Louisiana deep oil drilling disaster

[Peter Presland]

Hardly the occasion for levity I know - God knows some of the pictures of devastation coming out of the GOM are enough to make any sane person weep - but Dmitry Orlov does have a unique perspective. His deep droll black humour with its roots in his experience of the Old Soviet Union's collapse, are guaranteed to shed useful light on parallel events in the West. The destruction being wrought in the GOM is no exception.

A brief extract from his latest Blog post:

It is embarrassing to be lost. It is even more embarrassing for a leader to be lost. And what's really really embarrassing to all concerned is when national and transnational corporate leaders attempt to tackle a major disaster and are found out to have been issuing marching orders based on the wrong map. Everyone then executes a routine of turning toward each other in shock, frowning while shaking their heads slowly from side to side and looking away in disgust. After that, these leaders might as well limit their public pronouncements to the traditional "Milk, milk, lemonade, round the corner fudge is made." Whatever they say, the universal reaction becomes: "What leaders? We don't have any."

Getting lost can be traumatic for the rest of us too. When we suddenly realize that we don't know where we are, urgent neural messages are exchanged between our prefrontal cortex, which struggles to form a coherent picture of what's happening, our amygdala, whose job is to hold on to a sense of where we are, and our hippocampus, which motivates us to get back to a place we know as quickly as we possibly can. This strange bit of internal wiring explains why humans who are only slightly lost tend to trot off in a random direction and promptly become profoundly lost. After these immediate biochemical reactions have run their course, we go through the usual stages of:

1. denial—"We are not lost! The ski lodge is just over the next ridge, or the next, or the next..."
   
2. anger—"We are wasting time! Shut up and keep trotting!"
   
3. bargaining—"The map must be wrong; either that or someone has dynamited the giant boulder that should be right there..."
   
4. depression—"We'll never get there! We're all going to die out here!" and
   
5. acceptance—"We are not lost; we are right here, wherever it is. We better find some shelter and start a campfire before it gets dark and cold."
   

Some people don't survive, some do; the difference in outcome turns out to have precious little to do with skill or training, and everything to do with motivation—the desire to survive no matter how much pain and discomfort that involves—and the mental flexibility to adjust one's mental map on the fly to fit the new reality, and to reach stage 5 quickly. Those who go on attempting to operate based on an outdated mental map tend to die in utter bewilderment.

[Ed Jewett]

Sounds like he has read "Deep Survival". http://www.deepsurvival.com/ I've read it, it's on my personal empowerment reading list [http://tiny.cc/magicbiblio], and I have written a recommendation for it at Amazon.

[Paul Rigby]

"I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully,"

Bush II, Saginaw, Michigan; September 29, 2000

[Paul Rigby]

A very germane cutting from this morning's press:

Gilligan Andrew, “Whitehall Gets Slick after BP,” The Sunday Coalitiongraph, 30 May 2010, p.3

A secret Whitehall subcommittee, named after some or other poisonous snake to convey the illusion of guile and deadly efficiency, has concluded its meetings on the full ramifications for Britain of BP’s ongoing travails in the Gulf of Mexico. Calling upon some of the finest minds in British diplomacy, spying and finance, the think-tank has produced a set of proposals for discussion by the full cabinet at some unspecified point this week, informed sources inform me via a plain brown envelope left with yesterday’s morning milk delivery.

Topping the agenda is the recommendation that the new government appoints, as a matter of urgency, a new ambassador to Washington where, it is widely agreed, a vigorous pounding for all things British is sure to follow. “We need a very special kind of diplomatist for these very special circumstances,” a senior Whitehall source said yesterday. “We need, in short, a most enormous arse to soak up the punishment and say precisely nothing. We believe we have just the man to begin the process of relubricating the wheels of Anglo-American comity.”

The arse in question

The man in question is believed to be Sir Denzil Tooth, the solicitor-general-turned-MP for Craven Cottage, as the Fulham constituency is affectionately known within Metropolitan police vice squad ranks. Tooth was forced to return to the back benches in Mrs Thatcher’s last cabinet following “a ghastly misunderstanding” in Soho’s infamous London Rubber Emporium, where he was accused of shoplifting while under the influence of excessive quantities of talc. His tired and emotional plea to the magistrate’s court – “I want the finest punishments known to humanity, I want them here, and I want them now!” – remains a favourite of the London legal circuit, several of whose members witnessed the entire shocking incident at first hand, albeit through a veil of pain, upside down, and a giant nappy, respectively.

Consigned to the back benches, Tooth dedicated himself anew to the three governing passions of his life: architecture, good food and the Church of England’s outreach initiative to the urban youth of Thailand. “I’m off to inspect a Bangkok erection” became a familiar refrain, as he dashed off, at short notice, to offer relief – and Otto’s Idea of the Holy – to his unofficial flock. This punishing schedule took its inevitable toll, according to colleagues, who soon noticed an alarming change in his appearance. “His entire torso and head disappeared among mounds of buttock fat,” one admirer explained. “He became a giant bottom.”

The human wedge

The challenge confronting HMG is a daunting one, another informed source informed me. “As 9/11 confirmed, the average Yank will believe anything and has the memory of gnat. But there are intelligent, unscrupulous types, mostly of the legal, political and financial varieties, who will use this little local difficulty to suggest, quite erroneously, that we have destroyed the Atlantic, and covered a lot of corpulent hicks in a thick, black rain of death. We need to drive a wedge between the gullible and the cynical. Tooth is a very large part of that wedge. What’s more, he’s as fat as they are, which must count for something.”

A second element to the subcommittee’s proposed strategy involves the BBC and the British Council. Speakers are to be selected and financed to tour the States, there to make provocative speeches in improbable places. It will be the BBC’s task to ignore these speeches in toto. Sir Reginald Pike-Darkness and Monsignor Maurice Gamp are believed to head the list of intellectual provocateurs designed to bring the boil of anti-British sentiment to a pussy head. “When it reaches a strained and swollen acne of anger, we shall lance it with the sword of sycophancy and a wad of cash,” explained the informed source. “But the eruption will take place in the backwoods, and no one who matters in New York or Washington will feel a thing. You see at once the strategy’s genius.”

[Keith Millea]

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/05/29-3
Published on Saturday, May 29, 2010 by the McClatchy Newspapers BP: 'Top kill' has Failed to Stop Gulf oil Leak

by Erika Bolstad

BP has abandoned its most recent "top kill" effort to contain its well, a company official announced Saturday evening.

"After three full days, we have been unable to overcome the flow," said the company's chief operating officer, Doug Suttles.

In its next effort to halt what its officials have called an "environmental catastrophe," BP will cut off the leaking riser at the top of the five-story blowout preventer atop the wellhead to get an even surface on the broken pipe.

Then the company will install what's called a lower marine riser package, a cap containment system that would be connected to a new riser from the Discoverer Enterprise drillship 5,000 feet above on the surface. The aim is to minimize the amount of oil reaching the shore until BP can drill relief wells, Suttles said.

He estimated that the procedure would take about four days to complete, but if it also fails, it could be several months before BP can finish drilling two relief wells to intersect the runaway well. During that time, millions more gallons of crude oil could contaminate the Gulf of Mexico, poison wildlife, destroy fragile marshlands, close fishing grounds and deprive fisherman, resort workers and many others of their livelihoods.

Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said officials were disappointed that the top kill method failed, but added that the Coast Guard and BP are still fighting to keep the oil from reaching the shoreline.

"It's a little bit of a roller coaster ride for everyone," she said. "Obviously, we've said we've had to prepare for a worst-case scenario from day one, that this could fail totally and release a tremendous amount more than it is releasing now."

After three days in which BP said it pumped more than 30,000 barrels of drilling lubricant known as mud into the runaway wells blowout preventer, BP engineers determined that it was time to try something else, Suttles said.

He said the decision was made in consultation with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Energy Secrtary Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics.
Engineers had hoped that the drilling mud pumped into the blowout preventer using the top kill method would block the crude oil and gas from spewing out of the damaged wellhead and blowout preventer.

However, from the beginning technicians said that most of the mud flowed right back out, along with the oil and natural gas. BP halted pumping the mud for an extended period within hours after it began on Wednesday, and in the ensuing days, it also pumped debris into the blowout preventer in hopes of blocking leaks and allowing the mud to accumulate. Those efforts apparently failed, too.

© 2010 McClatchy Newspapers

[Peter Lemkin]

To save you the drama of the next few days on MSM....BP's new efforts will, as all the former, fall short of the mark and do nothing to stem the flow of oil into the oceans of Planet Gaia!...... The Administration will make believe they are outraged....but nothing much will be done for another six months, if then...unless the American PEOPLE demand something done. Power was NEVER given up by the Oligarchy without demand...ever and it will:alberteinstein: never change! :eviltongue:

DEMAND IT BACK!

[Ed Jewett]

Renowned Marine Biologist Carl Safina on the BP Oil Spill’s Ecological Impact on the Gulf Coast and Worldwide

As we continue our discussion on the BP oil spill, we turn to its long-term ecological impact. Carl Safina, the founding president of Blue Ocean Institute, warns the ecological fallout from the spill may be felt across much of the world. [includes rush transcript]


Guest:
Carl Safina, founding president of Blue Ocean Institute. He is author of many books about marine ecology and the ocean, including Song for the Blue Ocean.
Related stories

• BP Oil Spill Confirmed as Worst in US History; Environmental Groups Challenge Continued Oil Operations in Gulf Excluded from New Moratorium
  
• Coast Guard Grounds Ships Involved in Spill Cleanup After 7 Fall Ill; BP Reportedly Preventing Fishermen from Wearing Respirators
  
• Disasters in Gulf Coast, West Virginia Spur Calls for Criminal Prosecutions of Corporate Execs
  
• BP Played Central Role in Botched Containment of 1989 Exxon Valdez Disaster
  
• BPA? As BP Says No To The EPA, Who Is In Charge of the Oil Cleanup?
  

JUAN GONZALEZ: As we continue our discussion on the BP oil spill, we turn now to look at the long-term ecological impact of the spill. Our next guest testified before Congress last week and warned the fallout from the spill may be felt across much of the world. Joining us here in New York is Carl Safina, the founding president of Blue Ocean Institute. He’s author of many books about marine ecology and the ocean, including Song for the Blue Ocean.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

CARL SAFINA: Thanks for having me.

JUAN GONZALEZ: What message did you bring to Congress?

CARL SAFINA: Well, that this is not just a regional disaster, although it certainly is, but that the Gulf of Mexico is a tremendous engine of life and also a tremendous concentration zone, where animals from the whole open Atlantic Ocean funnel into the Gulf for breeding and millions of animals cross the Gulf and concentrate there on their northward migration and then fan out to populate much of North America and the Canadian Arctic, the East Coast, the Canadian Maritimes. So it’s a real hotspot, and it’s a terrible place to foul.

AMY GOODMAN: Tuna?

CARL SAFINA: The bluefin tuna that occupy most of the North Atlantic Ocean have two separate breeding populations. One breeds in the Mediterranean. The other breeds in the Gulf. So all the tuna that populate the East Coast, the Canadian Maritimes, the Gulfstream, even that go as far as the North Sea, many of those are from the western population and breed only in the Gulf of Mexico. This is their breeding season. They’ve just about finished now. And their eggs and larvae are drifting around in a toxic soup of oil and dispersant.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the dispersant Corexit.

CARL SAFINA: Well, the dispersant is a toxic pollutant that has been applied in the volume of millions of gallons and I think has greatly exacerbated the situation. I think the whole idea of using a dispersant is wrong, and I think it’s part of the whole pattern of BP trying to cover up and hide the body. They don’t want us to see how much oil, so they’ve taken this oil that was concentrated at the surface and dissolved it. But when you dissolve it, it’s still there, and it actually gets more toxic, because instead of being in big blobs, it’s now dissolved and can get across the gills, get into the mouths of animals. The water below the floating oil was water. Now it’s this toxic soup. So I think that in this whole pattern of BP trying to not let people know what’s going on, the idea of disperse the oil is a way of just hiding the body. But it actually makes the oil more toxic, and it adds this incredible amount of toxic pollutant in the dispersant itself.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the potential you were talking about, that this is the season when so much of the marine life and the bird life is creating their young, what is the effect on the birds, on those birds that are about to hatch or maybe are already in the process of hatching?

CARL SAFINA: Yeah, well, not only do you have birds there that are breeding, like the pelicans and some of the gulls and some of the terns, those birds will probably have a completely catastrophic breeding season, because it’s not just birds on the beach or birds in their nest. Their parents make a living diving into water. There’s no way around that. You can put booms that are twenty-feet high. They’re going to fly out to feed. And when I was there, we could see on the Chandeleur Islands quite a few of the terns were already lightly oiled, but they will just get progressively more and more oiled. And no amount of protecting the area where the nests are is going to change the fact that the parents are going to have a tremendous amount of trouble. And many of them will just get killed.

But also, there were sanderlings, ruddy turnstones, black belly plovers and a dozen other species that don’t stay there. They’re moving, and they’re migrating through. They come—they winter as far south as southern South America. They nest across the Canadian tundra and in the High Arctic. They’re some of the longest-distance migrants in the world. They cannot do that unless their fathers are working. And if their feathers are sticking together, they’re not going to be able to make it. They don’t have the energy to get to where they’re going to go. So they’re going to be dropping out along the way. The other thing is you have peregine falcons that are coming across from the Yucatan on their way to breeding grounds in the Arctic—excuse me—and as far away as Greenland. They will be selectively picking off these birds that are compromised. So they will be getting higher doses of oil. So this is just a horrible place to have something like this happening, because it’s such a concentration point for animals that move.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the question of bombing the actual—where the leak is coming from? Some say BP doesn’t want to do it, because then they would have to rebuild if they would ever get to offshore drill again. But what effect would that have?

CARL SAFINA: Oh, well, I’m not a—you know, I’m not a drilling technologist, and I don’t know if it would work. But actually, bombing part of the sea floor right there, I think, would have no real ecological effect other than the noise, which would affect marine mammals like dolphins and whales. But, you know, one or two blasts, I think, if it shut the oil off, would probably have been worth trying. But I don’t know if that would work.

AMY GOODMAN: Who do you think should be in charge of this operation, this cleanup operation?

CARL SAFINA: Well, BP had a lease to drill. They did not have a lease to pollute the Gulf of Mexico. They did not have a lease to blow oil into the environment. They did not have a lease to disperse the oil and try to hide the body. They don’t have a lease to clean up. They don’t have a lease to make the fishermen sick. They don’t have a lease to tell the United States, "We’ll keep using a dispersant that’s banned in Europe, even though you’re telling us to stop using it." They should have been shoved out of the way on day two. And there should have been a war council of all the other oil companies that know how to drill to focus on stopping the oil from coming out of the hole. And then BP’s responsibility—they are responsible, but they obviously don’t know what to do, and they can’t do it, and they’re not doing it. Their responsibility should be what they’re good at: pay money. Pay money to the United States. They’re on our property. They’re in our water. They’re making our people sick. They’re destroying our wildlife. Pay money and have the United States take over.

JUAN GONZALEZ: This whole issue of drilling in areas so deep that if there is an accident you cannot really get there to fix it, what is it—you know, to me, it’s almost like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl. It’s like you never—you were guaranteeing people that it would never happen, but once it happens once, you realize the potential catastrophe that you are creating through this process. What is your sense of the future of ocean drilling, in terms of what this has told the rest of the people of the United States and the world?

CARL SAFINA: Right, well, there have been other blowouts, and there have been major oil spills. It’s different than Chernobyl because we know it happens. It happens. It’s happened before. It will happen again. And it’s happening right now. So, you know, and obviously they didn’t have any backup plan. It’s as if having poked 30,000 holes into the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico and have 5,000 rigs operating, it never occurred to them to say, "Oh, what if oil starts coming out of one of those holes, like it has in other places at other times?" They were completely unprepared. They don’t have the equipment. They don’t have booms that can work in open water. And what the obvious take-home message is, we don’t know how to do this. We can poke the hole. We don’t know how to deal with some things that we know happen, because they’ve happened. But people have not developed the technology or warehoused the tools or created booms that work in ocean swell conditions or any of that stuff. We’re trying to wring the last drops out of a depleting resource. And this really needs to be the pivotal moment where we say oil is declining, we need a national energy policy that looks past oil. You know, BP, at one time they said that their name meant "beyond petroleum." Now it’s "beyond pathetic." But we really need to get past oil.

AMY GOODMAN: What about "beyond prosecution"? Are they? And should they be held criminally liable?

CARL SAFINA: Of course they’re criminally responsible. They were trying to hurry up. When you have an argument on a rig about how fast to go and what to do, you don’t tell people, "Just hurry it up." I mean, this is absolutely criminal. And I think that—you know, we’re still asking, "Oh, can we go in? Can we use respirators?" This is insane.

AMY GOODMAN: The Atlantis, deepwater offshore drilling site, has that been shut down, which dwarfs the Horizon Deepwater?

CARL SAFINA: Actually, I don’t know if that’s still going on or has been shut down.

AMY GOODMAN: Has all offshore drilling been shut down? No?

CARL SAFINA: No, not at all. And in fact, unfortunately, the Obama administration, I think, blew it on the high ground here. You know, there was Sarah Palin, "drill, baby, drill," right? So we don’t want that; we elect Obama. And then what happens is we get "drill, baby, drill." That’s what we got. We got a stepped-up effort to eliminate the ban on offshore drilling that was, what, a couple of generations old. And now they’re stuck with that, because, of course, nobody wants to actually do the smart thing and say, "Oh, you know what? We made a mistake," because then, oh, they’ve lost face. So, oh, we can’t lose face. The obvious right thing is the drilling ban was the right thing to do. The drilling ban is the right thing to do. We don’t know how to take care of these problems. We need to stop it. We need to make this a pivotal moment and have a national energy policy for the first time that gets beyond this and phases out fossil fuels, which kill people, make people sick and detroy the environment.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you very much for being with us, Carl Safina, founding president of the Blue Ocean Institute. He has written a number of books, including Song for the Blue Ocean.


http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/27/ex...pill_could

[Ed Jewett]

A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order
Review of F. William Engdahl's Book

by Myron Stagman

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=19429

[Ed Jewett]

Attention readers:

The blog and media coverage and commentary on the Deepwater Horizon event, now well over a month old, has exploded like the oil rig itself, and is now gushing out words and links faster than a sane man can possibly deal with it.


Over at CGCS, http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=119560, a mega-thread has been created which is now being fed by multiple posters.

Multiple threads from that discussion board, which include many of the same articles I have posted here, are now being merged.

Over there, several people are contributing beyond just myself. One of them is Snuffysmith, veteran moderator there, well-versed in many issues, especially nuclear, a former lawyer, and with more to her resume as well. I’ve known and conversed with Snuffy for years and she is a member at E Pluriibus Unum as well.

Subsequently, further attention should be given to that thread as well as your own usual and customary sources.

One of the thrusts in the thread merger is the ecological impact and the now-escalating political, social, economic and other ramifications. As a single event, it will continue to generate news, opinion and speculation for many, many weeks to come.

This, of course, does not preclude any DPF members from posting here.
[/FONT]

[Peter Lemkin]

http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009...s-version/