I’m going to hazard a few predictions here. I hope I’m wrong. If I am you can crucify me later.
Neither BP nor anyone else has any workable idea how to stop the leak. If they did it would have been stopped by now.
The leak will continue to flow into the ocean for the foreseeable future, until the reservoir pressure drops to lower than the pressure of the weight of the ocean pressing down on it. At some point perhaps the seabed will collapse into an emptying reservoir and there will be seabed earthquakes. And maybe tsunamis.
BP will not be “shoved aside”. The government will not take over the management of the disaster response. Neither BP nor any of its management will face any substantive sanctions or criminal charges for this. Nor will BP be “debarred” from government contracts by the EPA.
For a very simple and obvious reason.
The government has the largest military in the world to supply and operate, and the government has two military occupations in progress to run.
BP has been one of the biggest suppliers of fuel to the Pentagon in recent years, with much of its oil going to U.S. military operations in the Mideast. (It sold $2.2 billion in oil to the Pentagon last year, making it No. 1 among all the oil companies in sales to the military, according to the latest figures from the Defense Energy Support Center.)
The government is going to do everything they can possibly do to keep BP alive and healthy, to keep their largest supplier of fuel to the military operating profitably and supplying that fuel.
Ken Salazar spouting his “”We will keep our boot on their neck until the job gets done” line to the media is PR to keep the peasants from burning down the castle, and is probably the only way he has of avoiding being made the scapegoat and saving himself.
Sorry about the Gulf of Mexico, folks. It’s being sacrificed for the (heave) greater good.