Oil spill from rig explosion getting bigger by the day. Bigger than Valdez?

[Islander]

I replaced all the incandescents in my house with CFLs a couple years ago, for whatever that's worth.

I use CFLs in most of my light fixtures, too, but incandescents have their advantages. They're very inexpensive, they don't need special handling or facilities to dispose of them, and the "waste heat" they produce is not wasted in a country like Canada, where we have to heat our homes for eight or nine months a year, and even longer in the northern areas.

[colterphoto1]

took my household batteries to recycling today at local library.

what are we supposed to do with burnt out CFLs? I have half dozen of them already. BTW, the 3 ways give out horrid quality of light.

[Islander]

On a lighter note, this is funny no matter who you are:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/massive-flow-of-bullshit-continues-to-gush-from-bp,17564/?ref=d

That is pretty funny.

On the same page, I spotted this item about Marlboro's new eco-friendly cigarettes, which could help save the planet:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-ecofriendly-cigarettes-kill-destructive-human,17529/

[Islander]

what are we supposed to do with burnt out CFLs? I have half dozen of them already.

Try Home Depot. They've been accepting them in Canada for a few years. Scroll to the bottom of this item to see the reference.

http://www.mnn.com/your-home/around-the-house/stories/5-ways-to-dispose-of-old-cfls

As far as I know, there are only two facilities in all of Canada that dispose of CFLs, but there are lots of collection points.

[JL Sargent]

Great avatar Colter! Looks like you've got a pretty lady there. []

[Chris A]

My stereo is on a lot, but I use solid state amplification that doesn't double as a space heater.

[heronrod]

Don't know if ya'll have seen these, thought you might be interested. A couple links that have some photos that don't seem to be making the national media, or at least not any that I've seen. However, gotta qualify that I don't have satellite or cable TV and don't plan to get it. I've pasted a message I rec'd the other day. Just wonder if the country is gonna stall for another 40 yrs....

Friends

In response to the Gulf Oil Spill I was driven to write & record this  


the other day.


Memphis Minnie's "What's the Matter with the Mill" was calling for a  


re-write.


While I encourage you to share this, learn this and sing this, mostly  


I just hope the song becomes obsolete...



listen:

or watch:

Ben Winship

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/06/caught_in_the_oil.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/30/louisiana-oil-spill-2010_n_558287.html#s95206

If the links don't work you should be able cut/paste on your http: window.

[Chris A]

I'm guessing that we are looking at percentages of the entire brown pelican population which are currently or impendingly dead but will never be found: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7144834.ece

Even if BP is fined, it isn't going to bring back the entire Gulf ecosystem. Putting all your cookies into the jar that says "blowout preventer" with effectively no backup isn't a strategy.

Could it be that that at the top of the corporate hierarchy that they collectively haven't a heart, conscience, or soul? That they are effectively just machines to make money, bound only by the threat of law? Remember Pasadena TX 2005?

How about a "corporate death penalty" ensuring turnover of upper management? And criminal prosecution of its corporate officers?

Enron wasn't that long ago.

[LarryC]

Features of modern corporations:

- dictatorial and anti-democratic

- legalised as pseudo-persons but lacking any human faculty for morality

- insulated from any proportional punishment for wrongdoing

- ruled by a relatively simple algorithm of investment return which contains no human qualities or considerations

- harder to kill than a vampire

I'd say that worked into that litany is corporate authority allowing and rewarding officials who decide that they will accept injury or death of their customers as part of their corporate product -- unsafe auto dashboards, steering wheels and weak front seat backs for many years, Chrysler and Ford continuing to build vans that easily became lethally unstable at high speed or with blow-outs, strengthening of tobacco carcinogens to increase product sales, etc. Followed by denials and destructive delaying. Corporate philosophies and rationalization allow and approve of its leadership being responsible for such things, with only occasional lawsuits as a feeble counterbalance. It's not entirely unlike the Milgram studies IMO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment). All MHO of course.

[Chris A]

It can't be any other way, can it?

I think that it comes down to the people in each organization. If a corporation is composed of people that refuse to work only for profit (and Peter Drucker argued strenuously for this concept and against "corporations should be run for short-term profits"), then you have the possibility that "humanitarian corporations" could or can exist.

Consider the following: http://thetyee.ca/Views/2005/01/10/HumanitarianCorporation/

Drucker talked about "Managing Oneself" in a very good article where he talked about "values" vs. corporate culture. I see this all the time in corporate cultures: some corporations exist in a "dog-eat-dog" "humans are just numbers" atmosphere, others take on a more systemically feasible culture of "we don't violate our personal beliefs in order to make a living".

What gets me is that we have these corporate "bad boys" that continue to survive when they really shouldn't - and there is a way to curtail them, but it will take the full force of national or even international governments to do it. Hence the strong words on "death penalty for corporations". It's for the abusers who just will not quit trying to do the wrong thing to make more money.

I believe now that BP is clearly in that pile.

Chris

[Olorin]

It can't be any other way, can it? Of course they will kill people if it is profitable. There can't be any other outcome when you build a "machine" using these rules, and explicitly remove any moral system from the machinery. The best and most accurate metaphor for the modern corporation is a "computer program." And, we've been talked into granting these computers Constitutional and legal rights as though they were a living person. The absurdity of that is so grand, so absolutely huge, that it can't be seen for what it is. To give such rights to a non-living entity is an obscenity hurled at men and women who actually give up their life and limbs to defend the Constitution - meant for human beings. This great absurdity is a testament to the power of modern media to control public thought. What sort of human being would confer competitive rights on a robot?

BP has also cut corners at the expense of its own workers. In 2005,
15 workers were killed and 170 injured after a tower filled with
gasoline exploded at a BP refinery in Texas. Investigators found that
the company had flouted its own safety procedures and illegally shut off
a warning system before the blast. An internal cost-benefit analysis
conducted by BP – explicitly based on the children's tale The Three
Little Pigs – revealed that the oil giant had considered making
buildings at the refinery blast-resistant to protect its workers (the
pigs) from an explosion (the wolf). BP knew lives were on the line: "If
the wolf blows down the house, the piggy is gobbled." But the company
determined it would be cheaper to simply pay off the families of dead
pigs.

After the blast, BP pleaded guilty to a felony, paying $50 million to
settle a criminal investigation and another $21 million for violating
federal safety laws. But the fines failed to force BP to change its
ways. In October, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis hit the company with a
proposed $87 million in new fines – the highest in history – for
continued safety violations at the same facility. Since 2007, according
to analysis by the Center for Public Integrity, BP has received 760
citations for "egregious and willful" safety violations – those
"committed with plain indifference to or intentional disregard for
employee safety and health." The rest of the oil industry combined has
received a total of one.

[heronrod]

Hightower has been a thorn in corporations for quite some time now...

http://jimhightower.com/sites/jimhightower.civicactions.net/files/20-18_rnc.mp3

http://jimhightower.com/sites/jimhightower.civicactions.net/files/20-18_mnc.mp3

[mungkiman]

There's nothing funny about what's happening, but sometimes I appreciate a little satire: http://twitter.com/BPGlobalPR

Here's an example from the twitter site, pretending to be BP: "A $75 million liability cap is too high! That
only leaves us w/ $5.525 billion in 1st quarter profits! Step up
taxpayers." [:|]

[WS65711]

As BP promised, the walruses are fine: Stephanie Grace

Published: Thursday, June 10, 2010, 7:30 AM Updated: Wednesday, June 09, 2010, 5:56 PM

Stephanie Grace, The Times-Picayune

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When BPGlobalPR, a popular parody of BP's official Twitter feed, asked readers last week to "cut us some slack" because "we've kinda just been winging this whole 'deepwater drilling' thing," it was, quite obviously, a joke.

BP PLC/The Associated PressThis image from video provided by BP early Saturday shows oil pouring out of the well head around the capping device in the Gulf of Mexico. June 5, 2010

Yet a new analysis of BP's emergency plans, rubberstamped by the equally asleep-at-the-wheel federal Minerals Management Service, suggests the fake company line is actually a pretty accurate summation of the real company's response to the oil well that's still gushing a mile under the Gulf of Mexico.

The Associated Press took a good close look at two disaster response plans that cover the Deepwater Horizon site, a 582-page regional spill plan and a shorter document addressing the individual site, and concluded that they were riddled with mistakes and erroneous assumptions.

Among the individual errors: Marine life specialists' phone numbers are wrong. An Internet link to a cleanup equipment supplier is broken. One national wildlife expert listed as a possible source of information actually died in 2005, four years before the document was filed.

And "sensitive biological resources" listed as in a potential spill's path include cold-climate marine mammals like walruses, sea otters, sea lions and seals, none of which inhabit the warm-water Gulf of Mexico. Kind of makes you wonder whether that passage was lifted from a document covering some place like Alaska, where all those animals actually do live.

In a broader sense, the assessments paint a rosy picture of the likely outcome of what the company describes as an unlikely spill.

BP said there would be just a 21 percent chance that oil would reach Louisiana's coast within a month; in fact the first sheen hit the state in nine days after the rig exploded. The company also said it had more than enough equipment in place to capture any oil before it would hit shore.

If the documents downplay risk to the Gulf coast, they completely ignore the threat beyond. There's no mention of the much-discussed loop current, for example, which could send oil around the Florida peninsula and up the Atlantic Coast.

The 52-page plan BP submitted early last year covering Mississippi Canyon Block 252, the location of the busted well, is particularly disheartening to read in hindsight, after seeing all those pictures of oiled birds and turtles and gunky wetlands and beaches.

Out in the Gulf, a spill might cause "some detrimental effects" on fish habitats, the report concedes, but it would likely be "sub-lethal." Both finfish and shellfish, the company pointed out, can swim away.

Potential onshore damage is described just as dismissively.

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

"Both the historical spill data and the combined trajectory/risk calculations ... indicated there is little risk of contact or impact to the coastline and associated environmental resources."

The document goes on to use the same wording to describe potential risk to wetlands, to shore birds and coastal nesting birds, to coastal wildlife refuges, and to coastal wilderness areas.

As with the misplaced sea mammals, you've got to wonder whether the author either used boilerplate language, or just blocked and copied. It's as if the goal was just to fill in all the lines and check off all the boxes, not to position the company to deal with an actual, rather than theoretical, crisis.

After hearing about the analysis, Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, unintentionally parroted the Twitter satirists' comic assessment.

"The AP report paints a picture of a company that was making it up as it went along, while telling regulators it had the full capability to deal with a major spill," Nelson wrote in an e-mail. "We know that wasn't true."

Yes, we do know that, now. What we don't know is whether to laugh about it, or to cry.

Stephanie Grace is a staff columnist. She can be reached at sgrace@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3383.

[Islander]

It's not like there has never been a blowout in the Gulf of Mexico before:

http://www.wimp.com/oilspills/

[Don Richard]

What I heard earlier in this debacle turns out to be true. The Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf was behind schedule, so shortcuts were taken to speed up finishing the well. 6 centralizers were used instead of the normal 21, allowing severe gas flow anomalies to occur. They also skipped the cement integrity test because it would take12 hours, and they felt the cement job would be OK. The well "burped" and the rest is, unfortunately, history.

Another sad chapter in the history of the oil patch. Business as usual for this segment of the oil industry... move into an area, rape the earth, get what you want, then move out after making the money, and leave the mess for someone else to clean up.

I believe that there is a provision for jail time in the law in cases such as this. If so, the "company man" who was giving the orders needs to be incarcerated. The management at BP, who should have been oversighting the well drilling operations should join him.

[jacksonbart]

I just hope we aren't talking about this 4 months from now.

[sunburnwilly]

This is like the EXXON Valdeez happening every 5 days , soo JB we will be talking about it for many years to come . I think this will be the big push to get us off of fosill fuels . It won't happen in our lifetime but it will happen .

[sunburnwilly]

What I heard earlier in this debacle turns out to be true. The Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf was behind schedule, so shortcuts were taken to speed up finishing the well. 6 centralizers were used instead of the normal 21, allowing severe gas flow anomalies to occur. They also skipped the cement integrity test because it would take12 hours, and they felt the cement job would be OK. The well "burped" and the rest is, unfortunately, history.

Another sad chapter in the history of the oil patch. Business as usual for this segment of the oil industry... move into an area, rape the earth, get what you want, then move out after making the money, and leave the mess for someone else to clean up.

I believe that there is a provision for jail time in the law in cases such as this. If so, the "company man" who was giving the orders needs to be incarcerated. The management at BP, who should have been oversighting the well drilling operations should join him.

What would anybody expect them to do ?! They were losing money ! Now if this had happened in say China , some BP execs may have lost they're heads .

[JJkizak]

One aspect that hasn't been covered is the type of fire-fighting equipment onboard the Horizon platform. Seems to me that an automatic LP fog/foam system would have had that fire out in about 1.5 minutes, ah la Navy ship board systems. Since the platform floats it is a ship isn't it? So if the platform didn't sink the pipe might have not been broken. In Great Lakes boot camp we would extinguish 100 ft high oil fires in a 30 ft x 4 ft deep caldron in 1.5 minutes with two 90 degree LP fog applicators with the steel caldrons red hot after the flames were extinguished. The LP fog barrier would enable us to stand next to the caldron while the fire raged without feeling the heat. The LP fog setting on the typical local fire fighter nozzles is a joke compared to what the Navy has. And of course we don't know if there were any Methane detectors to sound the alarm but I assume there were.

JJK