Tag: ecology

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

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

As you can see, I’ve gotten tired of just typing and complaining about this. That just didn’t seem to be enough, especially because BP is now collecting oil from the spill that it can sell, their stock is still traded, they’re still doing business. No, I wanted to do something else. So here’s an invitation to join me in creating a leaderless, spontaneous national boycott of BP.

Well, it isn’t exactly Alice’s Restaurant.  Yet.  But who knows what this can lead to.

Please join me.

——————————-

simulposted at The Dream Antilles and docuDharma

— Experts estimates that we are losing 137 plant, animal and insect species every single day due to rainforest deforestation. That equates to 50,000 species a year. As the rainforest species disappear, so do many possible cures for life-threatening diseases.

— Nearly half of the world’s species of plants, animals and microorganisms will be destroyed or severely threatened over the next quarter century due to rainforest deforestation.

— Rainforests once covered 14% of the earth’s land surface; now they cover a mere 6% and experts estimate that the last remaining rainforests could be consumed in less than 40 years.

— One and one-half acres of rainforest are lost every second with tragic consequences for both developing and industrial countries.

http://www.rain-tree.com/facts…

I recently had an opportunity

to visit some shorelines on Lake Michigan

and Lake Huron (after almost 2 decades away)

and the peaceful inland seas,

were beautiful and restoring.

But what stunned me most

was the green algae mats, most places

(both dead and living).

Tigers are on the brink of extinction.  This fact brought me initially surprise, and then immediately grief, despair, rage, anger and sadness.  So, I’ve written about it– this is the fourth essay in a week — in an effort to alert others to this catastrophe.  I consider the extinction of tigers and other big cats an environmental emergency, an impending disaster.

Tiger in Captivity

The Tiger is almost extinct.  This situation is beyond disquieting. It’s a very scary, dire one for our small planet.  As Meteor Blades wrote yesterday

“Sometimes fury and despair are the only responses that one can come up with. It seems as if nothing anybody does – laws, scoldings, appeals to people’s better nature – will stop this needless, heedless destruction.

Please join me in the jungle in Asia.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Doctor Dan Mongiardo, Kentucky’s Lieutenant Governor, has announced that he is running for the Democratic nomination for the Kentucky Senate race, to take on whoever wins the Republican nomination to challenge for the seat that Senator Bunning (R-Big$$$) has announced he is giving up.

Lots of politics to unwrap in that paragraph, which I’ll leave to the political wise-guys. The Sunday Train today is about Dr. Dan’s Rail Plan.

As far as I can tell, Dr. Dan’s Rail Plan has four main parts, and regular readers of the Sunday Train will recognize much from each of the four parts:

• Support for expanding Kentucky’s existing and potential Amtrak routes into 110mph Emerging Higher Speed Rail corridors
  
• Support for regional rail services to complete the above state rail map
  
• “Hybrid Light Rail” to provide cross-metropolitan local rail services, principally to Louisville
  
• Heavy investment in complementary local transit, including bus rapid transit and a high frequency driverless monotrain system for Kentucky.
  

Act Blue Page

For those looking to send some snake oil Doctor Dan’s way: Daniel Mongiardo’s Act Blue Page.