Tag: Gulf of Mexico

It begins as helplessness.  Nothing more, nothing less.  I watch as oil spews from BP’s well into the Gulf of Mexico, killing sea life, destroying the ocean, ruining the breeding grounds near the shore.  The Gulf of Mexico is becoming a vast petroleum gumbo garnished with oil soaked sea birds and drowned turtles.  I watch this.  I wish that all of the wise men and women of the world could find a solution, could stop the flow.  But as the time elapses, and the 48 hour periods to know whether the flow can be stemmed mount up, it should be obvious to me.  There may be no solution.  At least not for the foreseeable future.  And by then, by then what even BP is calling a “catastrophe” will be that much more enormous.  That much more irremediable.  The leak will have killed much of the Gulf of Mexico, and unchecked, it will continue to kill.

Keith Olbermann thinks that Obama should show more anger about this.  That, he thinks, will show people that Obama is with them.  Or something.  Personally, I have more than enough unproductive anger about BP.  I don’t need it to be mirrored.  Or extended.  No.  What I want is internal.  I want to understand what BP is doing and has done to my interior landscape.  I want to come to terms with that.  And to comprehend it in this way, I use what I know: I look at the mythic, and I look at myself.  It’s Shamanism 101.

Please join me on this voyage.  

Author and activist Naomi Klein has been visiting Louisiana, and conducted a short on camera interview with Al Jazeera about her impressions of the disaster response to BP’s oil leak catastrophe…

Senator Dick Durbin once described Capitol Hill as being owned by the banks. He said the banks ‘own this place’ describing why it was so hard to get financial reform through in Washington, and  all I can say from having spent the week here in Louisiana is that it really feels like the oil and gas industry owns this place.

I think we’re dealing with two factors here. One is an election strategy for the Obama Administration, they want to keep some distance, they don’t want to own the disaster fully, they want to still have somebody to point fingers to. But then there’s also just this major attitude in this administration from day one really, to trust industry.

And so, even when the industry creates the disaster – I’m sorry to make these analogies with the financial sector, but we saw it with the banks as well – they melted down the economy but then we still heard from the Obama Administration as well as the Bush Administration starting with them but carried through from the Obama Administration, ‘we’re not going to tell the banks how to do their jobs, they’re the experts, we’re going to stand back’.

And now they’re doing the same thing with the response to the greatest, what looks like the greatest environmental catastrophe, or what could very well prove to be he greatest environmental catastrophe this country has ever seen. And I think people are very confused by this because this is clearly a national emergency, so why is it that BP is in charge of the whole operation?

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 …

America gets everything it wants.   It wants oil, and for its sins, it’s getting oil.  70,000 barrels a day of it, coming ashore on the Gulf Coast with more on the way, flowing like black blood from that gaping wound in the earth, ripped a mile deep by the weapons of greed, held in the hands of stormtroopers of profit, nothing can stop it, no one can staunch it, that black blood will keep spilling all over our shores, through the loop current out into the Gulf Stream, up the East Coast and across the Atlantic, written on the waves like a message from Hell.    

Tell me no more of your plans to control this, tell me no more of your feeble response, the sea will not hear you, the tide will not heed you, the poison is spreading above and below. Our fate has been written in carbon emissions, in ozone depletion and polar cap melting, in black bloodstains of horror on the face of the deep.  

The devastation unleashed by BP/Transocean/Halliburton is already orders of magnitude worse than Katrina and there’s no end in sight.  A billion words have been written about this disaster, but the enormity of it is beyond words, only two words come even close to describing it . . .    

Corporate greed and political corruption have triggered this catastrophe in the Gulf, there is endless suffering ahead and no way to avoid it . . .

These are people used to surviving disaster.  It seemed there was nothing they couldn’t handle.  Until this spill.  Oysterman Buck Battle, who lost his house to Katrina, calls the oil spill “the monster of monsters.”

“I’ve never heard so much fear in people’s voices,” says Mike Tidwell, author of “Bayou Farewell,” which chronicled southern Louisiana’s long legacy of environmental problems. “A hurricane is an event with a beginning, a middle and an end.  This is more like a nuclear accident offshore and a radiation cloud is coming in.  There’s a sense of doom.”

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