willthomasonline
MEA CULPRIT
MEA CULPRIT
Who's Responsible For The Oil Mess?
by William Thomas
willthomasonline
MEA CULPRIT
MEA CULPRIT
Who's Responsible For The Oil Mess?
by William Thomas
For godssakes, stop with all the hand-wringing, finger-pointing and unctuous bleating over all that oil loose in the Gulf. Sure it's a mess that will haunt the rest of this Last Chance Century. And I'm sorry for dragging the Old Man into this. But we're all going to need forgiveness before this is over. And the Almighty's already implicated. In calling for more deepwater drilling, Texas Governor Rick Perry has labelled this unfolding evil an unavoidable "act of God".
Eleven dead drillers, as much as four million gallons of crude gushing from the blowout every day for weeks… a fragmented surface slick bigger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined… a pair of plumes up to 200 miles long stretching 3,000 feet below the surface… the Gulf's fast-moving loop current grabbing this oil cloud as summer hurricanes bear down… the livelihoods of countless human fishers and dependent industries wiped out… Bluefin tuna that spawn only in the Mediterranean and the vicinity of the Gulf of Mexico oil gusher eating crude… DDT-challenged Brown pelicans just removed from the endangered species list endangered again… 8,300 other Gulf species hard hit by the thinnest surface sheen…
Some God!
As Robert deNiro famously remarked, "If there is a heaven, he's got a lot to answer for."
[Purdue University engineering professor Steve Wereley testimony before Congress; truthout.org May 29/10; McClatchy Newspapers May 19/10, May 28/10; Independent May9/10; USA Today May 17/10; AlterNet May 5/10; AP May 1/10; Inside The Actor's Studio]
IT'S BP'S FAULT
Go ahead. Yell at the radio. Get steamed up while you're wasting gas stuck in traffic. Blame BP. God knows they deserve it. In just a few short years supplying North America's oil habit, "Brutish Petroleum" has amassed a criminal record that would make hardened felons jealous.
Give BP credit for consistently putting profits first. In March 2005, corrosion of BP's pipes and equipment vomited more than a quarter-million gallons of sticky crude across Alaska's North Slope. It was the largest spill ever recorded in that fragile wildlife refuge. After finding BP in violation of more than 300 health and safety regulations, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined the company $21.4 million - the biggest fine in the agency's history.
In 2007, BP paid a $50 million fine and pled guilty to a felony after investigators determined that the company's aggressive cost-cutting in safety issues, use of outdated equipment and overworked employees contributed to an explosion at its Texas refinery that killed 15 employees and injured 170 others. BP settled with the victims' families for $1.6 billion - less than one month's profits.
The U.S. Chemical Safety Board found that BP not only failed to comply with the terms of that settlement agreement - but went on to commit 439 more "wilful" violations that continued to endanger the lives of its refinery workers. This time, the OSHA fined BP $87 million.
In Alaska, BP's job as principal owner of the pipeline consortium Alyeska was to immediately deploy the Oil Spill Response Plans it had filed with the federal government. Rapid response is vital to containing oil spills. But when Exxon Valdez struck a reef - nothing was in place.
In 2009, their Gulf exploration plan and environmental impact analysis for the deepest ocean drilling ever attempted insisted that an accident leading to a super spill was virtually impossible.
But God knows they tried.
While operating Atlantis, the world's biggest and deepest semi-submersible oil platform about 200 miles south of New Orleans, a whistleblower accused the company of violating federal law and risking a catastrophe by foregoing current and complete piping and safety instrumentation and schematics. BP's own internal emails show that company officials feared that lack of these mandatory operating documents "could lead to catastrophic operator error" onboard Atlantis.
Mike Sawyer, a Texas-based engineer and safety consultants, found "BP's recklessness in regards to the Atlantis project is a clear example of how the company has a pattern of failing to comply with minimum industry standards for worker and environmental safety."
Stay tuned for the next big blowout onboard a rig where nearly none of its thousand critical underwater welds has received final approval. When one ruptures, the resulting mess is expected to be 30-times worse than Deepwater Horizon.
Less than four weeks before that rig went down, BP officials lobbied congress to commit more deepwater drilling. Additional equipment and inspection "wasn't needed" they said. During its nine years at sea, Deepwater Horizon had only suffered a series of spills, fires and a collision.
"Bad Petroleum" also neglected to tell their contractors that Deep Horizon's wellhead was deeper than they'd reported. So Halliburton crews didn't make the right cement mix for the extra pressure at this additional depth.
When the cap blew, CEO Tony Hayward had just finished boasting that despite increased drilling costs in very deep water he had cut BP's operating expenditures by another one-billion dollars a year. Among other measures, BP's management had vetoed installing a $500,000 remote-control shutoff switch on the Deepwater Horizon wellhead that would have snuffed this blow-out immediately.
The blowout preventer that was installed failed a crucial pressure test just hours before the April 20 explosion. Following company policy, BP's contractors kept right on drilling…
BP's response to a blowout that freaked out just about every sentient creature on this planet was to massage its message by dispersing massive amounts of a toxic dispersant misleadingly named Corexit. This limited PR damage by breaking the surface slick into hundreds of thousands of patches before it could stain a bathtub ring around the entire Gulf.
Al this poison dumped into the Gulf made it "harder to get 'Film at 11' about the effects" says James Cowan Jr. The professor of biological oceanography at Louisiana State University adds that most species killed by the oil slick - (of Corexit) - sink out of sight.
"That may be the preference of the oil companies, to keep the damage out of sight, out of mind," agrees Larry Crowder, a professor of marine biology at Duke University. But the dispersants changed the oil deep underwater, making it "much gooier and much oilier, and that has a lot of us worried, because it means the stuff is not going to degrade very easily," Cowan comments.
"It's probably going to be one of the worst disasters we've ever seen," concludes Paul Montagna, professor of ecology for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M. "Instead of creating a typical spill, where the oil goes to the surface and you can scoop it up, this stuff has been distributed throughout the water column, and that means everything, absolutely everything, is being affected."
As of June 10, a 3,300-foot thick plume of thick choking crude was making for the DeSoto Canyon off the Florida Panhandle, where nutrient-rich waters attract sea life in one of the most productive parts of the Gulf. The even richer waters of Key West lie just beyond. [AP June 6/10]
"A lot of us suspect that we may be dealing with this for decades," Cowan concludes.
[AP June 7/10; truthout.org Apr 30/10, May 4/10, May 5/10, May 12/10; AP May 1/10; Robert Reich's Blog May 16/10; abovetopsecret.com May 2/10; alternet.org May 17/10]
IT'S OBAMA'S FAULT
"Manslaughter", "fraud" and "reckless endangerment" are criminal offenses. But don't expect any BP officers to be issued orange jumpsuits and leg-irons soon.
Look at "Golden Slacks," as my buddy Ralph calls them. That megabank contributed heavily to Obama's presidential campaign. Former Goldman Sacks executives currently staff much of Obama's senior administration. After wrecking the world's economies, Golden Slacks received billion-dollar bailouts and what looks like immunity from prosecution from a grateful White House.
Big Oil corrupts more than fish and birds. Obama took more campaign "contributions" from BP than his Republican opponent. Once elected president, he began payback by breaking a decades-long ban in approving offshore drilling up and down the Atlantic coast.
"BP is one of the top donors to political campaigns over the last two decades, having shelled out $6 million to fund congressional and presidential campaigns," Truthout's Daniela Perdomoinvolves reveals. "A good amount of their targeted lobbying has been directed at the House Committee on Energy & Commerce, the very legislative group slated to begin hearings on Deepwater Horizon. Even now, despite hasty back peddling, he proclaims his support for offshore drilling on the Atlantic side with proper 'safeguards'."
Since President Obama announced a "moratorium" on new offshore oil drilling, at least seven new permits for drilling and five environmental waivers have been granted. Most of these new permits are for the same type of work as Deepwater Horizon. But the Deepwater rig couldn't drill safely at just over 5,000 feet. Four of the newly approved wells will attempt first-time drilling deeper than 8,100 feet!
White House waivers are still being granted through a legal provision intended for projects that present minimal or no risk to the environment. The Interior Department gave Deepwater Horizon just such a "categorical exclusion" from the National Environmental Policy Act. [alternet.org May 5/10]
Another type of permit still being issued allows rig operators to drill around a mechanical problem by side-stepping the original hole. Five days prior to the explosion, Deepwater Horizon received a bypass permit. Faulty cementing of the original hole led to the blow-out. [Inter Press Service May 29/10]
A few million dollars in legal bribes is coffee money for a corporate behemoth that rakes in $20 billion in profits every 12 months. But it's enough to buy betrayal from elected loss-leaders. Oil money recipient Gene Taylor has subsequently called the blowout in the Gulf, "chocolate milk."
Maybe the Mississippi Representative should hoist a glass to Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, who assured American viewers, "Ninety-seven percent of it is a rainbow sheen. Ninety-seven percent of it is an extremely thin sheen of relatively light oil on the surface."
Landrieu accepted $574,000 from Big Oil. [truthout.org May 9/10]
But the oil we demand has to come from somewhere. Canadian legislators fear that an oil blowout in the Canadian Arctic would be much worse than the current Gulf disaster - given the ice, severe weather conditions and the lack of infrastructure in one of the world's most remote regions.
FULL ARTICLE CONTINUES
Shell Oil is scheduled to start drilling in Alaska's the frigid Chuchki and Beaufort seas in June 2010. [alternet.org May 17/10]
Want to do more than cry and complain over the blowout in the Gulf of Mexico?
Stop driving.
!!@!#$!!!
Oops! Hit a hot button there. Most of us can't even be bothered to turn off unused lights and appliances at home - never mind taking the bus, riding a bike, walking or foregoing unnecessary car trips (most often riding alone).
Hooked on driving and oil, we're careful not to inquire how the stuff is procured. We self-censor the hundreds of thousands of families like ours blown apart in distant neighbourhoods for the cheap gas we burn. We ignore the first Gulf slaughter that eventually counted more than one million dead, and left a thousand oil wells gushing and burning, a globe-girdling pall - and an oil slick perhaps 27-times bigger than Exxon Valdez choking the Saudi marshes and Persian Gulf. (Funny how the eco horrors I witnessed there as a member of a three-man environmental emergency response team are never mentioned in all the 'Valdez comparisons.) [Eco War - award-winning documentary by William Thomas]
Pulling into a Shell station for another fix, we refuse to consider the Shell-sanctioned murders of Ken Saro-Wiwa and other activists following Shell's ecological and economic devastation of southeastern Nigeria. [AP May 5/09
Zooming away from Chevron pumps, we don't want to reflect on Texaco-Chevron spilling 17 million gallons of oil from its pipelines, while dumping another 18 billion gallons of toxic waste across 1,700 square miles of pristine Ecuador rainforest. Those persistent carcinogens are still twisting DNA among 1,640 species of birds, 4,500 species of butterflies, 345 species of reptiles, 358 species of amphibians and more than 16,000 species of plants. Not to mention five local tribes and 258 other species of mammals in - where was that again?
As Chevron's mess (at least 30-times bigger than Exxon Valdez) continues to pollute rivers, streams and drinking water throughout the region with benzene and TPHs, children are born with fused fingers and deformed eyes, suffer leukemia rates four-times higher than the Ecuadoran average, and die slowly from tumors and stomach cancers. But take heart. By not re-injecting toxic waste back into well cavities, Chevron saved approximately $4.5 billion during its Ecuadoran operations. [amnesty.org, ecolocalizer.com; Reuters Jan 21/01; sosyasuni.org thirdworldtraveler.com]
Even as we call for prosecution, we demand that oil companies like BP, Shell and Chevron keep that oil coming. And we want "our" oil kept secure. As U.S. Africa Command deploys more drones, warplanes and military personnel to the Dark Continent, atrocities routinely committed in Afghanistan and Iraq are being repeated. On January 8, 2007, for example, the Special Operations Command flew from its base in Djibouti to rain depleted-uranium cannon fire onto the desolate village of Hayo. "There are so many dead bodies and animals in the village," a distraught local official exclaimed. [Agence France-Presse Dec 22/05; Reuters Jan 10/07; Voice of Russia Jan 9/07; Stars and Stripes Jan 20/09; Global Research May 5/10]
Is that blood in our gas tanks?
SPILL BABY SPILL
"Big oil companies must behave responsibly," we intone, as if this magical incantation will ward off human error and greed. The president who recently declared, "Oil rigs today don't generally cause spills," while urging rapid expansion of deepwater drilling must have been sniffing fumes.
As Jim Hightower says, "Drill, baby, drill" means "Spill, baby, spill."
And as veteran reporter Alexander Cockburn points out, "Oil spills, particularly from ocean drilling to transport via pipeline and tanker, are dead certs, whether the depth is 5,000 feet or 500, the pipeline broken by incompetence or an earthquake, the tanker steered by a drunk or a seasoned master sipping his Bovril. [truthout.org May 9/10]
From just 2001 to 2007, we're talking about 1,443 serious drilling accidents in offshore operations alone that caused 356 spills, 302 injuries and 41 deaths.
Karl Grossman, a journalist who exposed the dangers of offshore drilling 35 years ago, now reports: "The reality is that wherever there's oil drilling, there's spilling. U.S. Department of Interior figures reflect 3 million gallons of oil spilled from 1980 to 1999 in the U.S. outer continental shelf offshore drilling program. As to blowouts, there were 18 in wells in the Gulf of Mexico from 1983 up to the eruption at the Deepwater Horizon rig." [truthout.org May 12/10]
Drive on. Dream on. Don't recycle plastic. Consume as if there's no tomorrow. And don't just worry about BP.
All oil companies suck. It's the nature of the business.
According to the Associated Press, the number of safety incidents experienced by Deepwater Horizon isn't unusual for an industry operating in the harsh conditions where any new oil will be found. Steven Sutton oversees the Coast Guard's offshore drilling inspectors. Sutton says the number of accidents and incidents reported on the Deepwater Horizon "didn't strike him as unusual." [AP Apr 30/10]
The Gulf environmental disaster's prime suspect?
"All of us," declares AlterNet's Scott Thill. "This is what most junkies do, when the drugs start to wear off and run out: Keep tapping that vein." [alternet.org May 17/10]
Oil authority James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, co-producer of The End Of Suburbia and weekly blogger, writes incessantly about "our pathological dependency on cars." He is not afraid to identify the real culprits:
"All of this shucking and jiving over blame is a Chinese fire drill concealing the fact that we are all complicit in this disaster, and refuse to even consider changing our underlying behaviour… Almost nobody wants to think about living with fewer cars driving fewer miles. We're going to be dragged there kicking and screaming, but that's our destination, like it or not. The nation is fully outfitted for extreme car dependency." [kunstler.com]
"There's blood in the water. We shouted out, 'Who killed the pelicans?' when after all, it was you and me," writes anguished Gulf Coast resident Stinson Carter. "This is what happens when we contradict ourselves - wanting Laissez-Faire policies with the oil companies and peel-and-eat shrimp and fresh oysters and pristine places to take our families in the summer time. We have to pick a side: the economy's or the planet's, because we clearly haven't yet figured out how to successfully reconcile the two." [huffingtonpost.com June 7/10]
Don't worry. Polls show half of all Americans "are cool with further coastal drilling for oil and gas. In spite of all that has happened, they'd rather drill for what's left of our domestic oil supply than prepare, plan and proselytize for our inevitable post-oil future. BP, MMS and other alphabet nightmares are monsters of our own consumptive creation," Thill theologizes. [alternet.org May 17/10]
This disaster is not going to end well or soon. Even with maybe 462,000 gallons/day being captured from the partially-capped wellhead, tanker loads of gooey crude are still gushing into the Gulf's water column every day.
And when this tenuous soda straw is broken by as many as 14 tropical storms and hurricane expected this summer, "We're going to be having oil coming up to the surface again," acknowledges Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen. [AP June 7/10]
A senior official at the International Energy Agency says the Obama administration is pressuring this energy watchdog to drastically downgrade the steepening decline from existing oil fields - while pumping up the nonexistent chances of finding major new reserves. "It's imperative not to anger the Americans," seconded another senior International Energy Agency source. "We have entered the 'peak oil' zone. I think that the situation is really bad."
"If the real figures were to come out there would be panic on the stock markets," explains Colin Campbell, a former executive with Total (France). [Guardian Dec 15/08]
With no major oil fields discovered since the 1970s, the IEA is backing away from its claim that world production will somehow reverse from its rapidly declining 83 million barrels a day to 105 million. Its chief economist, Fatih Birol said that for the first time, the agency's latest projections are based on detailed surveys of the world's 800 largest oilfields, both onshore and offshore.
"Last year it was an assumption, and this year it's a finding of our study," Birol declared. "In terms of non-OPEC, we are expecting that in three, four years' time the production of conventional oil will come to a plateau, and start to decline." [Guardian Dec 15/08]
That was in 2008.
In 2009, Merrill Lynch conducted its own analysis and concluded that the world needs "to replace an amount of oil output equivalent to Saudi Arabia's production every two years."
That's not going to happen. Despite more frantic drilling and Canada's grotesquely polluting and energy-intensive tar sands (where Calgarians bizarrely marched to protest the Gulf of Mexico blowout), Merrill Lynch predicts: "oil output could fall by 30 million barrels per day by 2015."
"We have to leave oil before oil leaves us," Dr. Birol says. [Gail the Actuary Aug 18/09; Calgary Herald June 7/10; Arabian Business Feb 4/09; Guardian Nov 11/09; Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Oct 14/05; ASPO USA Sept 14/05]
If you think that voluntarily curtailing driving is drastic, check out methane. Not even climate holocaust deniers challenge the data showing that thawing permafrost and frozen seafloor clathrates are releasing more methane into the atmosphere. (Cows count, too.) Methane traps 22-times more heat than CO2.The upper 10 feet of permafrost stores 1.9 trillion tons of methane. As you pull out of the 7-11 with another tub of ice cream, consider: We're already seeing thawing permafrost down to 17 feet. [LA Times Feb 22/09]
Just 1% of methane released each year will double our annual carbon emissions. And they aren't slowing down. Over the past seven years, CO2 concentrations have grown 35% faster than the world's coal-and-oil-fired economies. Why? Because the capacity of oceans and forests to act as carbon "sinks" is shrinking even faster than our attention span.
"We expected that emissions would grow because of the expansion in the world economy, but not because of a weakening in the sinks. Only the most extreme climate models predicted this. We didn't think it would happen until the second half of the century," exclaims Dr. Corinne Le Quere of the British Antarctic Survey. [Telegraph Oct 23/07]
ACID TRIP
The next time you get into your own personal carbon burner, think "Is this trip really necessary?"
Choose:
A. Don't turn that key!
B. Burn, baby burn!
If B, be sure to apologize to your kids and grandchildren. And Ma Mer.
On a planet that is three-quarters ocean, only lubbers ignore the sea. In the eastern Pacific alone, over the past eight years the waters have acidified more than 20-times faster than experts expected.
It turns out that the ocean absorbs about one-third of the carbon dioxide that our outmoded combustion machines spew into the atmosphere. When this gas dissolves in water, it forms carbonic acid. The ocean organisms dissolved by this acid anchor the bottom of the food chain. [Guardian Nov 25/08]
The tiny vital plankton that sequester carbon, produce more oxygen than all the remaining forests ashore, and which ultimately feed the entire marine habitat are already starving. "Global warming of the surface layers of the oceans reduces the upward transport of nutrients into the surface layers. This generates chaos among the plankton," explains Jef Huisman of the University of Amsterdam.
Less plankton means higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, which means more warming and methane releases, which means more heating, which means higher pH in acidifying waters…
"Smaller animals such as shrimp-like krill feed on plankton and are themselves eaten by larger organisms, from small fish to the biggest whales," the Independent explains. Without phytoplankton, the oceans would soon because marine deserts." [Independent Jan 19/06]
The last time this happened, something like 97% of all species checked off this planet.
DON'T JUST DO NOTHING
Jim Hightower likes to quote an old Texas saying: "When you've dug yourself into a hole, the first thing to do is quit digging."
To avoid crashing our space colony, "global greenhouse-gas emissions must decline by more than 80% of 1990 levels by 2050," the Guardian reports. "Realistically, meeting this requirement will demand that we engineer a transition to a zero-carbon energy system by mid-century"- with the bulk of those carbon reductions undertaken now. [Guardian Nov 11/09]
These are modest measures.
But they sure beat whining.
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