We all live in a yellow submarine.

[stilltrucking]

Obama has halted any new offshore drilling projects unless rigs have new safeguards to prevent another disaster.

Deepwater Horizon well lacked $500,000 shut off valve safeguard required in almost every country except U.S.


Rigs in Norway and Brazil are equipped with the remote-control devices, which can trigger the blowout preventers from a lifeboat in the event the electric cables connecting the valves to the drilling rig are damaged.

While U.S. regulators have called the acoustic switches unreliable and prone, in the past, to cause unnecessary shut-downs, Inger Anda, a spokeswoman for Norway's Petroleum Safety Authority, said the switches have a good track record in the North Sea. "It's been seen as the most successful and effective option," she said.

The manufacturers of the equipment, including Kongsberg Maritime AS, Sonardyne Ltd. and Nautronix PLC, say their equipment has improved significantly over the past decade.

The Brazilian government began urging the use of the remote-control equipment in 2007, after an extensive overhaul of its safety rules following a fire aboard an oil platform killed 11 people, said Raphael Moura, head of safety division at Brazil's National Petroleum Agency. "Our concern is both safety and the environment," he said.

http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot ... acked.html

Estimated six billion gallons of oil in that well. Estimated leaked so far anywhere from two million to four million gallons.

Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons.

[hester_prynne]

In the TOWN!!!!!
Where I was born.
Lived a ma a an
Who sailed the sea
And he TOLD!!!!
Me of his life,
In a yell el oh
Submarine!
Aha!
H

[stilltrucking]

"Sky of blue and sea of green,"

Thanks
That song always cheers me up.

I am not depressed
I am so grateful I don't live in a socialist country like Norway.
I am proud to live in America
The land of rugged individualists
Where we don't need no stinking cut off valves.
Five hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money.
Makes sense to me.

[Steve Plonk]

Still truckin, what nice circular reasoning! Sounds satirical.
However, $500,000 dollars for a safety shut-off valve
on an oil platform well is just a drop in the bucket to oil
companies, like BP (British Petroleum), who make millions
of profits per year. Someday, one of our own international
companies like ExxonMobil will have another spill and have
to pay the cost. If there are no safety measures, you get
a large oil slick to clean up which will cost quite a bit more
than the pittance of $500,000. The Alaskan Coast is still
recovering from the "Exxon Valdez" oil spill.

When the seas die down, I'd say it is time for all drilling
companies to retrofit their oil platforms with these cut off valves...
As a result of increased costs, soon we'll another increase at the gas pumps shortly.
We have lots of BP stations around here.

[stilltrucking]

Exxon paid for the spill? Are you sure about that? Seems to me that the case dragged on for twenty years and was settled for a pittance.

Since the Exxon Valdez there was a law passed to limit damages for one spill to 75 million dollars.

Oil companies make millions? Did you mean billions?

I just needed to talk about it. Maybe some good will come out of it.

Obama has halted any new offshore drilling projects unless rigs have new safeguards to prevent another disaster.

Maybe it will be like oil on troubled waters.

[mnaz]

1) we gotta get off oil (onto what?)

2) put the damn cut-off valves on and quit **** ing around. Exxon made $36 billion profit in one quarter in 2008 for godssake. I don't think they're strapped for funds.

[hester_prynne]

They thought they could get away with being cheap to get rich.
Now it's everybody else's fault.
Pretty soon, well, dammit, it'll be, if the ocean weren't so deep this wouldn't have happened!!!!!
Everyone wants' to eat the cake, but no one wants to do the work to make it.
That's the current ideology in the USA.
H

[stilltrucking]

I think it is about hubris too. Bon Voyage the unsinkable Titanic.

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair. —Douglas Adams

Sex & Drugs & the Spill
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: May 9, 2010


“Obama’s Katrina”: that was the line from some pundits and news sources, as they tried to blame the current administration for the gulf oil spill. It was nonsense, of course. An Associated Press review of the Obama administration’s actions and statements as the disaster unfolded found “little resemblance” to the shambolic response to Katrina — and there has been nothing like those awful days when everyone in the world except the Bush inner circle seemed aware of the human catastrophe in New Orleans.

Yet there is a common thread running through Katrina and the gulf spill — namely, the collapse in government competence and effectiveness that took place during the Bush years.

Yet there is a common thread running through Katrina and the gulf spill — namely, the collapse in government competence and effectiveness that took place during the Bush years.

The full story of the Deepwater Horizon blowout is still emerging. But it’s already obvious both that BP failed to take adequate precautions, and that federal regulators made no effort to ensure that such precautions were taken.

For years, the Minerals Management Service, the arm of the Interior Department that oversees drilling in the gulf, minimized the environmental risks of drilling. It failed to require a backup shutdown system that is standard in much of the rest of the world, even though its own staff declared such a system necessary. It exempted many offshore drillers from the requirement that they file plans to deal with major oil spills. And it specifically allowed BP to drill Deepwater Horizon without a detailed environmental analysis.

Surely, however, none of this — except, possibly, that last exemption, granted early in the Obama administration — surprises anyone who followed the history of the Interior Department during the Bush years.

For the Bush administration was, to a large degree, run by and for the extractive industries — and I’m not just talking about Dick Cheney’s energy task force. Crucially, management of Interior was turned over to lobbyists, most notably J. Steven Griles, a coal-industry lobbyist who became deputy secretary and effectively ran the department. (In 2007 Mr. Griles pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his ties to Jack Abramoff.)

Given this history, it’s not surprising that the Minerals Management Service became subservient to the oil industry — although what actually happened is almost too lurid to believe. According to reports by Interior’s inspector general, abuses at the agency went beyond undue influence: there was “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity” — cocaine, sexual relationships with industry representatives, and more. Protecting the environment was presumably the last thing on these government employees’ minds.

Now, President Obama isn’t completely innocent of blame in the current spill. As I said, BP received an environmental waiver for Deepwater Horizon after Mr. Obama took office. It’s true that he’d only been in the White House for two and half months, and the Senate wouldn’t confirm the new head of the Minerals Management Service until four months later. But the fact that the administration hadn’t yet had time to put its stamp on the agency should have led to extra caution about giving the go-ahead to projects with possible environmental risks.

And it’s worth noting that environmentalists were bitterly disappointed when Mr. Obama chose Ken Salazar as secretary of the interior. They feared that he would be too friendly to mineral and agricultural interests, that his appointment meant that there wouldn’t be a sharp break with Bush-era policies — and in this one instance at least, they seem to have been right.

In any case, now is the time to make that break — and I don’t just mean by cleaning house at the Minerals Management Service. What really needs to change is our whole attitude toward government. For the troubles at Interior weren’t unique: they were part of a broader pattern that includes the failure of banking regulation and the transformation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a much-admired organization during the Clinton years, into a cruel joke. And the common theme in all these stories is the degradation of effective government by antigovernment ideology.

Mr. Obama understands this: he gave an especially eloquent defense of government at the University of Michigan’s commencement, declaring among other things that “government is what ensures that mines adhere to safety standards and that oil spills are cleaned up by the companies that caused them.”

Yet antigovernment ideology remains all too prevalent, despite the havoc it has wrought. In fact, it has been making a comeback with the rise of the Tea Party movement. If there’s any silver lining to the disaster in the gulf, it is that it may serve as a wake-up call, a reminder that we need politicians who believe in good government, because there are some jobs only the government can do.

NYTIMESdotcom

I don't know what mnaz. Ethanol is a boondoggle. imo


I am thinking about that poem of Constantine's called The Wash.
It is comforting for me to think in terms of geologic time. "This too shall pass" I have to search for that poem. Maybe most likely it has nothing to do with this.
Here it is.
http://www.studioeight.tv/phpbb/viewtop ... light=wash

[Lightning Rod]

Ring Around the Tub--Gulf Oil Spill

It is neither new nor unusual for Man's industry to despoil the Earth. We have seen it for centuries. Some ecologists assert that the Sahara Desert exists due to overgrazing of the once lush savannah of Northern Africa. The deforestation of Europe is blamed for worldwide climate change. Entire river systems have been choked, clogged and poisoned in the name of commerce. Our smokestacks and tailpipes have fouled the atmosphere to the point where the polar ice-caps are melting because they are cooking under a blanket of carbon dioxide. Whole species have been slaughtered, starved or hunted to extinction. It's all part of the cost of doing business on Terra Firma. We should be used to it by now.

All excesses can be excused on the cosmic plane. Depending on how far we step back on the temporal scale, it doesn't really matter what we do. Empires rise and fall, civilizations flourish and fade, ice ages freeze and defrost, continents float around, asteroids play billiards with the planets, solar systems blink on and off, galaxies collapse or explode all without apparent concern for human endeavor. But we live in our own vapor-thin slice of history and thus are worried with our own temporary and petty affairs, births and deaths, prosperity and famine, fashions, fads and local weather, marriages and divorces, traffic tickets and lawsuits. And when someone pisses in our swimming pool or lets their dog crap on our carefully tended lawn, we take it personally. It matters.

If you've ever lived in an urban commune or even in a nuclear family you know how irritating it can be to find a disgusting ring in the bathtub. It's a symbol of lack of community awareness. It screams that someone has no respect for the general welfare or hygiene. Well, we are about to see the biggest bathtub ring of our lifetimes. The Gulf oil spill will ultimately soil the beaches and foul the estuaries of our entire hemisphere and god only knows what damage will be done to coral reefs and fisheries. The maddening and insulting part of this petro-debacle is that our entire world ecology will suffer because of the botched enterprise of a few greedy and careless people seeking to enrich themselves by tapping our earth's common resources.

Prepare yourselves to witness the most elaborate dance of mea non-culpa in the history of mankind. Nobody wants to own this one. It could possibly be the biggest mess ever made by human agency and nobody is likely to rush forward to accept the liability of cleaning it up. Already the creators of the disaster are pointing fingers at each other and the government, and soon they will be trying to transfer blame to Mother Nature or to God Himself. The legendary levels of legal legerdemain that we witnessed in the Exxon Valdez incident which ultimately allowed the most profitable corporation in the world to walk the check on that cleanup are about to be compounded a hundredfold. The fix is already in because oil industry lobbyists have already arranged for a 75 million dollar cap on liability in anticipation of an event such as this. We will likely allow them to get away with it too, because corporations are amazing creatures. They are 'people' when they want to realize profits or make campaign contributions but when it comes time to pay the piper for their rapacious practices or foul fuck-ups they conveniently disappear or morph into pristine new financial entities. It's magic.

So, when you are eating synthetic shrimp or trying to water-ski on an oil slick or surf around the tarballs in Tampa Bay, you should ask the question, Who is going to pay to clean up this mess? The answer is probably the usual one. You are. Unless our government has the oysters to take the obvious precaution of freezing the assets of BP, Halliburton and Transocean, the corporate street gangs who pissed in the pool, and unless it is done Right Now, before they either disappear into a void of litigation or move their money further offshore than their oil rigs, you will get the bill.

The Earth doesn't care. It's had a dirty face before. All washes off. On a geological scale it hardly matters. The planet is hemorrhaging now but it will certainly recover. But on a human scale, our environment has already been raped by greed and carelessness and now we are about to be robbed as well. The only way to prevent this is to Freeze The Assets of the corporations responsible. Don't let them leave a ring around the tub.

[mtmynd]

Nicely put, eLRod, but we will collectively live with our guilt, a shared guilt on many levels, despite our inability to do a damn thing about this enormous problem other than use the blame game to alleviate some of that burden of guilt off our shoulders. We hate to see beauty of nature despoiled but yet our corporations will continue 'serving mankind' as they always have like the kings and czars of the past, self-assured they are the most important of us all, while we cough up the costs of their greed to assure their longevity.

[SadLuckDame]

Any day now we'll have to start freezing our endangered species in ice, a male and female, a great big enormous frozen zoo! to release to our children or children's children, whom will be hopefully better able and careful to take care of this world for them, to reproduce their species again in.

[Arcadia]

sad news from the gulf... I have the vague faith that in the future we´ll use other energy sources and that we´ll have a more inteligent kind of technology or something like that far away from corporation-capitalist-power and what we know now... yeah, I know... it doesn´t sound very scientific and I don´t have the remote idea how we´ll do that but... Meanwhile, maybe the brazilians in this part of the world have some clues about how still doing the dirty job... I don´t know...

[stilltrucking]

I like this part a lot

We will likely allow them to get away with it too, because corporations are amazing creatures. They are 'people' when they want to realize profits or make campaign contributions but when it comes time to pay the piper for their rapacious practices or foul fuck-ups they conveniently disappear or morph into pristine new financial entities. It's magic.

I been wondering if corporations are persons, do they have souls? Wouldn't that mean they have freedom of religion too? I am waiting for them to follow our governor's claim that it was an act of god.

Lots of acts of god these days. The coal mine explosion in WVA that killed 29 miners was also an act of god. The methane buildup was do to a storm not to the hundreds of safety violations for improper mine ventilation. No shit.

The number 5,000 barrels a day is tossed around. That is the estimate from satellite images. But that is just the surface view.

BP is keeping a lid on what the actual amount. They won't let allow scientists do an accurate measurement.

Scientists studying video of the gushing oil well have tentatively calculated that it could be flowing at a rate of 25,000 to 80,000 barrels of oil a day. The latter figure would be 3.4 million gallons a day. But the government, working from satellite images of the ocean surface, has calculated a flow rate of only 5,000 barrels a day.

BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.

Scientists Find Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf

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

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

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/us/16oil.html?hp

The clean up after the Exxon Valdez is all done. Except if you dig down a foot under the beach you will still strike oil.

My advice is buy some BP stock cause they will come out smelling like a rose. You betcha.

Good luck Arcadia. I hear they will be drilling for oil around the Maldive Islands. Maybe that is what the war was all about.