A “Controlled” Burn of giant oil slick in Gulf of Mexico begins by our Coast Guard, to attempt to prevent landfall of the unprocessed crude oil gushing out of the destroyed BP Deepwater Horizon rig’s wellhead for a week. In spite of having four remotely operated submarines working nearly a mile underwater, trying to jigger the automatic shut off valves, the well continues to blow out at least 42,000 gallons of crude a day.
“They lit it with a little float that has a fuel source on it that floats into the oil and ignites,” Petty Officer Cory Mendenhall told AFP. “It did successfully ignite.”
The first burn was lit at around 4.45pm local time (7.45am AEST) and officials said any fires would have to be extinguished by nightfall. Sunset is at 7.27pm local time.
The U.S. Coast Guard “discovered” 4 days after an explosion destroyed and sank the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig 40 miles off the coast of Venice, Louisiana, killing 11 crew workers, that indeed, oil does appear to be leaking out of the well head on the floor of the ocean.
“We thought what we were dealing with as of yesterday was a surface residual (oil) from the mobile offshore drilling unit,” (Rear Admiral Mary) Landry said. “In addition to that is oil emanating from the well. It is a big change from yesterday … This is a very serious spill, absolutely.”
Coast Guard and company officials estimate that as much as 1,000 barrels – or 42,000 gallons – of oil is leaking each day after studying information from remotely operated vehicles (underwater) and the size of the oil slick surrounding the blast site. The rainbow-colored sheen of oil stretched 20 miles by 20 miles on Saturday – about 25 times larger than it appeared to be a day earlier, Landry said.
BP PLC, which leased the rig and is taking the lead in the cleanup, and the government have been using the remotely operated vehicles to try to stop the leak by closing valves on the well deep underwater. If that doesn’t work, the company could drill what’s called an intervention well to control the oil flow. But the intervention drilling could take months.
The article says that the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker wreck in Alaska was 11 million gallons. By dividing 11 million by 42,000 gallons, assuming the government is not lowballing this estimated amount, which seems like a nice, suspiciously round number, “1000 barrels,” I’m coming up with 261 days before this is as big as the Exxon Valdez spill. The regional director for the Federal government’s Mineral Management Services (the wonderful folk who let the companies bid on offshore drilling tracts) says that leaks have been repaired at this depth before, but it is difficult. Bad weather is currently delaying the cleanup of already spilt oil.
This Earth Day, while an oil rig was burning and sinking and spilling out into the Gulf of Mexico, I joined a small band of protesters during my lunch break to tell the government to stop a similar crime against nature, one that is taking place in my home state of Pennsylvania. There are no offshore oil rigs here, of course, but the new and dangerous method of extracting natural gas through fracking is becoming a larger and larger threat to our water, our land, and our climate. And Pennsylvania is ground zero.
So I took to the streets at a Green Party-organized protest. We stood outside the regional Department of Environmental Protection and made our voices heard.
(Go below the fold for more info on the protest, fracking, and what you can do, including upcoming actions.)
A report[1] prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on June 30, 1947, stated: “A peace enforced through fear is a poor substitute for a peace maintained through international cooperation based upon agreement and understanding. But until such a peace is brought about, this nation can hope only that an effective deterrent to global war will be a universal fear of the atomic bomb as the ultimate horror in war.” We can see even at that time that nuclear weapons were seen as the ultimate deterrent to any nation’s aggression. If Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons, the United States would not have invaded the country in 2003. In his own words[2], Saddam Hussein stated that he allowed the world to believe he had WMD so he wouldn’t appear weak to Iran. He further stated, “By God, if I had such weapons, I would have used them in the fight against the US.”
Last week, President Obama announced a plan to open 167 million acres of ocean for offshore oil and gas drilling, a vast area that even George W. Bush — a former oil executive and great ally of the oil industry — didn’t open for drilling.
Obama’s plan will deepen our country’s addiction to oil, and open pristine oceans off America’s East and Alaskan coasts to the massively polluting oil industry.
Obama’s plan would allow the fossil fuel industry to drill in a great expanse of ocean that has been off-limits for two decades. [1]
This proposed giveaway of our ocean to Big Oil, an industry notorious for environmental devastation, was announced soon after we discovered that the Obama administration is considering a deal to loosen the international ban on commercial whaling.
Our planet does not need more oil drillin g and commercial whaling. We need more energy conservation and clean renewable energy like solar and wind power.
There is a years long grisly struggle between ethnic groups in Darfur — with one government-backed militia brutalizing civilians with ethnic connections to the guerrilla rebels they fight. There is a refugee crisis, starvation, drought, and horrible violence.
The conflict in Darfur is complicated. It has several causes, and the people who fight sometimes do so for different reasons. Sudan is riddled with deep ethnic divides, fueled by the colonialism that favored one ethnic group over others. There is political posturing and finger pointing in Khartoum that might occupy a handful of doctoral theses on the subject before we understand it all. But at least two of the reasons this conflict persists are rooted in ecojustice: desertification and oil. And that oil doesn’t even lie under Darfur.
Why was the US so quick to send so many troops into Haiti after the earthquake? Why were there so many fears from around the world of US militarism and exploitation in Haiti?
Oil?
F. William Engdahl is an economist and author and the writer of the best selling book “A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order.”, and has written on issues of energy, politics and economics for more than 30 years, beginning with the first oil shock in the early 1970s.
Here Engdahl talks with Paul Jay of The Real News, says that geophysics suggest there could be massive oil and mineral deposits in Haiti and that the US may be motivated by the desire to strategically deny oil deposits in Haiti to the rest of the world.
ENGDAHL: Well, if you look at a geophysical map of Haiti and the Caribbean, it jumps out that Haiti and Port-au-Prince, Haiti, lies right along the conjunction of what are called tectonic plates, but three separate tectonic plates. If you can imagine a China vase that falls off the table and gets broken in many pieces and you glue it back together, well, these tectonic plates are a bit similar in terms of images.
But three of those converge right at the land area that’s called Haiti, and generally where we have such a conversion of tectonic plates, we have a great amount of geophysical motion, energy, and so forth. They tend to be along-in the Pacific you have the Ring of Fire, which is literally the ring of vulcanic activity-. Indonesia is in one such zone; Saudi Arabia and the giant oil fields of the Middle East, from Kuwait and so forth, the Persian Gulf, are another such convergence of such plates.
And up until now there’s been very little talk about petroleum and Haiti, but it’s not because there hasn’t been interest in petroleum in Haiti. My take on it is that there are-according to geophysicists knowledgeable about the geophysics of the Caribbean basin-you probably have large multinational oil companies, US, British oil companies and their allies, who are aware that with a little bit of exploration onshore and offshore, that there are probably enormous oil finds.
And you just had, two years ago, offshore Cuba, just north of Haiti, a giant-supergiant, actually, oil discovery, with several billion barrels of believed reserves of oil there that the Russians are helping the Cubans to exploit. So it stands to reason that the same geological fault line of these tectonic plates-the Caribbean plate, the North American plate, and the South American plate-they all converge north of Venezuela and in the area that’s called Haiti.
That also makes Haiti ripe for other unusual minerals, such as uranium, gold, and so forth. And my own sense from talking with geophysicists on this whole Haiti question is that Haiti is probably one of the undeveloped treasures of mineral wealth on the planet… full transcript here
We see images of Darfur on our computer screens, with people like Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, and Don Cheadle raising awareness about the mounting humanitarian crisis in that region of the Sudan and Chad. But to make the story clear, they tend to speak of Darfur as an isolated conflict inside Sudan; the greater context of the crisis does not change the dire need for aid and intervention.
But the reasons behind the conflict in Darfur are complicated, and they cannot be separated from Sudanese civil war history. The conflict in Darfur started as an uprising against the Sudanese government by the Fur and other farmers in the region because they were marginalized and excluded from the peace negotiations toward ending the Second Sudanese Civil War…
Chalk up yet another reason why we have two wars going right now — the U.S. Military is one of the biggest consumers of petroleum products in the world.
And because of this, it is also one of the world’s leading producers of CO2.
By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy in general. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements.
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The Feb. 17, 2007, Energy Bulletin detailed the oil consumption just for the Pentagon’s aircraft, ships, ground vehicles and facilities that made it the single-largest oil consumer in the world.
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Even according to rankings in the 2006 CIA World Factbook, only 35 countries (out of 210 in the world) consume more oil per day than the Pentagon.
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This information is not readily available … because military emissions abroad are exempt from national reporting requirements under U.S. law and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change” …
Bryan Farrell in his new book, “The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism,” says that “the greatest single assault on the environment, on all of us around the globe, comes from one agency … the Armed Forces of the United States.”
Sixteen gallons of oil. That’s how much the average American soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan consumes on a daily basis — either directly, through the use of Humvees, tanks, trucks, and helicopters, or indirectly, by calling in air strikes. Multiply this figure by 162,000 soldiers in Iraq, 24,000 in Afghanistan, and 30,000 in the surrounding region (including sailors aboard U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf) and you arrive at approximately 3.5 million gallons of oil: the daily petroleum tab for U.S. combat operations in the Middle East war zone.
And there’s more:
And in 2008, Oil Change International released a report showing that:
The [Iraq] war is responsible for at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) since March 2003. To put this in perspective, CO2 released by the war to date equals the emissions from putting 25 million more cars on the road in the US this year.
Between March 2003 and October 2007 the US military in Iraq purchased more than 4 billion gallons of fuel from the Defense Energy Support Center, the agency responsible for procuring and supplying petroleum products to the Department of Defense. Burning these fuels has directly produced nearly 39 million metric tons of CO2 Just transporting 4 billion gallons of fuel to the military in Iraq consumed at least as much fuel as was delivered nearly doubling overall fuel-related emissions.
Emissions from the Iraq War to date are nearly two and a half times greater than what would be avoided between 2009 and 2016 were California to implement the auto emission regulations it has proposed (but that the Bush Administration struck down).
If the war were ranked as a country in terms of annual emissions, it would emit more CO2 each year than 139 of the world’s nations do, more than 60% of all countries on the planet…
Wow, no wonder the Powers that Be don’t want to put the brakes on this thing. It’s a paradise for the oil companies, a dream come true. They take over a country with oil, then spend gargantuan amounts of oil in order to keep the Army there, then when things settle down a bit they just gear up ANOTHER “war” so that they can pump even more and more, all the while charging it to the United States taxpayer.
A new TV program premires on TruTV (Turner Broadcasting/Time Warner) in December, titled: Conspiracy Therory, starring former Governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura.
If you know anything about Ventura, it is that he never minces his words, or holds back how he really feels about things (a refreshing trait for any politician), and on December 9 at 10:00pm, he tackles the subject that no one else on television will: What really happened on Septemeber 11, 2001 to the most well defended Country on the face of the planet?
Jesse steps into America’s most controversial conspiracy by challenging the 9-11 Commission report and considering the claim that the September 11th attacks were an inside job. At the urging of victims’ families, he finds witnesses who claim the towers were brought down by revolutionary explosives that were placed in plain sight, but no one knew what they were. Ventura also hears from those who claim the missing black box flight recorders were actually recovered. And he is told a shocking story about who may have been in the cockpits before the jets took off.
Featured Experts and Eyewitnesses: Physicist Steven Jones, who says he found evidence of thermite, a bomb material, in the residue from Ground Zero; explosives expert Van Romero, who performed a test purported to show that liquid thermite can make steel girders burn hotter and faster; demolition expert Brent Blanchard, who says that no inspection for explosive materials was done at the scene; former Air Force pilot Jeff Dahlstrom, who is convinced that 9-11 was a “false flag” operation carried out to push the country into war; Mike Bellone, a recovery worker at Ground Zero who says that he saw airline flight recorders recovered at the scene; Dave Lindorff, a journalist, who says that the recorders were recovered, inspected and turned over to the FBI; Dale Leppard, a former head of the Airline Pilots Association who insists recorders are always found; and former FBI investigator Jack Cloonan, who disputes claims the recorders were found.
Key oil figures were distorted by US pressure, says whistleblower
Exclusive: Watchdog’s estimates of reserves inflated says top official
Terry Macalister
guardian.co.uk, Monday 9 November 2009 21.30 GMT
The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.
The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.
The allegations raise serious questions about the accuracy of the organisation’s latest World Energy Outlook on oil demand and supply to be published tomorrow – which is used by the British and many other governments to help guide their wider energy and climate change policies.
In particular they question the prediction in the last World Economic Outlook, believed to be repeated again this year, that oil production can be raised from its current level of 83m barrels a day to 105m barrels. External critics have frequently argued that this cannot be substantiated by firm evidence and say the world has already passed its peak in oil production.
I posted a diary at Daily Kos earlier today in response to Jerome a Paris’s diary in which he purported to debunk any claim that the invasion of Afghanistan for a pipeline was all conspiracy theory.
There is a teaching moment here; no matter how much you’ve previously researched, there is always more information out there you missed.
I know this, because I missed something very important…
We see images of Darfur on our computer screens, with people like Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, and Don Cheadle raising awareness about the mounting humanitarian crisis in that region of the Sudan and Chad. But to make the story clear, they tend to speak of Darfur as an isolated conflict inside Sudan; the greater context of the crisis does not change the dire need for aid and intervention.