bingaman spokesman Bill Wicker declined Friday to provide details about Bingaman’s bill, but suggested it will be expansive. “It will address all the things which are in the scope of our committee's jurisdiction,” Wicker said.
He said it would be released some time ahead of a Thursday hearing that will explore several pieces of legislation in response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Various lawmakers are exploring plans that would require stronger blowout prevention safeguards, improve response to spills and ensure that Interior Department regulators maintain an arm's-length relationship with oil company officials.

At least two other bills will be discussed at the Thursday Senate hearing. Sens. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) introduced a bill June 16 that requires companies drilling offshore to have peer-reviewed response plans in their leases that describe the “means and timeline” to contain and end oil spills, among other provisions.

The committee will also review a bill by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) that would codify several ethics requirements for federal drilling regulators.

It bars them from accepting gifts from energy companies developing federal resources and holding stock in the companies. The bill also aims to close the “revolving door” by preventing regulators from working for these companies for two years after leaving their jobs.

The plan is co-sponsored by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Bill Nelson (D-Fla.). It applies to employees of the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service or successor agencies.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar recently announced plans to carve up MMS into three separate agencies, citing “conflicting missions” at the agency that currently fosters offshore development, collects billions of dollars in royalty revenues and oversees safety and environmental rules.

Bingaman, at a June 9 hearing on offshore safety, said the fatal April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig laid bare the need for major reforms.

“The challenge for regulators, and for Congress in enacting statutory responsibilities and authorities to those regulators, is to put appropriate requirements in place ensuring that this horrible price is not paid again,” he said.

Bills in response to the oil spill are under construction on both sides of Capitol Hill.

Top members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee allege BP used risky procedures in designing and crafting its ill-fated Macondo well to save money, such as use of well casing methods with insufficient barriers to gas flow.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) outlined various House plans at a Thursday press conference.

“BP has represented that they had the capacity to drill safely, that they had the capacity to stop a blowout should one occur, and that they had the adequacy for cleanup. In all three cases, they really betrayed the American people with their comments,” Pelosi said.

“We cannot leave it to taking their word for it. So you will see some legislation come forth from the hearings that are happening in the Energy and Commerce Committee,” she said.

She noted that several committees are working on plans that change rules governing industry liability and damages from spills, clamp down on industry royalty holidays, improve the response to oil spills and safeguard the health of cleanup workers.

Spilling It on BP

The Revelations of Jeanne Pascal
By RUSSELL MOKHIBER

Jeanne Pascal knows BP.

Up until three months ago, when she retired, Jeanne Pascal was an attorney at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Her beat: debarment of BP.

For years, she worked on the BP case.

After all BP’s rap sheet was long and nasty – three convictions, an $84 million OSHA fine, and a deferred prosecution agreement.

Last year, Pascal was inclined to debar BP – strip it of its government contracts – because of its repeat violations.

But the Pentagon intervened.

“The Defense Energy Support Center told me that BP was supplying 80 percent of the fuel going to the U.S. military in Iraq,” Pascal told Corporate Crime Reporter.

“That’s a very substantial need.”

“We’re talking 2009,” Pascal said. “Had we debarred BP at that time, the Defense Department would have gotten an exception to the debarment and continued to do business with BP. We would have gotten a sister federal agency doing a substantial amount of business with a debarred contractor. And we would have had no oversight or no audit rights over that company.”

So, Pascal shifted to Plan B.

She was willing to enter into a compliance agreement – so that the government could audit BP’s operation to ensure that what happened on the North Slope – spills, slipshod safety – would be corrected.

She had cut a similar five year compliance agreement with BP after it was convicted of polluting on Endicott Island on the North Slope.

But that ended in 2005.

And now BP was in trouble again.

And Pascal offered BP another compliance agreement.

One problem – BP wanted no part of Pascal’s conditions.

First and foremost – that BP’s ombudsman – former federal judge Stanley Sporkin – be kept independent outside of BP.

No, BP said – we need our own ombudsman in house.

“Judge Stanley Sporkin’s office is providing ombudsman services to BP as a result of the House Energy and Commerce oversight hearings in 2007,” Pascal said.

“Then BP president Bob Malone promised that Judge Sporkin would restore the integrity to BP’s operation and restore the confidence of the American people. I wanted Judge Sporkin’s office to continue to do the job that BP promised Congress Judge Sporkin would do.”

“But BP wanted to terminate Judge Sporkin’s office and control that function by appointing a BP person to that position.”

Who did BP want to appoint as its in house ombudsman?

“I think his name was Tom McCormick – but I am not certain,” Pascal says.

Pascal says that the issue of keeping Sporkin as ombudsman for the workers was important to her because she recognized that BP was a “retaliatory company.”

In 2003, BP sought to end the first five year compliance agreement – which Pascal negotiated with BP outside counsel Carol Dinkins, a partner at Vinson & Elkins – end it early – at three to five years instead of five.

When BP workers on the North Slope caught wind that BP was in negotiations to end it early, they complained to Pascal and to BP’s probation officer – Mary Frances Barnes.

“Employees who came to me or to Stanley Sporkin with health safety and environmental complaints found themselves retaliated against,” Pascal said.
As a result, Pascal rejected BP’s plea to end the first five year compliance agreement early.

“If a company employee brings me information and wanted me to look into it, BP would conduct an investigation and try to find out who talked.”

“When they thought they had the answer, they would either demote that person, discipline that person or terminate them.”

Do you know for a fact that workers who went to you were retaliated against?

“Yes I do,” Pascal says.

How many?

“Enough to be of huge concern to me personally. I had about 35 people come to me under the first compliance agreement. And they were terrified that the company would get their names and retaliate against them. “

”People who work for BP are afraid of their employer. BP is a very retaliatory company.”

“BP has the money, talent and resources to correct all of these problems and do all of this right. But they have chosen not to do it.”

“What happened in the Gulf – it looks as if they took shortcuts to save a couple of millions of dollars – that tells me that they have not learned from their four encounters with the law, their millions in fines, the multiple civil lawsuits filed against them – they still have not gotten the message.”

“The amount of the fines and the bad press clearly has not been sufficient to stop their behavior.”

“If I were the debarment official now, I would look at this company and say – this company cannot be rehabilitated. They are not going to do it right. They have actively chosen not to do what they need to do to correct the problem.”

“What stunned me was that BP told us that their lines were in pristine top notch shape. The employees were telling us that the pipes were corroded and in bad shape. In fact, a year after the compliance agreement ended, there was a substantial spill on Prudhoe Bay. That was the 2006 leak. But that was a year after the first compliance agreement ended.”

A second issue was BP’s Health Safety and Environment (HSE) unit.

“BP Exploration Alaska under Doug Suttles had an HSE, which was an independent division with a vice president who reported to the President,” Pascal said.

“Following the 2006 oil spill, Doug Suttles folded HSE under the technical directorate under Tony Brock. So, you have an HSE manager reporting to Tony Brock. Tony Brock reported to the President.”

“I wanted HSE restored to a vice presidential position.”

“BP was saying that HSE didn’t deserve a top billing as a operational concern. So, that was another sticking point.”

Pascal was negotiation the second compliance agreement with BP’s general counsel Jack Lynch.

“He’s a man of great integrity,” Pascal said.

“However, Mr. Lynch is an attorney providing attorney services. And people making decisions on his advice were and are Lamar MacKay, Doug Suttles, Andy Inglis and Tony Hayward.”

“Lamar MacKay is the president of BP America.”

“Doug Suttles was the CEO of BP Exploration Alaska. He’s the guy who devalued HSE. They promoted him and sent him to Houston and gave him control over all exploration worldwide, including exploration in the Gulf.”

“Those four individuals were in control of what was happening and were in control when the Deepwater Horizon sank.”

Halliburton to make money off oil spill

Disaster capitalists

By Daniel Tencer
Friday, June 18th, 2010

Does a company that both builds oil rigs and cleans up oil spills have any motivation to prevent oil rig disasters?

That's the question some people in business and politics are asking themselves after Halliburton's purchase of an oil clean-up company 10 days before the Deepwater Horizon explosion that killed 11 workers and launched the worst oil spill in US history.

Some observers see a conspiracy in the actions of the company once headed by Dick Cheney. Halliburton, which built the cement casing for the Deepwater Horizon's drill, announced its purchase of Houston-based oilfield services company Boots and Coots for $240 million on April 9, just 11 days before the Deepwater Horizon explosion.

According to a report at the Christian Science Monitor Friday, Boots and Coots is now under contract with BP to help with the oil spill. The company "focuses on oil spill prevention and blowout response," CSM reports. Halliburton's purchase is not yet a done deal -- it's still awaiting regulatory approval, though few observers think the purchase won't pass muster.

"[Mergers and acquisitions] in the industrial and oil services sectors is totally normal," writes David Anderson at The Inspired Economist, "but the timing in this case, is not. Boots & Coots sure seems like the perfect company to own if it would soon become necessary to get more involved with some oil disaster. "Does this strike readers as a coincidence? If so, it’s a pretty lucky one for Halliburton."

But could Halliburton have known that an oil disaster was on the horizon, and planned in advance to profit from it? News reports indicate they could have.

The New York Times reported in May that BP was concerned about the rig's well casing -- which Halliburton worked on -- as early as June of 2009. The Times also reported that a Halliburton employee warned BP three weeks before the explosion that BP's use of cement for the well casing was "against [Halliburton's] best practices."

But even if the company's purchase of Boots and Coots was just a "lucky coincidence," there is still plenty about it to alarm observers. According to CSM, analysts are worried that a company like Halliburton will grow "complacent" in preventing disasters, because there is money to be made from cleaning up the mess -- and then rebuilding the oil rig.

“Working on both sides of the fence” is common in the oil industry, University of Louisiana professor Robert Gramling told CSM, but “it makes for a very complex decision-making environment that can become problematic."

At the very least, Halliburton's purchase should give the company a revenue boost. While Halliburton has been reporting plummeting revenue in recent quarters, Boots and Coots has been a business success story, with its revenue jumping from $11 million in 2000 to $209 million in 2008, before dropping slightly in 2009.

Addicted to Prosperity

The Real American Dependency
By ROBERT BRYCE

Back in 2006, George W. Bush declared that the US is “addicted to oil.” Since then, that phrase has been repeated ad nauseam by politicos on both the left and the right. But on Tuesday night, President Obama took the addiction trope to an entirely new level of inanity by saying “For decades, we’ve talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels.”

That sentence may cheer campaigners working for Greenpeace, but it demonstrates both the extreme poverty of our energy discussions and our politicians’ refusal to acknowledge the essential role that hydrocarbons play in the global economy.

By using the word “addiction” Obama implies that our consumption of coal, oil, and natural gas is somehow dirty, that we lack self-control, self-respect, or that we are somehow diseased. And of course, just as the recovering addict becomes a new man/woman, the America that frees itself from the evils of hydrocarbons will be made stronger and more employable. “The transition to clean energy,” Obama said, “has the potential to grow our economy and create millions of jobs.”

But forget about the president’s choice of words and consider, for just a moment, the math: nine out of ten units of energy consumed in the US and the rest of the world come from fossil fuels. On an average day, US consumption of coal, oil, and natural gas amounts to 41 million barrels of oil equivalent. That’s equal to the average daily oil output of five Saudi Arabias. Where will the US find such a huge amount of energy – and all of it carbon-free? Obama didn’t have that answer. Instead, he vaguely referred to the “scientists and researchers” who are “discovering clean energy technologies that someday will lead to entire new industries.”

That might be true – someday -- but entrepreneurs have been searching for a replacement for oil for decades. Despite many billions of dollars in investment, nothing comes close to oil in terms of flexibility, cost, or convenience. Despite that long history of failure to find a replacement for oil, Obama is now claiming that we not only need to replace oil, but we need to replace natural gas and coal, too. And he made that claim without ever using the words “global warming” or “carbon dioxide.”

Obama’s speech on Tuesday night revealed a political agenda that aims to use the blowout in the Gulf of Mexico as a rationale to pass an energy bill through Congress that includes some form of cap-and-trade that will increase consumers’ energy costs. Where’s the popular appeal for such an energy tax? There is none, not at a time when the US unemployment rate is near 10 percent and one in seven American homeowners with a mortgage is either delinquent or facing foreclosure.

Even more surprising (and disappointing) in Obama’s speech was the fact that he used the phrase “clean energy” six times, but did not once mention the fuels of the future: natural gas and nuclear. That’s a stunning omission given that those two sources offer the best near-term, low- or no-carbon options for the US and the rest of the world.

Obama’s speech reveals a president who is under intense political pressure to do something, anything, so that he can appear to be in control of a blowout that the government is incapable of stopping on its own. Rather than admit that the government must rely on BP to stop the blowout, rather than acknowledge the irreplaceable role that hydrocarbons play in the global energy economy, he fell back onto the hackneyed claim about “addiction.” Here’s the reality: we are not addicted to oil. Nor are we addicted to fossil fuels. We are addicted to prosperity.

Empty Presidential Platitudes

Obama and the Oil Hemorrhage
By DAVID MICHAEL GREEN

I really didn’t want to write another rant this week on the now yawn-inducing fact of Barack Obama’s irrelevance and presidential impotence (when, that is, it isn’t something far worse), but watching his first Oval Office address to the country the other night, I’m just amazed at the deterioration of this presidency and the new heights of abysmalosity (to coin a term) the guy has managed to scale.

Next to the state of the union address, such speeches are about the most powerful arrow that presidents have in their quiver, used for doing the most important thing associated with the modern presidency – namely, persuading. The speech was absolutely pathetic, to the point where even those of us sick and tired of being sick and tired with disappointment at this president still need to pay attention.

First of all, it was ridiculously late. Why has it taken this guy two months to directly address the country on what he is himself calling the worst environmental disaster in our history?

Unfortunately, this is part of a pattern with him. Paul Begala, one of the folks who gave us Bill Clinton, absolutely slobbers over Obama and his speech, seeing in its tardiness the wonder of The Great All-Seeing One (With A Plan) in action: “Thus began what is now a familiar play. He hangs back, holds back, resists fully engaging. His supporters get nervous, then edgy, then panicky. And then he swoops in to save the day. It happened in the campaign, on health care, and now, can we dare to hope it's happening on the BP disaster?”

Whoa, babe. Be still my heart. There’s just one problem (well, really, more like six, but we don’t have all day here) with this dribble that is being passed off as analysis: This behavioral pattern that gets Begala a little, ahem, too excited, is actually a total disaster. Both for the country and for the president. Begala looks on the healthcare initiative, for example, as some great victory. To my mind, it was an utter fiasco. The legislation produced is anemic at best, and at its core exacerbates the medicine-for-profit destructive system that we are currently foolish enough to employ. By stupidly negotiating with his antagonists, who then shockingly unanimously failed to vote for his legislation, Obama was rightly seen to have lost control of the process. By failing to articulate a moral vision, by declining to specify enemies to the well-being of the American public, and by deferring to the cesspool that is Congress to fill in the details, Obama also succeeded in winning a legislative ‘victory’ that has produced no political benefit for him or his party, and probably considerable baggage instead.

If this is what Begala means by “saving the day”, then I’ll go ahead and stick with having my days unsaved, thanks just the same. He’s right that this is Obama’s style, he’s just wrong about its implications. Obama did the same thing with his stimulus bill and his Afghan war policy, as well as less prominent issues like (not) pushing Israel towards peace or advocating for the unemployed. In every case, the substantive product is pathetic, and the president and his party are further damaged in the process. Poll ratings for both have gone down precipitously in the last year and a half, twenty points lower for the president, who came to office on inauguration day with enough goodwill to launch a minor new religion. His hang back, frosty-cool aloof, style of governing accounts for a considerable chunk of this dissipated support. Call me crazy, but that is not a modus operandi to be emulated, as Democrats will surely learn in November.

It is, however, one that has also been applied to the oil hemorrhage in the Gulf. Here, I think someone like Begala must have a truly excellent drug dealer in order to obtain the amazing hallucinogens he’s obviously been imbibing. Even if Obama donned his superman briefs and cape tomorrow, swam to the bottom of the Gulf, and tied the pipe into a knot, in what sense would this constitute saving the day? Eleven people are dead, untold numbers of birds, fish and other critters are suffering and dying, fishing and tourism industries have been hammered in four states, and the economy is likely to plunge in a region still suffering from the effects of the last president who couldn’t be bothered. Even assuming he could shut the thing off right now, how out of it would you have to be to consider that a victory?

A second problem with Obama’s speech is that he just flat-out lies. When he tells us to “make no mistake, that were fighting this spill with everything we’ve got”, he neglects to mention that his administration has been assisting BP in covering up the magnitude of the crisis, in blocking press coverage, and in handling it whatever way the company wants. The United States federal government under Obama didn’t even bother to prevent BP from using highly toxic dispersant that is banned in BP’s home country. The administration just sort of asked them not to do it, whereupon BP reminded them of who was really in charge, and then went out spewed the damn poison. Obama also lies about his own complicity in turning the Minerals Management Service, the Interior Department, and the federal government into agents of corporate plunder. They knew what was going on in MMS, and they didn’t fix it. Indeed, you don’t appoint a guy like Ken Salazar to the cabinet if you remotely intend for that garbage to be fixed. Obama also repeated his lie about the drilling moratorium in his big speech this week, just as he lied about the known dangers of offshore drilling a few months ago when he announced his new “Drill, baby, drill” policy. We know that, since the moratorium has been in place, his administration has already issued at least seven new permits and dished out at least five environmental waivers for more projects like the Deepwater Horizon. Moratorium? Not even close. Moribund? Yeah, that’s more like it.

In his speech, Obama was brazen enough to say, “A few months ago, I approved a proposal to consider new, limited offshore drilling under the assurance that it would be absolutely safe – that the proper technology would be in place and the necessary precautions would be taken. That obviously was not the case in the Deepwater Horizon rig, and I want to know why.” It’s hard to even know where to start with that construction, so packed is it with dishonesty. Apart from the most significant lie – the fiction that he was duped – he doesn’t tell us who lied to him or why. He doesn’t tell us why he didn’t do sufficient due diligence as president to know better, before risking our lives and livelihoods on private oil profits taken from national resources. He doesn’t explain why, two months after Deepwater Horizon blew up, he supposedly still hasn’t by now obtained an answer to his own question of why it happened. He doesn’t tell us why he didn’t clean up the government agencies charged with making offshore drilling “absolutely safe” (don’t even get me started on that one), why he has been allowing drilling permits without required environmental impact reports, and why he continues to issue new permits even under his faux moratorium, and even though he doesn’t yet know what went wrong. This is pathetic. Like many a president before him, Obama has been reduced to stacking lies upon lies to justify his policies and hide his crimes and those of his sponsors.

And then he lectures us in this speech for our “lack of political courage and candor”?!?! Is that supposed to be funny?

This is a speech, third, that was just dripping in empty platitudes and filled with Obama’s recent and pathetic attempt to cowboy up and demonstrate presidential machismo. How is it possible that a presidential speech in 2010 could still make use of the most shop-worn of rhetorical devices in existence, the hoary ‘we-landed-a-man-on-the-moon-so-we-can-do-this-too’ assertion? Man, was sick of hearaing that one And just when you thought no president could look more idiotic than George W. Bush trying to convince us (and especially himself) that he possessed a courage that was instead so manifestly lacking, here comes Barack Obama to ‘kick some ass’. Are there actually political strategists in the White House – people who draw a salary paid by you and me – who believe that this pathetic speech will rally the country to adopt a new energy policy and change personal behaviors? If so, I say give that money to charity instead of paying for decision-making of this quality. As with the healthcare legislation or the stimulus bill, the president failed to specify one particular policy that he demands Congress adopt, or one particular behavior he expects members of the public to change. He gave us nothing to rally around, and did not ask us to rally around anything. Nobody even knows what he would do if it were entirely up to him to do what he wanted.

But what we do know, remarkably, is that President Deference will be delighted to chat with anybody to consider their policy prescriptions, a fourth set absurdities that emerge from the speech. Somehow, Barack Obama still believes that it’s a good idea to negotiate with people who are flat-out enemies of the public interest, and even announced enemies of his presidency, including all forms of corporate marauders and a political party that has overtly indicated its intention to oppose everything Obama does, regardless. So we have to listen to more mealy-mouthed, knock-kneed, do-nothing, embarrassing tripe, like this blather from the speech: “So I am happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party – as long they seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels. Some have suggested raising efficiency standards in our buildings like we did in our cars and trucks. Some believe we should set standards to ensure that more of our electricity comes from wind and solar power. Others wonder why the energy industry only spends a fraction of what the high-tech industry does on research and development – and want to rapidly boost our investments in such research and development. All of these approaches have merit, and deserve a fear hearing in the months ahead.”

Oh, please. Is there any possibility you could just shut up and govern? Any chance you could take your mandate and put it to work protecting the public, while permitting the Republicans to fulfill the mandate they got to go sit in Siberia for a while? Any chance that you could for once not bring predators to the negotiating table while leaving those who fight for the public interest standing at the White House gate? Any chance you could do away with negotiating tables altogether, and just take some serious actions to benefit the country – you know, like actually using the powers of your office?

After all, it was you yourself who said: “But the one approach I will not accept is inaction. The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is too big and too difficult to meet. You see, the same thing was said about our ability to produce enough planes and tanks in World War II. The same thing was said about our ability to harness the science and technology to land a man safely on the surface of the moon.” And thus we see that in addition to his fifth problem – that a once great orator has now been reduced, in his only Oval Office speech to date, to the most tired of analogies – the truth is that great things happen in America in significant measure because of gutsy leadership by presidents. Neither of those words seems remotely in his vocabulary, however. He might want to try them out, though. If it’s not too late for him by now, that is, having spent his political capital on ardently maintaining the status quo.

Obama’s speech the other night was abysmal for all of the five reasons catalogued above, but it wasn’t until he got to the end that I truly wanted to hurl. His sixth crime was unbelievably obnoxious. It wasn’t enough to end his speech, as they all do, calling for god to bless America. Instead, Obama spent the last major chunk of his speech riffing on the wonders of religious faith. This included the bizarre concept (but then, hey, it’s religion) regarding even the limited nature of what we expect from the magic deity: “The blessing is not that God has promised to remove all obstacles and dangers. The blessing is that He is with us always.” So, do I have this straight? We’re not asking god to make the bad things go away, but instead just to experience them with us together? Silently? And invisibly?

Obama ends his great turn to the spiritual with these words: “Tonight, we pray for that courage. We pray for the people of the Gulf. And we pray that a hand may guide us through the storm towards a brighter day.”

So this is what it has come to now, huh? A Democratic president, with all the power of the presidency at his disposal, refusing to act, refusing to be bold, refusing to lead, and now praying for the courage that he lacks, and calling on us to pray to some unseen fantasy in the sky for a solution to turn off this oily catastrophe in the Gulf? (Why the deity turned it on in the first place is, of course, not discussed.)

If I had to draw a portrait of the absolute depth of presidential impotence, that would be it. Hammered by adversaries, never punching back, afraid to seek real solutions to major problems, slow to even speak, and reliant upon the lamest of historical analogies to make a case before a tuned-out nation. And now, for the coup de grâce, kneeling on the train tracks, asking for Zeus or Ba’al or Jesus or some other mythical dude in the clouds to come rescue us from our drought or pestilence or famine.

Christ, if we’re down now to begging our deities for solutions to our problems, what’s the point of having a president anyhow?

We can be stupid and frightened pagans on our own.

We’re actually quite good at it.

BP and the English Mind

(I hope by posting this I don't offend any of my British friends, because that is not my intent. I just thought this was an interesting article, and I haven't heard much about what the British citizens feel about this catastrophe except for what I've read in the Guardian. No offense is intended.--jef)

***

Poor Britain
By CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI

Everything is soothed by oil, and this is the reason why divers send out small quantities of it from their mouths, because it smooths every part which is rough.


Pliny the Elder, Natural History

The British anger is really over the fact that Americans lack the stiff upper lip for which the British are so famous. Instead of just sucking it up and putting on a brave face we seem to be engaged in a constant state of whining and it’s hard for the British not to believe that it’s nothing more than wanting to make them and one of their prized corporate citizens look bad.

In fairness to the Americans, one has to observe that the oil being spilled (the word that is consistently used to describe something that never having been contained except by nature, was hardly capable of being “spilled”) is having a devastating effect on the environment and its inhabitants. Millions of people are having their lives irreversibly altered if not shattered with no prospect of returning to a pre-spill way of life during their lifetimes, presidential promises to the contrary notwithstanding. The environment will be irreversibly altered for hundreds of square miles with no prospect that the life contained therein will recover within the foreseeable future.

And it’s not that BP (referred to as “British Petroleum” by some commentators, in an attempt, the British think, to create more anger towards their country) did not do everything within its power, sort of, to protect against the very disaster that occurred. So thorough was BP that in the response plan that it furnished the government describing how it would deal with disasters, it said it had plans to protect “Sensitive Biological Resources” in the Gulf. It defined those resources to include “Sea lions, Seals, Sea Otters and Walruses”. That shows an amazing thoroughness since sightings of any of those creatures in the Gulf have, in recent centuries, been extremely rare. (During the recent congressional hearings in which executives from other companies that were drilling in the Gulf testified, it was disclosed that many of the response plans prepared by them also promised to protect those animals.)

BP also identified its “primary equipment providers in the Gulf of Mexico Region for deployment of spill response resources on a 24 hour, 7 days a week basis.” One of those providers, identified in a link on the proposal, was to a Japanese Home Shopping site but that was just a mistake and does not suggest BP was negligent. The fact that it identified them was significant even though when the event occurred the providers, including the Home Shopping Network were, contrary to the representation, unavailable. In its response plan it also says it has “personnel, equipment, and materials in sufficient quantities and recovery capacity to respond effectively to oil spills from the “worst case discharge scenarios” covered by the plan and it is almost certain that it believed that.

A rarely mentioned fact about the response plan is that it is almost 600 pages in length. That, too, speaks to the thoroughness of BP’s work.

Considering all of the foregoing, it is easy to see why the British are so upset by criticism of the company and its consequential damage to BP’s reputation.

BP is a very important British company. It has historically paid really good dividends and its stock is widely held by teachers’ unions, pension funds, etc. Boris Johnson, the mayor of London spoke for the British public when he expressed worry about “anti-British rhetoric” and “name-calling” from American politicians. George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer said it was important to remember the “economic value BP brings to people in Britain and America.” (The Americans will be forgiven if that benefit has been somewhat eclipsed by the disaster.) In addition, BP pays close to $1.4 billion in British taxes and any diminution in that amount would harm the British economy.

The Conservative peer, Lord Tebbit, was quoted in the New York Times as calling the American response “a crude, bigoted, xenophobic display of partisan, political, presidential petulance against a multinational company.” Sir Chrisopher Meyer, a former British ambassador to the U.S. said that the British government “must put down a marker with the U.S. administration that the survival and long term prosperity of BP is a vital British interest.” That is easy for Americans to overlook when contemplating the long-term survival and prosperity of residents of the gulf coast.

I am taking the concerns of the Brits to heart. I will, as I hope this column proves, say nothing but nice things about BP. And irrespective of what happens to the people who live on the Gulf coast, I join BP’s president in expressing the hope that he can get his life back. I am sure this has been an unpleasant and stressful time for him.

More than a Sea Change

Gulf Oil Spill
by Jean-Michel Cousteau

In the midst of desperate attempts to stem the flow of oil and the agony of waiting to understand its effects, we are left with simple questions like what exactly is happening to the waters of the Gulf? And how quickly can we move from dependence on oil to a sustainable, renewable energy policy?

Absolutely no one knows the damage being done throughout the mile-deep water column. Crude oil and gas are gushing out at a few thousand pounds per square inch of pressure. These very complex chemicals hit ice-cold water and travel one mile up to the surface and warmer water. This is similar to an oil refinery process where temperature and pressure convert crude oil into all sorts of other compounds. What are those compounds? Which ones are toxic? Which ones dissolve in water, which sink and which come to the surface? I truly doubt anyone knows fully what is happening.

On the subject of unknown chemicals, dispersants are being used in massive quantities. Dispersants are known to be harmful to aquatic life and some scientists believe that these chemicals are likely to be more harmful to organisms than is much of the oil. In addition, dispersants only disperse; they don't break down or detoxify. So, here we are adding more pollutants to an already massive amount of pollution. Why? Only to make the oil less visible!

We all know this is a catastrophe that should not have happened. We have not been prudent and we have not been diligent when it comes to oil drilling and extraction. The technology is limited and the oversight is inadequate. But now we have the consequences to live with.

I was at the Exxon Valdez 11-million-gallon oil spill and watched rocks being scrubbed and birds cleaned by 12,000 people using paper towels. Over 21 years later, we still hear stories of the ecological impact and lives forever changed, for the worse. Some estimates claim the Gulf spill may range from half that of the Exxon Valdez to the equivalent of the Valdez spill every four to seven days.

Of course we’re alarmed, but the present hysteria angers me. How many times must we be surprised by the latest catastrophe? Will only a Doomsday event motivate us? It is crystal clear to me that we need to stand back and look at our attitudes and make fundamental changes. Crisis management is no management at all. Crises are absolutely inevitable if we continue to ignore the FACT that nature is far more complex and unpredictable than we can imagine.

We cannot change what has taken place but we must learn from it.

We must embrace a completely different perspective of how we work in, exploit and manage the natural world, far beyond simply the search for new technology. We need a new philosophy about the appropriate use of technology and our relationship with nature. We must remember that it is the natural world that keeps our planet habitable, and so far, most of our activities undermine the health and vitality of nature.

We need to come to terms with the fact that nature is far more complex than we understand and technology is far more limited than we want to believe. Knowing the world is unpredictable means that our technologies need to be designed with multiple safeguards and multiple back up systems. We need to anticipate the worst, plan everything to prevent it and then prepare another plan for when that prevention fails. Constantly being surprised by catastrophe is stupid because unpredictable events in nature are totally predictable.

Actually, the entire process of evolution is based on the certainty that unpredictable events will occur and that back-up systems need to be in place to ensure the business of staying alive continues. This is the lesson from 3.5 billion years of evolutionary progress. Diversity and redundancy are safeguards against change. In fact, the existence of sexual reproduction ensures that there are multiple back-up systems, manifested as each individual being slightly different, as our parent’s genetic information is combined in unique ways for whatever the future may hold.

We all know that for now, we must stop the leak, clean up the mess, monitor the impacts, stay calm, and stick to the facts. We need to take care of the thousands and thousands of people whose lives are being destroyed in a domino effect, and make sure the political, industry and management people who were incompetent are held responsible economically and politically.

Finally, we need to accept the fact that some areas of our planet are too valuable and too risky for us to meddle in. I have spent much of my life on and in the sea. I know it well enough to know that I don't know it at all. It is unpredictable and powerful. Working in the ocean is dangerous business. At great depths, like a mile below the surface, it is beyond challenging. The pressure is otherworldly. The temperature approaches freezing, cold enough to make methane gas combine with water in the consistency of a smoothie. There is zero sunlight. This is close to an impossible environment in which to work. We knew this from the beginning. Agencies responsible for permits, to oversee technological security and back up systems, and BP itself, knew these challenges; sadly, the ultimate test of any proposed fail-safe system is sometimes the reality of a disaster. I believe drilling for oil in these regions is inappropriate across the globe, period.

Why would we treat the alien and hostile environment of the deep ocean with any less caution that we treat space, where we go only with multiple back-up systems?

We need to implement the precautionary principle, which requires the user to prove that any action taken will not cause harm. If we are not convinced, then the project should be stopped, whatever the profit. The Hippocratic oath, “First, do no harm,” must be applied a priori to our natural environment. When it comes to any action with a consequence to the environment, we must assume any industry is guilty until it proves itself innocent.

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill will be a tragedy of massive proportions to the natural world no matter what. Our only redemption is to make it the catalyst for a philosophical change that will protect us all in the future. For starters, in the meantime, we need an across the board inventory, from businesses and industry, to do what we can to reduce our need for oil.

No one has been harmed by extracting energy from sunshine and wind, tides, waves, currents, or from the temperature differential between warm surface and deep ocean water. In comparison, these seem risk-free. I, for one, am willing to take the chance.

Rape and Spillage

Jun 15, 2010
By Robert Scheer

What’s with the president’s war analogy on the oil spill? It’s as if some alien force, “The Invasion of the Slippery Sludge,” suddenly attacked us. “Abroad, our brave men and women in uniform are taking the fight to al-Qaida,” President Barack Obama said Tuesday in his White House speech, “and tonight, I’ve returned from a trip to the Gulf Coast to speak with you about the battle we’re waging against an oil spill that is assaulting our shores and our citizens.”

What nonsense. The oil was minding its own business until some multinational corporations, enabled by a dysfunctional government regulatory regime, decided to wage war on the ecological balance of the oceans by employing technology that they were not prepared to control. Cleaning up the oil spill mess we made by raping the environment to satiate our consumer gluttony is not a glorious battle against evil but rather obligatory penance for the profound error of our ways.

You wound Mother Nature by punching a hole deep in her pristine ocean where you have no business going and when she bleeds uncontrollably you dare blame her for the assault? This from a president who shortly before this disaster had given the oil companies permission to pillage in the deep seas at will. At least now he admits to having been extremely naive in his belief that they knew what they were doing:

“A few months ago, I approved a proposal to consider new, limited offshore drilling under the assurance that it would be absolutely safe—that the proper technology would be in place and the necessary precautions would be taken. That obviously was not the case on the Deepwater Horizon rig, and I want to know why.”

He already knows why! It’s the same ideological obsession that led to the deregulation of the banking industry based on the assumption that the unfettered pursuit of multinational corporation profits would somehow serve the public good. In every area of federal governance the story is the same; the mammoth corporations, through their lobbyists and campaign contributions, end up controlling the government agencies ostensibly regulating the activities of the military/industrial, health, financial and communications complexes. Why be surprised that the oil conglomerates are also in bed with their pretend Washington regulators?

Obviously Obama cannot be blamed for the bipartisan endorsement of the Reagan Revolution’s siren song, a call to make the world safe for multinational corporations. The radical anti-regulation campaign—endorsed by Bill Clinton as well as the father-and-son Bush team—corrupted rather than improved the efficiency of the entire private sector, and what happened with the oil industry was the rule and not the exception.

In explaining the failure of the Minerals Management Service, responsible for regulating the oil drillers, Obama stated: “Over the last decade, this agency has become emblematic of a failed philosophy that views all regulation with hostility—a philosophy that says corporations should be allowed to play by their own rules and police themselves. At this agency, industry insiders were put in charge of industry oversight. Oil companies showered regulators with gifts and favors, and were essentially allowed to conduct their own safety inspections and write their own regulations.”

That damning indictment of the corporate corruption of our political process should stand as a cautionary tale to those like the majority in those red states now suffering so because of the offshore drilling of which their voters previously approved. Hopefully they, and the president who catered to such impulses, will take away from this very costly mess a justifiable skepticism about the risk assessments of plunderers who treat natural treasures as nothing more than potential profit centers.

The public goes along because, as with the jobs created by military spending and the false wealth of financial bubbles, it is blinded by lavishly funded corporate PR to the true costs of such reckless corporate behavior. It is understandable that folks struggling to get by would fall for that line, but it is inexcusable when the political elite in Washington that know better goes along with such chicanery.

The war that needs to be fought and won is against corporate dominance of every important aspect of our political culture. I hope this disaster, its impact revised upward by the government on Tuesday to represent an Exxon Valdez-size spill of oil into the Gulf every four days, will facilitate that. The difference between the new estimate, 60,000 barrels of oil a day, and BP’s original claim of 5,000 barrels a day is just another example of the systemic corporate deceit that has characterized this immense catastrophe. This is the wakeup call to fight corporate arrogance that we, and our president, desperately needed.

Planet Killer?

(In my gut, I have the worst feeling about this oil spill, about how truly bad it is. At the least, it will cause many species of animals to go extinct, cause many businesses on the coast to go under, and ruin the Gulf of Mexico for decades. But the worst case scenario is that it kills our planet. They drilled deeper than anyone has ever drilled in history. Russia did the same thing, but on dry land. This is the first time anyone was ever foolish enough to try and drill 40,000 ft deep under a mile of seawater. How bizarre is it if this is what starts a chain reaction that leads to the death of the planet by 2012? I don't buy into prophesies of any kind, but wouldn't it be ironic..? Shit...-jef)


BP oil spill planet killer
Michael Webster, Investigative Reporter
June 16, 2010

Millions of listeners heard on the popular Coast to Coast Am radio show recently that the BP oil spill is a planet killer. Talk show host Ian Punnett welcomed two guests, Jim Bell during the second hour and Minister Lindsey Williams in the 3rd hour, for a discussion on the Gulf oil crisis as well as alternative energy. In the second hour, Minister Lindsey Williams, who once served as a chaplain for the oil companies operating in Alaska, shared what he claimed to be the "real story" behind the Gulf oil crisis. He explained that, in the 1970's, Russia drilled over 40,000 feet into the ground and discovered abiotic oil, i.e. oil which replenishes itself via an as-yet-unknown natural chemical process. The off-shore drilling done by BP in the Gulf of Mexico, Williams said, was their attempt to create a similar super-deep well and access this same abiotic oil. However, according to his sources, BP insiders and U.S. Government officials the pressure from this pocket of abiotic oil in the Gulf was so great that it burst all the safety valves on the floating platform.

Williams went on to allege that oil industry insiders believe that the only method to stop the flow of oil in the Gulf is via a nuclear device and even that has potential for catastrophic results. Bell, who rejoined the conversation in the fourth hour, agreed with Williams about the potential danger of using a nuke to thwart the spill because it could "pop the bubble" and cause all of the underground oil to emerge simultaneously. On the potential long term effects of the crisis if the flow of oil is not stopped, Bell speculated that it could reach Europe within three years through the Gulf Stream.

Additionally, Williams observed that the overwhelming amount of dangerous gasses, which are also being released from the disaster, could be swept along the East Coast should a hurricane arrive in the Gulf. Williams stated that those same dangerous pollutants are in the air in alarming amounts and getting more dangerous everyday. He further indicated that the oil pressure coming up the oil deep water pipe was running between 20,000 and 70,000 PSI. Last night on the Coast to coast Am show Science Advisor Richard C. Hoagland commented on the oil spill in the Gulf. He warned listeners that an even worse catastrophe could be looming if a giant gas bubble that has formed at the site of the leak on the ocean floor should blow. Hoagland said the pressure in the pipe is 100,000 or more lbs of pressure per squire inch or PSI. Both agreed that BP nor anyone else knows how to shop this amount of pressure coming from the largest and deepest underwater oil well on earth.

Williams said "that the dangers from this run away well is a planet killer and we may not be able to stop it." Mankind could be doomed.

Bell, who calls himself an "ecological designer," blamed the oil spill on a corporate culture which focuses on making a profit by way of "taking short cuts" that, ultimately, result in situations such as the one in the Gulf of Mexico. He put forward the notion that the ideal scenario to break free of corporate controlled energy is to aggressively pursue efficient solutions which would make the transition away from oil easier and faster. Using solar power as an example, he theorized that, with good leadership, it would take about 40 years for such a transition to take place.

According to writer Jose Lugo in the movie Armageddon, there was a scene where Steve Buscemi who played the part of a reluctant-hero-astronaut and while sitting and waiting for liftoff, he uttered a profound philosophical statement;

"Hey Harry, you know we're sitting on 4 million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder, makes you feel good doesn't it"?

In the movie, this statement was made by an oil drilling roughneck to other roughnecks; but it says so much about the oil business and today's corporate culture. It's the reckless, do it quick, cheap and dirty routine.

Lugo went on to say that the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster is a case in point. The disaster started with an explosion that nobody was ready for. Then the oil companies (BP and Transatlantic) discovered that they had absolutely "NO PLANS" to handle the unfolding disaster, they had to think things up as they went along. They had only one shut off station in one location, that malfunctioned! Reckless, quick, cheap and dirty!

Williams said that the amount of oil gushing from the well is much greater than BP and the amount the Government is reporting as only one million gallons a day. Both guests surmised that the more accurate amount gushing from the well is in the millions of barrels. Why didn't they have shut off valves along the pipe line? They did but all the system was overwhelmed by the great pressure of the blow out.

But the most anguishing question remains, "Why didn't they have a back-up plan?" Things happen in the ocean--hurricanes, sinking ships, equipment breakdowns, Murphy's Law etc.. Why didn't they have plans for these possible disasters? Because no commercial company has ever drilled that deep before this is a super-deep well with a mile of sea water on top of it. The pressures alone at those depths are enormous and may have contributed to the failures.

During the program it come out that there are multiple holes in the pipe and that more oil is gushing from fissures as far away from the well head as 20 miles.

Hoagland said that at the sea bed at the well for miles around it is a bubble and it is growing, believed to be pressure from a huge natural gas build up that could blow at any time and kill many there and in the general area working to stop the rush of the largest out of control oil leak that man has ever known.

Adulthood

U.S. Supreme Court Rejects Workplace Privacy Rights

Supreme Court Decision: Ontario v. Quon
6/17/2010

U.S. Supreme Court Rejects Workplace Privacy Rights Claim For Police Officers, Public Employees In Text Messages, Emails

WASHINGTON, DC — In a unanimous ruling in City of Ontario, Calif. v. Quon, the United States Supreme Court has upheld the search of a police officer's personal messages on a government-owned pager, saying it did not violate his constitutional rights. Pointing out that the workplace has increasingly become an extension of the home, where people spend a significant percentage of their lives, undertaking personal as well as work-related tasks, attorneys for The Rutherford Institute had urged the Court to recognize that when public employees are given assurances that their communications will remain private under certain circumstances, they retain an expectation of privacy under the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment.

The court's ruling is available at www.supremecourt.gov.

"All Americans—whether at home or in the workplace—have a right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures, even as it pertains to communications on their pagers, cell phones or other personal devices," stated John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute. "Unfortunately, the Court's decision undermines this important Fourth Amendment principle by allowing government employers to evade these constitutional protections."

The case before the Court arose from an audit of pager text messages undertaken by the City of Ontario's Police Department in 2002. The audit, initiated after some police officers exceeded their monthly total text character limits, revealed the content of certain personal and sensitive messages. The audit was carried out without the officers' consent, despite the fact that a superior officer had assured one of the officers, Jeff Quon, that so long as he paid any charges for exceeding the monthly character limits, no audit or search of the electronic communications would take place.

Insisting that the audit constituted a search in violation of the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures, Sergeant Quon filed a civil rights claim against the City. After a jury ruled in favor of the City, Quon appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which reversed the lower court's judgment. The appellate court ruled that Quon had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the content of the text messages by virtue of the assurance that they would remain private if any overage charges were paid by the officer. It also found that the search conducted by the City was "excessively intrusive in light of the noninvestigatory object of the search...[and] based on our conclusion that Quon's reasonable expectation of privacy in those messages was not outweighed by the government's interest."

In reversing the Ninth's Circuit ruling, the Supreme Court noted that it had purposely avoided a broader ruling about employees' expectations of privacy when using equipment provided by their employers because of rapid and unpredictable changes in technology.