Category: Environment

Here we go again.

Those Scientists are back out there, taking samples, plotting data, and Kicking Uncertainty’s Butt!

Underwater Oil Plume Discovered Near Mobile Bay

By Bobbie O’Brien — May 27, 2010

TAMPA — New tests show what appears to be a massive, second underwater plume in previously untested waters northeast of the leaking BP wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico.

Marine scientists have discovered a new, wide area of “dissolved hydrocarbons” in that Gulf. It is six miles wide and goes as deep as 3,300 feet.

More tests are being run, but researchers from the University of South Florida suspect the plume may be from chemical dispersants used to break up the gushing oil leak a mile below the surface.

They suspect the gunk to be Disperants, But HOW can you be sure — you can’t even see it!

Because for most of America, those Underwater Plumes won’t really exist, until they SEE them on the Evening News!

Gulf oil plume darker; not good news, expert says

By SETH BORENSTEIN — May 25, 2010

The color of the oil gushing from the main pipe has changed in color from medium gray to black. Two scientists noticed the change, which oil company BP downplayed as a natural fluctuation that is not likely permanent.

But engineering professor Bob Bea at the University of California at Berkeley says the color change may indicate the BP leak has hit a reservoir of more oil and less gas. Gas is less polluting because it evaporates.

Bea has spent more than 55 years working and studying oil rigs.

Sounds serious.

Too bad we can’t get any submarines down there to start tracking all that Oil, which scientists previously reported, looked to be spreading far and wide, at the mid-levels of the Gulf waters.

Luckily, the Scientist behind the first effort to track the underwater oil plumes, is mounting a second effort, with some new sciencey gadgets …

We’ve all had a month to stew about this.  The Gulf of Mexico is slowly turning into a petroleum gumbo laced with oil coated pelicans and dead dolphins.  We’ve been watching a slow motion train wreck.  Except it’s not just two colliding steam engines.  No.  No such luck. It’s the Gulf of Mexico, teaming with life, and its currents are moving the spilled oil around.  Eventually it will be everywhere.  And while we’re watching that unfold, and seeing clumps of tar and oil all over the beaches, we are beginning to suspect that, hard as it is to believe, maybe nobody, that’s right nobody, knows how to plug the leak.  And stop the spill.  So we’re going to have to watch a colossal ecological disaster we are utterly helpless to stop.  Or mitigate.  The signs are already everywhere, preparing us for a spectacle of wildlife and oceanic death, slowly breaking to us the very bad news we really don’t want to hear.

Just look at this from AP:

Oil spill frustration is rampant.

The White House is being pounded for not acting more aggressively in the month-old oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The administration is hitting back, mostly at BP. Louisiana is threatening to take matters into its own hands. The truth is, the government has little direct experience at either the national or state level at stopping deepwater oil leaks – and few realistic options.

With the oil flowing and spreading at a furious rate, President Barack Obama has accused BP of a “breakdown of responsibility.” He named a special independent commission to review what happened.

But the administration seems to want to have it both ways – insisting it’s in charge while also insisting that BP do the heavy lifting. The White House is arguing that government officials aren’t just watching from the sidelines, but also acknowledging there’s just so much the government can do directly.

“They are 5,000 feet down. BP or the private sector alone have the means to deal with that problem down there. It’s not government equipment that is going to be used to do that,” Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen told a White House briefing on Monday.

This is a recipe for a most horrible outcome.  Our frustration today is absolutely nothing compared to what is coming.  What is coming is the largest man made environmental disaster in history.  This is going to make Chernobyl look like Three Mile Island.  This is going to make Exxon Valdez and Santa Barbara look like a joke.

The administration has stated that it is going to have “a special independent commission” “review what happened.”  But I don’t need no stinking commission to know what happened.  We’ve been over it and over it and over it.  That’s all back story anyway.  If the Gulf of Mexico dies, as surely it will from enough oil, “what happened” is going to be the least of anyone’s concerns.  It’s going to be a footnote in a narration of the extensive misery and suffering that the spill has caused.

Meanwhile, the Secretary of the Interior supposedly has his foot on the throat of BP.  And the government continues to rely on oil company “expertise” to deal with the spill.  But the Interior Department was still apparently granting permits for underwater drilling even after he declared a moratorium on that.  And we’re already being told that the feds can supervise and direct BP, but that they aren’t capable to doing anything on their own.  Look at this.  The Coast Guard’s guy who’s in charge of this federal emergency response is saying that it’s BP or the private sector that has “the means to deal with that problem”, not the government.  If you kick them out of the way, who will take over?  Nobody, he claims. I asked before and I ask again, whether this is the first time that a claimed foot on the throat has been confused with fellatio.

No, the administration isn’t going to elbow BP aside.  Ever.  Absolutely not.  No matter what.  We’re already being told that BP, the fourth largest corporation in the world, has all the “means to deal with that problem,” and that the rest of us can just sit here and watch the largest man made ecological disaster in history slowly, but inexorably unfold.  And the expertise, we’re being told, is all in the hands of the oil companies.  They’re doing, so we’re told, all they can do.

There are some very, very smart people in the United States.  I’d like to tell you that they can be quickly called together to solve this problem.  That it’s that big a disaster that unconventional approaches are required.  But I don’t think that’s going to happen.  I don’t think the administration will take over the efforts to close the spill.  I don’t think anything will change in the way this disaster is being handled until much later.  Until we’ve been made physically and emotionally sick by the condition of the Gulf of Mexico.  Then maybe things will change. If it’s not too late.

simulposted at The Dream Antilles and dailyKos

Cross posted and DKOS.

Since this happened I’ve been commenting in various places that there seem to be no “there” there when it comes to this Administration. It has, as a crisis team, performed remarkably poorly. The Administrations response to this crisis in the Gulf of Mexico is stunning in its punyness as David Gergen points out in a CNN story.

Although this disaster is not an existential threat, it could be argued that if the U.S. government had fought World War II in the same way it has fought the oil spill, we might well be speaking German now.

I’m not a Gergen fan. He is, however and intelligent and engaged insider in Washington whose opinions reflect his milieu and counts for something.

BP Hard To Pin Down On Oil Spill Claims

NPR, Morning Edition – May 24, 2010

Yuki Noguchi

BP has repeatedly said it would pay all legitimate claims resulting from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but such promises raise a crucial question: What exactly does “legitimate claim” mean?

[…]

BP has declined to define the term or provide examples.

BP American President Lamar McKay remained steadfastly vague during a Senate hearing this month. Despite prodding from Washington Democrat Maria Cantwell, McKay would not veer off of his message: We’re going to pay all legitimate claims.

A BP spokesman declined to discuss the company’s definition of “legitimate.” In an e-mail, the spokesman said BP hired a firm called ESIS to assess all oil spill claims. As of last week, it had received nearly 16,000 claims. The spokesman said BP has in some cases paid some claims within 48 hours of receiving supporting documentation.

What exactly does “legitimate claim” mean?   Good Question.

This is a sea turtle swimming in BP’s oil spill.

Exactly how far does BP have to go, how many times does it have to blunder and fail and make excuses while it tries to preserve its investment in the leaking well, before the US pushes BP out of the way and stops the leak that is now destroying the Gulf of Mexico?  Apparently, pretty damn far.  Long story short, the US isn’t going to take over the problem at this point.  You know we’re in big, big trouble when the intervention of the US Army Corps of Engineers looks like an improvement in disaster management.  

This from Reuters makes the US government’s intentions less than perfectly clear:

The U.S. government will move aside BP (BP.L) from the operation to try to halt the Gulf of Mexico oil spill if it decides the company is not performing as required in its response to the well leak, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said on Sunday.

“I am angry and I am frustrated that BP has been unable to stop this oil from leaking and to stop the pollution from spreading,” Salazar told reporters after visiting BP’s U.S. headquarters in Houston.

“We are 33 days into this effort and deadline after deadline has been missed,” Salazar added, referring to the failure of containment efforts attempted so far by London-based BP to control the gushing undersea well one mile (1.6 km) down on the ocean floor.

President Barack Obama’s administration is facing growing public and political pressure to take full charge of the oil spill containment operation as criticism against BP grows.

Yeah, Ken, we’re all angry and frustrated.  But, guess what?  We’re not the Secretary of the Interior or of anything else.  We’re not in the cabinet.  We’re sitting here watching the Gulf of Mexico turn into a petrol gumbo laced with oil coated pelicans.

And what exactly do you  mean when you say, “if” the company isn’t performing as required?  Performing as required means that the leak is stopped.  Closed up.  That there’s no more oil.  Running a straw into the leak so that BP can sell it and make money on it isn’t exactly “performing as required.”

“If we find they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, we’ll push them out of the way appropriately,” Salazar said, but he did not specify at what point this would occur or what might be the trigger for it.

“This is an existential crisis for one of the world’s largest companies,” he said, in a reference to the billions of dollars of cleanup and damages costs that BP faces.

Give me a f*cking break. That last paragraph has to be some kind of sick joke.  “An existential crisis for one of the world’s largest companies?”  Dude, it’s an existential crisis for the Gulf of Mexico, its inhabitants, and its wild life if not the oceans generally and the planet.  You think I or anybody else gives a rat’s ass whether BP fails?

If you know how to stop the leak, it’s really time to stop it.  This sitting and watching as BP diddles and tries to harmonize stopping the leak with preserving its investment in the well is going to kill the Gulf, if it hasn’t done so already.  33 days is more than enough time to stop the leak.

The federal response, described in your brilliant statements today, is what I call feckless.  And that’s the nicest term I can find to describe it.  This is a disgrace.  The only thing we’re lacking at the moment is the icing.  That would be Obama telling Ken Salazar what a great job he’s doing.  I wish I didn’t think that was next up.

———————-

simulposted at The Dream Antilles and dailyKos

In the nineteen sixties and seventies the western world was in the throes of a cultural and psychological revolution of awareness that at times threatened to bring down the governments and destroy the societies of some of the most powerful countries on earth, and terrified many who were unable to step outside of the structure and limitations of the worldviews they had constructed for themselves in the course of their lives.

Questioning cultural norms and prejudices and searching for alternatives that better respected and valued human beings and their relationship with the larger society and with the natural world as the basis and reason for societies actions and existence rather than society and the state and the status quo as the determining factors of how people should interact with each other, were the drivers behind this revolution.

The insecurity of many in the face of insistent and deep questioning that in a religious context would have been labeled blasphemy and heresy caused knee-jerk fear reactions that in many arenas turned into violent confrontations, particularly but not only race riots and countless smaller horrors of the racial Civil Rights Movement, and in the struggle for equality under law and social systems of  more than half the population in the Gay and the Women's Liberation Movements, and what was often termed a Sexual Revolution, all of which had been percolating and growing for many years and all of which naturally contributed to making up the more encompassing psychological or awareness heightening Cultural Revolution of the times.

History is full of “flashbulb moments” — when FLASH!

the course of History, changes instantly, on a dime,

as the result of some collective common experience.

This is not one of those tales.

Rather it’s another kind of story entirely,

when we all collectively sense something’s wrong,

but no one can really pin it down, to …

Exactly what the problem is.

Deja vu

Déjà vu [Deja vu] is the experience of feeling sure that one has witnessed or experienced a new situation previously (an individual feels as though an event has already happened or has happened in the recent past), although the exact circumstances of the previous encounter are uncertain.

[…]

The experience of déjà vu is usually accompanied by a compelling sense of familiarity, and also a sense of “eeriness,” “strangeness,” “weirdness,” or what Sigmund Freud and other psychologists call “the uncanny.” The “previous” experience is most frequently attributed to a dream, although in some cases there is a firm sense that the experience has genuinely happened in the past.

The story the US government and BP are not telling. Oil slick hits Cuba, Honduras, and Nicaragua.

Satellite Image