Rolling 2010 Oil Spill Thread

Because the mess in the Gulf doesn't have its own thread, because I never followed up on what happened to that stranded tanker on the Great Barrier Reef, and because every time one of these spills happens I'm downright humbled by how horrible it all is on many different levels.

http://images.huffingtonpost.com/gadgets/slideshows/6519/slide_6519_86881_large.jpg

http://i.huffpost.com/gadgets/slideshows/6519/slide_6519_86629_large.jpg?1272747057015

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/05/02/us/02spill_CA1/02spill_CA1-popup.jpg

http://softporal.ucoz.ru/Music4/Gorillaz-Plastic_Beach_2010.jpg

RE: Great Barrier Reef wreck, and I hate that I'm linking to the Washington Fucking Examiner for this, but the ship was eventually successfully lifted off the reef, 3 tons of oil ended up being spilled, and arrests have been made for straying waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay outside of the shipping lane. In all likelihood the arrests will result in a fine to some massive corporation that they'll barely notice. JUSTICE.

Anyone else eeried out by the graphic similarity of the swirling oil vortex to Katrina?

ugh, I was trying to find some new pictures of the oil spill and found this fucker, who has decided to dedicate his life to making horrible companies look as good as possible when they massively screw up.

BP Must Assert Greater Control Over the Oil Spill Pictures and Story

As a first priority, BP is failing to manage the pictures of the crisis. Right now, stock footage and photos of indigenous animals in peril are telling a powerful story about what many expect to happen in the coming hours. Meanwhile, images of the massive clean-up effort – and the hard-working men and women that are carrying it out – are nowhere to be seen. At a time when BP can ill-afford to be perceived as a faceless corporate entity, this imbalance needs to be remedied.

He was honored as "Crisis Manager of the year for 2007 for his work on the spinach E. coli crisis, the industry-wide pet food recalls, and the lead paint toy recalls.

Yaaaaay!

It makes me think of a story I just read about the world's third richest man defending Goldman Sachs. Let me read the world's third poorest man's opinion instead.

eating so much local seafood right now before it's all fucking gone. dear bp: fuck you and die.

yah and so the new orleans times-picayune which you think would be all over this story is paying not quite enough attention. top story right now: jazzfest. distant 2nd or 3rd: catastrophic river of roofing tar making its way toward us. fuck them too.

LA Times: BP's containment problem is unprecedented

The problem with the April 20 spill is that it isn't really a spill: It‘s a gush, like an underwater oil volcano. A hot column of oil and gas is spurting into freezing, black waters nearly a mile down, where the pressure nears a ton per inch, impossible for divers to endure. Experts call it a continuous, round-the-clock calamity, unlike a leaking tanker, which might empty in hours or days.

...To BP falls the daunting task of trying to stop the gush before it becomes the most damaging spill in American history. If the flow is not stopped, it will exhaust the natural reservoir of oil beneath the sea floor, experts say. Many months, at least, could pass.

As I mentioned on the other thread, the initial estimates were 1,000 barrels per day (BP's estimate), which was then recently revised upward to 5,000 barrels/day (collaborative estimate between NOAA, US Coast Guard and...BP again), and now recent reports from WSJ are suggesting it might actually be closer to 25,000 barrels/day (1 million gallons/day). Further, both BP officials and Dept. of the Interior are saying that it may take at least 90 days to stop the oil flow.

So...I guess they gave up on the idea of setting the oil on fire, once they realized they'd have to keep setting it on fire for months? Or...?

http://i43.tinypic.com/wr0u41.jpg

I was trying to find some new pictures of the oil spill and found this fucker

I'm sure it's only a coincidence that he looks a lot like Dick Morris did in the '90s. Have we isolated which part of the DNA turns someone into a slimy opportunist asshole yet?

http://i40.tinypic.com/ets8q1.jpg

More reassuring information: BP's Initial Exploration Plan for the well that's currently leaking, besides concluding that drilling there did not pose a significant risk to the shore that's currently being fucked up, also mentions that BP has the capabilities to respond to a "worst case scenario" of a 300,000 gallon/day leak (Section 7.1). Remember, we may actually be at 1,000,000 gallons/day right now.

Section 14.2.3.2 WETLANDS

"An accidental oil spill from the proposed activities could cause impacts to wetlands. However, due to the distance to shore (48 miles) and the response capabilities that would be implemented, no significant adverse impacts are expected."

And similar language for the sections on beaches, shore birds and coastal nesting birds, and wildlife.

Meanwhile, an internal NOAA document from April 28 suggests that the leak could be "an order of magnitude higher than previously thought." On April 28, they were estimating it at 5,000 barrels/day, so an order of magnitude higher would be 50,000 barrels/day, or over 2 million gallons/day.

Da-da-da-daaamnn...

10 and 99 are also an order of magnitude higher than 5, but yeah, not good.

And here's the leak, apparently:

http://i43.tinypic.com/wa67mf.jpg

xpost to caek: really? I guess I always thought an order of magnitude was a factor of 10, but you're definitely more authoritative on the subject! So is 10.0 an order of magnitude higher than 9.9?

Here's another update: New Cleanup Method Shows Promise for Well Leaking About 210,000 Gallons a Day

Officials in charge of the cleanup of a massive oil spill now approaching three Gulf Coast states said Saturday that a new technique in battling the leaks 5,000 feet beneath the sea showed promise.

Among the various weapons employed against the gushing crude has been the distribution of chemical dispersants on the water’s surface to break down the oil. The new approach involves the deployment of the dispersants underwater, near the source of the leaks. Officials said that in two tests, it appeared to be keeping crude oil from rising to the surface and that the procedure might be used more frequently once evaluations of its impact on the deepwater ecology were completed.

Anyone else reaaaaaally skeptical about this idea of sweeping the oil under a rug? Also: "Estimates are useful, but we are planning far beyond that, he [Adm. Thad W. Allen, the commandant of the Coast Guard] said.” It doesn’t really matter, he said, whether it is 1,000 barrels or 5,000 barrels a day that are leaking, he said."

It doesn't really matter? Would 25,000 barrels a day matter? Or 50,000 for that matter? btw, memo to NYT: your leak estimates are already out of date.

A good discussion of how the blowout initially occurred, and legal liability.

A radio interview with a Deepwater Horizon crew member describing the incident.

Halliburton's name keeps coming up here and there as an involved party, and that first link provides even more reasons to believe they were primarily responsible, although, as the author mentions, it's BP who will almost certainly be footing the bill.

Some pictures from Sanpaku's first link up there:

http://i44.tinypic.com/28tb2va.jpg
http://i44.tinypic.com/r1akvn.jpg

the distribution of chemical dispersants on the water’s surface to break down the oil

These chemicals that break down oil, do they like dissolve completely into water undetected afterward and lose all their organic-molecule-destroying properties soon after getting rid of the oil? Cos we're talking about a LOT of oil and I would think we would need a LOT of these chemical dispersants and in that case what are the impacts they will have?

xp Z S:

For comparison, there's the natural oil seeps just offshore Coal Oil Point, Santa Barbara, California, normally flow 100 barrels of crude per day.

This is visible as surface sheen and beach crud/tarballs. Every so often thousands of birds are killed. Seepage probably could be dramatically reduced by producing from that reservoir to reduce pressure (this has worked in other parts of the Santa Barbara field). That hasn't been politically possible since the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill.

So, somewhere between 100 barrels/day and 5,000 barrels/day (the current high-side estimate for Deepwater Horizon) is the threshold where environmental damage from oil matters enough for us to take action.

The LA Times story you just linked to says that SkyTruth has a "rock bottom" estimate of 25,000 barrels/day.

But yeah, I take your point, regardless of the amount this is unconscionable.

From Cleanup specialists not optimistic (Globe and Mail)

Mr. Miller, whose firm has helped stop out-of-control wells across the world, faulted first-response crews for making a bad situation much worse.

When an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig ignited a massive fire on April 20, fire boats raced to put it out. Pictures show at least four vessels pumping massive streams of water onto the rig.

That was a mistake, Mr. Miller said.

“Why they put the fire out is beyond me,” he said. “Basically once it was burning it’s not going to get any worse. But when they pulled all those fire boats out there, the result was they sunk the rig by filling it full of water.”

He blames the oil leak on that act, since the sinking oil rig took with it the main connection to the well, which is located 1,500 metres below water. That allowed oil to leak out. Had the fire been left alone, the oil would have burned instead – a more palatable choice, he said.

Basically, putting out wellhead fires offshore is a terrible idea.

It was 4/20, cut them some slack.

Maybe this is why the blowout preventer malfunctioned:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqhXz6mVPTM

My impression is that the initial response to the incident was focused on rescuing or recovering the missing crew, which might explain the eagerness to put out the fire. I guess I can't fault an effort to save lives, but those first key hours seems to have been a squandered opportunity to lessen the severity of the disaster.

^but actually I kind of think the crew of these rigs assumes considerable risk when they sign up, and given the horror of this disaster, securing the rig ought to be the top priority.

Oil Spills deserve their own double entendre in the spirit of the oh-so-subtle "Drill, Baby, Drill."

was waiting for this thread to get started. the whole thing just sickens me enormously.

This breaks my heart. Adam, my heart goes out to you and all my friends/family back in NOLA. My uncles a shrimper. Well, I guess now he used to be. Looks like it's expected to reach Pensacola by Wed at the latest.

xpost to caek: really? I guess I always thought an order of magnitude was a factor of 10, but you're definitely more authoritative on the subject! So is 10.0 an order of magnitude higher than 9.9?

― biologically wrong (Z S), Sunday, May 2, 2010 1:46 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

strictly, yes. but it's strict definition is vague (i.e. 10.001 to 99.999), and its actual day-to-day usage adds even more vagueness, so figuring out what someone means and then how precisely they mean it is not always straightforward. party time!

This breaks my heart. Adam, my heart goes out to you and all my friends/family back in NOLA. My uncles a shrimper. Well, I guess now he used to be. Looks like it's expected to reach Pensacola by Wed at the latest.

thx kyle. am gonna go down to that bp station on tchoupitoulas and beat down the attendant. want me to give him one for you?

i am not the only person to make it a point to go out and eat a huge shrimp po boy (dressed, please, and add a ton of crystal hot sauce)--when i got to work last night a number of people told me they'd done the same thing. we all, i think, feel powerless in the path of all consuming poison ooze so we exert what agency we can.

the times-picayune continues its moronic coverage: yesterday's crop of articles included one about some podunk oil-beholden coastal alabama and mississippi congresspeople telling us it's not that bad and one about how not that many birds are oily.

Since nothing related to the environment or energy can occur without a large portion of the U.S. population taking a batshit insane position on it, I shouldn't be surprised to see the developing conspiracies:

Rush Limbaugh pointed out that the explosion occurred on April 21st, the day before 'Earth Day.' He also reminded us that Al Gore had previously encouraged environmental nutjobs to engage in civil disobedience against the construction of coal plants that don't have carbon capture technology. 'Eco-terrorists' exist and have done millions of dollars worth of criminal damage. Fire is one of the main tools of their evil trade. I'm not claiming the Deep Horizon was bombed by eco-terrorists, although I don't believe it's out of the realm of possibility. But, it would take some serious money and ability to pull off an attack like that, so I would tend to think much bigger than college hippie eco-wackos with some money-backing -- a foreign government, perhaps. Of course, before I could finish writing my thoughts here, I just heard Michael Savage posing the same questions. He also said there is a theory on a Russian website that claims North Korea is behind this. The article claims that North Korea torpedoed the Deepwater Horizon, which was apparently built and financed by South Korea. Torpedoes would make sense for the results we see.... There are a number of international 'suspects' who might want to do something like this. They range from Muslim terrorists to the Red Chinese, Venezuela and beyond. Remember that China and Russia are drilling out there, as well, and they would benefit from America cutting back on our own drilling.

That's from the Dakota Voice, summarizing the cognitive dissonance that is triggered in the brainstems of people that have been duped into defending Big Oil for the last several decades.

and they would benefit from America cutting back on our own drilling

Again, how does this work outside of a fantasy world where oil companies can only sell where they drill?

I believe it works something like this:

1. The GOP has been pushing offshore drilling relentlessly for decades as core "energy solution".
2. Offshore drilling won't significantly improve ANYTHING, whether that's the price of gasoline or the problems of keeping up with demand.
3. It's really hard to admit you're wrong.
__________
4. Ignore anything approaching reality when it comes to offshore drilling.

You gotta admit it's funny to see them holding the W-era "stay the course" line even as this disaster unfolds. It's fucking sucks tho, and I'm really sorry for anyone that lives in the Gulf area. This is definitely a "getting caught selling your mom's TV to a pawn shop to score junk" and anyone that wants to defend oil production needs an intervention.

I just can't believe there's a giant artery of OIL gushing thousands of gallons into the Gulf and it's going to take a minimum of 90 days to stop. can you even stop it? how do you get down there? what if it doesn't work?

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_NHVPmXi04PI/RrALG6oLHHI/AAAAAAAAAOU/JNgqO_5i5Vo/S660/cthulhu-ocean2.jpg

it was nice knowing you guys, see you in the next life

I think the 90 days estimate is coming from the amount of time it would take to drill a SECOND well on the seabed to siphon off some of the oil/reduce the pressure on the gusher. At first that idea was floated as sort of a worst-case scenario plan, in case all the other ideas didn't work, but it's looking more and more likely from what I'm seeing. I just watched the new Coast Guard leader on the spill, Admiral forgot his name, on Meet the Press, and when he was asked about what countermeasures they're taking, he was still saying something like "BP is working very hard on plans to mitigate the..." Given BP's track record of success on this over the past week, umm...

what incentive does BP have to deal with this in a timely manner?

They're on the hook for cleanup costs, which of course increase with every day that the oil is still leaking.

To me, its not so much about defending big oil.

So far, alternatives to petroleum for liquid vehicular fuel are few and (as yet) not competitively priced.

If we believe we can simply stop producing from domestic resources, we're simply displacing the production to other, often more ecologically sensitive areas of the world. While its possible that we (in the US) as a service economy might survive by cutting each others's hair, creating financial industries devoted to disguising risk, or sponsoring our empire's version of gladitorial combat in the judicial system, none of those are readily exportable.

Perhaps China will continue to extend our credit lines. But when the rinminbi is revalued, it will be to halt supply driven price inflation within China. The rinminbi can be revalued much higher to better bid for limited world resources, before it impacts that nation's labor price advantage. They can outbid us for any surplus petroleum energy easily, even at current exchange rates.

We (in the US) only produce about 30% of our liquid fuel/petroleum needs. For 60 years an suburban infrastructure development has been predicated upon cheap liquid fuels for transportation.

Can you walk to work?

In a decade US oil demand coverage goes to 20% (or less), while world supply declines. This will be worst for nations who are too small to have reserve currencies. But its bad, very bad, for the US as well. Any industry subject to trade might benefit from the leveling of currencies and relative labor costs, but it will be harmed as raw materials climb.

We (in the US) still have some liquid fuel reserves that might be exploited, and their contribution will be to defer the day our suburban sprawl must become self sufficient. They can buy us time to convert to shale gas, wind, solar and other fuels.

As for the oil industry, the U.S. Gulf of Mexico is one prospective basin among about 40 worldwide. The capital (rigs and other capital intensive items) will move elsewhere, and 20,000 America-based mid-skilled workers will have to find alternative means of support.

I agree, especially on the point that less production here just means more production elsewhere. It's the opposition to any measure that might even REDUCE the use of oil and other fossil fuels that is outrageous. Between the mid-70s and last year, fuel efficiency of our vehicle fleet actually DECREASED, even as 40 mpg became the norm in Europe and Japan. High speed trains? Even as, again, Europe and Asia made rapid advances so that their citizens would have the option of traveling conveniently and relatively cheaply from city to city, we let our passenger rail system collapse over the past century.

And, of course, there's the biggest gift of all to the oil industry - the refusal to even consider a price on carbon. Alternatives to oil and coal already are competitively priced, if the costs of oil and coal reflected their true costs to the environment and society. That's a subsidy to the oil industry that comes in the form of a cost that should be imposed but isn't. On top of that there are more transparent subsidies, like reduced corporate income taxes on companies that are making higher profits in history.

I agree with all you've said. Sometimes I've decribed my political views (elsewhere) as green libertarian. While the two philosophies may seem intractably opposed, the real problem with lassais fair approaches it that they don't place a price on environmental externalies. These are fundamental, the social inequity issues can be solved, should a steady state environment permit general prosperity.

In the future, our descendants will live in a world of low-impact high-technology renewable resources. That's never been a question. The issue is how we can tranform from here to there.

My view is not dissimilar to that of James Hanson: carbon emission rights trading is a failure where it's been tried. It enriches traders & lawyers but does little to actually throttle carbon production. Simply put a final use tax on carbon, and adjust the taxation rate to match the externalities.

As for this spill? I lived through IXTOC 1, and while it took a season for volunteers to clean the beaches from Brownsville to Galveston, it was done. No species perished. We'll solve this.

suspicious of the timing of the calamity (namely that it occurred right on the cusp of Earth Day and during a period of political contentiousness over drilling)

So, like, in most of our lifetimes then? What suspicious timing indeed!

For 60 years an suburban infrastructure development has been predicated upon cheap liquid fuels for transportation.

Can you walk to work?

In a decade US oil demand coverage goes to 20% (or less), while world supply declines.

What pro-oil seems to miss is that these are not simply causes -- or reasons to continue pursuing oil -- but also symptoms of the problem. Everyone that lives in a suburb is now heavily dependent on oil. I can't walk to work because oil is king and stomps all over other public transportation options. US demand rises because we make cars that use more oil. etc. etc.

takes my parents 15 minutes to drive to the nearest supermarket from their home in suburban jersey. -0-

As for this spill? I lived through IXTOC 1, and while it took a season for volunteers to clean the beaches from Brownsville to Galveston, it was done. No species perished. We'll solve this.

The BP Gulf Disaster is already approaching the scale of the Exxon Valdez spill, and will likely surpass it, so I think it's a more appropriate point of comparison than IXTOC 1, as bad as that was. Unfortunately, the impacts of Exxon Valdez on environment and economy are still being felt today.

Maybe we'll "solve" the immediate problems created by this spill. The more important question is, will we learn anything this time?

(I should say "scale of the disaster", not just scale, because I realize the IXTOC spill was huuuuuuge, but it was also 600 miles away from Texas)

AFAIK, it was the automotive industry tied to internal combustion engines that bought out and extinguished private commuter rail in the US, not the oil producers/transporters/refiners/marketers. Blame GM, not XOM, for the historical problem.

If we chose to produce ammonia or methanol fuels from offshore wind, or algal biodiesel from desert saline pond impounds, it will be produced by companies whose logo you already know. Capital doesn't appear from nowhere. Little capitalists (like myself) can trade in advance of the behemoths. But I assure you, when algal biodiesel (say, from the Mojave) becomes competitive, there are only a handful of companies who with the intellectual and financial wherewithal to make carbon neutral fuel production profitable.

Sure, I don't doubt it. But it's not the fact that BP/Exxon/Shell/Chevron/Conoco are huge corporations that's the issue here. If BP would actually move beyond petroleum and supply some innovative clean energy, I'd be ecstatic. It's what they're actually DOING. The point is, those huge companies won't make the shift to clean energy until every drop of profitable, dirty fossil fuels are exploited. The wellbeing of humanity and our environment doesn't factor into the decision, just the $$$ of it. And as the need to shift to clean energy becomes increasingly urgent with climate change and supply constraints, the price of increasingly scarce fossil fuels will only go up.

http://www.sovereign-publications.com/images/renewable-energy/BP-Alt-Energy.jpg

BP, amongst international majors, has been second only to Statoil (the Norwegian national oil co), in its move towards renewables. Its a shame this happened to them, rather than Exxon, who have vehemently opposed alternatives...

I'm pretty sure that BP has dropped most of its renewables research. I can't remember where I was reading this but the "beyond petroleum" logo has been dropped, Tony Hayward said something to the effect that "we're not in business to save the planet" when he became CEO a couple of years ago, and what little research/funding there is is pretty much confined to biofuel and runs in the low millions of dollars.

Agggh, don't get me started on BP's greenwashing.

Choose your favorite word to click on: BP's actions don't line up with their pleasant logo.

I'm pretty sure that BP has dropped most of its renewables research

See the "actions" link just above.

You're right. More has been spent marketing the "beyond petroleum" label than has actually been spent investing in it. AFAIK, Statoil is the only major with profitable renewables subdivision.

That doesn't change the fact that its international oil companies and the largest electricity utilities that actually have the wherewithal to effect a gradual change to renewables. Government and the public can change incentives, but in the US at least, local/state governments will be incapacitated by public sector unions and their pension obligations for the next few decades.

Go look at the mechanics of making your own biodiesel and decide if its worth it. All the information is online.

If BP stands out at all compared to Exxon et al., it's in the same way that someone convicted of assault and battery looks pretty good next to the child rapist.

Again, I'm fully aware that big energy companies are better positioned to take clean energy solutions and ramp them up quickly. There's a reason that utilities are the primary examples of natural monopolies in Econ 101.

I'm saying that it's demonstrated that they've fought tooth and nail to resist that switch to clean energy, and are primary culprits in the malaise of disinformation on climate and energy.

If we want to treat corporations as people, fine - when people in our society have repeatedly demonstrated that they're attitudes toward other people are malign, we usually keep a careful eye on them, rather then letting them take over the town.

Corporations are artificial life-forms. We the living choose the terrain over which they consume resources and release waste.

BP, the corporation, is in a carbon intensive field, and of course like others in its field chooses to adjust local gradients to improve its own prospects.

Physicist Steve Koonin became VP for science at BP, and his 1995 lecture on our energy prospects, including CO2 issues is among the best discussions I've found anywhere. He's now Undersecretary for Science in Obama's DOE, and I think he's an excellent choice.

It's silly to consider these corporations like people (sillier still to grant them political rights). They're artificial lifeforms under our control, if we collectively choose to use it. Some, like BP were and and can still be directed to advance human needs. Others (Exxon) have demonstrated intense opposition to balancing economic gain with environmental externalities. At some point we collectively will have to dispose of them.

I don't think I'm understanding your "green libertarian" stance. You agree that there should be a price on carbon, and that Big Oil are "artificial lifeforms under our control, if we collectively choose to use it", and that "at some point we collectively will have to dispose of them". Where does the "libertarian" part come in?

Loosely "libertarian" in that I'm generally opposed to governmental middle-class income transfer subsidies/entitlements like Social Security & Medicare, as well as subsidies to the millitary-industrial complex like the Cold War buildup or elective wars like those in Grenada, Panama, Columbia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Excluding middle-class income transfers, overspending on the military, and concomitent interest on entitlement/MIC produced deficits leaves about 20% of the US federal budget as actually elective, the pie-slice that has been argued over for the past 40 years.

Once one takes as the principle that we should leave a better world for successive generations, and to not do so will only make their liabilities worse, then wealth transfer entitlements and military spending become obstacles to steering the ship of state as great as that of corporate preferences.

I'd love a market economy in which balancing human needs and environmental externalities were considered engineering optimization problems. Unfortunately, we're ruled by lawyers and not engineers, so we'll get "solutions" supported by Goldman Sachs and law partnerships rather than incentives that actually work. Noted GW scientist Jim Hansen has spoken at length on this.

Its a two party system. I still support the party that is more amenable to pragmatism & rationalism than that which clamps its hands over its ears. That doesn't mean I like all of my fellow supporters.

apologies in advance for the irrational sidebar on an otherwise rational thread, but a secret kremlin report detailing the north korean torpedo attack responsible for the rig explosion! waaay more exciting than discussion of energy policy, and more plausible than 9/11 conspiracy theories to boot.

(ugh repost, sorry, mods can delete at will)

Libertarianism means a lot of different things to different people. But one unifying feature (I thought) was that it stresses the primacy of individual action over that of the State. But of all the arguments against libertarianism, I always thought that the history of man's interaction with the environment was perhaps the #1 case against it. After all, environmental policy is so difficult precisely because of the paradox that people, acting in their own private interests, will destroy the environment that they depend on, due in part to the temporal and spatial discounting that I rambled about over here on the impending end of the world thread.

Corporations are artificial life-forms.

OTM. Skynet has been happening for 100+ years now.

xp Z S: Exactly.

The major fault of classical libertarianism with respect to my concerns is that doesn't take into consideration economic externalities. My neighbor can build a pork concentrated animal feeding operation, its atmospheric and surface water effluents will destroy my own well-being and property value, and classical libertarianism has nothing to say about it. The same is true of industries, nations, and individuals releasing greenhouse gases into our common atmosphere. Its no stretch to say that many current crises are in Garrett Hardin's phrase, Tradgedies of the Commons. The linked essay should be required reading for anyone in elective or high executive office by the way.

So, if you see the primary and central role of government as ensuring our and our descendants survival and well-being, then within native/market economies the most effective tool is for government to place a price on externalities. Put a price on C02, and tax carbon consumption and exhaust rather than income from non-carbon intensive income, etc.

Governments can't do everything, and to no small extent, they much chose priorities. In the US we have archeological strata perverse incentives who all have their own lobbies. We encourage housing separation of family generations (since the elderly expect to receive independent income), reverse wealth transfer from the poor to the rich (the elderly are now the wealthiest demographic slice), health cost inflation (since we demand coverage rather than insurance), increasing debt (federal deficits are now funded by Fed Reserve "quantitative easing" (read printing)), and I could go on and on.

In time, we will change our incentive structure. If a country like China can wholly transform itself in 30 years, so can we. But to think we can do everything is youthful idealism. We choose priorities, and I choose leaving my nephews and nieces a better world (environmentally) than the one I inherited.

archeological strata of perverse incentives which all....

I shouldn't essay whilst taking breaks from lawnmowing....

On a lighter note:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWuuXpeqNNw

I LOVE that clip. Just used it to defuse a heated political argument (and simultaneously make my point!) with a family member on FB.

loooooooooooooooool

I thought I was maybe being pessimistic with 25,000 barrels/day, but...

Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad Allen said the volume of crude oil spewing from the damaged well could climb to 100,000 barrels a day, with 60 days to 90 days needed for BP to drill relief wells to stem the flow. He spoke to the obvious urgency of stopping the flow of crude.

http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/05/gulf_oil_spill_has_our_full_at.html

nice

British Petroleum has withdrawn one of its waiver forms after fishermen in Venice, a town bracing for the arrival of an oil slick from the company's leaking rig, complained BP was trying to “pull the wool over our eyes” by asking them to sign away all rights to sue.

The waiver form was distributed Saturday at a Venice public school, where the company was offering a health and safety class for locals whom it says it will hire. Though a spokeswoman said the company does not yet know exactly what positions it's hiring for, it was accepting applications and, with them, the signed waivers

...

Many were frustrated by the paperwork and bureaucracy, citing frequently BP's lack of local staff.

“We got a certificate of completion that doesn't even have my name on it. Come on, now,” said Bret Ainsworth, 51, a crab fisherman...

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/bp-pulls-forms-asking-fishermen-to-sign-away-rights-to-sue/article1554200/

There are a number of international 'suspects' who might want to do something like this. They range from Muslim terrorists to the Red Chinese

Whew, glad Chiang Kai-Shek isn't involved.

Man, this whole situation has me seriously depressed.

It's mindboggling that there isn't a regulated safety procedure in place in case of such an event. Like, no one sat down and said "if this device fails, x amount of oil will flow out at such and such a rate - let's devise a way to cap it." What other safety.procedures are not in place for activities with potentially catestrophic results?

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/05/ag_bp_trying_to_get_alabamians_to_give_up_right_to.php?ref=fpblg

They're still trying to cheat in Alabama, though. xxxp

Who's to blame for the oil spill? Dick Cheney
By Alex Pareene

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill could end up being the worst American man-made environmental catastrophe of this generation. With the oil still spilling and investigations into the causes yet to come, it's too early to neatly assign blame to any one person. But for now, let's hold Dick Cheney personally responsible for the whole thing.

Here's the evidence: The Wall Street Journal reports that the oil well didn't have a remote-control shut-off switch. The reason it didn't have a thing that it seems every single offshore drilling rig should have? According to environmental lawyer Mike Papantonio, it's because Dick Cheney's energy task force decided that the $500,000 switches were too expensive, and they didn't want to make BP buy any.

Is that not enough reason to blame the former Dark Lord of the Naval Observatory? Guess what: Halliburton is involved, too! The Los Angeles Times reports that BP contracted Dick Cheney's old company to cement the deepwater drill hole. Cementing the hole was, according to the U.S. Minerals Management Service, "the single most-important factor in 18 of 39 well blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico over a 14-year period." And Hallburton is already under investigation for faulty cementing in an Australian well last year.

The spill will very likely destroy the fragile economies of at least five states and it could even plunge the nation back into a recession. So thanks, Dick. Nice work.

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/05/03/dick_cheney_halliburton_oil_spill/index.html

lol @ that conspiracy link:

To the reason for North Korea attacking the Deepwater Horizon, these reports say, was to present US President Obama with an “impossible dilemma” prior to the opening of the United Nations Review Conference of the Parties to the Treat on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) set to begin May 3rd in New York.

This “impossible dilemma” facing Obama is indeed real as the decision he is faced with is either to allow the continuation of this massive oil leak catastrophe to continue for months, or immediately stop it by the only known and proven means possible, the detonation of a thermonuclear device.

Looking forward to "Loose Change 2: NK-Ultra"... actually, I was writing a big long post about how that conspiracy theory is tailor-made for libertarians and other free-market types so they don't have to deal with the cognitive dissonance this tragedy should trigger in their credulous, tiny minds. But this whole thing is so depressing I just don't have the heart right now.

Things could be looking much more positive by the weekend:

May 3, 2010
BP Says Crews Make Progress Stemming Oil Leaks
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and HENRY FOUNTAIN

NEW ORLEANS — BP reported some glimmers of progress on Monday in its efforts to stem oil leaks from an undersea well off the Louisiana coast that have created what President Obama called a “potentially unprecedented environmental disaster.”

Bill Salvin, a company spokesman, said that crews had finished building a containment dome, a 4-story, 70-ton structure that the company plans to lower into place over one of the three leaks to catch the escaping oil and allow it to be pumped to the surface. The other two domes would be completed on Tuesday, Mr. Salvin said, and crews hoped to install all three domes by the weekend.

“That will essentially eliminate most of the issues you have with oil in the water,” he said.

Basically, while the relief wells are drilled to clog the reservoir around the first well (this rig was contracted the day Deepwater Horizon sank, and has been on station since Tuesday), they'll pump up collected oil/sea water collected in these 70-ton domes up to a barge, separate out the oil (this is done cheaply with centrifuges), and offload at intervals. The manufacturer of the collector domes is Superior Well Services, who had a handful of these already fabbed for just such an event.

From someone who is a regular on a number of energy and energy investment related boards, the sense is that this leak will be much, much smaller than either Valdez or IXTOC 1, with most of the consequence being political. It will be very difficult to expand US drilling, so most of the rigs present in the GOM will be moving to the Mexican side, Brazil, or West Africa, and 5-10k or so jobs will be lost.

I saw that article earlier today, and while it's about 100x more optimistic than anything thing else I've read (and not so coincidentally relies on the optimism of the BP spokesman), maaaaaaaaaan I hope they're right and it works.

I suppose owners of BP-branded gasoline stations will be hurt as well by boycotts, organized or not, as happened in the aftermath of the Valdez incident.

Most (all?) BP stations are franchised and not owned by the company, and in the US, gasoline is transported through regional distribution hubs shared by all refiners and retailers. When you fill up your tank, the oil may have come from an Aramco well in Saudi Arabia, transported on Frontline tanker to a Valero refinery, with gasoline shipped on Energy Transfer Parners pipes to a distribution facility in your city, then trucked out by a BP truck to a BP station. The various brands differ only in the additive mixture added to the tanker trucks at local distribution facilities. Its a highly rationalized and vertically segmented industry, so boycotts only hurt the owner of the retail station, who more often than not is not the company you wish to boycott.

I hear this guy is hiring

This is so cool:

http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/loopcurrent.gif

Figure 1. The Loop Current flow northwards into the Gulf of Mexico. Every 6-11 months, a bulge in the current cuts off into a clockwise-rotating eddy that then drifts slowly west-southwestward towards Texas. Image credit: NOAA.

I had always assumed the flow was clockwise more or less throughout the Gulf...

Spill, baby, spill!!

The PB Atlantis rig (photo) is the world's largest and deepest submersible oil and natural gas platform -- it can produce 8.4 million gallons of oil a day. It is situated in the Gulf of Mexico.

Despite the present disaster, concerns that had been raised about the safety of Atlantis have not gone away. Rather, they are a giant step closer to having been validated. Food and Water Watch made this statement about Atlantis as early as July 2009:
BP has repeatedly skirted the law in developing the Atlantis project. BP’s own database from November 2008 shows that it does not have the required engineering certification for 85 percent of the project’s subsea piping and instrument diagrams and many of its safety shutdown systems’ logic diagrams....

Tell Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar to launch an immediate investigation and, given the seriousness of the situation, immediately suspend production at the Atlantis. Ask your member of Congress to call for oversight hearings on MMS regarding the regulation of the Atlantis and what role the Bush Administration played in allowing BP to operate the platform without proper safety documentation.

http://jotman.blogspot.com/2010/05/why-us-must-order-bp-to-supsend.html

Looks some scientist share my concerns about the chemical dispersant (my emphasis):

The dispersants are designed to break down crude into tiny drops, which can be eaten up by naturally occurring bacteria, to lessen the impact of a giant sea of crude washing on to oyster beds and birds' nests on shore. But environmental scientists say the dispersants, which can cause genetic mutations and cancer, add to the toxicity of the spill. That exposes sea turtles and bluefin tuna to an even greater risk than crude alone. Dolphins and whales have already been spotted in the spill.The dangers are even greater for dispersants poured into the source of the spill, where they are picked up by the current and wash through the Gulf.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/05/dispersant-deepwater-horizon-oil-toxic

And that's for the new, approved dispersant. The article makes it clear that BP would probably run out of these and use their old backup supply, which is a more toxic substance that hasn't been approved in the US.

....all so that they avoid the 'bird covered in oil' photo op

These guys really have their safety bases covered don't they. Jesus fuck. And there I was on the politics thread like a month ago going "well, drilling isn't necessarily a bad thing, hem, haw, blah". Fuck me.

I just read up on this thing and it's rly depressing me. What sort of impact is it going to have on the environment over the next year? How is it going to affect peoples' health, and will you even be able to fucking go to the beach anymore?

What sort of impact is it going to have on the environment over the next year100 years?

:(

wait, their rig is called Atlantis? After the mythic city lost in a disaster that sank it to the bottom of the ocean?

Oh i meant to add "Next decade?" to that.

I was young but experienced the IXTOC 1, in which 454,000 tonnes were spilled, about twelve times as great as the 37,000 tonnes spilt by the Valdez in Prince Edward Sound. Beaches from Brownsville to Galveston had crud, which was cleaned up by volunteers and tide over the course of 3 months. There was little/no evidence of the spill even on the nearest Mexican beaches within 3 years.

The Gulf is pretty resilient, and crude is disposed of by bacteria, heat, and waves much more rapidly than the Arctic. Every year, about 600 natural oil seeps release about 2 Valdez spills worth of oil into the Gulf every year. In fact, the largest oil field in the Gulf was discovered in 1976 when a fisherman named Rudesindo Cantarell noticed abnormally oily patches on the surface. Pemex named the Cantarell field, responsible for about half of Mexico's production for many years, after him.

There are environmental disasters that have much longer lasting consequences. Dioxin in groundwater. Near permanently poluted rivers from mining (especially in China and Eastern Europe). Global warming. But they don't produce newsworthy photographs.

So far, the engineering discussions are looking fairly positive for this one being contained. Besides the containment "domes", it appears some bright guy at Cameron or BP figured out how to repurpose the blow-out preventer to pump heavy mud into the top of the well, rather than waiting for 2-3 months for the relief well to touch-down near the site of the bottom-well plug failure.

Don't worry, the Gulf coast oil industry will suffer. In fact, most of the deep-water rigs are being bid much higher dayrates to work in other basins. After all, the Gulf was only producing about 1.5 million bbl/day (about 8% of U.S. consumption), and we can afford the additional $130 million to buy it from elsewhere. China's still extending credit. Right?

The IXTOC spill took place hundreds of miles from the Texas coast, and didn't end up impacting the TX coast for several months, correct? Again, comparing your experience with that spill to Exxon Valdez on the current spill is apples and oranges.

I'm not sure why you linked to the study about 2 Valdez spills worth of oil in the Gulf every year. The article itself notes that the oil spilled out in this manner is a hundredth of a millimeter thick, and "impossible to see with the human eye and harmless to marine animals". So what is the point you're trying to make? Oil in water isn't a big deal? Against all evidence?

I suppose maybe you're trying to make a point about coastal resiliency to oil spills, but again, that assertion flies in the face of evidence of ruined communities, economies and ecosystems.

"Don't worry, the Gulf coast oil industry will suffer." ? The only, ONLY potential "bright side" of this whole debacle was that potentially it could help to spur on desperately needed energy/climate legislation. A lot of the consequences of climate change are difficult for people to comprehend either because they come in the form of warnings about the future, or increases in the probabilities of events such as severe weather, droughts, etc. In other words, a lot of the issue is difficult to communicate because it's somewhat abstract. This oil disaster, on the other hand, is concrete and undeniable, and thus serves as a potential turning point for a lot of closed minds. But in response, you repeatedly opine about how oil spills aren't a big deal and worry about the health of the oil industry?

What's your point?

I simply wished to counter the speculation about decades or a century of devastation above.

It's potentially going to be pretty lousy for some coastal marshes and barrier islands from Grand Isle to Mobile, but the Gulf is warmer and not nearly as enclosed as Prince Edward sound. In Alaska, the spill washed ashore almost immediately, without any time for weathering. Here, most of the volatile components (like the gasoline fraction) evaporate off, leaving heavier tarballs that mostly sink to the mud and get eaten by bacteria. The Gulf eddy current presently active will tend to draw a good deal of the spill into a clockwise rotation that will send the much of the spill away from shores to deposit in the abyss. There's also a huge difference in that whereas Prince Edward sound was roadless wilderness with little infrastructure, Houma and Morgan City are two huge centers for the service industry and only about 150 mi away, so the response has been an order of magnitude faster.

I understand the desire to have some press focus on environmental concerns. I think its a great idea to wean ourselves from carbon fuels. But I spent quite a bit of time investigating the issue when I first studied peak oil issues around 1998-2001. We have enormous investments in housing sprawl and transport infrastructure for which green alternatives, even when economically competitive, will only scale with great difficulty, and 3+ decades of intense investment. I suspect the political will to do so, however, will come from sustained $200+/bbl oil. At which point oil industry will do just fine without access to the U.S. Gulf, though most of the jobs will migrate to countries nearer the more prospective basins.

By the way, I'm the environmental nutcase on energy boards. I guess its only fair that I'm viewed as the industry apologist around here.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2010/05/while-oil-slick-spread-interior-department-chief-of-staff-rafted-with-wife-in-grand-canyon-.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwQOD_Ir2vQ

http://www.matteroftrust.org/programs/hairmatsinfo.html

so the first shot at using the "containment dome" didn't work.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6430AR20100509

The problem is gas hydrates, essentially slushy methane gas that would block the oil from being siphoned out the top of the box. As BP tries to solve it, oil keeps flowing unchecked into the Gulf in what could be the worst U.S. oil spill.

"I wouldn't say it's failed yet. What I would say is what we attempted to do last night didn't work because these hydrates plugged up the top of the dome," Suttles said.

"What we're currently doing, and I suspect it will probably take the next 48 hours or so, is saying, 'Is there a way to overcome this problem?'"

even though it may very well wind up being completely useless, i gotta say i'm impressed with how quick this four-story tall, 100+ tons structure went from being a lightbulb in some engineer's head to grounded on the ocean floor in less time than i've taken to write a two-page paper. can't figure out what purpose the scaffolding-looking stuff on all sides of it is, though.

http://www.treehugger.com/containment-dome-468.jpg

can't figure out what purpose the scaffolding-looking stuff on all sides of it is, though.

hold on, let me find a diagram that explained its purpose...

Here we go:

http://i40.tinypic.com/20b049h.jpg

hey, thanks. ok, that's what i assumed it was, just to stop it from sinking in too far to the sediment-rich floor, but then i couldn't figure out why the opening to allow the pipe in wouldn't rise up a little bit further than the flaps, so it doesn't pinch it. in all the pictures i've seen, the flaps look about even with the top of the opening. oh well!

wow.

David Rainey, BP’s VP for Gulf of Mexico exploration, was on the rig celebrating its safety record when it blew up. Although 11 workers were killed, Rainey and the other BP employees on the rig safely escaped the inferno.

can picture him doing a homer simpson-esque "WE ARE SO SFE! WE ARE SO SFE! S-F-E! I MEAN S-A-F-E!" dance

yes but what does he really mean by 'S-A-F-E'?

hmmm probably means he is a place where people can store valuable objects

also maybe they were participating in an impromptu game of whiffleball and he narrowly avoided being tagged out by the unusually good blowout preventer technician

Hay should help:

http://www.wimp.com/solutionoil/

The next tactic is going to be something they call a junk shot," Allen told CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday. "They'll take a bunch of debris -- shredded up tires, golf balls and things like that -- and under very high pressure, shoot it into the preventer itself and see if they can clog it up and stop the leak."

http://i37.tinypic.com/2wgd4ee.jpg

when my sink gets clogged, it's because rice and pasta have accumulated at the bottom of the sink and have covered the drain -- maybe they should try that

fuck yeah, Sisko!

Hah "Junk Shot". Damn, they really didn't prepare AT ALL for this type of event, did they? The free market at work.

just goes to show, there is no problem that can't be solved by kicking it in the balls.

Wouldn't clogging the leak with a bunch of debris just cause a build-up of pressure that will find a way out somewhere else? Of course, this may be why BP doesn't pay me big bucks.

when my sink gets clogged, it's because rice and pasta have accumulated at the bottom of the sink and have covered the drain -- maybe they should try that

Hair works well for clogging drains - and it also adheres to oil - so maybe this approach will work:

Sopping Up An Oil Slick With Castaway Hair
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126536482

BP now urgently looking for Ned's phone number.

http://paulrademacher.com/oilspill/

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/05/11/us/11oil2-cnd/11oil2-cnd-hpMedium.jpg

NYT - Size of Oil Spill in Gulf Underestimated, Scientists Say

Two weeks ago, the government put out a round estimate of the size of the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico: 5,000 barrels a day. Repeated endlessly in news reports, it has become conventional wisdom.

But scientists and environmental groups are raising sharp questions about that estimate, declaring that the leak must be far larger.

Repeatedly endlessly in news reports...BY THE NEW YORK TIMES. god DAMMIT, there have been indications for over a week now (upthread, for example) that the 5,000 barrels/day estimate was highly likely to be bullshit!

“I think the estimate at the time was, and remains, a reasonable estimate,” said Dr. Lubchenco, the NOAA administrator. “Having greater precision about the flow rate would not really help in any way. We would be doing the same things.”

Environmental groups contend, however, that the flow rate is a vital question. Since this accident has shattered the illusion that deep-sea oil drilling is immune to spills, they said, this one is likely to become the touchstone in planning a future response.

“If we are systematically underestimating the rate that’s being spilled, and we design a response capability based on that underestimate, then the next time we have an event of this magnitude, we are doomed to fail again,” said John Amos, the president of SkyTruth. “So it’s really important to get this number right.”

Based on “sophisticated scientific analysis of seafloor video made available Wednesday,” Steve Wereley, an associate professor at Purdue University, told NPR the actual spill rate of the BP oil disaster is about 3 million gallons a day — 15 times the official guess of BP and the federal government. Another scientific expert, Eugene Chiang, a professor of astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, calculated the rate of flow to be between 840,000 and four million gallons a day. These estimates mean that the Deepwater Horizon wreckage could have spilled about five times as much oil as the 12-million-gallon Exxon Valdez disaster, with relief only guaranteed by BP in three more months.

Gotta love the evil music in this clip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlPPFcy-3Vo&

Sorry, that's from thinkprogress

Steven Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, analyzed videotape of the seafloor gusher using a technique called particle image velocimetry.

A computer program simply tracks particles and calculates how fast they are moving. Wereley put the BP video of the gusher into his computer. He made a few simple calculations and came up with an astonishing value for the rate of the oil spill: 70,000 barrels a day — much higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day.

The method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent.

the particle image velocimetry method is intriguing but i wonder if it accounts for all the natural gas, which looked to be a pretty significant part of the output but obviously wouldn't fill a barrel like the crude. but whatever.

what concerns me more than the lack of a leak rate estimate is the fact that the bulk of the spill is occupying "a huge cone, a mile high and about two miles across" that's subject to undersea currents, which, by bp's own admission, are untrackable at various depths. they don't even know where it's going!

some1 school me -- is the pipe that's gushing gas & oil in that clip still gushing gas & oil right now at that rate?? plz say no

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/may/13/bp-boss-admits-mistakes-gulf-oil-spill

"The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume"

well I guess if you look at it that way...

some1 school me -- is the pipe that's gushing gas & oil in that clip still gushing gas & oil right now at that rate?? plz say no

― contl;drizer (J0rdan S.), Friday, May 14, 2010 1:17 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

you mean the one that's been doing that for the last three weeks, unabated, with previous efforts to contain it having failed and all prospective solutions untested at this depth and involving shooting shredded tires and golf balls into the well? yes.

Steven Chu on it all. As is said before the interview, "As a mental exercise, try and imagine what these answers would sound like if "Brownie" or some other top Bush officials were still overseeing disaster relief in the Gulf."

x-post Yeah, that BP tools "it's a big ocean" defense just doesn't fly.

man, Chu sounds like Reed Richards or Geordi LaForge or something in that interview. "Well, I happen to know a little, just a little mind you, about gamma rays, and recently I was working on a Negative Zone Portal that could - potentially - be adapted to create a subspace feedback field...."

The shock that the footage prompts, along with the fact that it was immediately used bu researcher to demonstrate that the oil was leaking in much higher quantities than official estimates, is probably why BP suppressed the video for weeks.

what fucking scumbags

what fucking scumbags

― rahni, Friday, May 14, 2010 2:04 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

btw I am loving lame-duck Stupak giving these guys the business

Big Oil? Scumbags? I am SHOCKED. Why, I had heard that BP is one of the greenest oil companies! Well, don't worry, this will all be cleaned up in a few months. Can we please get the discussion back to where it belongs - the financial wellbeing of BP, the gulf coast oil industry, and BP-branded gas stations that may be hurt by boycotts that aren't happening?

where's that tl;dr apologist from upthread with all the links

I'm dubious about Wereley's results, simply because a 7" production string has difficulty producing over 60 kbbl/day, completely unchoked. Just as a matter of fluid viscosity. In this case, at the blowout preventer the shear ram seems to have cut the production casing, but annular rams that held the seal around the shear ram scissors blade failed. 5500 bbl/d is 2.67 gallons/second, which (oil isn't all that compressible) seems consistent with the video imagery (once one knows scale of the casing and riser).

Ultimately, the actual amount doesn't matter much compared to the public perception. Lawyers will benefit, insurers will make much US GoM production economically marginal, and this spill killed the climate bill.

As I said above, we could always buy our gasoline to feed our bloated sprawl on our collective credit card. We don't actually have to produce anything we need now that everything is digital.

oh there you are

For a second I saw 7" production string and thought we were looking at some weird mis-post from I Love Vinyl, a la the abuse of Building Meter Data by George Lucas.

Seriously though, much more than "Obama's Katrina" this is looking like it could be Big Oil's Chernobyl. I don't say that with particular glee or relish because while I'd be glad to see the country shift towards a healthier amount of energy policy skepticism, it's coming at the cost of what looks like an unprecedented disaster. What if they can't cap the thing? What will that do to the Gulf Coast, of Mexico as well as the US?

btw thread: Exxon Valdez spill was in Prince William Sound, not Prince Edward

(wtf is with all these Britishes involved in oil spills here?)

The last resort is the relief wells that they're currently drilling, which are expected to be completi'd in 60-90 days. So I don't think there's too big of a risk of it going beyond three months, as the relief well plan has been portrayed as a pretty sure-fire strategy, albeit a slow one.

Still, three months of leaking oil at the higher rate that the MSM is FINALLY waking up to is a fucking catastrophe.

Sanpaku, feel free to ignore this if you want, but I'm just curious what line if wirk you're in. Since you have your own independent assessment of the oil leak rate and you appear to be pretty involved on the energy community. I guess I'm wondering if you work in the industry as a consultant or something, or if it's just a hobby.

U.S. GoM oil production is 1.57 mmbbl/d, about 1.8% of present global capacity of 86 mmbbl/d. The majors dramatically reduced their lease bids around 2002, and moved capital to places like Angola and Qatar, so a lot of newer production would be for companies like Anadarko, McMoran, Devon, Nexen etc. You've never bought a gallon of gas from any of their branded outlets, as they don't have downstream ops.

Say all new drilling is halted indefinitely. Present GoM depletion rates are running about 8%, so that means a deficit of 125k bbl/d. 0.6% of US needs. A marginal effect on prices for a couple of years. If the global market resolves the S/D dynamics as it did in 2000-2008, it will largely mean the developing world of China, India, and Brazil will outbid sub-Saharan Africa for supplies. But no one cares about them.

Maybe in 3-4 years the price might mean some little old ladies start freezing to death. BP, Exxon, and Chevron etc. will continue drilling offshore Angola or Malaysia to supply the Chindia demand. Life goes on. Except for little old ladies.

But not on the Gulf Coast.

Wirk = work (iPhone arrggh)

Am I misreading that, or did you really just claim that halting new offshore drilling in the gulf of Mexico will kill little old ladies?

If so, would you care to balance that with the consequences of increasing drilling on human health and the environment? Again, maybe read that incorrectly.

Maybe *I* read that incorrectly, grrrr

ZS: I don't work within the industry, but I've made about 1400% after tax for my family in equity and futures, mostly in petroleum related paper, over the past 9 years. When opportunities present themself, I also invest in green technology. For the most part, I've been out of energy related investments since November, but I follow developments closely.

I live in part of the world economically dependent on energy. I experienced depression level unemployment levels from 1986-1991 when prices collapsed, and every professional told their children not to get involved in the field.

Ted Kaczynski had an intellectually coherent approach to the costs of energy. Anyone voluntarily living in suburbia and commuting in ICE powered vehicles, while complaining about the costs of their lifestyle? Not so much.

125k bbl/d/y is not that much now. But the long gas lines and ensuing economic recession of the 1973 Arab Oil embargo occurred with a deficit 3% of U.S. consumption. It really doesn't take much.

As for little old ladies, I don't doubt some elderly on fixed incomes refused to buy HO in late 2007 when prices went over $4/gallon. $4 for 138,700 BTU is dirt cheap when some are spending $6.25 for about 0.2 gallons of triple grande soy vanilla latte.

yes, ted kaczynski really should be given more credit.

f u btw

I'm still baffled at the dead little old lady thing, because if you believe they would suffer so much as a result of an increase in the price of oil from banning new oil offshore drilling projects (which already doesn't make any sense, because EIA has estimated that new offshore drilling would have no effect on the price of oil by 2020, and only a 3 cents per gallon decrease by 2030...not enough to murder old ladies imo), then why aren't you more concerned with the economic consequences of relying on fossil fuels, which are of course finite, rapidly depleting, and thus a sure bet to be more expensive in the future. The fact that we're drilling for oil 18,000 feet below the surface of the fucking ocean is a good indicator that the easiest to reach, highest quality fossil fuels are long gone. I know you've mentioned upthread a few times that you're sympathetic to clean energy, the climate change bill, etc. It just doesn't make much sense to me how you couple that with straight up oil industry PR copy. Anyway.

Meanwhile, Obama has assembled a team of scientists to tackle the spill, including "The Old Hand", "The Establishment Man", "The Maverick Man", "The No-Nonsense Engineer", and "The What-Am-I-Doing-Here? Guy". Good luck USA.

my takeaway there is that black and white headshots look really out of place on the internets

otm

Z S, it was an offhanded remark of little consequence to my main points, which I might reorganize as:

- Everyone is going to use Mississippi Canyon 252 as a political cudgel or teachable moment. If the outcome is as bad as some fear, then a lot of drilling will move elsewhere. If it isn't a catastrophe, then doomsayers lose credibility in the future. There's little long-term good to be achieved with distortions.
- Some of the politics are paradoxical. The Kerry-Lieberman carbon-emission cap and trade bill only had a chance for passage by throwing a bone to Republican senators in the form of expanded offshore drilling. That won't fly with Democrats now, so this spill just killed chances for a climate bill. Practically, there's little harm here in that as James Hansen opines, cap-and-trade has a dismal record and a carbon consumption tax that doesn't enrich Goldman Sachs, Al Gore, and the other traders is a better option.
- its a global race for the last cheap energy, China has been acting accordingly, and your average TV viewer has no idea this is among the most important news items this decade. China is going to revalue their currency, but it won't be to placate American politicians. It will be to more easily outbid for raw materials.
- 65 years of energy intensive sprawl won't be reversed in considerably less time. If everybody bought only Prius's starting tomorrow, it would still take 28 years to turnover the passenger vehicle fleet at the current new sales rates of 9 million passenger vehicles/year. We don't really have 28 or 65 years. Consensus among those I follow, particularly Chris Skrebowski is for global peak oil first half of this decade. Add in things like Jeffrey Brown's Export-land model, and things look potentially really grim, really quickly. Including freezing LOLs.
- That's the sort of political environment I expect for decisions about whether or not to explore the MMS's Eastern Planning region or ANWR in a few years. They won't be decisions made in a calm atmosphere. And it won't matter that flows won't come on stream for a decade or more.

As to the the video of the riser terminus, assuming a full 9-inch internal diameter of the production tubing (inside the 20 inch riser), flow of 100% incompressible crude, here would be the average exit velocities for various flow rates mentioned in the press:

5000 bbl/d = 0.50 miles/hour
20000 bbl/d = 2.01 miles/hour
56000 bbl/d = 5.62 miles/hour
70000 bbl/d = 7.02 miles/hour
84000 bbl/d = 8.42 miles/hour
100000 bbl/d = 10.03 miles/hour

The nice round relationship is coincidental. I no longer buy the 5000 bbl/d number, but somewhere in the 20-30k bbl range seems eminently plausible given the video.

Everyone is going to use Mississippi Canyon 252 as a political cudgel or teachable moment. If the outcome is as bad as some fear, then a lot of drilling will move elsewhere. If it isn't a catastrophe, then doomsayers lose credibility in the future. There's little long-term good to be achieved with distortions.

A lot of people making the argument that "if it isn't drilled here, it will be drilled elsewhere, with less effective environmental regulations" seem to think that offshore exploration is a zero sum game - "if x million barrels aren't drilled here, than x million barrels will be drilled elsewhere." Well...that's not true, is it? Last time I checked, Big Oil corps are the most profitable companies in the world, in HISTORY, and they have enough money to explore/exploit any location that's potentially profitable. So when you say "if the outcome is as bad as some fear, then a lot of drilling will move elsewhere", well...drilling was going to expand elsewhere ANYWAY, if there was a dime of profit to be made.

I no longer buy the 5000 bbl/d number, but somewhere in the 20-30k bbl range seems eminently plausible given the video.

OK. Why then, did you argue 5 hours ago that

5500 bbl/d is 2.67 gallons/second, which (oil isn't all that compressible) seems consistent with the video imagery (once one knows scale of the casing and riser).

so this spill just killed chances for a climate bill. Practically, there's little harm here in that as James Hansen opines, cap-and-trade has a dismal record and a carbon consumption tax that doesn't enrich Goldman Sachs, Al Gore, and the other traders is a better option.

A few things here. First of all, there's all the harm in the world if the climate bill doesn't pass. As steep as the odds are for cap-and-trade, what do you think the chances are for a carbon tax? Do you REALLY think a carbon tax is more politically feasible than cap-and-trade? If you do, please, for the love of Catbeast please explain why and convince me, because last I heard the chances of a carbon tax bill has no chance in hell of passing. I'm sympathetic with the view that it actually work better than a cap-and-trade mechanism, btw, but anyone with 5 minutes of experience observing the U.S. political scene knows that it's dead in the water. James Hansen is a genius when it comes to climate science, but he's not a policymaker.

Also, did you REALLY have to include Al Gore there in your list of evil traders profiting off of the crisis? Come on. The WSJ comments section is over here.

What changed in the last 5 hours?

If I can make an offhand remark myself (lol), I would say that the way you reference the whole BP/Deepwater Horizon disaster as "Mississippi Canyon 252", a moniker that virtually no one in the U.S. is using to refer to the accident, suggests that you are, knowingly or unknowingly, playing into the hands of an industry effort to deflect criticism away from the instigators of the incident by avoiding the use of the corporation "BP". I could be wrong, of course, but it does stick out like a sore thumb.

shit just got real

I live in part of the world economically dependent on energy.

Oh, yeah, I hear those parts of the world that need energy are pretty wild.

I'm assuming that meant "economically dependent on producing energy"? I don't know.

if it isn't drilled here, it will be drilled elsewhere...Well...that's not true, is it?

To a large extent, it is for prospective wells at the depths being drilled in the US Gulf. There are 760 offshore drilling rigs worldwide, about 10% in the US Gulf. The vast majority of the global count are shallow water jack up rigs with fewer than 100 capable of drilling 18000 feet down in 5000 foot water. These deepwater semisubmersibles are mostly on long contracts at high day rates. You can spot verify this looking at the Transocean or Ensco fleet status. Pemex or Petrobras or Sonangol would be glad to take spare deepwater rig capacity. It wouldn't happen tomorrow, as there are usually 3+ year lead times for development infrastructure, but there are numerous fields where surplus deepwater rig capacity could be slotted in for immediate development drilling without intefering with future tiebacks to platforms or FSPOs.

Outside OECD waters, its probably true that environmental compliance and rig safety are more by self-regulation than by the national oil companies that are paying the bill.

As for the plausible flow rates, when I get new information, I change my mind. I was of the understanding that the production casing was 7 inches (as I recalled reading in reports on the cementing job). That would have meant a pipe cross-section of 38.5 in^2 vs the 63.6 in^2 of a 9-inch casing, and calculated flow velocities about 65% greater.

Do you REALLY think a carbon tax is more politically feasible than cap-and-trade?

I actually think a carbon tax is politically viable, but in the present political environment only if its revenue neutral. Have a carbon tax tied dollar for dollar reduction of estate taxes (for example) and I'm pretty sure the Mars and Coors family would reconsider their support for big coal. Or increase personal income tax deductions. However much Republicans may dislike social engineering, very few actually work for the coal industry, and carrots do work. Even oil & gas benefits, as natural gas has less than half the CO2/kwh as coal.

Emissions trading, on the other hand, is demonstrably ineffective in the EU, and its largest effect has arguably been rent seeking by trading firms, who haven't been very popular of late. As for VP Gore, he did the community concerned about climate change an immense disservice by placing himself in a position to personally profit from carbon emissions trading. It allows his case to be written off as a sales pitch by many, many people. For example, I'd spent months explaining the atmospheric chemistry and consequences to staunch Republican stepparents, and was making progress, only to have Gore's involvement with GIM and Chicago Climate Exchange thrown back. He's entitled to a living, but as a figurehead for climate change awareness it angered me tremendously...

the way you reference the whole BP/Deepwater Horizon disaster as "Mississippi Canyon 252"

Its been called the Mississippi Canyon 252 spill since day one by the US MMS and NOAA, as on today's NOAA spill trajectory forecast. Call it the "BP Raped my Childen Catastrophe" if you must. It still occurred at MC 252 on my lease maps.

I'd be a lot more angry at Al Gore if his assertions weren't backed by the vast majority of climate scientists, which they are. It's unfortunate that some people are so desperate to ignore bad news that they'll disregard climate science and focus instead on how big a former VP's house is. He donates all the money he makes from his talks (and his Nobel Prize) to his non-profit (Alliance for Climate Protection), but I agree, the cause would be helped if he wasn't a rich man. But on the whole, could anyone possibly argue that he's done more damage to awareness of climate change than he has to help it? It just seems like such an red herring, repeatedly endlessly (and ironically, by you also) with only one real purpose: to distract others from actually discussing the science and policy implications.

"Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill": About 2,720,000 results (0.52 seconds)
"Mississippi Canyon 252": About 15,500 results (0.09 seconds)
"BP Raped my Children Catastrophe": No results found...YET

I realize that "Mississippi Canyon 252 is the technical name of the location of the well. I also realize that the words we use in our discourse are important, and "MS Canyon 252" has a much more neutral connotation than "BP". I suppose there's a chance that you just happen to be the <1% of the internet referring to the spill as "MC 252", but forgive me if I suspect that there are other motivating factors in play. I'm sure that Exxon wishes that it could have rebranded its disaster the "60.83333°N 146.86667°W Event".

‘Junk Shot’ Is Next Step for Leaking Gulf of Mexico Well

http://i40.tinypic.com/2uep4eh.jpg

Officials with BP and other companies involved in the effort, who discussed the plans in detail at some of the operations rooms, said the best of several options included a “junk shot,” which could be tried within the week. The method involves pumping odds and ends like plastic cubes, knotted rope, even golf balls — Titleists or whatever, BP isn’t saying — into the blowout preventer, the safety device atop the well.

“Where you want to end up is, you want to have killed the well,” said Kent Wells, a BP senior vice president who is overseeing much of the planning.

Glad they got Kent Wells overseeing the planning on this, he seems really sharp.

his last name is WELLS

heck of a post, brownie

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-may-13-2010/there-will-be-blame

looooool

I enjoy the idea that the malfunctioning device was named, creatively, "the blowout preventer"

Laugh it up

the costs and future regulations could be too substantial vs the risk/reward models they employ today

who would have thought

really hate that argument of "if you don't let us destroy the planet PEOPLE WILL LOSE THEIR JOBS", like the worker's corporate overlords would hesitate one second before laying them all off for half-price Indian labor bargains.

also, if I read that Kaczynski argument correctly, you're inferring that nobody who uses any kind of modern industrial products has a right to critique the system. this is obviously bullshit. everybody has to make compromises in order to live and that doesn't make them hypocrites, or invalidate their arguments by default.

xp

He told me that the government is meddling with the whole process and is being advised by, in his words' more moron's with less knowledge than thought could exist on the planet.

According to a government official, BP initially "dismissed" Chu's gamma ray suggestion, but came back a week later and admitted "Chu's right."

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/05/exclusive-how-steven-chu-used-gamma-rays-to-save-the-planet/56685/

Hmmm.

you're inferring that nobody who uses any kind of modern industrial products has a right to critique the system.

No, I'm simply saying there's a price for your standard of life. Accidents are nearly inevitable drilling 48,000 boreholes in the U.S. Gulf, but they've been remarkably rare.

Try to figure out how to eliminate the need for deep water oil within the next 30 years. Just do the math. I recommend Walter Youngquist's Geodestinies or Robert Bryce's Power Hungry if you're looking for numbers to plug in.

There are some very interesting alternatives on the distant horizon. I'm optimistic about algal biodiesel for transport fuel or traveling wave nuclear reactors for electricity to become viable in my lifetime. But in the meantime, present green alternatives don't scale to the demand. Even if we all drove Prius's (or smarter) Lupo 3Ls tomorrow. Hint: the most likely interim alternative will be compressed natural gas from suprisingly large unconventional shale gas reserves.

In the meantime the U.S. produces 5 mmbbl per day and imports 11.1 mmbbl per day net. In 2007, the value of those imports was $400 billion dollars a year, or about 92 percent of our current account deficit.

We've financed those current account deficits by borrowing internationally, both public (China holds $790 billion) and private (though I suspect the appetite for U.S. securitized debt is not what it once was). Given that the Federal government's GAAP obligation is 65.5 trillion (according to the CBO), the likelihood of that debt ever being repaid at anything remotely resembling current dollar values is approximately zero. U.S. 30-year Treasuries are among the world's worst investments.

So, what happens as our major exporters like Mexico or Saudi Arabia decline precipitously? China and other nations with strong currencies will revalue to secure more of the international market, and the U.S. will have to bid in shrinking dollars for a shrinking slice of a shrinking supply.

1.5 mmbbl/day from the U.S Gulf is only about 1.8% of global production, but its 30% of U.S production. I really hope that we'll have the 85 mmbbl/day global market available as we transition. But its not a sure thing. On 31% of our current liquid fuel usage (on the day we are outbid), what would you like to run? Farm equipment? Food transport to your grocery? Ambulances? Mass auto commuting and air travel for plebes are pretty much out of the question.

Most people aren't terribly familiar with either the mechanics of money creation, or the gravity of looming resource scarcities. Others aren't so sanguine.

Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf

Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots.

BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.

“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”

can't imagine a scenario when gathering more data would be detrimental, as if we have a crystal clear picture/model of how these spills work

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l20aefkpmj1qb25dg.jpg

The plumes thing is fucking scary.

And why am I not surprised that the totally untested "dispersants" that BP insisted be used might have caused them.

By the way:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v134/tracerhand/deepwater-horizonburing-and-going-d.jpg

What is what is??

The most criticised dispersant (ie, soap/detergent) is 60% 2-butoxyethanol. If you're concerned about its environmental impact, throw out any household cleaners stronger than handdishwasher liquid, as 2-butoxyethanol is the main detergent in Windex, Simple Green, and Formula 409.

It seems the net effect of underwater dispersant application has been to reduce surface slick and to create a low crude density emulsion in the midwater column. In effect this displace harms from surface slicks being blown into brine wetlands, toward harms to more mature pelagics.

I haven't found a current map to see if the mid water column plume coincides with the the Midwest fertilizer runoff created hypoxic dead zone - that would be ideal for minimizing incremental impact.

Anyone else watch 60 Minutes last night? Absolutely riveting.

On the CBS news show "60 Minutes" on Sunday, rig survivor Mike Williams described some of the disturbing incidents that proceeded the accident, including another crewman's discovery of chunks of rubber in the drilling fluid.

"He thought it was important ... I recall asking the supervisor if this was out of the ordinary. And he says, 'Oh, it's, it's no big deal.' And I thought, 'How can it be not a big deal? There's chunks of our seal now missing,'" he said.

He also said BP was applying pressure to get the drilling operation done faster.

Rubber chunks in the mud return are not uncommon, and usually arise from the mud pumps rather than the BOP. The rubber half-annulus on the annular rams is retracted entirely out of the return flow on the BOP.

Sanpaku you're starting to scare me a little.

The shear/ram BOP that seems to have worked
The annular BOP that seems to have failed
The question is whether this rubber part inside the annular had visible pieces falling off in the weeks prior to failure:
http://wcbop.com/annular.gif
In normal operation, its exposed to the return flow of the drilling fluid (mud), but my informant in the industry indicate that its simply not that unusual for bits of rubber seals in the topside pumps to get abraded off and get pumped down through the drilling string and back up the annulus to get caught in sieves that exploration geologists examine for rock chips.

Also note that its a full and not a half annulus rubber donut (I had a mistaken mental image of how the annular BOP works).

Given their size, the plumes cannot possibly be made of pure oil, but more likely consist of fine droplets of oil suspended in a far greater quantity of water, Dr. Joye said. She added that in places, at least, the plumes might be the consistency of a thin salad dressing.

....a thin salad dressing of doom

Countdown to sanpaku enumerating all the jobs that will be created by the new Gulf Coast salad-dressing industry...

I just read a quote that the plume might be 10 miles x 3 miles x 300 feet. If oil was entering at 5000 bbl/day for the past 25 days, the plume of that size would include 700,000 cu ft of oil, so it would average 1 part in 358000 oil.

To make your own Gulf Coast salad dressing, fill a standard 30x60 inch bathtub 12 inches deep with salt water (93 gallons = 352000 cubic centimeters). Then add just under 1/5 a teaspoon (1 cc) of used motor oil, and some household detergent (like Simple Green). Agitate till all the oil is dispersed into barely visible oil droplets and the tub takes on a slightly less than clear color.

As far as I can tell, there isn't much literature on the environmental effects of underwater oil emulsions. I'd expect that since the water is colder and less oxygenated, that natural bacterial digestion is slower. On the other hand, there isn't the physical effect of feathers or gills becoming clogged with sludge, the effects are just the chemical ones (less the alkane oils and waxes, than the heavy metals that are sometimes associated with some crudes).

Make sure that bathtub doesn't support an ecosystem or huge economic sector before conducting the salad dressing experiment, btw

If you really want to go nuts with your simulation, take every step possible to keep others that may be trying to research the size of your "oil spill" or its effects.

To be perfectly honest, if this spill kept shrimpers from bottom trawling the whole shelf for the next 5 years, it would be a net positive for the ecosystem. Recommended 18 minute TED talk by coral reef biologist Jeremy Jackson

this thread has been very informative, ty ZS/Sanpaku

Sanpaku, your calculations for the oil-to-seawater density ratio seem to be correct for that particular plume, but the nytimes article says that's just one (particularly large) plume of several. the inference is that there are multiple other plumes, and if these other plumes are smaller, it follows they'd be less spread out and therefore their oil density would be greater. and it also should be noted that you're using what is now considered a fairly conservative estimate. so your density ratio would need to be multiplied by a factor of however much larger the spill rate actually is.

oh and also that the underwater plume wouldn't be agitated to a even consistency like in your bathtub example - some parts would be denser than others, and i'd assume those parts would be exponentially more dangerous to life than homogeneously thin parts.

The danger to wildlife from crude spills arises from two main, from bulk physical sludges that inundate gills and feathers and kill by inhibiting breathing/respiration and thermal insulation, and chemical toxicity. By adding detergents and making a midwater emulsion, the cleanup crew has strongly reduced those bulk effects and the amount of surface sheen driven onshore, but in the process slowed slowed evaporation of volatile components (like the benzene that gives gasoline that sweet, sweet smell) and caused the spill to be driven by water currents (rather than wind).

Given that the most sensitive habitats near the spill are the coastal marshes of southern Louisiana, this seems like a reasonable tradeoff.

Any chemical toxicity remains in the water column until digested by bacteria or settling to the seafloor. Some crudes are a lot worse than others - there's an Arab super light grade that can be practically used in gasoline engines straight from the wellhead, and less desireable super heavy crudes like Venezuela Orinoco, which is 320 ppm the toxic heavy metal vanadium.

Its hard to say what crude in the Macondo reservoir is like. If its like the similar source rock subsalt crude from BP's nearby Thunderhorse platform, its medium gravity, low sulfur crude with API weight 34.5 (a measure of viscosity / relative amounts of long waxy chains), and low heavy metals (10 ppm Vanadium). The bulk will be alkanes which are relatively innocuous, but disolved in are substantial aromatic compounds like benzene and much smaller tar compounds like heterocyclic amines you'll find in tobacco smoke or on the crust of barbequed steak, which are carcinogenic. What crude doesn't have to any large extent are the halogenated aromatics (like dioxins, PBDEs, PDBEs) which are relatively stable and hence bioaccumulative.

Meanwhile, I've been reading up on the extent of damage caused by bottom trawling worldwide following up on that Jeremy Jackson lecture above. Here are Louisiana shrimp boats destroying the seabottom ecosystem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Louisiana_trawling_landsat_cropped.jpg

Even if I wasn't vegan, I'm not sure I could eat wild caught shrimp in good conscience after today.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d4/Louisiana_trawling_landsat_cropped.jpg/648px-Louisiana_trawling_landsat_cropped.jpg

off-topic but it frustrates me when people question veganism because "animals don't have feelings" or whatever as if that's the only fucking ethical reason people choose it.

The most criticised dispersant (ie, soap/detergent) is 60% 2-butoxyethanol. If you're concerned about its environmental impact, throw out any household cleaners stronger than handdishwasher liquid, as 2-butoxyethanol is the main detergent in Windex, Simple Green, and Formula 409.

― nori dusted (Sanpaku), Monday, May 17, 2010 3:30 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

Ugh, I feel like such a hypocrite for all the household cleaners that I've poured in the ocean.

Uuuuuuugh, getting so irritated at the combination of 1) BP resisting attempts to estimate the amount of gushing oil:

BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.

“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”

and 2) simultaneously citing the 5,000 barrels/day figure that is almost certainly WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY wrong as a measure of the success of the tube it has installed over one of the leaks:

BP's Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles told CNN that about 1,000 barrels of oil per day is being suctioned up by the tube, out of about 5,000 barrels that the company believes is gushing out daily.

If you're like the 99.99999% of people who aren't following the continuously increasing revisions of the spill rate, you'd be forgiven for assuming that the tube that BP has installed is suctioning up 20% of the spill. And in other accounts, such as the NYT, it's mentioned that BP believes that the tube could eventually suction up 5,000 barrels per day. Which leaves the distinct impression that there's a strong chance that the tube could take care of the entire spill.

But virtually everyone except for BP is repeatedly insisting that it's likely that the oil is gushing at a rate of at LEAST 70,000 barrels per day! In other words, far from the tube suctioning up 20% of the gushed oil, with the potential to address 100%, the tube that BP installed is most likely suctioning up <1.5% of the spill, with the potential to increase to 7%. It wouldn't be so frustrating except that the media STILL insists on trusting everything that BP says. Just now, the PBS Newshour repeated the "tube suctioning up 1,000 barrels out of 5,000" nonsense.

From tonight's NBC Evening News broadcast, Steve Wereley, the Purdue professor who is among the many arguing that 5,000 barrels/day is ridiculously low, said

I can't say how much in excess of that 70,000 barrels/day this leak is, but I would use the word "considerable".

In other rolling debbie downer oil gusher news, the oil spill is either about to or already has entered the Loop Current that connects the Gulf to the Florida Keys and Atlantic Ocean, depending on whether you believe govt. officials or independent scientists.

Millions of gallons of oil have already escaped from the blown well, presenting an enormous challenge to contain it and keep it from killing ocean life and fouling Gulf Coast beaches and wetlands. That task will become immeasurably more difficult if the huge plume of oil moves into the powerful and unpredictable loop current, which carries warm water in a clockwise motion from the Yucatán Peninsula into the northern Gulf of Mexico, then south to the Florida Keys and out into the Atlantic.

great vitriol from Shep

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8s-KHDmNqlQ

massive HD NASA pic of spill

sigh

A very good analysis of the blowout by a Yahoo poster:

7 shortcuts lead to tragedy Part 1
7 shortcuts lead to tragedy Part 2

Shortcut #1: Running a tapered long string rather than a liner with 9-7/8” liner top packer, followed by tieback string and pumping heavy cement all the way to seabed. Perhaps the original permits for this casing program were based on a planned appraisal well, and changed midstream to a producer well, then hastily approved by the complacent or under-staffed MMS. This tragic shortcut may have saved about 1.5 rig days.
Shortcut #2: Insufficient time was used to cure the mud losses prior to cementing the open hole reservoir section, depending instead on using lightweight cement to prevent losses to the formation.
Shortcut #3: The nitrified primary cement job. This is difficult to pull off, even under ideal conditions.
Shortcut #4: Hanger without lock ring may have used due to the previously unplanned long string, and to avoid waiting for hanger with lock ring to be fabricated or prepared.
Shortcut #5: No cement evaluation logs were performed after a job with known high calculated risk (mud losses to formation). This shortcut may have saved 8 hours of rig time.
Shortcut #6: Pressure testing casing less than 24 hours after cement in place can expand the casing before the cement is fully set. This shortcut can “crack” the cement and create a micro annulus which will allow gas migration.
Shortcut #7: Displacing 14 ppg mud from 8000 ft MDRT with 8.7 ppg seawater, less than 20 hours after primary cement is in place. How many tested and proven barriers can you count? I count zero satisfactory barriers. Industry standards dictate that at least two tested (to maximum anticipated pressure) barriers are in place prior to removing the primary source of well control (weighted mud or brine).
The operator and owner of this well ordered and directed all of the shortcuts above. There is no doubt, in my opinion, that this tragedy would not happen on a well operated by Chevron, Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips, Shell, Anadarko, Noble Energy, or any other responsible operators familiar to me. Transocean is still the world’s best provider of deepwater rigs and they have very competent crews. The crews on DWH were among the best in the world but they never had a chance against this tragic engineering blunder, and now we have 11 grieving families, and the environmental disaster.
Re: 60 Minutes report on possible Annular rubber observed on shakers -even if the rubber came from one of the two annular elements, the reported quantity is insignificant. These elements can withstand a lot of damage and still seal effectively. I have seen a bucket full of rubber missing from these elements and they still closed and sealed and held pressure as designed.

The disaster itself is, of course, heartbreaking. But it's the creeping realization that no real important lessons are going to be learned from this is what really crushes the soul.

Yes, there will probably be new regulations on offshore drilling, more strenuous safety checks, maybe the MMS won't be so casual about dishing out permits without ample safety plans and environmental impact statements. And maybe new offshore drilling won't be permitted in the next several years (though eventually, once the shit inevitably hits the fan re: impending oil crisis, we'll be drilling EVERYWHERE, I'd wager). But the crux of the problem - we're so hopelessly dependent on fossil fuels that we're drilling a mile beneath the ocean surface, and more miles below that into the sea bed, and the largest source of imported oil in the U.S. this year will most likely be the fucking Canadian tar sands, an ongoing desecration of the environment - remains unaddressed. We are scraping the bottom of the barrel, environmental consequences be damned, risking the wellbeing of billions by assuming that the technocratic thinking that got us into this mess will also, deus ex machina-style, save us with some miracle source of energy at the last moment, so that the status quo can be maintained ad infinitum.

And the most political will that can be mustered in response is Lindsey Graham spewing nonsense about offshore drilling having to be in an energy bill, most other senators and reps twiddling their thumbs and occasionally vomiting up some irrelevant soundbite.

hooooooooly shit shep that was hardbody

in other hero news, glad to see my newspaper runs amy goodman columns:

http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/column/article_d3f10107-ffcf-5a20-952f-f2327ac63aae.html

BP's refusal to evaluate the leakage rate could have nefarious reasons:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20100521/pl_mcclatchy/3511770

i'd like to remind everyone that shep is totally the greatest

What did shep do?

great vitriol from Shep

http://www.youtube.com/v/8s-KHDmNqlQ&fs=1&hl=en

― Stormy Davis, Thursday, May 20, 2010 12:25 AM (5 days ago)

shep GOING IN, this is what jordan & i were referring to

yeah shep is a proud mississippi boy -- don't fuck with the gulf imo

yeah he's the best. idk why fox hasn't sent him to the gulf coast, other than they put $$$ first and it costs too much to do the show remotely. interviewed axelrod the other day & axe was kind of trying to filibuster & kind of 'well i'm glad i could be here while you're making speeches' b/c the shep was spending a lot of time on verrryyy long and indignant leading questions wanting to know why BP won't let us find out how much oil is being spilled and generally why we're trusting BP to do anything

i honestly don't understand what the administration is doing, other than it seems there's this standoff.. in that the feds don't want to be responsible thus letting BP run things, and BP preoccupation #1 is CYA and not stopping the oil. i suppose they thought adding enough of this HIGHLY TOXIC dispersant would make enough of the oil not visible that they could play it off like it's not the disaster it is?

BP's refusal to evaluate the leakage rate could have nefarious reasons:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20100521/pl_mcclatchy/3511770

― Face Book (dyao), Tuesday, May 25, 2010 9:07 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

surprise!

This is what happens when you have an oil company in charge of the clean up effort - there's no reason for them, in terms of $$, to cooperate with efforts to estimate the size of the spill. It's all downside, no upside for them.

I mean, yeah, some people will do a little digging and figure out that BP has something to do with the lack of estimates. But not that many, and not enough to do much more damage to BP's reputation than has already occurred. But the benefits of downplaying, delaying or obstructing accurate estimates are clear and immediate for BP. There's the link dyao/Stevie D point to, but there's also the benefit of the company being able to avoid the following headline:

BP Disaster Spilling the Equivalent of Two Exxon Valdez Spills per Week

Instead, we get the paper of record using a wide variety of spill estimates, with the low side absurdly claiming that the disaster is still more than 4 million gallons less than Exxon Valdez.

this is what happens when you have an oil company in charge of the clean up effort

And just to proactively respond to the inevitable, yes, I realize that at this point the government isn't any better equipped to address the situation. It's an awful bind to be in.

How about using another oil company and getting BP to pay for it? They would have the knowledge, equipment, experience, etc. and could take more accurate spill measurements. Allow BP to oversee it all to ensure they're not being completely fucked over.

Or would other companies protect BP in the interests of the industry?

Don't know if it's been mentioned here yet but doesn't hurricane season kick in soon? Could be a disaster upon a disaster :(

I think it's bizarre how people are all anti BP now, like any other big oil company would have handled this any different.

Don't know if it's been mentioned here yet but doesn't hurricane season kick in soon? Could be a disaster upon a disaster :(

June 1st

I like all of the comments on sites like CNN where people are 'I hope some of this oil washes up in Britain' etc. Come on!

And where was all the BP hate when they were involved with paramilitaries in Colombia?

in Colombia

and where was all the BP hate when they turned Iran into a client state for most of the 20th century?

a: Iran

is an oilcane even possible? cuz like, that's not even something that would happen in an apocalypse movie

oil cane + lightning = firecane

And where was all the BP hate when they were involved with paramilitaries in Colombia?

oh, it's not only in colombia.

is an oilcane even possible? cuz like, that's not even something that would happen in an apocalypse movie
...
oil cane + lightning = firecane

oilicane + earthquake = tsunamoil + lightning = 100 foot wall of burning oil hitting the Gulf Coast at 50mph.

Just need a title and a £500m budget.

For real, though, the "oilcane" really is a worst-case scenario that experts have been mentioning since this whole thing started in April.

I'm not at home, but just google "oil spill + hurricane" for the Debbie downer details

so should we take bets on top kill or what

my understanding is that top kill has a good chance of blowing the lid entirely off the thing and thus making the situation infinitely worse..
there was some good info on some threads @ loldailykos but I can't read them at work..

BP put the chances of success at 60-70%, last I heard.

Yaaaaaaaay!

James Carville on "Good Morning America," pretending to be livid, went at it with Matthew Dowd.

Live shot of gusher

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jQUfOZTK-Y&feature=player_embedded

top kill pumping suspended for the second time in two days

...the company suspended pumping operations at 2:30 a.m. Friday after two “junk shot” attempts, said the technician, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the efforts.

The suspension of the effort was not announced, and appeared to again contradict statements by company and government officials that suggested the top kill procedure was progressing Friday.

Admiral Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, the leader of the government effort, said Friday on ABC’s Good Morning America” that, “They’ve been able to push the hydrocarbons and the oil down with the mud.”

But the technician working on the effort said that despite the injections at various pressure levels, engineers had been able to keep less than 10 percent of the injection fluids inside the stack of pipes above the well. He said that was barely an improvement on Wednesday’s results when the operation began and was suspended in its 11th hour of operations. BP resumed the pumping effort Thursday evening for about 10 more hours.

“I won’t say progress was zero, but I don’t know if we can round up enough mud to make it work,” said the technician. “Everyone is disappointed at this time.”

how soon till they just nuke it?

just jam it wth old tyres and golf balls, that'll do it!

http://i46.tinypic.com/11he7nr.png

Mr. Suttles said the oil-spill recovery operations had cost $940 million to date. He added that BP would reimburse the federal government for the more than $100 million the government had paid.

the fuck...?

if obama/dems et al dont use this for a long fucking hail mary on environmental regulation i just dont fucking know. jesus christ its absolutely disgusting

Guarantee ya it will be taxpayer money paying alot of this cleanup cost. Seriously fuck this country.

I guess in Nigeria people must be saying 'fuck this country' every year. Apparently the equivalent of the gulf spill happens there every year, and no one bothers to clean it up...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shell

I'm getting pretty sick of hearing this "gee wheez, we've never tried these things in these conditions... we don't know if it'll work or not... blah blah." How is it that fixes for a conceivable (and very significant) problem are total unknowns and unproven? Isn't Murphy's Law a basic tenet of engineering? No one thought it advisable to have proven methods for shutting this thing down before diving in? It seems like the height of irresponsibility.

I would not expect any meaningful environmental regulation to come as a result of this. That would be "exploiting this tragedy to advance the liberal agenda," and we have to avoid any appearance of saying anything that might look like we're saying "this kind of proves one of our points, as tragic as it is."

I feel numbed by the scope of this - it makes me want to take hard drugs & just stay high, is how it makes me feel. Not party high. Oblivious high.

definitely -- and that article about oil drilling in nigeria made me even more depressed. in some ways the world is lucky that this is happening to a first world country, when it happens to a country like nigeria everything gets swept under the rug. nobody cares.

I feel numbed by the scope of this - it makes me want to take hard drugs & just stay high, is how it makes me feel. Not party high. Oblivious high.

"Oblivious high" is an accurate description of our default perception of how our lifestyles impact the environment, tbh. The only silver lining to emerge from this disaster so far is that for a brief moment, it serves as an example of an impact of our energy use on the environment that is direct, tangible and occurring right now, rather than the indirect and/or deferred consequences that are a large part of the energy/environment/climate equation. Normally, warnings about the consequences of the way we use fossil fuels are weakened by the effects of time or distance, whether it's warnings of rising seas decades in the future, or stuff like corn ethanol production resulting in increased rainforest destruction (more corn for ethanol production in U.S. = less land for soy production in U.S. = more farmers in other countries growing soy to meet demand = more trees torn down to clear land). And even though this oil spill is much more immediate and tangible, since the source of the oil gusher is a mile deep and dispersants have kept a lot of the oil below the visible surface of the ocean, we're still only witnessing part of the full picture of the spill.

Soon after the BP disaster started, Bill McKibben wrote:

Dirty as the water is off the Mississippi Delta, that’s barely the tip of the damage from fossil fuel. If that oil had traveled down a pipeline to a refinery and then into the fuel tank of a car, it would have wrecked the planet just as powerfully. We now realize, as we didn’t on the first Earth Day, that the slick of carbon dioxide spreading invisibly across the atmosphere is driving change on a massive scale: by raising the planet’s temperature, it’s melting everything frozen, raising the level of the ocean, powering ever stronger storms. In the Gulf, and in every other ocean on the planet, that extra carbon is turning seawater acid. You can’t see it, but it’s wrecking marine life far more effectively and insidiously even than the spreading oil.

That's otm, I think, and if there was ever a time for a President to make a powerful case for energy/climate legislation, this is it.

not in an election year, silly

yeah, I know it's not looking likely now. But it will be even more difficult to pass anything meaningful after this November. There are 59 Democratic senators right now, and we're in the midst of an unprecedented oil spill here. Only in America would an unprecedented oil spill make passing environmental legislation MORE difficult. It's fucking ridiculous.

And yeah, totally cliche, but our atmosphere really doesn't give a shit about our political system.

I mean, one thing I was really excited about when Obama was elected was the idea that he really, REALLY understood the gravity of the problem. Beyond just paying lip service to it. The way he speaks about it doesn't seem insincere to me. Shit, just the other day he said

We all know the price we pay as a country as a result of how we produce and use — and, yes, waste — energy today. We’ve been talking about it for decades — since the gas shortages of the 1970s. Our dependence on foreign oil endangers our security and our economy. Climate change poses a threat to our way of life — in fact, we’re already beginning to see its profound and costly impact. And the spill in the Gulf, which is just heartbreaking, only underscores the necessity of seeking alternative fuel source

If he really believes that, then he understands that this bill has to be passed THIS year, before November. There isn't going to be a better opportunity until it's not just a decent chance that it's already too late to avoid some of the worst consequences of climate change (the current situation), but a near certainty.

yeah, I know it's not looking likely now. But it will be even more difficult to pass anything meaningful after this November. There are 59 Democratic senators right now, and we're in the midst of an unprecedented oil spill here. Only in America would an unprecedented oil spill make passing environmental legislation MORE difficult. It's fucking ridiculous.

― fuck it we're going to Applebee's® (Z S), Sunday, May 30, 2010 12:55 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark

OTM. And how are we enjoying our public option?

Oh man, I feel like I ought to finish it but I can't make it past the second paragraph of that article on Nigeria. </3

I don't see how the kind of massive, sweeping climate change legislation that is necessary can be passed when half the country thinks global warming isn't a big deal. That has to change first.

As sad as it is, I don't think the oil spill will do enough to change that. I don't know what it will take.

I don't see how the kind of massive, sweeping climate change legislation that is necessary can be passed when half the country thinks global warming isn't a big deal. That has to change first

xpost: change "country" to "world" and statement is more otm, IMO

My hopes are more for massive, sweeping corporate responsibility legislation, which tbh may be just as impossible...

Thank you, Rachel Maddow. I did not remember there being a Gulf oil spill in 1979 (I was only 5), so imagine my surprise when learning almost every detail is almost identical right down to the cause and the attempts to stop it. SPOILER ALERT: It took them nine months to stop it with two relief wells.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHmhxpQEGPo

I don't see how the kind of massive, sweeping climate change legislation that is necessary can be passed when half the country thinks global warming isn't a big deal. That has to change first

xpost: change "country" to "world" and statement is more otm, IMO

Interviews on BBC radio 4 with scientist/activists suggesting democracy will just have to be overridden (not that anyone has ever cared what 3/4 of the globe wants anyway). Might be more possible here that the US, which might transform the culture war into an actual civil war...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/us/30rig.html

little bit late but this article details how the deepwater horizon was troubled for nearly a year before the actual event. it would be almost funny if there weren't, you know, millions of gallons of fucking oil in the gulf right now.

http://i45.tinypic.com/9hjo07.jpg

I've been on vacation for the past 2 weeks and haven't paid any attention to the news in that time. What's with all this "gov'ts not doing enough" is it a right wing continuation of the "Obama's Katrina" or are lefties saying this too? Cos if just the former than everyone should be LET'S WATCH THE FREE MARKET MAGICALLY FIX THINGS COS $$$$ CAPITALISM IS GOD'S WAY OF MAKING THE WORLD AMAZING.

What's with all this "gov'ts not doing enough" is it a right wing continuation of the "Obama's Katrina" or are lefties saying this too?

It's an everybody thing, left and right:

http://i46.tinypic.com/14wej5u.gif

The reasoning behind it is equally sad, left and right, imo. On the right, in the early days of the gusher, there was a tendency by rightwing pundits to downplay the size of the spill and its potential ecological and economic damage. Once it was clear that that view was completely contradicted by, uh, facts, they immediately switched into an attempt to make this Obama's Katrina. So, nothing new on the right, they're doing what everyone expected them to do, utterly predictable.

The situation on the left is more complicated. imo it comes down to cognitive dissonance. A large chunk of the left (well, a large chunk of EVERYONE in the US, basically) is so deeply technocratic that it is difficult to believe that no one can come up with a quick and easy technical solution for the problem. We've all lived in a very strange era where exponential technological development has started to hit the vertical section of the J-curve.

I just typed and then deleted a stereotypical envirofascist rant about how we're nearing the end of the Age of Oil, an absurd period in time where a lot of people were able to take advantage of the incredible energy contained in oil (1 gallon contains the equivalent of 500 hours of human work output). But really, I think Richard Heinberg put it best in a recent article:

This is what the end of the oil age looks like. The cheap, easy petroleum is gone; from now on, we will pay steadily more and more for what we put in our gas tanks—more not just in dollars, but in lives and health, in a failed foreign policy that spawns foreign wars and military occupations, and in the lost integrity of the biological systems that sustain life on this planet.

A lot of people, for several decades, have acknowledged that our reliance on oil is dangerous. That's great. But now that the shit is starting to hit the fan, the other part of the statement - "our reliance on oil is dangerous...so let's DO SOMETHING about it NOW" - is still being ignored from all ends. It's just too uncomfortable to talk about. We can always do it tomorrow. Or maybe sometime after this year's elections.

So, unable to confront the root of the BP disaster - our OWN consumption - the left can only blame what is more immediately visible, like lapsed regulations and BP's ineptitude. Which deserve criticism, of course. But it's missing the forest for the trees.

imo

interesting/depressing read

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/5/11/11558/1890

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3410/4597166301_aec23fbe25_o.jpg

http://i46.tinypic.com/11he7nr.png

^^ to be fair, the first poll was Fox News/Opinion Dynamics and the second poll was USA Today/Gallup...

haha, yeah I didn't even notice that! But tbh the main reason I posted that was just astonishment that the % favoring STILL outweighted the % opposing.

outweighted

It's because oil drilled in US waters won't go on the world market and thus can only be sold to Americans who watch 24 and shop at Walmart.

It's because oil drilled in US waters won't go on the world market and thus can only be sold to Americans who watch 24 and shop at Walmart.

^^^why they fight

good luck getting ppl on board

It's because oil drilled in US waters won't go on the world market and thus can only be sold to Americans who watch 24 and shop at Walmart.

clarification: it's statments like that that are why -they- ie normal ppl hate envirofascists/bein green. I know what'll work! blame fat poorish ppl in the south/Midwest!

The petroleum industry shares the peculiar trait of the pornography industry in that consumers feel entitled to a sense of moral superiority to producers.

90% of the offshore petroleum industry is in other jurisdictions, and even companies with little or no US Gulf or BP exposure have had a 33% haircut. I smell opportunity. See you in Languedoc.

See you in Languedoc.

?

If you mean see you in Southeast France because it's pretty there or something...then...I guess? If you mean see you in Languedoc because there's shale gas there and there's money to be made...then...what?

The former. Successful capitalists take advantage of irrational markets.

http://images.french-property.com/9/1/9/cms919.jpg

congratulations on being a successful capitalist?

Man, being a "green libertarian" seems like a pretty fucking sweet deal

At least nine fishermen hired by BP to use their boats to help with oil cleanup in the Gulf of Mexico have been hospitalized with serious heath problems, including one who “busted his skull” after collapsing on a dock.
When asked about this clear pattern of illnesses of workers who come in contact BP’s oil and chemical dispersants, BP CEO Tony Hayward callously dismissed the health problems as “food poisoning.”

“I’m sure they were genuinely ill, but whether it was anything to do with dispersants and oil, whether it was food poisoning or some other reason for them being ill,” said Hayward.

http://workinprogress.firedoglake.com/2010/05/31/bp-ceo-sickened-cleanup-workers-probably-have-food-poisoning/

Successful capitalists take advantage of irrational markets.

in your heart, u know the unsophisticated deserved it

Interesting new perspective 30 minutes ago from a crazy ranting guy on the L train:

"A woman can start a war but she can't stop a war. If a woman can start a war why the FUCK she gonna stop a war? Why don't your LESBIAN ASS stop that oil spill? Go tell J-Lo and Oprah Winfrey and all the other PUSSY EATING WOMEN to stop that oil spill!"

If I catch his meaning correctly, the technique by which to stop the plume is 'lesbian ass'. Hope someone from BP is reading this.

that's thinking outside the box

wait....wtf? BP's decided to stop trying?

Bloomberg:

BP Plc has decided not to attach a second blowout preventer on its leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico and efforts to end the flow are over until the relief wells are finished, according to the U.S. Coast Guard’s Thad Allen, who spoke at a press conference today.

Business Week:

BP Plc said it won’t be able to stop the flow of oil from a gushing well in Gulf of Mexico until August when a relief well can be finished, and in the meantime it will divert as much of the oil as it can to surface ships.

The diversion strategy, unlike capping the flow, is subject to disruption by tropical storms and hurricanes.

until August

Those articles are from a few hours ago. NYTimes/WashPo/LATimes/BBC/etc aren't mentioning it. Am I missing something?

I hope so because if that's the reality then I'm just gonna go lie down on my bed for a few hours and draw the blinds

"A woman can start a war but she can't stop a war. If a woman can start a war why the FUCK she gonna stop a war? Why don't your LESBIAN ASS stop that oil spill? Go tell J-Lo and Oprah Winfrey and all the other PUSSY EATING WOMEN to stop that oil spill!"

J-Lo being a lesbian would be a high-level shocka.

Here is the transcript from Thad Allen's briefing earlier today, referenced in that first quote from Bloomberg. Let me see if I can find the relevant section.

what exactly was the outcome of russia using nukes on their leaks?

I presume we'd be nuking it if McCain was president.

they claimed it had a 4/5 success rate. none of the nukes were set off in deep-sea situations, nor were they set off in areas with geologically similar compositions to the current one.

Q: (Inaudible).

ADM. ALLEN: Sure. I think the first thing to understand is, we’re not talking about capping the well anymore; we’re talking about containing the well. The difference between capping the well and absorbing the pressure and being able to hold that until the relief well is completed, we’re at, now, where we’re containing the well, which means that we’re taking the hydrocarbons that are coming up and actually bringing them to the surface and actually producing oil and flaring off natural gas. Since we’re in a containment operation, we don’t want to restrict the flow of pressures on that well bore, because I don’t think we know the conditions of it, given the results of the top kill data that we got back.

What we want to do is be able to get that oil up and produced. So if you’ve got production going on, that necessarily involves – because that’s along the surface – that’s going to necessarily involve interaction with the weather.

And we’re going into hurricane season. Therefore, you need to have a plan for how you would suspend operations, if you had to, because of the weather. But also, once we get this thing stabilized, to bring in a larger platform for production that can withstand heavier weather, so we have as good a package out there as we can, knowing that nothing is failsafe with hurricane season coming. There may be a time when they have to disconnect, and that brings up the fact that there will be oil flowing up there until we can be deployed back.

And again, the ultimate solution to this whole thing will be sometime in August, we hope.

uhm does that read as incredibly self-serving to anybody else

Although Allen did mention the shift to "containment" rather than a "cap" during the first part of the press conference - "a result of that, we thought of oil containment, rather than capping the well. That involves a couple of things this afternoon. One of them is cutting the riser pipes" - it was pretty weaselly of them to slip that several paragraphs deep into the briefing. I mean, that's the fucking most important part of the press conference. WE'VE GIVEN UP TRYING TO CAP THE WELL. NOW WE'RE JUST GOING TO TRY TO CAPTURE SOME OF THE LEAKING OIL FOR NOW AND 'ASSUME THAT THE ULTIMATE SOLUTION TO THIS WHOLE THING WILL BE SOMETIMES IN AUGUST, WE HOPE', LOL"

drunk over here, so sorry. It's all you can do in the wake of shit like this. god damn.

whoa, they arent tryna to cap it, they are tryna bring it into production?

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l20aefkpmj1qb25dg.jpg

I think the "containment"/production thing is just saying that they'll capture what oil they can directly from the well, and of course direct that up into ships and then eventually refine the oil. I mean, that part isn't so crazy - if they're going to gather some of the oil directly up from the sea floor into a boat, they may as well refine it. It's the fact that they're giving up on the rest of it and accepting that the solution won't arrive until August that's significant.

btw, the reason I came upon this story was only because I was reading this, which was drawing attention to the fact that they gave up on trying to cap it at virtually the same time that Holder announced that there would be a DOJ criminal investigation.

I honestly don't know what to think about that, but I'm just throwing it out there to consider.

after this is over, how long will it take BP to change its name and logo? 10 minutes?

I'd give them a solid 20. Maybe they'll become Better Pizza and start producing some tasty slices.

They don't even need to change the name or logo, though, tbh. Exxon took a hit for a couple years after Valdez, and then 15 years later they became the largest corporation in the world. And some people are convinced by anything, even if it's just a Big Oil company diverts a few percentage points of their profits to renewable energy research and creating a new flowery logo accompanied by a misleading ad campaign.

It's because oil drilled in US waters won't go on the world market and thus can only be sold to Americans who watch 24 and shop at Walmart.

― Adam Bruneau, Monday, May 31, 2010 2:07 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

you're a real winner, bro

i did both of those things within the past 14 days and i live in a red state -- on the other hand i listened to the tame impala album before it was even reviewed on pitchfork -- i'm such a contradiction

pinkearmuffs If only the cleanup ships in the Gulf could take in oil like Bristol Palin takes in dick... oil spill #BP @sarahpalinUSA 5 minutes ago via web

For what its worth, the petroleum engineers I've followed with inside contacts report that as of Sunday, the first relief well being drilled by the Development Driller III was at 12,000, had cemented its last casing, and was expected to intercept the blowout formation in 12-14 days.

As far as other undersea efforts with containment domes, riser siphons, top kills, and lmrp, all had rather limited prospects for success (by comparison with the 2 relief wells), but were advanced in order to have some visible activity.

Morgan Stanley thinks the deepwater moratorium will last 12-18 months, so I expect to see some of these departing the Gulf in the next few months:

http://www.dockwise.com/media/uploaded/Blue_4.jpg

See you off Rio!

You've made similar statements before several times in this thread, but I'm still unsure what the point is. Is it

a) if we push oil exploration away from the U.S. Coast, then those same rigs will relocate elsewhere, to locations with worse environmental regulations than the U.S., to boot?

The problem with that argument is that it assumes that oil exploration a zero sum game - one less rig off the U.S. = one more rig elsewhere. But in reality, oil companies are exploring/drilling everywhere that is potentially profitable, right? It's not like Big Oil companies are lacking the startup capital to build new rigs anywhere that's accessible and there might be a chance to make some money. So, you must be trying to make a point about...

b) lost jobs? from offshore drilling workers? If that's the case, there's a few obvious counterarguments. 1) You could have a long, complicated ethical discussion about taking steps to save jobs that are contributing to the destruction of the planet. But that could get hairy. So I'll just skip straight to 2), which is "uhhh...but didn't the consequences of offshore drilling just DEVASTATE the gulf economy? Why are you so concerned with the relatively small number of jobs for people drilling a poisinous atmospheric poison deathwish and ignoring the impact it's having on millions of people living there?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWuuXpeqNNw&

That's right, a poisinous atmospheric poison deathwish!

was hoping that was gonna be porn

http://images.french-property.com/9/1/9/cms919.jpghttp://images.french-property.com/9/1/9/cms919.jpghttp://images.french-property.com/9/1/9/cms919.jpg
http://images.french-property.com/9/1/9/cms919.jpghttp://i50.tinypic.com/29y5phk.gifhttp://images.french-property.com/9/1/9/cms919.jpg
http://images.french-property.com/9/1/9/cms919.jpghttp://images.french-property.com/9/1/9/cms919.jpghttp://images.french-property.com/9/1/9/cms919.jpg

http://i48.tinypic.com/2nk2wwp.jpg

http://i46.tinypic.com/2r3ff49.jpg

I'm not really trying to have an argument. BP pissed in everyone's cup, and few people are as angry with what transpired onboard the Deepwater Horizon as other people in the offshore industry. I'm lucky in that my future isn't bound up with the field, but others whose expertise I respect are seriously concerned the field will see another depression, like the one in 1986-1991.

This has the potential be really, really ugly for southern Louisiana, even after the well is capped and the marshes recover. I'd guesstimate that 60% of the jobs south of I-10 wouldn't exist without the energy industry (incl indirect multiplier effects). It dwarfs other industries that use the Gulf. For example, the total commercial fishing catch in all 5 Gulf states is worth about $600 million/year, while at $70 just the oil produced in the Gulf reduces the trade deficit by $40 billion. Typically the Federal government makes $5 billion in lease sales and royalties, and Louisiana about $300 million (that's before corporate income taxes). The tug-of-war between Sen. Mary Landrieu and the administration has already begun.

Most people won't experience indirect long-term economic effects of the regulatory response taken til a few years post peak, maybe in 2015-17. And even there I expect mostly just acceleration the drumbeat of fuel shortfalls, current account balance drains and currency devaluation that would have occurred anyway. As someone whose been a regular on various post-carbon forums for about a decade, I've succumbed to a bit of gallows humor about it.

still whining about lost jobs in an industry that shouldn't even exist anymore. hate to c&p but... you deserve it cause your behavior on this thread is arrogant and snotty.

I commit to listening to Thursday Afternoon on repeat on Thursday, May 6th, from 12:01 PM to 5:59 PM CST. I'll report if its functional "furniture-music" for day-job, commuting, yard work, and web-surfing. I suspect it will be inappropriate as background for screaming at my broker, but we'll see how that goes.

― nori dusted (Sanpaku), Tuesday, May 4, 2010 1:25 PM (4 weeks ago)

so how did that go? still losing money as a result of this catastrophe or have you diversified in time?

Have been lurking..sorry, was too wigged out to say anything out loud for a while.

Sanpaku, somewhere in there is a useful perspective but the gallows humor doesn't have the same effect on us as it does on you.

Anyhoo, im not going to pile on. Been thinking abt this (upthread).. It is really doing my head in:

As far as other undersea efforts with containment domes, riser siphons, top kills, and lmrp, all had rather limited prospects for success (by comparison with the 2 relief wells), but were advanced in order to have some visible activity.

I mean, I get it. From a coldly rational point of view that shouldn't surprise me.

But on the other hand I'm a big baby and...holy shit. Forget appeasing the masses and giving the 24 hr news feed their b-roll footage...if all that dog and pony show was for my/our benefit then...well, fuck that. This is so messed up my brain can barely handle it.

Like the coal mining industry in western PA, phasing out fossil fuel extraction related industries will involve pain and lost jobs. The government should help promote economic diversification and work for job growth in other sectors. But the bottom line is that these areas will go into decline, and that's tragic but necessary.

Edward III linked this upthread - it's totally worth reading if you missed it -

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/5/11/11558/1890

Sanpaku, do you have stats on how much the oil jobs are worth to the working class in the gulf, as compared to shrimping and tourism? Like, I know it's a big industry down there, but telling me that BP makes a fortune on it isn't really the same as telling me how many people's lives are affected. It seems pretty clear to me that toxic waste spilling all over the beaches is bad news for lots of people but this seems not to really get much weight in your summation.

No to mention the rapid acceleration of wetland destruction that will take place if this oil really starts getting pushed inland. If it comes to choosing between dirty money from the richest and most destructive industry on the planet and a local family industry that supplies a major part of the culture of my hometown it's a pretty easy fucking choice. The first world's gonna have to take a financial hit of some kind if we want to last more than a century or so.

Hurricane season in the Atlantic started yesterday. Let's hope we're lucky this year.

It's really come to that, fuck.

Good luck USA various ecosystems, economic sectors, etc

Looking forward to the price of petrol shooting up to recoup lost pennies!

75,000 are directly employed on the Gulf offshore industry, according to Baker-Hughes. In terms of offshore crew, a reasonable breakdown might be 70 active rigs x 50 crew/shift x 4 shifts or about 14,000 total employed on rigs, a similar number in support vessels, aviation & exploration services, and the balance in fabrication, engineering and management. The jobs pay well, but they're highly skilled and require weeks away from family. Lease, finding and development costs in the GoM have run $63/bbl lately (EIA), with production costs at about $12/bbl, so the GoM is economically marginal and even negative at current crude prices. That $75/bbl went to salaries, infrastructure, subcontractors, and except for a brief period in late 2007-2008, not much was left for the Rockefellers of the world. Other basins have been more prospective.

I'm afraid 2 or 3 of you have misconstrued my comments. I haven't once said that the spill wasn't a grave event with widespread environmental impacts, and I'm particularly concerned with threatened marine turtles that nested in the spill area. But Z S was doing a fine job of echoing mainstream coverage of environmental impacts, I thought I could share what is leaking around the media filters.

Dear BP,
Please be better villains.
At the moment, you are apologetic, confused, and totally screwed, which is making it hard to bitch slap you into the next galaxy while simultaneously capping the spill with the least amount of "Oh noes, we is dead! Sry, fishes!," telling Israel to stop being a bunch of crybaby bullies and disconnecting the US from Zionist assholery, as well as simply building our tanned, muscular arms for rocking out this summer.
So, please, BP, consider it. Villains are an important part of the structure of human action response in all forms of literature and entertainment, including the news. As Robert Ebert once wrote, "Each film is only as good as its villain. Since the heroes and the gimmicks tend to repeat from film to film, only a great villain can transform a good try into a triumph."

Think About it,
A.Mags

They're getting bitch-slapped in the stock market right now, which may be the only place they can feel it.

http://twitter.com/SarahPalinUSA/status/15216694830

bitch what the fuck are you talking about

Fun fact: BP estimated that the well that us now gushing contained between 50 to 100 million barrels of oil, total. Global consumption of oil is around 85 million barrels of oil per day. In other words, the gulf of Mexico is being wrecked right now in the pursuit of around one day's supply of oil.

And that's being very optimistic. Typically only around 30% of oil is actually extracted, so in all likelihood the Macondo field would have ended up producing less than half a day of global oil consumption.

Cameron joined scientists, engineers and officials from the department of energy and the environmental protection agency at a meeting in Washington yesterday to share ideas about how to reduce the damage of the massive oil spill. The discussion was described by the Obama administration as a "listening session", though it is no secret that BP has struggled to find the right technology that can work at one mile below the ocean surface.

Two weeks ago, Cameron offered BP the use of his private fleet of submarines, currently moored in Lake Baikal in the Russian federation.

The director of Avatar, the world's highest-grossing film, and the previous record-holding movie, Titanic, is considered an expert in the technology of deep-sea diving, having used submersibles in a succession of his films.

His 1989 film The Abyss is set underwater around an oil rig where a US nuclear submarine has crashed. The film was shot in a deep-sea canyon in the Caribbean known as the Cayman Trough. The make-believe oil company that owns the rig in Cameron's underwater thriller is called BP, standing for Benthic Petroleum.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/jun/02/james-cameron-underwater-oil-spill

Wait wait, the Abyss was shot in an actual abyss?

crisis->opportunity moment: i wish there was a band named "the tar patties"

this doesn't even make sense reich:

Even after some separation time in the tankers, the crude will be contaminated with water beyond the typical water contamination levels acceptable at refineries. This would drive up the price of gas in the short term. The president will need to go on TV and ask all Americans to cut their gasoline and energy usage in half, as an emergency response to the disaster in the Gulf, so that tankers and refineries can enact these far-from-perfect cleanup measures.

is he saying that the cost of cleaning the crude to refine it will raise the cost of gas made from that crude, or is he saying that bp's cleanup will as a whole will be passed on to consumers? i mean both are technically true, but plz-- necessarily cut gas use IN HALF to accommodate oil which 1) would not even be in the system but for the incident 2)represents a really small portion of capacity?

i believe that hes this much of an industry shill, but i have a hard time believing that he is this dumb...

interesting comments range. how about:

Cameron offered BP the use of his private fleet of submarines, currently moored in Lake Baikal in the Russian federation.

For a while I thought this was about David Cameron. I mean, I know the guy is privileged, but jeez!

rebel british scientist retirees weigh in.

(sorry, that last post doesnt really belong itt, but _rebel_ scientists could probly solve this crisis)

that article did bring the lols though:

He refused to name the other signatories but admitted that few of them had worked directly in climate science and many were retired.

Video wall of ROV feeds. They're about to cut the riser with a 20 foot long hydraulic craw, so there should be some popcorn moments.

BP doesn't want to stop this, and they are pulling out these appropriately titled "junk shots" to show the situation getting worse and worse to the 24-hour news cycle. "OMG this thing is out of control!" If you're gonna fail, fail SPECTACULARLY. This way, regardless of if the amount of oil is equal to ONE DAY's supply, or if this sort of thing happens all the time off the coast of Africa, the growing horror that is this first world PR disaster will enable them to jack up prices a la 2005, and essentially they can make their money back in a heartbeat. Or maybe even make more money than had it not happened.

Then they fire some people, sacrifice a few cows, and in 6 months no-one is really that mad at BP anymore.

My conspiracy theory of the day.

looks different on the feed now, yeah confirmation they cut it with the shears

xp Adam:

For what its worth, in the modern market BP has no power to jack up prices. Nor does Exxon or Chevron. Aside from being a fungible commodity, its the national oil companies that control 52% of production and 88% of reserves. BP, incidentally, produces 2.93% of global crude oil and natural gas liquids, and that figure includes their minority equity share in other companies like the Russian TNK in which their executive power is constrained.

The last time private oil corporations withheld any production from the market was in 1970, at the behest of the Texas Railroad Commission. The national oil companies still potentially do, though even they were producing all out in late 2007-summer 2008.

The spike this decade is just an object example of a commodity moving from the supply constrained price curve to a demand constrained one. There's no particular reason prices can't spike to $200/bbl in 5 years, if that what the purchaser of the last marginal barrel is willing to pay. For example, the rinminbi could double in exchange value and it wouldn't effect the comparative price advantage of Chinese labor much, but it would double the nominal value in other currencies they're able to pay for raw materials.

looks much better since the cut, I guess the are going to lower the funnel again at some point

Right now their cutting off burrs on the crawed off riser end with a diamond circular saw.

Best viewpoint is from the position of the lower marine riser package (the "funnel"):

http://a662.l9789246661.c97892.g.lm.akamaistream.net/D/662/97892/v0001/reflector:49182

looks like its on its way down

Sanpaku OTM. BP is a totally fucked up company, but there's no incentive for them to drag this out, they are hemorrhaging money and their financial situation is gonna be really impacted by this. it's in their interest to get the leak stopped asap

Thanks for explaining these things clearly instead of making fun of my ignorance of the matter! I really hope things get fixed up soon because the poor Gulf region just keeps getting shat upon. My prayers go out to everyone directly affected by this mess.

i had no idea that hayward said "i want my life back" the other day... jesus

well if the ROV feed is anything to go by it don't look fixed to me.

Warning: super sad bird photos: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/06/caught_in_the_oil.html

whoops, should've been a link

if i were tony hayward id want my life back too

well, tony hayward, i want my gulf back so hey

pics are devastating, really wish i had not seen them

Yeah, really horrible.

no words. the british must pay for this. colonialist pigs. everything they touch dies or gets murdered. Just look at their history!! All their women leaders from Elizabeth to Thatcher are bloody murderers.
Posted by Joel June 4, 2010 10:03 AM

countdown to oilbird monster pic with "i want my life back"

:'(

xp Tracer:

Interestingly, all of BP's newsworthy environmental and safety problems (trans-Alaska pipeline spills, the Texas City explosion, this Macondo well blowout) seem to stem from their 1998 acquisition of Amoco, an American oil company, which became for all intents BP USA.

BP will probably have to cut their dividend at least until well control and at least superficial cleanup is completed. That's 14% of dividend income for British pensioners invested in the FTSE 100 index.

Totally off tropic, but I've been reading about Victorian era atrocities lately. Of special interest are the disasterous Stanley expedition of 1888 (He of "Dr. Livingstone, I presume" fame), during which Irish whiskey heir James Jameson paid six handkerchiefs to have a 10 year old girl executed and canniballised so that he could paint some water colors. I hear the British have gotten better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE-1G_476nA

That animation is of one of 6 simulation runs. This image gives better granularity on dilution levels than the shades of yellow above.

http://www2.ucar.edu/sites/default/files/news/images/features/2010/oilspill1nolanl600.jpg

These runs hence predict maximum concentrations on the Atlantic coast of between 0.0004 and 0.002 times that seen at the injection site. Hopefully, Florida won't see ensemble #2 or #4. There's no accounting for evaporation, weathering or digestion in the model (passive dye released in top 20m of water).

of course, that model depicts a dye injected within 20 meters of the surface, not 1500 meters like at the site of the actual leak. it would require much more sophisticated 3D modeling to track where the plumes are headed and when.

From the standpoint of coastal protection, the best outcome would be more of the spill getting caught up in "Eddy Franklin" that is presently pinching off from the Gulf loop current. These drift west-south-west to the central Gulf, and would permit months for weathering and digestion before any landfalls. The nightmare scenario is Ensemble #6 above, in which little of the spill gets caught in the eddy and is windblown into the Florida Gulf coast.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_edvxM1dkFlo/TAFHDkCUS9I/AAAAAAAAAfQ/iPpBMFmohfA/s1600/ssv_27may10.gif

Looks like the Emerald Coast of Florida has a very low probability of seeing any oil:

http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/2010/forbiddenzone.png

Paths of 194 floating probes released into the yellow-outlined area in the northeast Gulf of Mexico between February 1996 and February 1997 as part of a study by the Mineral Management Service (MMS). The probes were all launched into waters with depth between 20 and 60 meters. Image credit: Yang, H., R.H. Weisberga, P.P. Niilerb, W. Sturgesc, and W. Johnson, 1999, Lagrangian circulation and forbidden zone on the West Florida Shelf, Continental Shelf Research Volume 19, Issue 9, July 1999, Pages 1221-1245 doi:10.1016/S0278-4343(99)00021-7

that's... sarcasm, right? or did you mean to say tampa bay? also, again, that's a surface model, it doesn't account for heretofore unaccountable undersea currents, which is where the majority of the oil is currently churning around headed in all kinds of wacky unknown vectors.

I was thinking "Emerald Coast" was the area south of Tampa Bay, based on a recollection of some articles on the housing collapse. Looks like the actual "Emerald coast" is in the bullseye...

It was an unfortunate name for a well/prospect:

After its establishment, Macondo soon becomes a town frequented by unusual and extraordinary events. All the events revolve around the many generations of the Buendía family, who are either unable or unwilling to escape periodic, mostly self-inflicted misfortunes. Ultimately, Macondo is destroyed by a terrible hurricane, which symbolizes the cyclical turmoil inherent in Macondo.

i wanna know about the probe that ended up in lake okeechobee

I thought the interview/OpEd with Cameron in the NYtimes was if not reassuring than certainly ameliorating when it came to BP's apparent incompetence. Failure is failure, but from his vantage BP isn't really skimping on the effort. That said, he (and any reasonable person) still doesn't trust them to try every angle, both literal and figurative.

i wanna know about the probe that ended up in lake okeechobee

― a cooler full of courage and panache (Hunt3r), Friday, June 4, 2010 11:10 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

haha, maybe a bird ate it?

Looks like an Orlando sportsman on a Key West fishing trip took home a souveneir.

Those bird pix are the front page of the International Herald Tribune right now, good Lord.

Massive Flow of Bullshit Continues to Gush from BP Headquarters

The toxic bullshit, which began to spew from the mouths of BP executives shortly after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in April, has completely devastated the Gulf region, delaying cleanup efforts, affecting thousands of jobs, and endangering the lives of all nearby wildlife.

"Everything we can see at the moment suggests that the overall environmental impact of this will be very, very modest," said BP CEO Tony Hayward, letting loose a colossal stream of undiluted bullshit. "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean, and the volume of oil we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total volume of water."

According to sources, the sheer quantity of bullshit pouring out of Hayward is unprecedented, and it has thoroughly drenched the coastlines of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, with no end in sight.

Related mainstream media story:

Rate of Oil Leak, Still Not Clear, Puts Doubt on BP

On Monday, BP said a cap was capturing 11,000 barrels of oil a day from the well. The official government estimate of the flow rate is 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day, which means the new device should be capturing the bulk of the oil.

But is it? With no consensus among experts on how much oil is pouring from the wellhead, it is difficult — if not impossible — to assess the containment cap’s effectiveness. BP has stopped trying to calculate a flow rate on its own, referring all questions on that subject to the government. The company’s liability will ultimately be determined in part by how many barrels of oil are spilled.

...At least one expert, Ira Leifer, who is part of a government team charged with estimating the flow rate, is convinced that the operation has made the leak worse, perhaps far worse than the 20 percent increase that government officials warned might occur when the riser was cut.

Dr. Leifer said in an interview on Monday that judging from the video, cutting the pipe might have led to a several-fold increase in the flow rate from the well.

“The well pipe clearly is fluxing way more than it did before,” said Dr. Leifer, a researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “By way more, I don’t mean 20 percent, I mean multiple factors.”

http://i45.tinypic.com/1z5jlep.jpg

http://inapcache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/oil_05_24/o01_23462419.jpg

http://inapcache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/oil_05_24/o26_23518899.jpg

fuck BP in the ass, seriously

Another spill.

http://www.thestranger.com/images/blogimages/2010/06/08/1276057733-31799_400744461262_602071262_4752776_1178095_n.jpg
This white blanket on the water is made up of tiny dead fish. This is 20 miles from the mouth of Mobile Bay.

A+ work humankind, finally leaving our mark on the world!!

those pictures are so sad it makes me really feel hopeless.

Nice work
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/epic/bpdot/7812577/BP-buys-top-Google-search-result-for-oil-spill.html

That article is a little misleading, BP have bought the Google 'sponsored link' for 'oil spill', top real result is still Wikipedia.

BP today tried to shrug off as "politics" the personal attack by Barack Obama on its chief executive, Tony Hayward, and said it was too early to speculate on whether the company's business would be damaged in America by the Gulf oil spill.

Iain Conn, a group managing director seen by some as a potential successor to Hayward, was asked at a briefing in London for his reaction to the US president's comment that he would have sacked Hayward if he had been "working for me".

"It would be inappropriate to comment on the politics of the situation," replied Conn, adding: "What we are focusing on is the operational response [to the Deepwater Horizon rig disaster.]"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/jun/09/bp-downplays-obama-attack-hayward

IMHO firing a CEO who in under two months let company stocks fall 40% would just be a good business move.

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/09/plaq.jpg
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/09/bp-disaster-the-gulf.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+boingboing/iBag+(Boing+Boing)

ugh

http://ocg6.marine.usf.edu/~liu/Drifters/latest_roms.htm

On the plus side, seeing latest_roms.htm made me nostalgic for some ZSNES =)

This shouldn't surprise anyone since for the past month many experts have been saying that the official estimate was way too low, but the official government estimate of the amount of oil that's leaking has been revised upward again, this time to 25,000 to 30,000 barrels/day.

The new calculation suggested that an amount of oil equivalent to the Exxon Valdez disaster could have been flowing into the Gulf of Mexico every 8 to 10 days.

This assessment, based on measurements taken before BP cut the riser pipe of the leaking well on June 3 to cap some of the flow, showed that approximately 25,000 to 30,000 barrels of oil could have been gushing into the Gulf each day. That is far above the previous estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day.

http://images.dailyexpress.co.uk/img/covers/257x330front/2010-06-11.jpg

is it okay to Come on England in front of a baby?

Obama's "rants."

Dude probably hasn't "ranted" since his teens.

So can someone please tell me why I shouldn't believe a word in this Rolling Stone article? Because if half of this shit is true I'm just gonna bury my head in the sand and never follow politics, read the newspapers or vote again.

that seriously is one depressing article and I'm only 1/3 of the way through. UGH

The oil spill off the Gulf of Mexico is even worse than previously thought, with twice as much oil spewing into the ocean than earlier estimations suggested, figures show.

Latest estimates from scientists studying the disaster for the US government suggest 160-380 million litres (42-100 million US gallons) of oil have already entered the Gulf. Most experts believe there is more oil gushing into the sea in an hour than officials originally said was spilling in an entire day.

It is the third – and perhaps not the last – time the Obama administration has had to increase its estimate of how much oil is gushing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/11/bp-oil-spill-estimates-double

LOL clearly Obama is pulling some kind of political trick by complaining about this. I weep for the oil-coated pelican that is the BP stock dividend.

Im reading that RS article later, it's way too long I'm going to need to wait until I have a good hour free. Maybe the article will answer some of my questions:

Remember when they tried that first dome, and how BP said they couldn't get the oil harvested because it was clogged?
1) Wasn't clogging this spill the whole point of it? At least to non-BP shareholders?
2) After seeing they couldn't harvest the oil because the dome was clogged, did they just take the dome off? If so, why?

I'm guessing the dome wasn't big enough to trap the oil. After a while the oil would simply escape.

Also I believe the clog was at the top of the dome not where the oil is gushing.

I have never, ever taken a Rolling Stone political article at face value.

I thought the issue with the first dome was ice crystals.

RS may be suspect but a lot of what was said in the article dovetails with this one goole posted in the politics thread:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/06/11/95755/obama-overlooked-key-points-in.html

Hard for me to read the RS article when it starts off with "If Obama can kill innocents with predator drones, why can't he cap the well?!?!??!"

This is kind of hilarious:

http://www.wimp.com/oilpowder/

Instead of seizing the reins, the Obama administration cast itself in a supporting role, insisting that BP was responsible for cleaning up the mess. "When you say the company is responsible and the government has oversight," a reporter asked Gibbs on May 3rd, "does that mean that the government is ultimately in charge of the cleanup?" Gibbs was blunt: "No," he insisted, "the responsible party is BP." In fact, the National Oil and Hazardous Substances Pollution Contingency Plan – the federal regulations that lay out the command-and-control responsibilities for cleaning up an oil spill – makes clear that an oil company like BP cannot be left in charge of such a serious disaster. The plan plainly states that the government must "direct all federal, state or private actions" to clean up a spill "where a discharge or threat of discharge poses a substantial threat to the public health or welfare of the United States."

From the Rolling Stone article

has a corporation ever been held accountable for anything ever in the history of america

How much blood do you want? Right now, the rolling tab is 1.5 billion in efforts to kill the well plus clean-up efforts plus a future fine of $4300 per barrel spilled (I think we can assume the gross negligence clause will be invoked by MMS), plus estimates of an additional $10-12 billion in future liability by the time the lawyers are through wringing. The 1.5 billion is enough to put every single commercial fisher in the Gulf states on BP salary for 3 years, and Louisiana and Alabama are well known nightmare states for civil defendants.

Hey you could be Anadarko, who had nothing to do with design or operation of this well, and will still have to pay out 25% of all costs, fines and settlements. I suspect you aren't terribly familiar with the state of environmental litigation in the U.S., where several companies have been rendered bankrupt for buying other firms 30 years after they stopped producing the wonder material asbestos. Everyone pays. We'll all be paying for this long after all the wildlife returns.

incredible

How much blood do you want?

all of it, including yours, you sub-human clown

You must be fun in seminars.

Seriously, what do you want? BP to pay for 65% of all costs for clean up, remediation, and lost income, Anadarko 25% and Mizumi 10%? They've been on the line for that since day one, simply as a matter of maritime law, regardless of criminal fault.

BP to cease to exist? Sure, fine. That's a 12% cut to British retirement income, but fuck them limeys.

All deepwater drilling to cease, because insurance is prohibitive? Why not?

Not once in any comment above have I said this was anything but a tragedy. Not once have I said BP were saints. Incidentally, not once have I used the language of fascists to describe anyone else on this site.

My job (yes) is to figure out what will happen in a few years time. Right now I'm seeing an array of about a half-dozen unintended consequences several years out.

http://memegenerator.net/oilspillbp/ImageMacro/1314090/oilspillbp-Successful-capitalists-take-advantage-of-irrational-markets.jpg

BP to cease to exist? Sure, fine. That's a 12% cut to British retirement income, but fuck them limeys.

yeah. it's called an "investment". and as we (you and I, since I am an active trader as well) all know, "investments", do indeed "carry risks".

that is the fundamental principal of a "free market"

corporatist clown.

I mean, I understand the "fallout" that will occur to all the Brit pensioners, I remember when the dividend for Telephone in America went down to nothing after the old warhorse failed to actually, you know, become a modern adaptive corporation. and everyone wrung their hands about the impact on the dividend on old people and stuff. I dunno. I don't hear about homeless people on the streets in America because of what happened to Telephone.

Seriously, fuck BP, and may their investors indeed be damned. They could have bought bonds

your poor dear British pensioners could have directed their retirement funds elsewhere. that's the beauty of a "free market"

in fact, can't wait to short this dead cat bounce that BP had the last two days -- what a joke that has been. buncha scared shorts. but grateful for the opportunity. the weekend is not going to bring anything positive. Monday, it is lookout below

I'm not crying for BP or their investors.

The question that was raised above is do corporations pay for pollution. It seemed a naive question, because they do, all the time. When the the costs outstrip any advantage they do the regulatory arbitrage thing and move their shipbuilding to Pusan or their Pentium factory to Guangdong. Who really needs a tax base? According to Sacramento we can print IOUs.

It comes down to proportionality. If (a hypothetical), BP had a successful relief well touchdown in July and spent 10 billion getting every beach and marsh spotless, then would a settlement of an additional $10 billion be appropriate? $30 billion? $300 billion?

No matter how angry you feel, any settlement would effect not just BP, but the perceived sanity of the judgement would influence the decision of every single enterprise considering an investment within these borders. When Brazil and India look like more stable, more attractive political jurisdictions for many enterprises, it doesn't bode well.

The question that was raised above is do corporations pay for pollution. It seemed a naive question, because they do, all the time.
Who really needs a tax base?
It comes down to proportionality.

lolz

man, stormy davis sure loves the free market

If BP's footing the cleanup bill for this then clearly they're short-changing us on the work they're hiring. Some of the happiest memories of my life are from when my dad and I used to go fishing at Grand Isle on nice summer weekends and if they really haven't even got a boom blocking Barataria Pass then I just don't know what to say. So yeah, it's good that I'm not in charge of anything b/c I'd say seize every fucking asset from BP and send anyone in the company that's made more than 100k/yr down to those beaches to clean that shit up and see what real work is like.

The question that was raised above is do corporations pay for pollution. It seemed a naive question, because they do, all the time.

I don't really know what to say to this other than that practically the entire field of environmental economics is dedicated to trying to address externalities (i.e., corporations and other polluters not paying the full price for the pollution they create) to try to avoid market failures.

And I guess I could point to Exxon Mobil conducting an exhaustive legal battle across 20 years after the Valdez spill until they managed to dramatically reduce their punitive damages from the $5 billion penalty that was originally assessed to the $500 million that they ended up with in 2008. Or you could honestly ask yourself is Shell is paying the full cost for what it has done to Nigeria.

But you know that already, I'm sure. So again, I don't really know what to say.

a little perspective: http://www.ifitwasmyhome.com/

Z S, I listen to Amy Goodman on a daily basis too. And I think there should be a price on externalities. A predictable price that allows for planning and investment. At present its roulette.

RD is crazy to invest with NNPC in Bayelsa. Foreign engineers get kidnapped weekly or monthly, NNPCs product pipes get hacked into by impoverished locals resulting in catastrophic spills. I don't know how many of the spills are do to "bunkering", but I find it dominates news reports.

The smarter, more circumspect oil companies invested in shelf/deepwater in places like Equatorial Guinea and Angola where they can produce directly to FSPOs (retrofited tankers). Aside from an isolated coastal service center their main interaction with locals is regular royalty payments to the national governments. We don't get to choose them. And the best operators like Chevron seem to be a lot better than locals with respect to environmental conservation (I refer you to Jared Diamond's discussion of Kutubu in Papua New Guinea in his Collapse.)

Ideally, the solution for this Gulf event will be more or less compulsory participation of deepwater E&Ps in a mutual group with responsibility for prevention, response and insurance. Right now we've got career petroleum engineers attempting to corral shrimpers under contract to drag booms. Geologist CEOs making less than circumspect utterances (which reminds me, where the fuck did anyone get the idea that Heyward was upper class? Birmingham Municipal Technical School is not exactly Oxbridge).

Pretty much every rig guy I've read thinks BP America is a liability to the oil industry. The consensus is that a pervasive cost-consciousness at the the expense of safety infected the old Amoco (but not so much BP international) during Lord Browne's (yes, the green one with the boy toys) tenure - the comparative OSHA violations at BP refineries is horrid. Ideally, some solution would be found where BP fire-sells its American assets (and burgeoning liabilities) to more reputable organizations who can bring them back in line.

That won't happen so long as the potential liabilities for any aquirer are unpredictable. BP & APC shareholders have lost 120 B in market valuation in anticipation of unlimited ones, and no other party can justify catching that legal knife. The assets are kept in the worst hands. Kinda like the senate climate bill, where this spill killed any chance of aisle crossing votes. A cascade of unanticipated consequences.

I don't listen to Amy Goodman. Not that I avoid listening to her or anything. I just don't listen to her show. So I'm not sure why that's your first sentence. I'm assuming she often commits the embarrassing faux pas of putting the wellbeing of the environment and humanity above the concerns of BP shareholders?

I'm glad you support placing a price on externalities. But in all of your subsequents paragraphs you never actually address how that support contradicts what you said, which was:

The question that was raised above is do corporations pay for pollution. It seemed a naive question, because they do, all the time.

And again, the whole point of externalities is that no, corporations such as BP do NOT pay for a huge amount of the damage they are causing, whether that's expediting the extinction of a species, acidifying the oceans through climate change, or ruining watersheds while blowing off the tops of mountains. They've gotten a free pass since the dawn of the Industrial Age. So, while I feel sorry for people who work in the carbon energy industries who may suffer some job insecurity due to this disaster, the fact is that they work for companies that have been relentlessly destroying the world that I and any children you or I may have over the next century. Someday my kid is going to ask me what the fuck was happening in the early part of this century, when we knew what the consequences of pumping GHGs into the atmosphere were and didn't do anything substantial enough to stop them. I'm not sure what I can say, but it sure as hell won't be "Well, you have to remember that the BP & APC shareholders had already lost over 120B in market valuation, so..."

when humans cause a disaster, especially one on this scale, it is too big for ANYONE to "pay for" entirely

we are all fucked

I mentioned AG because rarely a month goes by without her mentioning RD's cozy relationship with whatever general currently controls Nigeria.

We can expedite every effort to move to a post-carbon future. It will happen due to price pressure (at least for liquid fuels) if nothing else by the end of this decade. But simply as a numerical / engineering problem, we still will have carbon extractive industries for 40+ years to fuel any transition. Every megawatt of wind requires about 320 m3 of concrete (that industry is 5% of all carbon emissions), way more when one considering capacity factor. 60 years of malinvestment isn't reversed in one or 5 presidential terms.

Lots of countries are well ahead of the U.S. here - France produces 80% of its electricity with fission, most other countries consider effective mass transport a prerequisite for urban planning, and they don't do stupid things like subsidizing suburban sprawl like the U.S. tax code and highway system does. We've got lots of peculiar political problems (no senator from Illinois will stand up to coal, no U.S. presidential candidate can speak openly about the ethanol boondoggle in an Iowa caucus). And no politician outside of China openly talks about population issues.

But demonizing any one industry won't make much difference in achieving transition. Wanna know the biggest investor in algal biodiesel? It's Exxon. Whether you like it or not the engineering expertise and capital to scale up any post-carbon technologies exist mainly in the companies that you seem to revile. I'll make an exception for coal here: the #1 most effective way of reducing carbon emissions in the next decade would be halting MMS licening of new tracts for coal, and converting existing coal plants to combined cycle natural gas for a eminently achievable 50% reduction in carbon emissions. Guess who has the expertise to extract tight gas to achieve that sort of emissions reduction? Your demons.

But demonizing any one industry won't make much difference in achieving transition. Wanna know the biggest investor in algal biodiesel? It's Exxon. Whether you like it or not the engineering expertise and capital to scale up any post-carbon technologies exist mainly in the companies that you seem to revile. I'll make an exception for coal here: the #1 most effective way of reducing carbon emissions in the next decade would be halting MMS licening of new tracts for coal, and converting existing coal plants to combined cycle natural gas for a eminently achievable 50% reduction in carbon emissions. Guess who has the expertise to extract tight gas to achieve that sort of emissions reduction? Your demons.

We covered this a month ago, and my response is still the same as it was then:

Again, I'm fully aware that big energy companies are better positioned to take clean energy solutions and ramp them up quickly. There's a reason that utilities are the primary examples of natural monopolies in Econ 101.

I'm saying that it's demonstrated that they've fought tooth and nail to resist that switch to clean energy, and are primary culprits in the malaise of disinformation on climate and energy.

― party time! (Z S), Sunday, May 2, 2010 1:48 PM (1 month ago)

I'm trying to get you to address this:

I'm glad you support placing a price on externalities. But in all of your subsequents paragraphs you never actually address how that support contradicts what you said, which was:

The question that was raised above is do corporations pay for pollution. It seemed a naive question, because they do, all the time.

And again, the whole point of externalities is that no, corporations such as BP do NOT pay for a huge amount of the damage they are causing, whether that's expediting the extinction of a species, acidifying the oceans through climate change, or ruining watersheds while blowing off the tops of mountains.

― fuck it, we're going to Olive Garden® (Z S), Saturday, June 12, 2010 4:02 PM (1 hour ago)

Here, let me google that for you.

It's an interesting question of whether litigation or fines/taxes work better. My recollection of my intro to environmental engineering text from 16 years back is that the U.S. regulatory pattern of fixing emissions allowances and then entering into litigation for those companies that exceeded them had few advantages over the German system of simply applying a fixed fee for each volume of release. Eg, whether to permit a municipality to release a certain tolerable amount of sewage, but encourage public and private suits for excessive releases, or simply to measure it and tax it. Same story with S02 releases, etc. Each works after a fashion, but the U.S. system funds the court system while the German system actually paid more directly for remediation and general government funds.

I like the idea of the German system as described. It makes small incremental improvements valuable, and turns environmental improvement into an engineering (and hence soluable) optimisation problem. Were you the fellow that was saying its better to fiddle with cap and trade so that a coal plant can claim carbon credits for not cutting down some patch of rainforest, rather than simply put a price on emissions?

No, I was not the fellow.

I'm well aware that industry pays a cost for some of the environmental damage it causes(and a small cost for some of the violent atrocities they also participate in, when they're caught). My point in raising your "It seemed a naive question, because they (corporations) do (pay for pollution), all the time" statement several times is that you seem to imply that what they're paying is commensurate with the damage they caused, and...it's not.

I agree, they do pay, but the fees and regulations and whatever they have to do whenever they mess up are minuscule. This is why when presented with an illegal action (which results in fees) vs. a legal action (which results in far greater loss of profits) they will go with the illegal action. It's not like a company can be sent to jail for killing 11 people! Which is the biggest fucking shame ever.

If I litter and get caught I could be fined up to a thousand dollars and sent to a year in jail. This is enough incentive for me to not do so; I can't afford either of those punishments.

Btw I have always wondered if anyone has done research compiling data on the amount of human lives lost to corporate carelessness. It would be hard to quantify what is directly the fault of the corporation vs. employee error but I think it would make a very disturbing and eye-opening read.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AAa0gd7ClM&

Predictable upward revision update

He (Thad W. Allen) also acknowledged that the volume of spewing oil could be higher than he has stated until now — up to 40,000 barrels a day rather than the 19,000 to 25,000 a federal panel trying to measure the elusive gusher had estimated last week. But Adm. Allen tempered his estimate by saying that the “mid-30,000 range is what we’re looking at.”

Also, at the end of the same article,

Gov. Bob Riley of Alabama and Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida echoed his criticism, with Mr. Crist calling his beaches “clean and pristine” and Mr. Riley urging Americans to “come down and rent a condo, stay in a hotel, play golf.”

I realize these economies depend on revenue from tourists, so I understand why they have to urge people to forget about all those pesky problems and come play golf. But there's a weird echo here of the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when Bush, with an unparalleled opportunity to address a country that was more united than it had been since 12/7/41, and more willing to actually act, to PARTICIPATE, instead told Americans to go shopping. In other words, to be spectators. This isn't on the same scale of 9/11, of course, but I see it as the same kind of opportunity to make the case that while BP is today's villain, it's our dependency on fossil fuels that's the underlying problem.

Photographer dives into Gulf, sees only oil

Can't believe this dude went diving without a hood on tbh

http://static.stuff.co.nz/1276119992/794/3794794.jpg

what a nightmare

Nice to see Port Fourchon there covered in oil. That's where we used to go cast for minnows and catch crabs when we needed bait.

In other rolling 2010 oil spill news, Chevron spills over 21,000 gallons of oil in Utah days after Governor called for more domestic production

Chevron pledged to clean up the 6-mile mess, but the company could not quantify the damage. As of late Saturday, Chevron said the leak had been stopped. But company representatives could not say when it began, how much oil spilled into city waterways and why — despite pipeline monitors — it apparently took hours to learn of the accident. [...]

By then [just before 8 a.m., when Chevron shut down the pipe], oil had reached Liberty Park’s pond, drenching Canada geese and Mallard ducks. At least 150 birds were rescued from the pond and taken to Hogle Zoo to be cleaned. Some were goslings and chicks as young as a week old. [...]

Depending on amounts, the spill could disrupt the food chain for the long term, killing bottom-dwelling invertebrates that feed fish, said Walt Baker, director of the state Division of Water Quality.

21,000 gallons is a little over half of the amount that is currently spewing into the gulf every day (according to the recently increased gov. estimate), but apparently the Utah leak was leaking 50 gallons per minute, or at about 4 times the rate of the Gulf disaster.

But there's a weird echo here of the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when Bush, with an unparalleled opportunity to address a country that was more united than it had been since 12/7/41, and more willing to actually act, to PARTICIPATE, instead told Americans to go shopping. In other words, to be spectators.

huh. I guess the Prez said something similar recently, according to Politico: Obama: Gulf spill 'echoes 9/11'

“In the same way that our view of our vulnerabilities and our foreign policy was shaped profoundly by 9/11,” the president said in an Oval Office interview on Friday, "I think this disaster is going to shape how we think about the environment and energy for many years to come.”

That's encouraging, I guess. Hopefully he'll use his (primetime?) Tuesday speech to forcefully make the same point. But somehow I get the feeling that changing "how we think about the environment and energy" will be equated to emphasizing "clean coal", nuclear energy and 1st generation biofuels (i.e, corn ethanol) while pushing for a weakass climate change bill.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee released dozens of internal documents that outline several problems on the deepsea rig in the days and weeks before the April 20 explosion that set in motion the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history. Investigators found that BP was badly behind schedule on the project and losing hundreds of thousands of dollars with each passing day, and responded by cutting corners in the well design, cementing and drilling mud efforts and the installation of key safety devices.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100615/ap_on_bi_ge/us_gulf_oil_spill

"I am confident that we're going to be able to leave the Gulf Coast in better shape than it was before," Obama declared.

Read more: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/front_page/20100615_Obama__Gulf_will_get_back_to_normal.html#ixzz0qv4hbO4W

before what, exactly?

Corporate transparency:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_97-zR4Gc58
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kusp53xgZIA

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/06/15/oil.spill.disaster/index.html?hpt=T1

so now the ship used to siphon the oil from the leak is on fire

OTM tho long from Calc Risk re: Oval Office speech

km4 wrote:
ZZZZzzzzzz
I will not be impressed unless he provides 5 or 6 specific examples of BP failures, links BP, Transocean, Halliburton, and the (non-present) regulators, tells the other Big Oil companies that they aren't out of the woods and they can expect to spend more money on safety starting now, tells US to stop consuming so damn much of the world's energy (and tells us much as we have a beef with BP, the rest of the world has one with us and our profligate energy consumption), links our bankrupting wars in the middle east to our oil consumption, makes an eloquent case for the absolute value of our remaining fisheries, estuaries, coasts, marshes, and water resources (yes, the fact that a huge portion has gone dead had raised the stakes and monetary value of what remains), and says that near 100% safety CAN be achieved, and if the expense is too much, the the drilling will cease until the expense is not too much.
If I hear that "We're going to be tough and use all our resources," my head: My Head Just Exploded

pretty much

U.S. boosts flow estimate of BP oil leak by 50 percent

A team of U.S. scientists on Tuesday upped their high-end estimate of the amount of crude oil flowing from BP Plc's stricken Gulf of Mexico well by 50 percent, the second major upward revision in less than a week.

The scientists said the "most likely flow rate of oil today" ranges from 35,000 to 60,000 barrels (1.47 million and 2.52 million gallons/5.57 million and 9.54 million liters) per day.

A quick trip through upward spill estimate revision memory lane...

As I mentioned on the other thread, the initial estimates were 1,000 barrels per day (BP's estimate), which was then recently revised upward to 5,000 barrels/day (collaborative estimate between NOAA, US Coast Guard and...BP again), and now recent reports from WSJ are suggesting it might actually be closer to 25,000 barrels/day (1 million gallons/day). Further, both BP officials and Dept. of the Interior are saying that it may take at least 90 days to stop the oil flow.

― biologically wrong (Z S), Saturday, May 1, 2010 8:10 PM (1 month ago)

Meanwhile, an internal NOAA document from April 28 suggests that the leak could be "an order of magnitude higher than previously thought." On April 28, they were estimating it at 5,000 barrels/day, so an order of magnitude higher would be 50,000 barrels/day, or over 2 million gallons/day.

― biologically wrong (Z S), Saturday, May 1, 2010 8:38 PM (1 month ago)

Anyone else reaaaaaally skeptical about this idea of sweeping the oil under a rug? Also: "Estimates are useful, but we are planning far beyond that, he [Adm. Thad W. Allen, the commandant of the Coast Guard] said.” It doesn’t really matter, he said, whether it is 1,000 barrels or 5,000 barrels a day that are leaking, he said."

It doesn't really matter? Would 25,000 barrels a day matter? Or 50,000 for that matter? btw, memo to NYT: your leak estimates are already out of date.

― biologically wrong (Z S), Saturday, May 1, 2010 9:15 PM (1 month ago)

The LA Times story you just linked to says that SkyTruth has a "rock bottom" estimate of 25,000 barrels/day.

― biologically wrong (Z S), Saturday, May 1, 2010 10:01 PM (1 month ago

I thought I was maybe being pessimistic with 25,000 barrels/day, but...

"Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad Allen said the volume of crude oil spewing from the damaged well could climb to 100,000 barrels a day, with 60 days to 90 days needed for BP to drill relief wells to stem the flow. He spoke to the obvious urgency of stopping the flow of crude."

http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/05/gulf_oil_spill_has_our_full_at.html

― party time! (Z S), Sunday, May 2, 2010 9:06 PM (1 month ago)

NYT - Size of Oil Spill in Gulf Underestimated, Scientists Say

Two weeks ago, the government put out a round estimate of the size of the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico: 5,000 barrels a day. Repeated endlessly in news reports, it has become conventional wisdom.
But scientists and environmental groups are raising sharp questions about that estimate, declaring that the leak must be far larger.

Repeatedly endlessly in news reports...BY THE NEW YORK TIMES. god DAMMIT, there have been indications for over a week now (upthread, for example) that the 5,000 barrels/day estimate was highly likely to be bullshit!

“I think the estimate at the time was, and remains, a reasonable estimate,” said Dr. Lubchenco, the NOAA administrator. “Having greater precision about the flow rate would not really help in any way. We would be doing the same things.”
Environmental groups contend, however, that the flow rate is a vital question. Since this accident has shattered the illusion that deep-sea oil drilling is immune to spills, they said, this one is likely to become the touchstone in planning a future response.

“If we are systematically underestimating the rate that’s being spilled, and we design a response capability based on that underestimate, then the next time we have an event of this magnitude, we are doomed to fail again,” said John Amos, the president of SkyTruth. “So it’s really important to get this number right.”

― A lot of you have come here today with booing in your heart (Z S), Thursday, May 13, 2010 10:26 PM (1 month ago)

Based on “sophisticated scientific analysis of seafloor video made available Wednesday,” Steve Wereley, an associate professor at Purdue University, told NPR the actual spill rate of the BP oil disaster is about 3 million gallons a day — 15 times the official guess of BP and the federal government. Another scientific expert, Eugene Chiang, a professor of astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, calculated the rate of flow to be between 840,000 and four million gallons a day. These estimates mean that the Deepwater Horizon wreckage could have spilled about five times as much oil as the 12-million-gallon Exxon Valdez disaster, with relief only guaranteed by BP in three more months.

― A lot of you have come here today with booing in your heart (Z S), Thursday, May 13, 2010 10:40 PM (1 month ago)

Steven Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, analyzed videotape of the seafloor gusher using a technique called particle image velocimetry.
A computer program simply tracks particles and calculates how fast they are moving. Wereley put the BP video of the gusher into his computer. He made a few simple calculations and came up with an astonishing value for the rate of the oil spill: 70,000 barrels a day — much higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day.

The method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent.

the particle image velocimetry method is intriguing but i wonder if it accounts for all the natural gas, which looked to be a pretty significant part of the output but obviously wouldn't fill a barrel like the crude. but whatever.

what concerns me more than the lack of a leak rate estimate is the fact that the bulk of the spill is occupying "a huge cone, a mile high and about two miles across" that's subject to undersea currents, which, by bp's own admission, are untrackable at various depths. they don't even know where it's going!

― iiiijjjj, Friday, May 14, 2010 2:00 PM (1 month ago)

I'm dubious about Wereley's results, simply because a 7" production string has difficulty producing over 60 kbbl/day, completely unchoked. Just as a matter of fluid viscosity. In this case, at the blowout preventer the shear ram seems to have cut the production casing, but annular rams that held the seal around the shear ram scissors blade failed. 5500 bbl/d is 2.67 gallons/second, which (oil isn't all that compressible) seems consistent with the video imagery (once one knows scale of the casing and riser).

Ultimately, the actual amount doesn't matter much compared to the public perception. Lawyers will benefit, insurers will make much US GoM production economically marginal, and this spill killed the climate bill.

As I said above, we could always buy our gasoline to feed our bloated sprawl on our collective credit card. We don't actually have to produce anything we need now that everything is digital.

― nori dusted (Sanpaku), Friday, May 14, 2010 3:23 PM (1 month ago)

The nice round relationship is coincidental. I no longer buy the 5000 bbl/d number, but somewhere in the 20-30k bbl range seems eminently plausible given the video.

― nori dusted (Sanpaku), Friday, May 14, 2010 9:13 PM (1 month ago)

uuuuuugh, getting so irritated at the combination of 1) BP resisting attempts to estimate the amount of gushing oil:

BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.
“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”

and 2) simultaneously citing the 5,000 barrels/day figure that is almost certainly WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY wrong as a measure of the success of the tube it has installed over one of the leaks:

BP's Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles told CNN that about 1,000 barrels of oil per day is being suctioned up by the tube, out of about 5,000 barrels that the company believes is gushing out daily.
If you're like the 99.99999% of people who aren't following the continuously increasing revisions of the spill rate, you'd be forgiven for assuming that the tube that BP has installed is suctioning up 20% of the spill. And in other accounts, such as the NYT, it's mentioned that BP believes that the tube could eventually suction up 5,000 barrels per day. Which leaves the distinct impression that there's a strong chance that the tube could take care of the entire spill.

But virtually everyone except for BP is repeatedly insisting that it's likely that the oil is gushing at a rate of at LEAST 70,000 barrels per day! In other words, far from the tube suctioning up 20% of the gushed oil, with the potential to address 100%, the tube that BP installed is most likely suctioning up <1.5% of the spill, with the potential to increase to 7%. It wouldn't be so frustrating except that the media STILL insists on trusting everything that BP says. Just now, the PBS Newshour repeated the "tube suctioning up 1,000 barrels out of 5,000" nonsense.

― it makes sense......................................does it to you? (Z S), Tuesday, May 18, 2010 7:33 PM (4 weeks ago)

From tonight's NBC Evening News broadcast, Steve Wereley, the Purdue professor who is among the many arguing that 5,000 barrels/day is ridiculously low, said

I can't say how much in excess of that 70,000 barrels/day this leak is, but I would use the word "considerable".
― it makes sense......................................does it to you? (Z S), Tuesday, May 18, 2010 7:40 PM (4 weeks ago)

BP's refusal to evaluate the leakage rate could have nefarious reasons:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20100521/pl_mcclatchy/3511770

― Face Book (dyao), Tuesday, May 25, 2010 9:07 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

surprise!

― limp bizkotti (Stevie D), Wednesday, May 26, 2010 12:04 AM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

This is what happens when you have an oil company in charge of the clean up effort - there's no reason for them, in terms of $$, to cooperate with efforts to estimate the size of the spill. It's all downside, no upside for them.

― fuck it we're going to Applebee's® (Z S), Wednesday, May 26, 2010 12:08 AM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I mean, yeah, some people will do a little digging and figure out that BP has something to do with the lack of estimates. But not that many, and not enough to do much more damage to BP's reputation than has already occurred. But the benefits of downplaying, delaying or obstructing accurate estimates are clear and immediate for BP. There's the link dyao/Stevie D point to, but there's also the benefit of the company being able to avoid the following headline:

BP Disaster Spilling the Equivalent of Two Exxon Valdez Spills per Week

― fuck it we're going to Applebee's® (Z S), Wednesday, May 26, 2010 12:22 AM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Instead, we get the paper of record using a wide variety of spill estimates, with the low side absurdly claiming that the disaster is still more than 4 million gallons less than Exxon Valdez.

― fuck it we're going to Applebee's® (Z S), Wednesday, May 26, 2010 12:24 AM (2 weeks ago)

Related mainstream media story:

Rate of Oil Leak, Still Not Clear, Puts Doubt on BP

On Monday, BP said a cap was capturing 11,000 barrels of oil a day from the well. The official government estimate of the flow rate is 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day, which means the new device should be capturing the bulk of the oil.
But is it? With no consensus among experts on how much oil is pouring from the wellhead, it is difficult — if not impossible — to assess the containment cap’s effectiveness. BP has stopped trying to calculate a flow rate on its own, referring all questions on that subject to the government. The company’s liability will ultimately be determined in part by how many barrels of oil are spilled.

...At least one expert, Ira Leifer, who is part of a government team charged with estimating the flow rate, is convinced that the operation has made the leak worse, perhaps far worse than the 20 percent increase that government officials warned might occur when the riser was cut.

Dr. Leifer said in an interview on Monday that judging from the video, cutting the pipe might have led to a several-fold increase in the flow rate from the well.

“The well pipe clearly is fluxing way more than it did before,” said Dr. Leifer, a researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “By way more, I don’t mean 20 percent, I mean multiple factors.”

― fuck it we're going to Applebee's® (Z S), Monday, June 7, 2010 10:16 PM (1 week ago)

This shouldn't surprise anyone since for the past month many experts have been saying that the official estimate was way too low, but the official government estimate of the amount of oil that's leaking has been revised upward again, this time to 25,000 to 30,000 barrels/day.

The new calculation suggested that an amount of oil equivalent to the Exxon Valdez disaster could have been flowing into the Gulf of Mexico every 8 to 10 days.
This assessment, based on measurements taken before BP cut the riser pipe of the leaking well on June 3 to cap some of the flow, showed that approximately 25,000 to 30,000 barrels of oil could have been gushing into the Gulf each day. That is far above the previous estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day.

― fuck it, we're going to Olive Garden® (Z S), Thursday, June 10, 2010 8:12 PM (5 days ago)

The oil spill off the Gulf of Mexico is even worse than previously thought, with twice as much oil spewing into the ocean than earlier estimations suggested, figures show.
Latest estimates from scientists studying the disaster for the US government suggest 160-380 million litres (42-100 million US gallons) of oil have already entered the Gulf. Most experts believe there is more oil gushing into the sea in an hour than officials originally said was spilling in an entire day.

It is the third – and perhaps not the last – time the Obama administration has had to increase its estimate of how much oil is gushing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/11/bp-oil-spill-estimates-double

LOL clearly Obama is pulling some kind of political trick by complaining about this. I weep for the oil-coated pelican that is the BP stock dividend.

― Adam Bruneau, Friday, June 11, 2010 10:10 AM (4 days ago)

Predictable upward revision update

He (Thad W. Allen) also acknowledged that the volume of spewing oil could be higher than he has stated until now — up to 40,000 barrels a day rather than the 19,000 to 25,000 a federal panel trying to measure the elusive gusher had estimated last week. But Adm. Allen tempered his estimate by saying that the “mid-30,000 range is what we’re looking at.”
― fuck it, we're going to Olive Garden® (Z S), Sunday, June 13, 2010 12:25 PM (2 days ago)

U.S. boosts flow estimate of BP oil leak by 50 percent

A team of U.S. scientists on Tuesday upped their high-end estimate of the amount of crude oil flowing from BP Plc's stricken Gulf of Mexico well by 50 percent, the second major upward revision in less than a week.
The scientists said the "most likely flow rate of oil today" ranges from 35,000 to 60,000 barrels (1.47 million and 2.52 million gallons/5.57 million and 9.54 million liters) per day.

― fuck it, we're going to Olive Garden® (Z S), Tuesday, June 15, 2010 9:07 PM (2 minutes ago)

btw anyone have any thoughts on Obama's speech tonight?

pretty blah huh.

guys i think we got our threads backwards

Christ, they keep bumping up the spill rate! Now it's 60,000! Anyone wanna bet it will reach 100k like the worst case scenario in the RS article?

lotsa dead animals so far

hang ten

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v134/tracerhand/bigoilAlabamaSurf.jpg

Crude oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill washes ashore in Orange Beach, Alabama on June 12, 2010. Large amounts of the oil battered the Alabama coast, leaving deposits of the slick mess some 4-6 inches thick on the beach in some parts. (AP Photo/Dave Martin)

That picture is seriously fucked up. I'm sending it to everyone i know.

Yeah, I posted that on FB. It's so... odd-looking.

Facing the worst case scenario... Is the oil leak unstoppable?

Original post at The Oil Drum:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6593#comment-648967

Some commentary:
http://scienceblogs.com/casaubonsbook/2010/06/worst_case_scenario_on_gulf_sp.php
http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2010/06/worst-already-true-BP-well-now-unstoppable

The upshot is that it's a very real possibility that the leak will be continuing at 150,000 barrels a day with no possibility of any kind of containment as further attempts to cap only further damages a badly compromised well. There's lots of FUD and speculation out there, but phrases like "2 billion barrels before depletion" and "sea floor collapse" are in play.

that is pretty much the scariest thing I have ever read

RIP Atlantic Ocean

gahhhhhhhh

jesus christ.

somehow I'm guessing someone will pop in and say something that suggests that we need to drill more offshore oil and that the spill isn't that bad, I'm almost craving it after reading that. fuck.

HO-LE-SHEE-IIT

I wonder if Sarah Palin knows about that. She recently actually spoke out in favor of -gasp!- offshore oil regulation.

btw, sorta off-topic, but reading serious articles/books about peak oil (the Oil Drum's primary topic of discussion when unprecedented oil spills aren't taking place) creates the same kind of helpless dread. It's tough to even think about sometimes.

Somehow this

The comment in question is from a seemingly very knowledgable "dougr."

makes it seem a little less credible.

dougr town

The comment in question is from a seemingly very knowledgable "dougr."

makes it seem a little less credible.

True enough, but I'm not finding BP (or even the government) to be any more credible.

At least we have the internet and can see this shit they're keeping off TV. Imagine what we missed during the Exxon Valdez!

The comment in question is from a seemingly very knowledgable "dougr."
makes it seem a little less credible.

Totally see where you're coming from on this, but I pretty much agree with what Sharon Astyk said:

"For those who think it is strange that I be highlighting a comment in a thread, I should note that TOD attracts many, many petroleum geologists and other professionals, and while sometimes the comments are the same "pulled it out of my ass" as on every other website, often, the technical knowledge on offer is pretty astounding. This one passes my smell test, which is usually pretty good - that doesn't mean I claim commenter Doug R is right - it means I think his information is interesting enough to be worth exposing to a wider audience for clarification or correction."

fwiw I've been reading The Oil Drum for several years now and can cosign on the "technical knowledge on offer is pretty astounding" bit.

fwiw i'd have to say that i have appreciated sanpaku's technical knowledge on all this, whether or not y'all think he's just a shill or whatever. dude knows his stuff imo

And what worries me is that seemingly very knowledgeable TOD poster "dougr" posted that comment 3 days ago, and no one has really rebutted his argument there. Which is especially worrisome on TOD, the first place you would expect to find such a rebuttal. I mean, shit, if dougr had posted that on some other forum, the first place you would look for an effective rebuttal would still be on the Oil Drum.

sanpaku, what do you make of that link?

Especially after his comment has started to get wider media attention.

fwiw i'd have to say that i have appreciated sanpaku's technical knowledge on all this, whether or not y'all think he's just a shill or whatever. dude knows his stuff imo

^^this, and I've been meaning to say that for a while now. Although I feel like I disagree with Sanpaku on just about all the non-technical stuff, but he's providing a technical perspective here that we'd otherwise be lacking, v v valuable.

"Obama vs. BP (and You): The government holds a company's stock price hostage."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704009804575308763321043220.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read#articleTabs%3Darticle

It's probably for the best it's behind a paywall.

What if we construct an experimental swarm of nanobots that feed on the crude oil in the sea? The spill would be contained until the swarm used it all up, then fell to the sea floor, where we can recover it and keep it for study. Or use it to remake The Blob in 3D.

that scenario ends with the nanobots conquering us and putting us in zoos, you realize.

May have said this upthread, but I keep thinking of Ice-9

hey guys is the world ending cuz if so I prob. should start doing drugs.

fwiw i'd have to say that i have appreciated sanpaku's technical knowledge on all this, whether or not y'all think he's just a shill or whatever. dude knows his stuff imo

― gbx, Thursday, June 17, 2010 10:22 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

would like to third this, I think some people are mistaking his very very rational, almost a-emotional response as being in favor of the oil companies. he's doing a good job reminding all of us just how fucking dependent we are on oil, and it's the sad truth, as tough as it may be to bear.

May have said this upthread, but I keep thinking of Ice-9

It's not a particularly great book, but that's basically the plot of this:

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/22/1b/8d4f92c008a0b6f5aa1f6010.L._SL500_AA300_.jpg

A supertanker sinks in SF Bay, and the responsible oil company releases an oil eating microbe to clean up afterward. Nothing can possibly go wrong, right?

would like to third this, I think some people are mistaking his very very rational, almost a-emotional response as being in favor of the oil companies. he's doing a good job reminding all of us just how fucking dependent we are on oil, and it's the sad truth, as tough as it may be to bear.

― dyao, Thursday, June 17, 2010 4:01 AM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark

There's an "awwww don't gang up on poor BP" tone to his posts.

Slick approaches Cuba

oh, love the BP guy who talked after the White House meeting; "THE SMALL PEOPLE"! hilar. Kill em all.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010/06/bp-chairman-says-firm-cares-ab.html?wprss=44

The great P. Sainath on how the Bhopal holocaustr paved the way for BP:

http://www.counterpunch.org/sainath06152010.html

I'm really beginning to feel like the people responsible for this should be put to death.

elvis' links above are horrific

at the very least we should go to war w/ the country responsible for this

Britain?

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/images/2008/04/05/camerondm0504_228x365_2.jpg

Republicans falling all over themselves to apologize to BP for us having an ocean in the way of their oil.

The "worst case" link is describing something I can't really picture in my head. What is a collapsed sea floor like? What does it do? Destabilize the whole continental shelf?

I guess the closest I can get to imagining that is to think of Yellowstone, some giant undersea caldera hundreds of miles across, spewing oil instead of ash, killing everything in the entire Gulf, and causing southern Louisiana to literally fall into the sea. Is that what we're talking about?

No.

Then what?

What is a collapsed sea floor like? What does it do?

I'm guessing
short-term = huge tsunami & (even more) massive oil & gas leak, sea-life (even more) fucked
long-term = currents & local climate changed forever, might affect hurricane frequency & intensity

According to Barton, asking BP to set up an escrow account to compensate victims of BP's disaster was a criminal action -- a "shakedown" as he put it.

Wow, so I guess any time you ask a company to post a bond that's a "shakedown" too?

According to Barton, asking BP to set up an escrow account to compensate victims of BP's disaster was a criminal action -- a "shakedown" as he put it.

What is it when you ask large companies to donate to your political funds in exchange for e.g. access to their lobbyists?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Barton#Funding
During his political career, the industries that have been his largest contributors were oil and gas ($1.4 million donated), electric utilities ($1.3 million) and health professionals ($1.1 million)[29]

kenan Elvis Telecom said "sea floor collapse" but I don't see anything like that in the Oil Drum comment. The commenter was talking about how the area around the well is unstable and could lead to the whole well sort of flying apart underground. But I don't have any special knowledge, I'm just reading the article same as you.

"I am hearing the same dark rumors which suggest fracturing and a complete bleed-out are already underway. Rumors also suggest a massive collapse of the Gulf floor itself is in the making. "

Again, this is from an anonymous commenter who "seems knowledgable" to some Mother Jones writer.

lets not deny ourselves the ability to totally shit our pants tho

Oh I see - that came after all the footnotes that I ignored. I don't really understand what the whole shaded-box thing signifies on that site.

^^ Posts that summarily define the spirit of ilx (xpost to max)

the oil drum comments from today describe how the relief well/s are likely to progress and the uncertainty involved with killing the flow once the intersection is made. very interesting. the issue with getting the mud in there without fracking whatever formations are there sounds very complex. sounds like if they put mud in there too hard, the mud could basically flow out into the rock formation, and not kill the flow. or they might kill the flow, but cause the oil/gas to flow into a new "reservoir" in the rock of unknown integrity.

lets not deny ourselves the ability to totally shit our pants tho

I've already got a pretty good supply of sharts going on down there, tbh.

lets not deny ourselves the ability to totally shit our pants tho

I can get as apocalyptic as anyone else around here, but what terrifies/irritates me more than a (I can't believe I'm going to say this) Bruckheimer-sized event is a slow shrug and eventual write-off of the Gulf. Everyone involved seems close to saying "oh well, we did what we could. sorry!" and the Gulf becomes America's Aral Sea - a toxic dead zone of nothing.

Just throwing money at it is the only way us Americans know how ta fix stuff! You know, capitalism, the free market! Wooh!!

Everyone involved seems close to saying "oh well, we did what we could. sorry!"

i considered being injected into the well during the junkshot, but i sorta figured it wasnt gonna work anyway.

Just asked the Swedish gf and she couldn't think of a translation of "small people" that wasn't condescending.

The Little Guy - US pols use it all the time

"main street"

<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/jun/18/bp-gulf-oil-leak-estimates";>Some estimates say it will spew into 2012</a>. The Mayans knew about BP!!!

Why is it that when there is a minor problem--someone scalds themselves with hot coffee they bought from a chain convenience store--there is no problem in holding someone accountable for it (perhaps even unjustifiably), but when there is a massive catastrophe of some sort, holding anyone accountable is suddenly dismissed as "playing the blame game?" (This is a rhetorical question, obv.) We wouldn't want to play the blame game, now, do we?

Important NYT article with a relatively innocuous title: Failure of Rig’s Last Line of Defense Tied to Myriad Factors

This may turn out to be an "important" article, I hope, and it's well worth the time it takes to read.

Why is it that when there is a minor problem--someone scalds themselves with hot coffee they bought from a chain convenience store--there is no problem in holding someone accountable for it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/us/22poll.html

anything but higher gas prices

I was telling some friends about the total sea floor collapse scenario and they kinda guffawed at me. I hope that they're right in the end.

http://motherjones.com/rights-stuff/2010/06/BP-louisiana-police-stop-activist

creeeeeepy

yeah. i mean i know that louisiana is at the "smoking out of the hole in its trach collar" stage of petro-dependency, but that is pretty fucked

An appeals judge in Houston just overturned the 6-mo drilling ban, btw. Nice going, Louisiana.

Oh wait, he's in New Orleans.

Get your story straight, msnbc!

Everyone knows by now that BP is stil blocking press access to oil-spill sites even though they're not supposed to anymore.

are bloggers really "the press"?

The most publicized BP press block I've seen was a local news station, not a blogger.

the appeals judge who blocked the 6 month moratorium apparently has stock in drilling companies

this is me looking surprised

Thing is, this moratorium is for a tiny, tiny percentage of the gulf rigs. And we can't even have that. I kinda hope this shit is unstoppable.

GULF GASH 2014
GULF GASH 2014
GULF GASH 2014
GULF GASH 2014
GULF GASH 2014
GULF GASH 2014

I kinda hope this shit is unstoppable.

Don't say that. I wish that it could be fully plugged up tomorrow, though it won't, of course. What are you hoping for? That it continues on indefinitely and people finally get outraged and Americans start conserving tons of energy voluntarily and a strong climate bill is unanimously passed?

Because it already has gushed pretty much indefinitely, people did get sorta halfway outraged (at a company and at failed govt. oversight, not at the root of the problem itself - utter dependency on fossil fuels), there hasn't been a whisper of any sort of boycott against oil itself, and barely any hints that people are finally connecting the dots, and somehow, miraculously, the gusher made the climate bill less likely to pass.

To me, more than anything, this disaster has demonstrated that the American public just does not get it, will not get it until it's too late. Ditto Congress. It's fucking sad.

Sorry. Like a lot of other people I sometimes go through very dark swings on this stuff, and sometimes I can't help but let it provoke misanthropy on my part. A few years ago, I remember that I was sympathetic to the (pessimistic, again) view that it would take some sort of Pearl Harbor-esque moment for the American public to actually "get it". Something so dumb and obvious that finally it would be possible to get meaningful action on energy & climate. But now that there actually IS something big and dumb and obvious, and still nothing is happening, it's very frustrating, very bleak. Forty years ago there were a wave of environmental disasters, Club of Rome/Limits to Growth, Silent Spring, Cuyahoga, all of that, and meaningful environmental action was the result (Clear Air/WaterActs, EPA, etc). This time? Maybe we'll get better oversight on offshore oil drilling. Maybe Congress will barely manage to squeak through some utility-only carbon cap. The response is completely disproportionate to the magnitude of the problems.

Yeah, I shouldnt say that. I just want the USA to put the needle down and flush the smack down the toilet.

And not climb into the toilet like they're fixing to do in August.

http://i45.tinypic.com/29w3ho2.gif

"Why didn't anyone tell us, jeez, derrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr"
http://i49.tinypic.com/rw5k49.jpg

i just saw back-to-back tourism commercials for florida, one saying "worried about the oil spill and florida's beaches? well, don't worry we offer 380 miles of beaches" and one for noted gulf destination beach spot destin, fl that said "destin: we offer more than just beaches"

are bloggers really "the press"?

Uh... yes? You don't have to like it, but yes. People going out and writing about what they see, even if irresponsibly, even if their intention is to stir flies out of the shit, are the press. Thus was always the case.

Like a lot of other people I sometimes go through very dark swings on this stuff, and sometimes I can't help but let it provoke misanthropy on my part.

Swings, my ass. This is a dark black hole of massive FAIL, and there's no swings to be had about it. What do you imagine in your "up" moods, I wonder?

I guess I swing between crying in the shower and being at work so I don't have time to dwell on it too much.

"this stuff" = humans vs environment, not just oil spill

in my up moods I imagine weeping orphans

We're only animals.

The only animals with the power to alter the environment for the next thousand years, be cognizant of what they're doing, and yet do next to nothing about it

That middle thing is somewhat up in the air. We're the only animals with enough brain to know we're going to doe, but that comes with the gift of self-deception in equal parts.

die, not doe. That's when deer mate, I think.

lol I'm pretty sure when deer mate it's called a squooooooooonk-wika-wika-boooooing

The fact that humans have successfully managed, or at least mitigated, complex problems before (ozone layer) is no guarantee that they'll do so again in the future. But it's proof that we're capable.

I agree. FWIW.

be cognizant of what they're doing

There's far more evidence against this than for it.

I'd like to agree with you, just so that in the future I could entertain the thought that there's nothing to regret because there's nothing that could have been done because no one really knew what was really going on. But the fact is that the vastx10 majority of historical GHG emissions have come from the industrialized west, and we've known the score for 2 decades now.

We also had more to lose by changing our ways, and less incentive to sacrifice for a common cause.

What am I saying... "had." I meant "have".

We also have more to lose by not changing our ways.

xpost hahaha, yeah, I noticed that too but we may as well switch to the past tense. After all, the 2010/12 elections are more important than feeding people in the future

SHH! We don't talk about death around here. We'll all live forever, until we become one of those old people that our families ship away to gentle death camps, where they kill you with too many pillows.

sorry, srsly disregard what I'm even saying, recently I've really been more pessimistic about "all this" than I have been in the last several years

the problem is that in order to solve the problems we need lots and lots of people who are optimistic. But the more one learns about the problems, the more pessimistic one becomes

No! Wrong! We don't need optimism, we need accurate information, and a fundamental change in the way we view our relationship the the planet and each other. Fuck optimism right in the ear. Panic isn't good either, but at least it has the facts.

Good things don't magically happen because you think they will.

We don't need optimism, we need accurate information

just curious, where is the information inaccurate?

ok, media. But that's not going to change in the short-term. So did you mean something besides how the media communicates climate science?

Ten million pissed-off, sour, disillusioned people can bring about as much of a change as ten-million starry-eyed optimists, and likely moreso. The trick is, we have to be in it together.

So did you mean something besides how the media communicates climate science?

Information is just where you start.

I think there will definitely be far more than ten million pissed off, sour, disillusioned people. I think it'll likely be far more than that. But this mass of pissed off people can't appear, say, 5-20 years ago, when really avoiding the worst affects of climate change would have been possible. And they won't appear tomorrow. And they likely won't appear in 2-3 years, even. I think they'll appear in 10-20 years, when you really start seeing widespread global food and water shortages. I don't "think" that - to be honest, on our current path I think it's inevitable.

That's why the Pentagon has been studying climate change as a driver of massive global unrest and conflict.

The "optimism" I was talking about isn't optimism that we can continue living as we are and be a-ok. It's optimism that it's still possible to change minds and habits, and to do it in an incredibly short period of time. That's the optimism we need, and unfortunately it's the optimism I can't manage to fake.

I guess I was thinking of the American version of optimism.

I don't "think" that - to be honest, on our current path I think it's inevitable.

All war is about unequal resource distribution. I've said this before, but many remain convinced that it's about religion. It's not. Imagining that others have religious beliefs beyond what is immediately convenient for them is the ultimate delusional religious belief. It's top-to-bottom about land, water, energy, and food.

When people start to run out of resources, they start to attack each other. We're only animals.

xpost

I think I'm mainly I'm just in a funk because I just finished Bill McKibben's excellent new book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, and even though I enjoyed the book, I found the last chapter, which is supposed to be the feel good "there's still a chance, look at these things that we're already doing that demonstrate that people can relocalize and live sustainably", to be unconvincing. I mean, I agree with him - there are things we could do, and that we could and should have been doing a long time ago. But I just don't see it happening in time. The last chapter is supposed to offer hope, and instead all I could think as I read it was "man, this is gonna be unbearably sad to read in 50 years, unbearably sad"

and kenan, your last post could be a whole thread to itself, there's definitely a lot to say about it (I would agree that a lot of conflict, if not most, is driven by resource issues, but I'd stop short of saying "all" because A) I don't know the history of every war of all time, and B)I think in many cases resource issues are a contributing factor but perhaps not the immediate cause), but I'm afraid I'd derail this thread again for the millionth time. I really wish this kinda stuff would go in The Energy Thread tbh

Just riffing into the wind.