So NOW we need to be realistic about the issues of operating in a mile of water?

(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

So said BP CEO Tony Hayward yesterday when he was discussing the chances of a successful end to the worst manmade disaster in history.

BP’s top officer downplayed the likelihood that the desperate effort will succeed in actually sealing the pipe, which is spewing hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude into the Gulf each day.

“If it was on land we would have a very high confidence of success, but… we need to be realistic about the issues around operating in a mile of water,” BP CEO Tony Hayward told reporters on Monday.

Ahh, yes, NOW we need to be realistic about those issues.  Were you being realistic about the issues around operating in a mile of water when you applied for the rights to drill offshore in the Gulf of Mexico Mr. Hayward?

Was the government being realistic in April?

But after Ken Salazar personally intervened in federal court to overturn an injunction against offshore drilling, specifically for the catastrophic well at Mississippi Canyon Block 252…

Democrats just grinned their usual shit-eating grins, and blamed everybody else except Barack Obama.

And that’s the real story.

Obama/Salazar intervened last year to allow BP to drill at Mississippi Canyon Block 252, where tens of millions of gallons of oil are now polluting the Gulf of Mexico.

The actual exploratory drilling was approved by the Obama administration on April 6, 2009.

Within days of the 2009 approval, the Center for Biological Diversity and its allies won a court order vacating the Bush Five-Year Offshore Drilling Plan. Rather than use the court order as a timeout on new offshore oil drilling to develop a new plan, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar filed a special motion with the court to exempt approved oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. He specifically identified BP’s operation as one that should be released from the vacature.

So the system actually worked, and offshore drilling  had been shut down around Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, but then…

Obama/Salazar intervened in court to start drilling again, in April 2009, without further evironmental review, exactly where Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank.

Was Salazar being realistic about the issues of operating in a mile of water?  

Was Obama being realistic about the issues of operating in a mile of water when he reversed decades old restrictions that protected 85% of the nations shorelines?

“There will be those who strongly disagree with this decision, including those who say we should not open any new areas to drilling,” Obama acknowledged. “But what I want to emphasize is that this announcement is part of a broader strategy that will move us from an economy that runs on fossil fuels and foreign oil to one that relies more on homegrown fuels and clean energy. And the only way this transition will succeed is if it strengthens our economy in the short term and long term.”

“To fail to recognize this reality,” he concluded, “would be a mistake.”

No, Mr. Obama.  It is YOU who failed to recognize reality and made the mistake.

We need to start being realistic about offshore oil drilling.  We need to start banning it immediately.

You want reality people?  The reality is that there’s never been a windspill.  There’s never been an ecological disaster caused by solar energy.  The reality is, breakthroughs in any of these alternative energy sources have been suppressed by the same people who now say we need to be realistic about the issues of operating in a mile of water.

Now the damage is done. NOW they say we need to be realistic.  Okay, let’s BE realistic about the issues of operating in a mile of water.  Realistically, the world and our nation cannot take another apocalyptic disaster on the scale it is seeing right now.  Realistically, the oil companies cannot guarantee that further oil drilling won’t cause another one.  Realistically, the oil companies won’t have any easier time of it dealing with the issues of operating under a mile – or four – of water if there is another disaster of this magnitude.

So realistically, we need to stop all offshore drilling immediately and forever.