Louisiana Oil Rig Fire / Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill - Page 12 - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

filtherton · 06-22-2010, 02:47 AM

The problem seems to be that the ecology of business is fucking up the ecology of the planet. Maybe the idea is that if we can just use the same terms it will be easier to convince ourselves that it's okay to poison parts of our planet for money?

Sorry, your honor, but this state's speed limit laws are fucking up the ecosystem of my afternoon commute.

And OH NO! the oil companies might take their rigs and go home! Somehow I suspect that the ecosystem of the oil industry would have them back ASAP (or someone else would take their place).

aceventura3 · 06-22-2010, 07:52 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by raging moderate

Doesn't really change the point: we won't change until we're forced to.

I have a different take on this point. We won't change until the economics of the issue makes it advantageous to change.

The reason I don't have solar panels on my house is because the payoff is too long, about 10 years for me. If the number was closer to 2 or 3 years, I would do it. The reason I don't drive a hybrid is because they lack relative power (cost/horsepower and weight/horsepower), they cost more up front and the payoff is also too long. Change they dynamics of the cost and change will happen pretty fast.

Baraka_Guru · 06-22-2010, 10:21 AM

It's back to business.

Quote:

U.S. judge overturns drilling ban

Michael Kunzelman

New Orleans — The Associated Press Published on Tuesday, Jun. 22, 2010 1:53PM EDT Last updated on Tuesday, Jun. 22, 2010 2:18PM EDT

A federal judge in New Orleans on Tuesday blocked a six-month moratorium on new deepwater drilling projects imposed in response to the massive Gulf oil spill.

The White House said the administration would appeal. It had halted approval of any new permits for deepwater drilling and suspended drilling at 33 exploratory wells in the Gulf.

Several companies that ferry people and supplies and provide other services to offshore drilling rigs asked U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman in New Orleans to overturn the moratorium, arguing it was arbitrarily imposed.

Judge Feldman agreed, saying in his ruling that the Interior Department failed to provide adequate reasoning for the moratorium. He said it seemed to assume that because one rig failed, all companies and rigs doing deepwater drilling pose an imminent danger.

“An invalid agency decision to suspend drilling of wells in depths of over 500 feet simply cannot justify the immeasurable effect on the plaintiffs, the local economy, the Gulf region, and the critical present-day aspect of the availability of domestic energy in this country,” Judge Feldman wrote.

The moratorium was imposed after the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that killed 11 workers and blew out the well that has spewed millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf.

The Interior Department said it imposed the moratorium so it could study the risks of deepwater drilling. But the lawsuit filed by Hornbeck Offshore Services of Covington, La., claimed there was no proof the other operations posed a threat.

The moratorium was declared May 6 and originally was to last only through the month. President Barack Obama announced May 27 that he was extending it for six months.

In Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal and corporate leaders have opposed the moratorium, saying it will result in drilling rigs leaving the Gulf of Mexico for lucrative business in foreign waters. They say the loss of business will cost the area thousands of lucrative jobs, most paying more than $50,000 (U.S.) a year. The state's other major economic sector, tourism, is a largely low-wage industry.

In its response to the lawsuit, the Interior Department said the moratorium is necessary as attempts to stop the leak and clean the Gulf continue and new safety standards are developed.

“A second deepwater blowout could overwhelm the efforts to respond to the current disaster,” the Interior Department said.

The government also challenged contentions the moratorium will lead to long-term economic harm. Although 33 deepwater drilling sites were affected, there are still 3,600 oil and natural gas production platforms in the Gulf, the government said.

U.S. judge overturns drilling ban - The Globe and Mail

wing870 · 06-22-2010, 11:03 AM

Its just so sad that greed leads to such a huge mess.

roachboy · 06-23-2010, 03:53 AM

what capitalist firms do is attempt to generate profits. with this in mind they will attempt to shape if not control information.
what matters is the circulation of capital.

despite the very bad things that have happened, the circulation of capital continues.
so don't worry.
be happy.

Quote:

BP Magazine Discovers Bright Side to Oil Spill

In the “Life of Brian,” a 1979 comedy from the Monty Python team, the hero ends up whistling the song “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” despite having his hands nailed on each side of a cross.

Sound familiar?

Last weekend, Tony Hayward left for a yacht outing two days after a very public crucifixion on Capitol Hill. So was this a sign that he is a born optimist, convinced things can only get better — or simply an admission that he might as well enjoy himself for a couple of days given he’s likely to lose his job over the oil spill disaster in any case?

Retaining an upbeat tone, in an email to staff last Friday, Hayward again pledged to “get [BP] through the immediate crisis as a stronger and safer company.”

That was after a week that saw a congressional grilling, credit downgrades to just above junk status, a pledge to pay $20 billion into a cleanup and compensation fund and a freeze in dividend payouts for the rest of 2010.

But in Planet BP — a BP online, in-house magazine — a “BP reporter” dispatched to Louisiana managed to paint an even rosier picture of the disaster. “There is no reason to hate BP,” one local seafood entrepreneur is quoted as saying, as the region relies on the oil industry for work.

Indeed, the April 20 spill on the Deepwater Horizon is being reinvented in Planet BP as a strike of luck.

“Much of the region’s [nonfishing boat] businesses — particularly the hotels — have been prospering because so many people have come here from BP and other oil emergency response teams,” another report says. Indeed, one tourist official in a local town makes it clear that “BP has always been a very great partner of ours here…We have always valued the business that BP sent us.”

Fortunately the articles — on which BP declined to comment — don’t go as far as praising that new treat: seasonal shrimps in (crude) oil.

It ain’t all whistling-along on Planet BP, though. The reports mention consumers being “afraid all seafood might be contaminated” and the uncertainty over the region’s economic future.

To be sure, Hayward and BP are right to reassure their staff — they are not aboard the Titanic just yet. The company’s average production of 2.5 million barrels a day in liquids, would make it third in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries if it were a government. Its sales and other operating revenues stood at $239.3 billion in 2009 — larger that the gross domestic product of Nigeria. And BP only has 80,000 mouths to feed.

But if Hayward is looking on the bright side of life, it’s only from afar for now. An army of lawyers and regulators are examining whether he was nailed for other people’s sins — or for his own.

BP Magazine Discovers Bright Side to Oil Spill - The Source - WSJ

la la la.

meanwhile, the oil drum on the federal court ruling yesterday, the state of the dwh fiasco itself and hurricane season.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6642#more

la la la.

roachboy · 06-23-2010, 06:42 AM

and isn't this special?

Quote:

Judge who nixed drilling ban has oil investments

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The Louisiana judge who struck down the Obama administration's six-month ban on deepwater oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico has reported extensive investments in the oil and gas industry, according to financial disclosure reports. He's also a new member of a secret national security court.

U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman, a 1983 appointee of President Ronald Reagan, reported owning less than $15,000 in stock in 2008 in Transocean Ltd., the company that owned the sunken Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.

Feldman overturned the ban Tuesday, saying the government simply assumed that because one rig exploded, the others pose an imminent danger, too.

The White House promised an immediate appeal. The Interior Department had imposed the moratorium last month in the wake of the BP disaster, halting approval of any new permits for deepwater projects and suspending drilling on 33 exploratory wells.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement late Tuesday that within the next few days he would issue a new order imposing a moratorium that eliminates any doubt it is needed and appropriate.

BP's new point man for the oil spill wouldn't say Wednesday if the company would resume deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

Asked about it Wednesday on NBC's "Today" show, BP managing director Bob Dudley said they will "step back" from the issue while they investigate the rig explosion.

Also Wednesday, BP said Dudley has been appointed to head the new Gulf Coast Restoration Organization, which is in charge of cleaning up the oil spill.

Several companies that ferry people and supplies and provide other services to offshore rigs argued that the moratorium was arbitrarily imposed after the April 20 explosion that killed 11 workers and blew out a well 5,000 feet underwater. It has spewed anywhere from 67 million to 127 million gallons of oil.

Feldman's 2008 financial disclosure report — the most recent available — also showed investments in Ocean Energy, a Houston-based company, as well as Quicksilver Resources, Prospect Energy, Peabody Energy, Halliburton, Pengrowth Energy Trust, Atlas Energy Resources, Parker Drilling and others. Halliburton was also involved in the doomed Deepwater Horizon project.

Feldman did not respond to requests for comment and to clarify whether he still holds some or all of these investments.

He's one of many federal judges across the Gulf Coast region with money in oil and gas. Several have disqualified themselves from hearing spill-related lawsuits and others have sold their holdings so they can preside over some of the 200-plus cases.

Although Feldman ruled in favor of oil interests Tuesday, one expert said his reasoning appeared sound because the six-month ban was overly broad.

"There's been some concern that he is biased toward the industry, but I don't see it in this opinion," said Tim Howard, a Northeastern University law professor who also represents businesses and people claiming economic losses in several spill-related lawsuits. "They overreacted and just shut an industry down, rather than focusing on where the problems are."

That was what Feldman essentially said in his ruling, writing that the blanket moratorium "seems to assume that because one rig failed and although no one yet fully knows why, all companies and rigs drilling new wells over 500 feet also universally present an imminent danger."

Josh Reichert, managing director of the Pew Environment Group, said the ruling should be rescinded if Feldman still has investments in companies that could benefit.

"If Judge Feldman has any investments in oil and gas operators in the Gulf, it represents a flagrant conflict of interest," Reichert said.

Feldman's ruling prohibits federal officials from enforcing the moratorium until a trial is held. He wrote: "If some drilling equipment parts are flawed, is it rational to say all are? Are all airplanes a danger because one was? All oil tankers like Exxon Valdez? All trains? All mines? That sort of thinking seems heavy-handed, and rather overbearing."

At least two major oil companies, Shell and Marathon, said they would wait to see how the appeals play out before resuming drilling.

The lawsuit was filed by Hornbeck Offshore Services of Covington, La. CEO Todd Hornbeck said after the ruling that he is looking forward to getting back to work. "It's the right thing for not only the industry but the country," he said.

Earlier in the day, executives at a major oil conference in London warned that the moratorium would cripple world energy supplies. Steven Newman, president and CEO of Transocean, called it unnecessary and an overreaction.

"There are things the administration could implement today that would allow the industry to go back to work tomorrow without an arbitrary six-month time limit," Newman said.

BP stock dropped 81 cents Tuesday, or 2.7 percent, to $29.52, near a 14-year low for the company in U.S. trading. The stocks of other companies associated with the spill remained low despite Feldman's ruling.

In London, British Prime Minister David Cameron's office said he would discuss BP and the oil spill in a meeting Saturday with President Barack Obama. Cameron's spokesman Steve Field told reporters Wednesday the men will discuss the beleaguered energy company during a meeting during the G-8 and G-20 summits in Canada.

Feldman is a native of St. Louis and former Army captain in the Judge Advocate General Corps who was appointed in May to a seven-year term on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, according to court records.

The court meets secretly to consider government requests for wiretaps in national security cases, such as those involving foreign terrorist groups.

A graduate of Tulane University in New Orleans with bachelor's and law degrees, Feldman frequently jokes with lawyers before his court about his friendship with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, known for his strict interpretation of the Constitution as written more than 200 years ago.

Feldman has handled several cases stemming from Hurricane Katrina, among them a lawsuit against the city of New Orleans filed by a retired teacher who sued over his beating by police officers in the French Quarter. The case was settled. Feldman also presided over the first trial in a wave of insurance litigation spawned by the storm.

In August, he will sentence Wayne Read, a former movie studio CEO who pleaded guilty to selling $1.9 million in nonexistent state film tax credits to current and former members of the New Orleans Saints, including head coach Sean Payton and Super Bowl MVP quarterback Drew Brees.

News from The Associated Press

this is a mere appearance of conflict of interest you might say.
most members of the oligarchy are tied to other aspects of the oligarchy: were that not the case there'd be no oligarchy. conversely, it is in part because that is the case that there is an oligarchy.

the logic of the decision is peculiar though.
it is of course the case within a certain frame of reference that just because the dwh rig exploded it does not necessarily follow that all will explode.
but it also follows--and this is the point once you move off the violated sensitivities of these corporate persons---that the problem the dwh disaster reveals that's most fundamental is that the regulatory system has not provided anything like adequate planning or technologies for addressing problems with deepwater drilling operations.

this, somehow, was put aside or rendered secondary.

the factors that seem to have made it secondary is the impact of the monitorium on the lousiana economy. which brings the ruling into line with jindall and other conservatives, who are willing to throw the dice on ecological concerns if they bump too hard against short-term economic considerations. it is a bit amazing that local government is in a position to seriously do that. you'd think that a role of the federal government would be to save the localities from the consequences of their own self-interested short-sightedness...

roachboy · 06-24-2010, 03:50 AM

so if you watched petro-disaster tv yesterday you saw the cap removed from the main leak and the full stream of oil blowing out into the gulf of mexico like many days before. and they say the cap's been refitted after being repaired due to an encounter with an rov or submarine.

on the incident and aftermath:
The Oil Drum | Deepwater Oil Spill - Problems with the LMRP Cap - and Open Thread

meanwhile, in one of the developments that disgusts me, for whatever that's worth, at a level even more than i have managed up to this point:

Quote:

BP Is Pursuing Alaska Drilling Some Call Risky
By IAN URBINA

The future of BP’s offshore oil operations in the Gulf of Mexico has been thrown into doubt by the recent drilling disaster and court wrangling over a moratorium.

But about three miles off the coast of Alaska, BP is moving ahead with a controversial and potentially record-setting project to drill two miles under the sea and then six to eight miles horizontally to reach what is believed to be a 100-million-barrel reservoir of oil under federal waters.

All other new projects in the Arctic have been halted by the Obama administration’s moratorium on offshore drilling, including more traditional projects like Shell Oil’s plans to drill three wells in the Chukchi Sea and two in the Beaufort.

But BP’s project, called Liberty, has been exempted as regulators have granted it status as an “onshore” project even though it is about three miles off the coast in the Beaufort Sea. The reason: it sits on an artificial island — a 31-acre pile of gravel in about 22 feet of water — built by BP.

The project has already received its state and federal environmental permits, but BP has yet to file its final application to federal regulators to begin drilling, which it expects to start in the fall.

Some scientists and environmentalists say that other factors have helped keep the project moving forward.

Rather than conducting their own independent analysis, federal regulators, in a break from usual practice, allowed BP in 2007 to write its own environmental review for the project as well as its own consultation documents relating to the Endangered Species Act, according to two scientists from the Alaska office of the federal Mineral Management Service that oversees drilling.

The environmental assessment was taken away from the agency’s unit that typically handles such reviews, and put in the hands of a different division that was more pro-drilling, said the scientists, who discussed the process because they remained opposed to how it was handled.

“The whole process for approving Liberty was bizarre,” one of the federal scientists said.

The scientists and other critics say they are worried about a replay of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico because the Liberty project involves a method of drilling called extended reach that experts say is more prone to the types of gas kicks that triggered the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon.

“It makes no sense,” said Rebecca Noblin, the Alaska director for the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental watchdog group. “BP pushes the envelope in the gulf and ends up causing the moratorium. And now in the Arctic they are forging ahead again with untested technology, and as a result they’re the only ones left being allowed to drill there.”

BP has defended the project in its proposal, saying it is safe and environmentally friendly. It declined to respond to requests for further comment.

Extended-reach drilling has advantages. Drilling at an angle might be less threatening to sensitive habitats. But engineers say that this type of drilling is riskier and more complicated than traditional drilling because it is relatively new and gas kicks are more frequent and tougher to detect.

And because of the distance and angles involved, drilling requires far more powerful machinery, putting extra pressure on pipes and well casings.

Several companies have built artificial islands to drill offshore in the Arctic and elsewhere, in part because surging ice floes can destroy conventional floating or metal-legged offshore drilling platforms.

Critics say that such islands are so tiny that a large oil spill will quickly flow into the surrounding waters.

BP officials say that by accessing the Liberty oil field from far away, the project reduces its environmental impact in the delicate North Shore area.

The Liberty field lies about five miles from land under the shallow waters of the Beaufort Sea in an area populated during the winter by seals and polar bears and covered by thick floating ice.

During the summer, bowhead whales migrate through the region.

“The overall Liberty Project has been planned and designed to minimize adverse effects to biological resources,” BP wrote in 2007 in the development proposal to federal regulators. “Impacts to wetlands have been significantly reduced including shoreline and tundra habitat for birds and caribou.”

The project will also involve nearly 400 workers in a region where jobs are scarce, according to BP.

But concerns exist about the project’s oversight and critics say the project offers another example of dangerous coziness between industry and regulators.

For example, the federal scientists say that BP should never have been allowed to do environmental reviews that are the responsibility of the regulators. And yet, the language of the “environmental consequences” sections of the final 2007 federal assessment and BP’s own assessment submitted earlier the same year are virtually identical.

No such overlap existed in the documents for other major projects approved by the same office around the same time, a review of the documents shows.

Both assessments concluded that the effects from a large spill potentially could have a major impact on wildlife, but discounted the threat because they judged the likelihood of spill to be very remote.

They also asserted that BP’s spill response plan would be able to handle a worst case — which BP estimated as a spill of 20,000 barrels per day.

Officials from the minerals agency declined to answer questions about the handling of the BP’s environmental assessment, but they added, “In light of the BP oil spill in the gulf and new safety requirements, we will be reviewing the adequacy of the current version of the Liberty project’s spill plan.”

In promotional materials, BP acknowledges that the Liberty project will push boundaries of drilling technology.

To reduce weight on the rig, BP has developed a new steel alloy for the drill pipe.

So much force is needed to power a drill over such long distances that BP had to invest more than $200 million to have a company build what it describes as the largest land rig in the world.

The drill’s top drive is rated at 105,000 foot-pounds of torque, while North Slope rigs are typically rated at 40,000 foot-pounds.

“It will take all of this technology that we’ve developed and exploited in Prudhoe Bay and extend it to a new realm,” Gary Christman, BP’s director of Alaska drilling and wells, told Petroleum News in 2007.

But engineers say that realm includes greater risk.

John Choe, an expert in extended-reach drilling and director of the department of energy resources at Seoul National University, said that it was less safe than conventional types of drilling because gas kicks that can turn into blowouts are tougher to detect as they climb more slowly toward the rig.

“So, you may not detect it until it becomes serious,” he said. “In that case, the kick or drilling related problems become too big to be managed easily.”

A 2004 study commissioned by the Minerals Management Service came to a similar conclusion.

“A gas kick represents probably the most dangerous situation that can occur when drilling a well since it can easily develop to a blowout if it is not controlled promptly,” it said. Extended-reach drilling wells “are more prone to kicks and lost-circulation problems than more conventional and vertical wells, but have some advantages when the well takes a kick because gas migration rates are lower.”

Despite these concerns, the Liberty’s 614-page environmental assessment says nothing about how the project would handle the unique risks posed by this type of drilling.

Mike Mims, a former owner of a company that specialized in extended-reach drilling, said he believed that the worries about this type of drilling were overblown. “The kicks can occur but they move slower and the bubbles don’t expand as fast,” he said.

“It all comes down to personnel,” he added, “If your people understand the risks and handle the work carefully, this drilling is entirely safe.”

BP discovered the Liberty oil field in 1997, began construction of a rig there in 2008, and was nearing final preparations this April when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico.

Two weeks after the Obama administration declared a moratorium on offshore drilling on May 27, BP announced that the Liberty project would continue, with drilling scheduled to start in the fall, generating its first oil production by 2011. By 2013, BP estimates, Liberty will yield 40,000 barrels of oil per day.

If approved, the Liberty will be the longest horizontal well of its kind in the world. BP’s production plan for the Liberty notes that drilling studies only support horizontal wells up to 8.33 miles. Any horizontal wells longer than that, the plan says, “have not been studied.”

State regulators have faulted BP for not being prepared to handle a spill at a similar, though less ambitious project, known as the Northstar field. That project involves vertical drilling and sits on an artificial island six miles northwest of Prudhoe Bay in the Beaufort Sea.

The Liberty project will tie into the Endicott pipeline when complete. On April 20, the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration warned BP that it was in “probable violation” of federal standards because of corrosion found on its Endicott oil pipeline and a lack of records indicating corrosion protection and monitoring efforts.

BP has faced a number of challenges at its Alaska facilities. The company sustained two corrosion-caused leaks in its rigs in Prudhoe Bay in 2006, including a leak of over 200,000 gallons that cost the company around $20 million in fines and restitution. This was the largest spill to have occurred on Alaska’s North Slope.

BP Is Pursuing Alaska Drilling Some Call Risky - NYTimes.com

TWO miles down.
the same pattern as obtained in the gulf.
the same corporate person.

the **only** rationale for this lunacy hinges on a conservative-specific meme about "energy independence" which seems little more than a gesture toward some isolationist nostalgia. funny that conservatives don't care about transnational capital flows, which outstrip the control of any particular nation-state, or about the transnational organization of almost all capitalist production (cheap commodities=democracy in neoliberal-land)...but on oil, it's all and Urgent Need for Independence. and this meme seems to have the traction adequate to allow projects like very deep water drilling off alaska to be contemplated KNOWING that there are no technologies or plans to address another spill because we SEE what's happening in the gulf...and no-one in their right mind sees in a blow-out a research-&-development opportunity.

it seems that this is a place where capital is pissing in the face of all of us.

great stuff.

Cimarron29414 · 06-24-2010, 05:51 AM

What sort of jackass government licensing board thinks it is safer to drill two miles down, and then 8 miles horizontally than just positioning the rig directly over the oil?!?! I mean, if you are going to let them drill, let them drill directly for it - the safest possible way! If they can't prove they can repair a leak in < 24 hours at the proposed drilling depth, then the answer is "No." Watch how fast R & D spins up a solution, then!

roachboy · 06-24-2010, 12:32 PM

remember bhopal?
folk in india do.
why do you think they're a bit pissed off about the bp disaster in the gulf of mexico?
for reasons not that different from those outlined from both the government of nigeria and people whose misfortune it is to live in the ecological disaster area that is the niger river delta, brought to you by shell.

but read on...

Quote:

In India, BP Response Feeds Outrage Over Bhopal
By LYDIA POLGREEN

NEW DELHI — The contrast between the disasters, more than a quarter-century and half a world apart, could not be starker.

In 1984, a leak of toxic gas at an American company’s Indian subsidiary killed thousands, injured tens of thousands more and left a major city with a toxic waste dump at its heart. The company walked away after paying a $470 million settlement. The company’s American chief executive, arrested while in India, skipped bail, never to return. This month seven senior officials from the company were convicted of negligence, but the sentence — two years in jail — seems paltry to many here compared to the impact of their crime.

No matter how halting the Obama administration’s response to the gushing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico might look to Americans, Indians cannot help but marvel — and envy — the alacrity with which the United States government has acted.

BP’s $20 billion cleanup fund, as vast a sum as it seems from here, is in all likelihood merely a down payment on what the company will probably pay for the damage caused by the explosion of its oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. A criminal investigation has begun. And while the environmental toll is massive, the cost in human lives, compared with Bhopal, has been minimal.

Now, 26 years later, in the face of public outrage prompted by the light criminal sentences and the inescapable contrast with the BP disaster, the Indian government is trying shake off the shadow of Bhopal, an incident that has become synonymous with of ineffectual governance and humiliation at the hands of Western capital.

Indeed, the disaster and its aftermath are a stark reminder that even as India aspires to superpower status it still struggles to provide its 1.2 billion people with some of life’s most basic necessities.

“This is one case where every organ of the state failed,” said Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of the Center for Policy Research. “An event like this is actually does remind you that India is a weak state.”

Analysts and historians say that the entire episode reeks of the humiliation of a poor and powerless country at the hands of a rich and resourceful Western corporation. India sought $3.3 billion in damages from Union Carbide, but in 1989 settled for less than half a billion dollars. Charges of culpable homicide against the company’s senior officials were later reduced by India’s Supreme Court to a charge most often used against reckless drivers in auto accidents.

Many Indian commentators have taken the BP comparison further, arguing that the Obama administration cares more about fish and birds in the Gulf of Mexico than it does about Indians maimed by an American company. But the onus, others argued, lies with the Indian government.

“If we in India aspire to sup with those at the high-table in the world, then the Indian government cannot be allowed to undervalue Indian lives so contemptuously,” wrote Sitaram Yechury, a member of the upper house of Parliament representing the Communist Party, in The Hindustan Times.

At a news conference late Thursday evening, government officials announced a raft of new measures, from increased compensation for victims to a fresh effort to extradite Warren Anderson, the octogenarian former chairman of Union Carbide, the company that owned the pesticide factory in Bhopal, from the United States.

The government approved compensation of about $22,000 for the families of people killed by the leak, and about $4,000 for those diagnosed with cancer or total renal failure linked to the toxic gas. It also pledged that it would clean up the abandoned factory. Activists have long sought to make Dow Chemical, the company that bought the now-defunct Union Carbide, pay for the cleanup. The Indian government said Thursday that it will pay and seek reimbursement if a court finds Dow liable.

Some of the measures, like increased compensation and a cleanup of the site, are simply a matter of money. But others will be much harder to accomplish. The government said it will ask the Supreme Court to revisit its 1996 decision to reduce the criminal charges against the men convicted this month. Because the charges were reduced to negligence, the men faced a maximum sentence of 2 years rather than 10 years under the previous charges.

Mr. Anderson, the former Union Carbide chairman, traveled to India in the wake of the disaster in 1984. He was arrested and released on bail, then fled the country. He is still considered an absconder, but has retired comfortably on Long Island.

Indeed, his hasty departure, along with what many see as the meager price the company paid in compensation to the victims, became symbols of India’s impotence, confirmation that it was a soft state unable to protect its citizens.

The new measures did little to quell anger among victims and activists.

“The victims will get hardly 10 percent of the money and rest will go to the pockets of ministers and bureaucrats,” said Satinath Sarangi of Bhopal Group for Information and Action an advocacy group. “Indian people have to pay for the crimes committed by the U.S. corporations.”

In India, BP Response Feeds Outrage Over Bhopal - NYTimes.com

roachboy · 06-25-2010, 04:08 AM

meanwhile, the double-edged problem of attempting to hold a corporate person accountable financially for the disaster that they make:

Quote:

BP share slide as oil spill bill climbs to $2.35bn

Shares in BP hit a 14-year low this morning after the oil giant revealed that its bill for containing and cleaning up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico had climbed to $2.35bn

* Julia Kollewe
* guardian.co.uk, Friday 25 June 2010 10.07 BST

Shares in BP hit a 14-year low this morning after the oil giant revealed that its bill for containing and cleaning up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico – the worst in US history – had climbed to $2.35bn (£1.57bn).

The shares dropped 6.8% at one stage and later traded down 6.3% at 304.5p, making BP the biggest faller on the FTSE 100. Five-year BP credit default swaps, which insure the company against debt default, widened 19 basis points to 555 points.

The latest cost estimate is up from a previous figure of $2bn. It includes $126m already paid out in claims to those affected by the disaster, mainly workers in the fishing industry. So far, nearly 74,000 claims have been filed and more than 39,000 payments have been made.

The bulk of the cost covers wages paid to 37,000 people involved in efforts to capture oil at the blown-out well in the Gulf and the clean-up operation on the shore.

It has emerged that the oil company has ordered clean-up contractors to pay out wages to workers suspected of claiming for work they have not done. Rear Admiral James Watson, the federal on-scene co-ordinator for the oil spill, admitted that there had been "instances of fraud".

Under intense pressure from the White House, BP agreed to set up a $20bn independently administered fund to pay for the clean-up and meet compensation claims last week.

The oil giant said this morning that work on two relief wells, designed to kill the leaking well, and measures to improve the capture of oil, were on track. A new containment system will start operating next month.

The company had to reinstall an oil-siphoning cap on the blown-out well and resumed collecting crude yesterday after an accident led to oil flowing unhindered into the ocean for 10 hours on Wednesday. So far, 364,500 barrels of oil have been recovered from the ocean.

BP share slide as oil spill bill climbs to $2.35bn | Business | guardian.co.uk

because of course shareholders are shareholders in order to earn returns and not to accept the unpleasant responsibilities of any disaster that might be made by the corporate person with whom the relationship of return-getting is established it makes sense that when the going gets really really ugly the heroic rational shareholders will dump the stocks yes?

this of course has effects including on bp's short-term credit.

dealing with the consequences of profit extraction isn't really part of the business model now is it?

so it would appear that we are already at one of the limits of capitalist rationality.
the niger river delta and bhopal are much more indicative of how the game is normally played.

meanwhile bp is now saying that the relief wells are "on track" and that killing the dwh disaster is "in its sights"

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/...ef=global-home

except maybe for the weather.

meanwhile it remains somewhere between difficult and impossible to get an idea of the spread of the massive amounts of oil that continue to leak into the gulf and/or that has leaked into the gulf.

curious concentrations of methane, the exact meaning/implications of which are still not obvious to anyone:

The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Methane Levels Unusually High - and Open Thread

a map that should show the extent of things:
ERMA

oil oil everywhere.

UF expert scrutinizing sea turtles found dead in Gulf | Gainesville.com

but read through the oil drum comments for accounts by folk on the ground trying to help with cleaning up who aren't allowed to wear respirators.

and the weather.

sigh.

ASU2003 · 06-26-2010, 06:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cimarron29414

What sort of jackass government licensing board thinks it is safer to drill two miles down, and then 8 miles horizontally than just positioning the rig directly over the oil?!?! I mean, if you are going to let them drill, let them drill directly for it - the safest possible way! If they can't prove they can repair a leak in < 24 hours at the proposed drilling depth, then the answer is "No." Watch how fast R & D spins up a solution, then!

I think the companies want to minimize the number of oil rigs. At least that was their argument for drilling in ANWR was that they would only have a few building on the surface, but drill far away using horizontal techniques.

And I think we have been drilling shallow waters for decades, the oil is probably gone by now. Or it was never there in the first place.

roachboy · 06-28-2010, 06:15 AM

another little object lesson in the nature of contemporary capitalism courtesy of the massive oil disaster in the gulf of mexico:

Quote:

Boycott BP? That's easier said than done
Consumers who want to show their outrage over the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will find that the company is deeply rooted in the U.S. economy.

By Ronald D. White, Los Angeles Times

June 28, 2010
Advertisement

Jesse Torres, an avid sport fisherman, says he's boycotting BP products out of anger over the company's handling of its massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

But the other day, he could be found filling up his GMC Yukon with BP gas at an Arco station in Santa Monica.

"Oh, I see it now," Torres said, squinting at the BP's small green-and-yellow sunburst logo on the Arco sign. "It's horrible what is happening down there. Next time, I'll go somewhere else for my gasoline, and I'm going to start reading the signs more carefully."

Environmentalists and consumer activists have been urging citizens to voice their outrage at BP with their wallets. "Boycott BP," said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, "because BP must pay."

That's easier said than done, experts say. Boycotts are usually difficult to pull off under normal circumstances, and in the case of BP, there are additional hurdles.

Torres and many other consumers may not be aware of BP's many tentacles. Indeed, few foreign companies have ever become as deeply rooted in the U.S. economy as BP.

You've probably been touched by a BP product or brand if you've ever flown on a commercial airliner, purchased an item that was delivered to the U.S. by ship, turned on a natural gas stove or water heater, warmed a home with fuel oil, gotten a drink from an AM/PM "thirst oasis," filled up at an Arco station or bought Amoco fuel or Castrol motor oil.

BP's five U.S. refineries provide fuel and other petroleum products not just for BP and Arco dealers but also for stations that aren't affiliated with a major brand, including pumps at Safeway supermarkets. In addition, BP sells aviation fuel to several major airlines and is one of the nation's biggest suppliers of lubricants for cargo and cruise ships.

BP's natural gas clients include Southern California Gas Co. Customers of Southern California Edison are among those who use electricity generated by BP-owned wind farms.

"I'm not sure it's possible to boycott BP," said Bruce Bullock, executive director of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University. "When you combine the things that you can't see with the things you don't know, it's virtually impossible to avoid a corporation with the reach of BP. Most consumer boycotts are ineffective for that reason."

On a recent morning, Torres wasn't the only one who didn't notice the small BP logo and name on Arco's blue-and-red signs and pumps.

Andy Murphy, 22, a case manager for a social work organization, said he came to the Santa Monica Arco station because it was close to his office.

"I probably wouldn't have come here if I had known this was BP gasoline," Murphy said.

BP does operate service stations and convenience stores under its own name. East of the Rocky Mountains, about 9,700 service stations carry the BP name and sell Amoco products, acquired in 1998 when Chicago-based Amoco Corp. was bought out by British Petroleum, as the company was then known.

In California and four other Western states, BP sells fuel through about 1,350 Arco stations, the legacy of the Los Angeles company once known as Atlantic Richfield Co., which entered the BP fold in 2000. Most of those Arco service stations have AM/PM convenience stores.

But most of the BP and Arco service stations are run by independent owners, usually with one or a few outlets. A boycott against those stores may hurt the owners more than BP, because the company can always find buyers for its wares in a worldwide market.

Since the gulf oil disaster, protests and boycotts have cost BP service station operators as much as 20% of their normal business, said John Kleine, executive director of the BP Amoco Marketers Assn., which represents 475 independent service station owners east of the Rockies.

"Some of these service station owners have been in the business for two or three generations. They hire local people," Kleine said.

Arco stations in the West have suffered little disruption, said Scott Dean, a BP spokesman for refining and marketing.

"We would hope that people wouldn't penalize those local businesspeople who had nothing to do with the spill," Dean said.

Arco's current advertising campaign doesn't mention the BP connection. Dean said promoting the parent company has never been a priority in the West, where Arco has a strong brand presence.

Last year, BP held about 10% of the U.S. market while its Arco brand had a 20.5% market share in California, said Trilby Lundberg, publisher of the Lundberg Survey, an energy research firm. Lundberg said statistics on the boycott's effect on sales weren't yet available, but anecdotal evidence was mounting that "at least some BP marketers and retailers have suffered financial fallout from BP's oil spill — this in an overall bad economy with poor gasoline sales."

Ben Raouf, 55, who has owned the Arco station at Lincoln and Ocean Park boulevards in Santa Monica for nine years, said his pumps had been busy.

"Business is about the same," Raouf said. "We try to make our customers feel welcome. I have customers who have been coming here for years."

Some customers said they weren't boycotting BP.

"Am I supposed to buy from the 'good' oil company? Which oil company would that be?" Calvin Jones, a process server, said as he filled up.

Rob Hudson, a 33-year-old unemployed construction worker, came to Raouf's Arco station because its regular gasoline was as much as 30 cents a gallon cheaper than nearby gas stations.

"I wish I could afford some outrage," Hudson said as he pumped gas into his old Dodge Coronet. "That must be a good feeling."

BP boycott: Consumers who want to boycott BP over Gulf of Mexico oil spill find it's easier said than done - latimes.com

and of course from foreign policy a pseudo-realpolitik assessment of the implications of the disaster, which features imaginary flows of oil drilling away from regulations and other such pesky interferences toward places like the alberta sand reserves...

The BP Oil Spill Winners - By Charles Homans | Foreign Policy

because capitalism is just like that and it's all necessarily ok because....well....um.....

meanwhile the TED people gather to be Smart or whatever while streaming live:

TEDxOilSpill - live streaming video powered by Livestream

here's a blog from the guardian to help you keep score:

BP oil spill - live updates | Environment | guardian.co.uk

and from the oil drum watching tropical storm alex do it's thing:

The Oil Drum | Storm Watch, 28 June 2010 and BP's Deepwater Oil Spill Open Thread

roachboy · 06-28-2010, 09:40 AM

a bit more information for an image of the reality of contemporary capitalism brought to you by those fine responsible swaggering fellows at bp:

Quote:

BP Loses Trading-Floor Swagger in Energy Markets
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

It seems like Wall Street at its worst: a cowboy on the trading floor plots to corner a market, and gets caught.

Only in this case, the brash trader did not work for a high-flying investment house — he worked for BP, whose reputation for taking risks in the oil fields is matched only by its daring in the energy markets, traders and industry experts say.

The trader’s attempt to corner the propane market resulted in the largest fine for market manipulation in the history of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal regulator, in 2007.

BP, however, remained committed to the aggressive trading that brought in billions annually — as much as a fifth of the company’s total profits — according to interviews with experts, government officials and other traders.

Now, with BP facing billions in liability claims from the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the trading unit’s prospects are uncertain, and the resources the unit once took for granted are threatened.

There are already signs that trading partners are becoming wary of BP’s financial outlook; one market participant, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, is halting long-term contracts with BP. The company’s deteriorating credit rating — on June 15, it was downgraded by Fitch to one notch above junk bonds — makes it harder for traders to cheaply deploy vast amounts of cash. And with its stock down by more than half since the blowout in the gulf, BP can only watch as rival firms try to poach its best traders.

“A lot of the swagger comes from the amount of money they have to trade with,” said Craig Pirrong, a director at the University of Houston’s Global Energy Management Institute. “And traders realize they don’t have the capital they had just a couple of weeks ago.”

It is a humbling moment for a secretive unit that earns the company $2 billion to $3 billion annually and has long inspired fear and envy among rival traders.

BP declined to comment for this article.

For all its influence, BP’s trading unit is something of an anomaly in the staid world of drillers and refiners.

While other oil giants like Exxon Mobil and Chevron shy away from big market wagers, BP employs a diverse array of bets as part of its strategy. Its market wagers on crude oil, gasoline or natural gas can use both physical supplies as well as paper petroleum — in the form of futures contracts and other derivatives.

Even in the outsize world of Wall Street, this is a huge market. More than 137 billion barrels of oil changed hands on the Nymex exchange last year, making it a multitrillion-dollar market, while energy derivatives on the more lightly regulated over-the-counter markets account for a trillion dollars more, according to the Bank for International Settlements.

BP and Shell, another major trader, declined to disclose the size or profitability of their trading units, but experts say BP’s operation is twice Shell’s size and much more active in the American market. In a 2005 Securities and Exchange Commission filing, BP disclosed that it earned $2.97 billion from overall trading in 2005, with $1.55 billion coming from the oil market and $1.31 billion from bets on natural gas.

Analysts estimate that BP’s trading profits have remained in the $2 billion to $3 billion range since then, which would be slightly less than 20 percent of the company’s $16.7 billion in earnings in 2009.

“They are the 800-pound gorilla in their market and the perception is they don’t let you forget it,” said Stephen Schork, president of the Schork Group, an industry trading and research firm.

But that swagger has faded since the April 20 accident in the gulf.

With their bonuses likely to be decimated by the company’s financial problems, many BP traders are eyeing opportunities at Wall Street firms or with companies overseas. They are among the most sought-after professionals in the sharp-elbowed world of energy trading desks.

At least a dozen have quit since the disaster, with BP losing crucial traders in Singapore, London and Chicago, according to other traders. Several have joined Brightoil, a Chinese oil trading and logistics company, in Singapore.

“Everyone is hovering over that company right now,” said George Stein, managing director of Commodity Talent, an executive search firm in New York.

BP’s size and ability to make huge bets was at the heart of the 2007 case, which resulted in $303 million in fines.

According to the government complaint, traders in Houston amassed short-dated futures contracts on 5.1 million barrels of propane stored in Texas pipelines in February 2004 — 800,000 barrels more than existed in the system. As prices steadily rose, BP refused to sell, driving prices steadily higher until they could force buyers to accept the asking price.

“How does it feel taking on the whole market, man?” one BP trader asked another, according to tapes of conversations cited as evidence in the case. “Whew! It’s pretty big, man,” was the answer.

Although one trader did plead guilty, four others had their indictments dismissed last September after a judge said the trades were exempt under federal law because they took place on the lightly regulated over-the-counter-market, not on an open exchange.

The government is appealing to have the indictments reinstated, but the Houston judge’s ruling underscores how difficult it is to prove commodity fraud cases — as well as how what might be manipulation to one observer is smart trading to another.

According to people familiar with the 2007 case, investigators also found evidence that BP traders had previously engaged in a more sophisticated effort to manipulate the much-larger crude oil market, by moving oil in and out of its gigantic storage facility in Cushing, Okla. Prosecutors did not pursue the case because the statute of limitations had nearly expired.

Experts point out that BP’s huge physical empire of wells, pipelines, refineries and storage facilities gives it an edge that is perfectly legal. For example, if traders see oil piling up in storage facilities or aboard supertankers in the BP fleet, it is a signal to bet oil prices will fall. Similarly, if BP refineries are low on gasoline, traders can scoop up gas futures.

“If you are actually dealing in the physical market, you have an informational advantage over purely financial traders,” said Neill Morton, an analyst with MF Global in London, who covers BP.

In addition, until the Deepwater Horizon spill in the gulf, BP’s solid financial position and physical infrastructure meant it could safely take on huge positions and hold on until they paid off. The physical assets are still there, of course, but the long-term financial picture is not so secure.

“Everyone says nothing has changed, but I’m sure they have their running shoes on,” Mr. Pirrong said. “People think if it starts to go, I want to be able to get away as fast I can.”

Risk-Taking at BP Extends to Energy Markets - NYTimes.com

aceventura3 · 06-28-2010, 11:56 AM

What in the heck is "aggressive trading"? Is "aggressive trading" done with a scowl on your face rather than a smile? What is the opposite of "aggressive trading", is that th
e kind of trading you do while playing Monopoly with your kids?

Then we have the concept of "contemporary capitalism" as if "aggressive trading" (whatever it is), is something new! News flash....News Flash... - people who actively trade in commodities seek to make a boatload of money doing it, others use the market to hedge (hedging is actually a positive thing for markets, the term has taken on new meaning lately)

Here is what the company had to say about the trades:

Quote:

April 2003, February 2004 propane trades
BP America has entered a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) with the U.S. Justice Department under which the company admits that it manipulated the price of February 2004 TET physical propane and attempted to manipulate the price of TET propane in April 2003. The DPA concludes all criminal investigations of BP America on matters related to propane, gasoline, crude oil and other commodity trading.

BP Products North America Inc. also has entered a companion consent order with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) resolving all civil enforcement matters concerning the company's propane and gasoline trading.

BP America will pay fines, penalties and restitution totaling just over $303.5 million, including $53.5 million to a victim restitution fund, a criminal penalty of $100 million, a civil penalty of $125 million and a $25 million payment to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service Consumer Fraud Fund.

The DPA has a term of three years. Charges will be dismissed at the end of the term following Justice Department determination that BP America has complied with the terms of the DPA. The DPA requires BP America's continued cooperation with the U.S. government investigation of the trades in question.

The DPA will result in the appointment of an independent monitor to make sure BP America has appropriate trading compliance policies and programs in place, that the policies and programs are implemented appropriately, and that they are being enforced. The independent monitor will have authority to investigate and report alleged violations of the Commodity Exchange Act or CFTC regulations and to recommend corrective action.
BP America conducted its own investigation and cooperated with the Justice Department and the CFTC investigations of propane trading in April 2003 and February 2004. The February 2004 TET propane trades resulted in a loss of $10 million to the company.

"Our view of the legality of these trades changed as our knowledge of the facts surrounding them became more complete," Malone said. "This settlement acknowledges our failure to adequately oversee our trading operation. The agreement provides compensation for victims and establishes a foundation for working with the government to ensure our participation in the nation's energy markets is always appropriate. We are determined to restore the trust of regulators in our trading operations."

After investigating the propane trades, BP America developed an enhanced compliance program specifically fit for the trading organization; increased compliance and legal resources; enhanced training for traders; upgraded transaction monitoring capability and improved metrics to measure compliance performance.

BP America announces resolution of Texas City, Alaska, propane trading, law enforcement investigations| press centre| bp.com

Here is what the CFTC had to say, partial quote:

Quote:

The TET propane market refers to propane that is deliverable at the TEPPCO storage facility in Mont Belvieu, Texas or anywhere within the TEPPCO pipeline system. The TEPPCO pipeline runs from Mont Belvieu, Texas up through Ohio, into New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois. The TEPPCO pipeline is the only pipeline that transports propane from Mont Belvieu to the Northeast and Midwest regions of the United States.

“Although this case was difficult, our professional staff used strategic techniques during thousands of hours of investigation to uncover BP’s misconduct. They effectively rooted out evidence of the defendant’s intentions. This settlement shows that BP has decided to take positive steps to rectify the situation and provide relief to those who were impacted by BP’s misdeeds,” said Gregory Mocek, CFTC’s Director of Enforcement.

The Order finds that in February 2004, BP employees sought to, and did, corner the TET propane market for the purpose of dictating prices to other market participants in order to obtain a significant trading profit. The Order finds that by engaging in this conduct, BP employees violated the Commodity Exchange Act’s prohibitions against manipulating the price of a commodity and cornering a commodity market. The Order finds that BP employees attempted to manipulate the price of TET propane in April 2003 by engaging in similar conduct.

The CFTC would like to thank the Department of Justice and U.S. Postal Inspection Service for their cooperative enforcement assistance in this matter.

The following CFTC Enforcement Division staff are responsible for the case: Joseph Konizeski, Deputy Director Joan Manley, Judy Lee, Charlotte Ohlmiller, and Associate Director Paul Hayeck.

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The key phrase form the CFTC is "...rooted out evidence of the defendant’s intentions." So, regulators spend thousands of hours to discover the intent of a trader is to make a boatload of money - and for that BP get fined even-though BP said they lost $10 mil on the trades???? Here is the issue, if any regulator spends thousands of hours looking for a problem, they will find one. For example, if I ever get investigated by the CFTC I will state (foolishly) that my intent is to make a boatload of money and if other traders let me corner the market, I will do it. Then after they complete their investigation, I will settle, agree to pay a fine, and set-up controls, etc., so it does not happen again.

Is this "contemporary capitalism"? Not really capitalism at all but some weird hybrid system where big government does things for show to justify their existence, and the media goes bizzaro when they find people who actually do things to try and make money, but there always is another scheme being crafted by "aggressive traders", continuing the cycle? How would a true free market respond? I think more directly, faster and with more integrity.

Baraka_Guru · 06-28-2010, 12:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

What in the heck is "aggressive trading"? Is "aggressive trading" done with a scowl on your face rather than a smile? What is the opposite of "aggressive trading", is that the kind of trading you do while playing Monopoly with your kids?

Do you mean to say you've never heard of value investing?

Quote:

Then we have the concept of "contemporary capitalism" as if "aggressive trading" (whatever it is), is something new! News flash....News Flash... - people who actively trade in commodities seek to make a boatload of money doing it, others use the market to hedge (hedging is actually a positive thing for markets, the term has taken on new meaning lately)

There is more than one strategy for making money in the markets. Surely this isn't news to you....

roachboy · 06-28-2010, 12:22 PM

gee, ace, i don't know what you're all in a snit about. i'm just trying to figure out what the term "bp" refers to. it's an interestingly decentered operation that's destroying the gulf of mexico as a result of the manly man way in which it tried to make boatloads of money.

aceventura3 · 06-28-2010, 12:41 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru

Do you mean to say you've never heard of value investing?

Value investing can be defined pretty clearly. Using concepts penned by Benjamin Graham, generally looking for investments selling below book, intrinsic value or some other value bench mark we know what is going on. Putting the term "aggressive" in front of trading or investing has no meaning. Why can't a value investor be "aggressive"? Why can't a value investor act to corner the market? Why can't a value investor walk the line between what is legal and or ethical?

Quote:

There is more than one strategy for making money in the markets. Surely this isn't news to you....

I clearly don't understand what the writer meant, and I still don't. In the context is appears as if the writer was disturbed by the thought of a trader taking risks to make money at the expense of those on the opposite side of the trades. BP has billions and resources to influence the market, but so do others. When a market gets out of balance, balance gets restored based on others wanting to profit from the imbalance. If BP could corner a commodity market, how long would it last? I would argue not long, but I doubt they could do it. I agree that they can influence price and supply on a short-term basis, but even with that demand is another variable.

---------- Post added at 08:41 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:40 PM ----------

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

gee, ace, i don't know what you're all in a snit about.

My love of capitalism.

Ourcrazymodern? · 06-28-2010, 01:03 PM

You're making me cry. I can taste blood. This boondoggle resulted from our belief in the almighty dollar, multiplied by seeing no need to earn it. Corporations aren't people. I have doubts about people who see money as truth.
As usual, what's going to happen is outside our control. Is that what makes us so desperate to tell ourselves we know what's going on? Our resident bacteria do.

Have you tickets to the gulf yet?

roachboy · 06-28-2010, 01:05 PM

it's funny how unencumbered by problems of ethics and law your cheerleading for capitalism allows you to be, ace. attempting to corner a market in commodity futures--not a problem. markets magically correct. fraud is a distortion introduced by an irrational state and made into a Problem by a hysterical media apparatus. and none of its necessary because of the mystical self-regulating capability of magickal markets framed through the circular magickal thinking of cheerleaders like yourself.

whatever.

here's a strategy document from march in which bp indicates just how big a deal deepwater drilling is (was?) for it's long-term strategy:

BP Strategy Presentation, March 2010 | ProPublica

the hall of mirrors:

BP Document: Big Plans for Deepwater Drilling - ProPublica

BP 'staked future on expanding offshore drilling' | Environment | The Guardian

Ourcrazymodern? · 06-28-2010, 01:37 PM

His cheerleading seems to have gotten your goat. It HAS NOT diminished your conduit.

roachboy · 06-28-2010, 03:33 PM

ace just says goofy things. they rarely if ever actually get to me, that is to the person who drives the roachboy machine.

anyway, here's a link to the ongoing collection of stories about the oil disaster from the new orleans times-picayune:

Oil Spill Gulf of Mexico 2010 - NOLA.com

which updates quite frequently.

meanwhile out in another sector of the bp fiasco:

BP Oil Disaster Costs U.S. State Pensions $1.4 Billion in Value - Bloomberg

the article is a list of various pension funds which had invested in bp stock and the amounts each has lost.

i still think it's lunacy that pension funds are allowed to play anything more risky than long-term bonds with peoples retirement money. you know, little people, the ones who are always fucked over when things go south.
my suspicion has long been that pension funds were allowed to start playing the market as a function of the professionalization of investment advising/spread of computer technologies and as an attempt to purchase social solidarity by tying the interests of working people directly into the fluctuations of stock prices. the fordist idea transposed to a post-industrial reality. and so long as the various forms of bubble creation created conditions that gave the impression that growth was a steady state, the lunacy of this idea could be forgotten about. but here it is again. bad idea. bad policy. bad outcomes.

but i digress.

aceventura3 · 06-29-2010, 06:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ourcrazymodern?

You're making me cry. I can taste blood. This boondoggle resulted from our belief in the almighty dollar, multiplied by seeing no need to earn it. Corporations aren't people. I have doubts about people who see money as truth.

Money is a means to keep score, nothing more, nothing less. Squirrels who collect/save/hoard acorns for their future don't see them as "truth", they see their efforts as a means to help secure their future. Only the foolish fail to secure their future when given an opportunity.

Quote:

As usual, what's going to happen is outside our control. Is that what makes us so desperate to tell ourselves we know what's going on? Our resident bacteria do.

Have you tickets to the gulf yet?

No. I do volunteer work locally cleaning (mostly picking up trash) local natural areas.

---------- Post added at 02:38 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:30 PM ----------

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

it's funny how unencumbered by problems of ethics and law your cheerleading for capitalism allows you to be, ace. attempting to corner a market in commodity futures--not a problem. markets magically correct.

Ethics? Do the ethics you talk about for commodity traders apply to honest and open debate? Do you use tricks of the trade to your advantage at what you think is at the disadvantage of others?

Quote:

fraud is a distortion introduced by an irrational state and made into a Problem by a hysterical media apparatus. and none of its necessary because of the mystical self-regulating capability of magickal markets framed through the circular magickal thinking of cheerleaders like yourself.

whatever.

What is the "whatever"? Is it some mythical construct of super centralized regulators who protect the world from evil? Who has to be diligent in the market? Who has to look out for your interests? Self-regulation is basically a state where each market participant does their homework and enters the market place understanding the risks. Children, armatures, and the foolish should stay home - and hopefully they have someone else to protect their interests.

---------- Post added at 02:44 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:38 PM ----------

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ourcrazymodern?

His cheerleading seems to have gotten your goat. It HAS NOT diminished your conduit.

Perhaps, I can get yours.

Do you pursue money, or is it beneath your dignity? Do you save or hoard money? Do you consume beyond your needs to survive? Have you ever gambled or taken a risk to obtain money not earned through work? Why? If you obtained a sum of money greater than you needs what would you do with it and when? Why? Have you ever done anything for a profit? Why? What are the differences between you and the aggressive BP trader, besides hypocrisy? Just asking.

---------- Post added at 02:47 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:44 PM ----------

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

ace just says goofy things.

I like to think that I make or illustrate profound points in goofy ways. My guess is that there is a difference between what you meant and what I actually do. Your focus is on the goofiness because you have no response to the points.

roachboy · 06-29-2010, 07:09 AM

unnecessary bit of snarkiness edited out.

====================
meanwhile

Deepwater Horizon : la marée noire du siècle - LeMonde.fr

here's an interesting infographix about the bp disaster in the gulf of mexico.
it's labelled in french but it's pretty obvious what the information is.

meanwhile the vultures are circling:

Exxon, Shell May Consider Possible Bid for BP, JPMorgan Says - Bloomberg

what anything like that would mean for the task of cleaning up capitalism's mess who can say?

but i am sure that the cheerleaders of capital would have no real problem leaving the gulf a fucking desert so long as money can be made and optimism maintained:

Quote:

Optimism and the Oil Spill
Posted by Bryan Walsh Monday, June 28, 2010 at 11:47 pm

I'm not by nature an optimistic person. If there's a dark side of the moon, or anything else, I'll usually find it, and my glasses only come half empty. Getting excited—not something you'll witness me doing very often. Maybe it's growing up a Philadelphia sports fan (the Eagles alone being enough to pummel the optimism out of any young heart), or too much Smiths at an impressionable age, or maybe I just suffer from a shortage of the right neurochemicals. But it means that if someone tells me things will get better, well—I doubt it.

And the environmental beat has not had salutary effect on my disposition. In one of the first pieces I ever wrote for TIME, a review of Peter Matthiessen's haunting 2002 book on endangered cranes, Birds of Heaven, I quoted a line from the naturalist Louis Crisler on the inextricable link between "love [of the earth] and despair." It's easy to despair about the environmental—the existential threat of climate change, the steady erosion of wild places and wild things, the sense that day by day the world, our only world, lessens. That the best days have passed, and our best hope is to manage the decline.

Take that attitude, pump 150 million or so gallons of oil into it, and, well, you can se why I might not be walking around with a smile on my face. As I've written before, the Gulf oil spill is uniquely depressing—first, of course, for the damage it is doing to a vibrant coastal ecosystem, to the marshes and the seabirds and all that live in the depths, still unknown to us. And for the plight of the people of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the panhandle of Florida, the fishermen and those who depend on them, the men and women still recovering from storm of the century before they were hit with something truly unprecedented. But most of all, because our best and brightest can't seem to do anything about this spill. Because 70 days after the Deepwater Horizon exploded, killing 11 men, oil is still bleeding from a well 5,000 feet below the surface of the ocean. Because BP, the company most responsible for the disaster, is responsible for the response, blocking media access to the spill it created. Because oil has such a hold over us, and over the Gulf region especially, that even after the biggest environmental disaster in history, Gulf residents and politicians are calling for President Obama to lift his moratorium on new deepwater drilling—because there are no other jobs. Because in a hot and crowded world—to steal a phrase— we could see these disasters repeated again and again, as we scramble for the last drops of oil.

See, not optimistic. And I haven't even gotten into the dysfunction U.S. Senate.

So that's why I was so glad to get the chance to attend the TEDxOilSpill conference in Washington in Monday. It's not that the scientists, technologists and activists who spoke at the meeting are unaware or in denial about how screwed up the oil spill is. Carrie DeMoss Roberts of the Gulf Restoration Network spoke about losing her father to the oil industry, and Phillipe Cousteau—yep, Jacques's grandson—described his several trips to the Gulf, the hemispheric damage that would be done to the ecology of that already stressed region. They were clear-eyed about the challenge ahead. And there was righteous anger too—necessary, to me—in the words of Carl Safina, the president of the Blue Ocean Institute, who described the way that the Deepwater Horizon disaster was a failure of industry and regulation, and ultimately an unforgivable failure of our democracy.

But the people at the conference believed—really believed—that there were solutions to this spill, just as their could be solutions to every other environmental challenge facing us. Sometimes those solutions were small-scale and mobile—like the OilReporter smartphone app, which allows anyone to report on the spill, or Google's work spreading real-time information during disasters. Sometimes those solutions were low-tech—like Ronald Atlas, a microbiologist at the University of Louisville, who works with bacteria that can eat oil. And sometimes those solutions were tech so high that it doesn't quite exist yet—like the algal biofuel that Mike Mendez makes at Sapphire Energy, fuel that just might become replacement for the crude we drill from the ocean floor.

What united them all was a belief that progress on this most insoluble of problems was really possible, that enough smart people really could come together and address the challenges facing the country and all of us. And sometimes, for me at least, that optimism could seem a bit blinkered—do they really understand how much it will take to get us off oil? (Actually, Lisa Margonelli of the New America Foundation does, and her talk on the need to address oil consumption first, more than exploration, was a welcome dose of reality.) TED can succumb to technoutopianism too easily, the idea that all the world's problems are just an app away from being fixed. It can grate against someone who doesn't quite share that confidence in the world's ingenuity. But after watching the sadness and frustration of the oil spill—still ongoing—I needed a little optimism.

And if that doesn't work, well, there's always Leroy Stick's attitude. He's the comedian behind the great fake Twitter stream @BPGlobalPR, and he had this to say from the TEDx stage: "It's very easy as Americans to just get down. We're used to bad news. We're in two seemingly endless wars, our economy has collapsed, people are losing their homes, and the Gulf is being destroyed in front of our eyes." There's a TEDster I can get behind.

TED Oil Spill Conference - Ecocentric - TIME.com

because what matters is staying perky.

aceventura3 · 06-29-2010, 02:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

meanwhile the vultures are circling:

Exxon, Shell May Consider Possible Bid for BP, JPMorgan Says - Bloomberg

This is a bad thing because....

roachboy · 06-30-2010, 07:33 AM

i'm kinda waiting to see how the walk-away happens.
and i can't imagine that concentration is a desirable thing for a capitalist-type cheerleader who thinks markets are rational and all that. think hayek for example, his problems with monopoly.

anyway, there's plenty squabbling amongst bp and anadarko about well design and between bp and shell and exxon et al over whether bp's decisions can or cannot be seen as conforming to "industry norms"---of course all the non-bps have every interest in separating these norms from what bp had been doing because they are opposed to things like the drilling monatoria which would obviously interrupt the sacred functions of capital accumulation. but the case seems a bit shaky given that, for example, all the companies involved with off-shore drilling use basically the same disaster plan....

Quote:

Stakes high for warring oil spill partners

By Carola Hoyos in London

Published: June 29 2010 22:33 | Last updated: June 29 2010 22:33

One of the bitterest battles resulting from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is the dispute between BP, operator of the Macondo well, and Anadarko, its biggest junior partner.

On June 18, after Anadarko’s credit rating had been downgraded to junk, Jim Hackett, chief executive, launched an attack on BP. He said the accident could have been avoided and that BP would likely be found to have acted with “gross negligence or wilful misconduct”.

He said he was “shocked” at what he had learnt from documents that became publicly available after the accident.

What he did not mention was that Anadarko knew and even approved some of the most controversial decisions BP made, ones that US lawmakers have given as examples of BP cutting corners to cut costs.

Lawmakers, in the course of congressional hearings into what caused the disater, have raised concerns about Macondo’s basic well design, the technology used and about BP’s execution of the development of the well.

Executives from Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips, all peers of BP and Anadarko, have testified that they would have done things differently than the partners at Macondo.

BP and Anadarko ThumbnailRoyal Dutch Shell, for example, said it would not have used the well design approved by Anadarko, BP and Mitsui, the third partner, for use at this type of deepwater exploration well.

Marvin Odum, president of Shell, told a Congressional hearing in mid-June: “It’s not a well that we would have drilled in that mechanical set-up.”

In contrast, Anadarko says that the accident was caused purely because of BP’s faulty execution, not the design or the technology.

“What we knew was that the design, the long string and the use of centralisers all met industry standards if executed correctly. The problems were caused by BP’s execution of each of these,” Anadarko said.

A long string is a cheaper way of lining a well but one that gives less protection against gas leaks than using multiple layers, including liners and casings, while centralisers stabilise a well before it is cemented.

Industry executives on and outside the Macondo project agree that BP, not Anadarko, called the shots on the Deepwater Horizon and had more information on what went into day-to-day decisions than its partners, which did not have a representative on the rig on a regular basis.

However, Anadarko was kept abreast of what was going on each morning when BP sent it a report of what happened at the rig in the previous 24 hours, both companies said. The report included information such as well test results, the technical procedures that had been undertaken and any unexpected challenges, such as a surge in gas.

“BP gave or made available to the co-owners Authorisation for Expenditure (AFE) documents, supplemental AFE documents, daily operations reports, and other documents that showed the well design, changes to the well design, and identified big well control events encountered during drilling operations,” BP said in an e-mail in response to Financial Times’ questions. “Further, personnel from the co-owners engaged in periodic communications with BP personnel about well design and other issues related to the well.”

Anadarko says that, still, it did not have enough data, to throw up red flags.

For example, Anadarko says it knew of BP’s decision on April 16 to use only six centralisers despite the challenging nature of the well. However, Anadarko says it was only told of the decision after the centralisers had been put in place and was not aware that BP’s decision contradicted advice from Halliburton, the contractor on the rig.

Anadarko also did not know of at least two of the most controversial decisions BP made, executives from both sides acknowledge. That is because those calls were made within the final 24 hours of the life of the well, executives said.

Thus, the fate of Anadarko will depend on whether investigators and courts decide that the Macondo well was flawed from the onset, or whether the decisions BP made – especially in the critical final 24 hours – were what caused the accident.

The stakes are high for both parties.

If BP alone is indeed found guilty of gross negligence or wilful misconduct, Anadarko and Mitsui will not have to pay their share of the cost of the clean up and the liabilities that have arisen from the accident.

For Anadarko, in particular, that decision could be the difference between life and death given its size and the fact that no one knows how much those liabilities would be, analysts say.

FT.com / Companies / Oil & Gas - Stakes high for warring oil spill partners

meanwhile those heroic captains of industry set up an organization to help deal with oil spills that now finds itself wholly outstripped by reality:

Quote:

Oil industry cleanup organization swamped by BP spill

By Joe Stephens and Mary Pat Flaherty
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, June 29, 2010; 9:57 PM

For the past two decades, companies that produce and transport oil have channeled tens of millions of dollars a year into an organization they set up to provide cleanup equipment and personnel if a catastrophic offshore spill were ever to hit the United States.

But when that spill occurred two months ago, it soon swamped the Marine Spill Response Corp.

MSRC "has never had to deal with anything even remotely this large and chaotic," said Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, which is suing BP for damages under the Clean Water Act.

MSRC officials say they expect to be in the spotlight as Congress investigates whether the industry and the nation should have been better prepared for a disaster on the scale of the one playing out in the Gulf of Mexico. Congress also is likely to look into whether the tax-exempt company's equipment -- much of it two decades old -- is up to the current challenge, as wells move farther out to sea and deeper below the ocean.

"Should the industry's capacity have been greater than it is? That's a fair question," said Steve Benz, MSRC president and a former BP executive. He stressed that the U.S. Coast Guard set benchmarks for how much equipment and manpower large oil-recovery companies should have. Also, he said, any standing operation would have difficulty immediately capturing the volume of oil gushing from the Gulf well.

"If this happened again, should we already have in place 20,000 people and 1,000 boats?" Benz asked. "You can't build a firehouse that big and have it make any reasonable economic sense. You need to prevent the fire in the first place."

Congress has been here before. Twenty years ago, after the Exxon Valdez dumped millions of gallons of oil into Prince William Sound, lawmakers angrily reacted -- much as they have today -- by vowing to ensure that such devastation would never happen again. Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, requiring companies transporting oil over water to have ready access to clean-up equipment adequate for the worst possible spill. Big oil companies banded together to form MSRC.

Far from the coast, the nonprofit is run out of nondescript offices in Herndon, Va., sharing a building with a credit union and a title company. The company, which calls itself the nation's largest oil spill recovery organization, remained low-profile while growing to more than $100 million in assets. Its resources include 400 employees and 15 large oil-recovery ships dubbed "Big Blues" and positioned in the lower 48 states and Hawaii. It and its contractors have responded to 700 spills, none approaching the magnitude of the Deepwater Horizon blowout.

State and regional officials familiar with MSRC's past work say it does a good job handling more contained environmental challenges. But now MSRC finds itself leading the charge in a much different battle.

"There is no asset MSRC has that is designed to collect oil 5,000 feet under the seas," said Brett G. Drewry, chief executive of the industry-backed organization that funds MSRC.

That fact did not stop BP and other companies from citing MSRC, alone or alongside for-profit cleanup companies, as their first responder for massive spills. Oil companies, Congress and regulators point to MSRC as evidence of lessons learned from Valdez. Suckling said safeguarding the coasts should not be left to private industry.

"It seems to me there is a real significant conflict of interest here," he said. "When you are dealing with an issue that has such enormous stakes for public health and safety, it should be in the government's hands."

In most spills, recovery efforts capture only between 10 and 15 percent of the leaked oil, according to several state and industry experts.

Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D- Calif.), wants to increase funding for federal research into spills. "The fact that we didn't have the technologies in place to prevent and respond to these kinds of disasters before we allowed drilling 5,000 feet underwater is totally unacceptable," Woolsey said.

MSRC sprang from a cost calculation by big oil. The companies decided that, rather than each buying its own armada of skimmers, it would be cheaper and more efficient to work together.

In 1990, they formed the non-profit Marine Preservation Association and based it in Scottsdale, Ariz. MPA, in turn, funded the creation and operations of MSRC.

The structure was designed to shield oil companies from liability, in case MSRC was later found responsible for damages related to a skimming operation, according to officials at both organizations.

By joining MPA, oil companies gain the right to enter service agreements with MSRC, said Judith Roos, an MSRC spokeswoman. If a spill occurs, companies then pay MSRC for individual cleanup services.

At its inception, MSRC commissioned 15 specialty ships, each 210 feet long with temporary storage for 4,000 barrels of recovered oil. Today, the corporation's annual operating budget is about $80 million.

For most spills it has handled, MSRC has been the primary or only responder, cleaning up the mess on its own or through its contractors. But the BP blowout has required much greater resources.

Within hours of the explosion, MSRC dispatched four skimmers; they arrived while the fire was still burning. MSRC is providing the largest number of skimming vessels in the off-shore fleet, Benz said. Specific figures are unclear, but Benz said that "well over half" of the oily water recovered offshore has been collected by MSRC and its contractors.

Onsite today in the gulf are 10 Big Blues. Two more, now in California, should arrive soon. (MSRC's remaining three vessels will remain elsewhere in case of unrelated spills.)

The Big Blues skim oil from the surface through an umbilical hose that vacuums oily water and empties it into the ship's storage tanks or a barge alongside.

The company has three ocean-going barges onsite, each capable of holding about 40,000 barrels, and 25 shallow-water barges. It also has deployed an assortment of smaller, fast-response boats and has its C-130 cargo plane in Louisiana to spread dispersant. At the disaster's peak, MSRC said it had 7,000 people working in the gulf. The number dropped as volunteers and other organizations arrived.

When MSRC was formed, the oil companies envisioned it as uniquely poised to clean up catastrophic spills. But over time, a competing approach arose.

Seacor Holdings, based in Fort Lauderdale, saw a business opportunity in the post-Valdez cleanup standards. It formed the for-profit National Response Corp., and set out to provide many of the same services as MSRC at lower prices. While MSRC had a dedicated fleet, NRC retrofitted a handful of ships and contracted with commercial shippers for access to their fleets in an emergency.

Before long, some MSRC customers were moving to NRC. MSRC cut costs, including research into better ways to recover spilled oil.

"That was much to the detriment of the organization," said David McLain, a former MSRC consultant.

Today, NRC has eight ships it owns recovering oil for BP, and has secured more than 100 other vessels for the operation. It remains to be seen, however, whether the for-profit company is better prepared to deal with a deepwater spill.

"All of us who do oil spills will be looking for the lessons learned here," said Stephen Edinger, who works on oil recovery issues for the state of California. That reexamination likely will include MSRC itself, according to oil industry consultant Robert Peterson.

"The industry will rethink the MSRC's ability to respond," he said, "and I expect increased investment and increased response capability."

Oil industry cleanup organization swamped by BP spill

meanwhile this article:

Quote:

Second pipe may have crippled BP well's defense mechanism
The discovery joins a list of clues that is helping scientists understand the complexities of the Deepwater Horizon accident, and from that, craft changes in how deep-water drilling is conducted.

Jim Tankersley, Tribune Washington Bureau

4:17 PM PDT, June 29, 2010

The gushing BP oil well is a mystery still unfolding, and late last month, a team of scientists from the Energy Department discovered a new twist: Their sophisticated imaging equipment detected not one but two drill pipes, side by side, inside the wreckage of the well's blowout preventer on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

BP officials said it was impossible. The Deepwater Horizon rig, which drilled the well, used a single pipe, connected in segments, to bore 13,000 feet below the ocean floor. But when workers cut into the wreckage to install a containment cap this month, sure enough, they found two pipes.

The discovery suggested that the force of the erupting petroleum from BP's well on April 20 was so violent that it sent pipe segments hurtling into the blowout preventer, like derailing freight cars.

It also offered a tantalizing theory for the failure of the well's last line of defense, the powerful pinchers called shear rams inside the blowout preventer that should have cut the pipe and stopped the rising oil and gas from reaching the Deepwater Horizon 5,000 feet above. Drilling experts say those rams, believed to be partially deployed, could have been thwarted by the presence of a second pipe.

The doubled-up drill pipe joins a list of clues that is helping scientists understand the complexities of the Deepwater Horizon accident, and from that, craft changes in how deep-water drilling is conducted.

"We still don't really know what's in" the well wreckage, said Energy Secretary Steven Chu, whose team discovered the second pipe using gamma-ray imaging. He added: "If there were two drill pipes down there when the shear rams closed, or two drill pipes below, is it possible that in the initial accident … there was an explosive release of force?…Did it buckle and snap?…The more we know about this, the better we can know what to do next."

The challenge will be making enough changes to soothe policymakers' and the public's fears of a repeat accident, while keeping deep-water drilling economically feasible in an area that provides a third of the nation's domestic oil.

Whether this requires halting deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is hotly debated. Last week, a federal judge overturned the Obama administration's May decision to ban work on 33 deep-water rigs until January, when a presidential commission is expected to release its reform suggestions. The administration is appealing.

Officials are trying to plug the leak while looking for at least interim answers to fundamental questions about the oil spill. Chief among them: What part of the confluence of events that caused the disaster is unique to BP's methods and practices, and what is common to the industry at large? What amount of government oversight can increase the safety of deep-water drilling, and at what cost?

Drilling experts and advocates, environmentalists and government officials agree so far on one point: No amount of regulation can absolutely preclude another drilling accident.

But some changes could not wait: Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has dismantled and begun to reassemble the agency charged with drilling oversight after finding it had too cozy a relationship with the oil industry and had ceded too much safety responsibility to the drillers.

Many drilling experts say there's already ample evidence of errors designing and drilling the well beneath the Deepwater Horizon — and of officials on the rig "cutting corners" to finish a job that was expensively behind schedule. Those could be addressed, and could be penalized with civil and criminal charges, without shutting down part of the industry.

The accident "absolutely was preventable," said Eric N. Smith, associate director of the Tulane Energy Institute. The rig, he added, lacked "a regulatory presence onboard that said, 'I don't care how late it is, you do it right or you go home.' "

The experts suggest that the most glaring mistake was a faulty cementing job in the well that was unable to handle the high-pressure oil and gas flow.

The government could prevent similar errors by hiring experienced engineers, stationing them on drilling rigs and empowering them to shut down any operation that failed to meet established safety standards, Smith said.

Administration officials acknowledge that the federal government has not provided nearly enough money or inspectors for that level of oversight.

Salazar called past and present funding levels for inspectors "woefully inadequate" and said that "you need to have the horsepower to be able to have the inspection" of deep-water drilling rigs.

He has also insisted that the drilling moratorium would give investigators crucial time to solve the mystery of why so many of the Deepwater Horizon's "fail-safe" backups failed. That includes learning why the shear rams are partially deployed but resisting efforts to fully close.

"There clearly needs to be identified what, if anything, went wrong with the fail-safe system," said Gene Beck, an assistant professor of petroleum engineering at Texas A&M University. "We need to understand, did something happen with the [blowout preventers] that we didn't understand? Did they fail to function, in any way, shape or form, within their design parameters?"

Regulators could recommend additional backup systems, such as a second blowout preventer or a relief well drilled in conjunction with the initial well.

The other key to minimizing the risks of a similar blowout is economic. For example, Beck said requiring a concurrent relief well with every project could drain any profit from drilling. Smith, along with a chorus of public officials on the Gulf Coast, warns that Salazar's six-month moratorium could drive the exploration industry out of the gulf permanently.

Environmentalists are pushing the administration to value ecological protection more highly as it updates its risk calculations.

"Safety costs a bit more," said Chris Mann, a senior officer with the Pew Environment Group. "Our argument is that should be the cost of doing business."

Chu said scientists won't solve the mystery of the Deepwater Horizon — and absorb its lessons — until they exhume the blowout preventer from the seafloor and break it down.

Still, economists are beginning to tally the costs of possible reforms. A Washington-based think tank, Resources for the Future, released an analysis suggesting that if the United States brought deep-water safety regulations up to the stricter standards of nations such as Norway, the cost of a typical drilling project would rise about 10% to 20%.

That shakes out to less than half a cent per gallon at the pump.

Second pipe may have crippled BP well's defense mechanism - latimes.com

has triggered an interesting exchange at the oil drum:

The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - Making the Connection- also Hurricane Effects - and Open Thread

which is still the best source for information about the struggle to control the leak itself.

aceventura3 · 06-30-2010, 09:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

i'm kinda waiting to see how the walk-away happens.

The above statement is confusing.

BP has a legal liability, they can not walk away from their legal liability while keeping the organization intact. At this point the value of the company far exceeds the legal liability. Also, given the legal liability involving the oil spill and clean up, the liability will move to the front of the line ahead of almost all other liabilities. In addition, BP already made a commitment of $20 billion that will be handled by the government. Certainly BP wants to walk away, and they want to do it a.s.a.p, with certainty or defined costs, but they can not just walk away. To the degree that BP gets away with not being held accountable our judicial system and the Obama administration will have to take the blame.

And, if BP gets sold and a firm with deeper pockets assumes BP's legal liabilities, that is good for us. And given BP's current credibility problems and the perceived risks in financial markets with the company (either share price or ability to get debt financing to help manage legal liabilities) it may be best that another entity step in.

As BP's share price falls below book value/intrinsict value/etc., naturally "value investors" are going to be interested. This is a normal market response, and not about "vultures" circling. BP failed, and there are consequences for failure.

roachboy · 06-30-2010, 09:56 AM

right. in the way that union carbide did not walk away from bhopal. in the way that royal dutch shell did not walk away from the niger river delta. it never happens. capitalism is wonderful. ask the people who live in the delta or bhopal.

aceventura3 · 06-30-2010, 10:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

right. in the way that union carbide did not walk away from bhopal. in the way that royal dutch shell did not walk away from the niger river delta. it never happens. capitalism is wonderful. ask the people who live in the delta or bhopal.

Read what I wrote and read this:

Quote:

The 1984 gas leak in Bhopal, India, was a terrible tragedy that understandably continues to evoke strong emotions even 25 years later. In the wake of the release, Union Carbide Corporation worked diligently to provide immediate and continuing aid to the victims and set up a process to resolve their claims – all of which were settled 18 years ago at the explicit direction and with the approval of the Supreme Court of India.

Bhopal Information Center

Quote:

1984
Dec 3
The Bhopal Gas Tragedy
Shortly after midnight, methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas leaks from a tank at the UCIL Bhopal plant. According to the state government of Madhya Pradesh, approximately 3,800 people die and several thousand other individuals experience permanent and partial disabilities.
Dec 4
Immediate Action
Word of the disaster is received at Union Carbide headquarters in Connecticut. Chairman and CEO Warren Anderson, together with a technical team, depart to India to assist the government in dealing with the incident. Upon arrival, Anderson is placed under house arrest and urged by the Indian government to leave the country within 24 hours.

Union Carbide organizes a team of international medical experts, as well as supplies and equipment, to work with the local Bhopal medical community.

The UCC technical team begins assessing the cause of the gas leak.

Dec 14
Warren Anderson testifies before Congress. He stresses UCC commitment to safety and promises to take actions to ensure that a similar incident “cannot happen again.”
1985
Feb
Interim Relief
Union Carbide establishes a fund for victims of the tragedy -- the (UCC) Employees' Bhopal Relief Fund -- that collects more than $120,000.
UCC sends more medical equipment to Bhopal.
Mar
Study Launched
UCC launches a disaster program to study the effects of over-exposure to MIC.
Bhopal Gas Leak Act
Government of India (GOI) enacts the Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster Act that enables the GOI to act as the legal representative of the victims in claims arising of or related to the Bhopal disaster.
Cause of the Incident
UCC Technical team reports that a large volume of water was introduced into the MIC tank and triggered a reaction that resulted in the gas release. Independently, a committee of experts for the Indian government arrives at the same conclusion.
Apr
Union Carbide Offers $7 Million Interim Relief
UCC offers $5 million in relief for victims before the U.S. District Court, bringing the total to date to $7 million.
Government of India Rejects Union Carbide Relief
Government of India rejects UCC offers of aid for Bhopal victims.
June
Additional Aid
UCC funds participation of Indian medical experts in meetings to obtain information and the latest medical treatment techniques for victims.
July
Additional Analysis
Core samples confirm that water triggered the reaction, which led to the gas release.
1986
Jan
Union Carbide Funds Hospital
Union Carbide offers $10 million to the Indian government for building a hospital to aid the victims in Bhopal.
Mar
Union Carbide Proposes $350 Million as Settlement for Victims and Families
Union Carbide proposes a settlement amount of $350 million that will generate a fund for Bhopal victims of between $500-600 million over 20 years. Plaintiffs’ U.S. attorneys endorse amount.
May
Bhopal Litigation Transferred to India
U.S. District Court Judge transfers all Bhopal litigation to India. Decision is appealed.
1987
Jan
U.S. Court of Appeals Affirms Transfer of Litigation to India
The court rules that UCIL is a separate entity, owned, managed and operated exclusively by Indian citizens in India.
Mar
Government of India Closes Vocational Technical Center
The Government of India closes and razes the Bhopal Technical and Vocational Training Center built by Arizona State University after determining that Union Carbide Corporation supplied funds for the project.
Aug
Union Carbide Announces Humanitarian Relief
Union Carbide offers an additional $4.6 million in humanitarian interim relief for immediate rehabilitation of Bhopal victims.
1988
Jan–
Dec
Litigation in India
Throughout 1988, arguments and appeals take place before the Indian Courts regarding compensation for the victims. In November, the Supreme Court of India asks the Government of India and UCC to reach a settlement, and tells both sides to “start with a clean slate.”
May
New Evidence on Causation
Independent investigation by the engineering and consulting firm Arthur D. Little, Inc., concludes that the gas leak could only have been caused by sabotage; someone intentionally connected a water hose to the gas storage tank and caused a massive chemical reaction.
1989
Feb
Final Settlement at $470 Million
The Supreme Court of India directs a final settlement of all Bhopal litigation in the amount of $470 million, to be paid by March 31, 1989. Both the Government of India and Union Carbide accept the court's direction. UCC pays $420 million; UCIL pays the rupee equivalent of $50 million (including $5 million of interim relief previously paid).

Union Carbide Makes Full Payment
Within 10 days of the order, UCC and UCIL make full payment of the $470 million to the Government of India.

May
Supreme Court of India Renders Opinion
The Supreme Court, in a lengthy opinion, explains the rationale for the settlement and emphasizes that the compensation levels provided for in the settlement are substantially higher than those ordinarily payable under Indian law.
Dec
Government of India To Act on Behalf of Victims
The Supreme Court upholds the validity of the “Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster Act of 1985” that authorized the Government of India to act on behalf of the Bhopal gas leak victims.

1990

Jan–
Dec
Supreme Court of India Proceedings Aim to Overturn Settlement
Hearings are held throughout year on activist petitions to overturn the settlement agreement.

Nov
State Government Prepares List of Victims To Be Compensated
The State Government of Madhya Pradesh submits to the Supreme Court of India the completed categorization of the claims of all of the victims. The State determines that, in addition to the victims who suffered various levels of disabilities, the incident resulted in 3,828 deaths.

Dec

Supreme Court Hearings Conclude
Court concludes review of petitions seeking to overturn settlement.

1991

Oct
Supreme Court Confirms the Settlement and Closes Legal Proceedings
The Supreme Court of India upholds the civil settlement of $470 million in its entirety and sets aside portion of settlement that quashed criminal prosecutions that were pending at the time of settlement. The Court also:

* Requires Government of India to purchase, out of the settlement fund, a group medical insurance policy to cover 100,000 persons who may later develop symptoms;
* Requires Government of India to make up any shortfall, however unlikely, in settlement fund;
* Gives directions concerning the administration of settlement fund;
* Dismisses all outstanding petitions seeking review of settlement; and
* Requests UCC and UCIL to voluntarily fund capital and operating costs of a hospital in Bhopal for eight years, estimated at approximately $17 million, to be built on land donated by the state government.

UCC and UCIL agree to fund the hospital, as requested.

1992

Apr
Union Carbide Sets Up Trust Fund
UCC announces plans to sell its 50.9 percent interest in UCIL.

UCC establishes charitable trust to ensure its share of the funding to build a hospital in Bhopal and fund operations for up to eight years.

1993

Oct
U.S. Supreme Court Denies Hearing on Legal Standing
The U.S. Supreme Court declines to hear appeal of lower court, thereby affirming that Bhopal victims may not sue for damages in U.S. courts.

1994

Apr
Union Carbide To Sell Stake in Union Carbide India Limited
Supreme Court of India allows UCC to sell all its shares in UCIL so that assets can be used to build Bhopal hospital.

Nov
Union Carbide Completes Sale
UCC completes the sale of its 50.9 percent interest in UCIL to McLeod Russell (India) Ltd. of Calcutta.

Dec
Union Carbide Fulfills Initial Commitment
UCC provides initial $20 million to charitable trust for Bhopal hospital.

1995-1999
Charitable Trust Builds Hospital

Hospital charitable trust begins facility construction in October 1995.

UCC provides approximately $90 million from the sale of all its UCIL stock.

By 1999, the trust has $100 million. Building is completed and physicians and medical staff are being selected. The hospital will have facilities for the treatment of eye, lung and heart problems.

2001
Hospital Opens to the Public

The Bhopal Memorial Hospital and Research Centre, funded largely by proceeds from UCC sale of all its UCIL stock, begins treating patients.

2004

July
Supreme Court of India Orders Release of Remaining Settlement Funds to Victims
Fifteen years after reaching settlement, the Supreme Court of India orders the Government of India to release all additional settlement funds to the victims. News reports indicate that there is approximately $327 million in the fund as a result of earned interest from money remaining after all claims had been paid.

2005
Apr
Supreme Court of India Extends Deadline for Release of Remaining Settlement Funds
The Supreme Court of India grants a request from the Welfare Commission for Bhopal Gas Victims and extends to April 30, 2006, the distribution of the rest of the settlement funds by the Welfare Commission. News reports indicate that approximately $390 million remains in the fund as a result of earned interest.
Dec Court Dismisses 2 Claims in Janki Bai Sahu Case
U.S. Federal District Court dismisses two of three claims in Janki Bai Sahu case; this is, damages for alleged personal injuries from exposure to contaminated water and remediation of the former UCIL plant site. (See Nov. 2006 for information on third claim.) Case originally was filed in November 2004.

2006
Aug
U.S. Court of Appeals Upholds Dismissal of 8-Year-Old Bano Case
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York upholds the dismissal of the remaining claims in the case of Bano vs. Union Carbide Corporation, thereby denying plaintiffs’ motions for class certification and claims for property damages and remediation of the Bhopal plant site by Union Carbide. The ruling reaffirms UCC’s long-held positions and finally puts to rest -- both procedurally and substantively – the issues raised in the class action complaint first filed against Union Carbide in 1999 by Haseena Bi and several organizations representing the residents of Bhopal, India.

Sep
Bhopal Welfare Commission Reports All Initial Compensation Claims and Revised Petitions Cleared
India media report states the “registrar in the office of Welfare Commissioner... said that all cases of initial compensation claims by victims of the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy have been cleared…. With clearance of initial compensation claims and revision petitions, no case is pending.…”
Oct

Madhya Pradesh State Government To Prepare Drinking Water, Healthcare, Environmental Rehabilitation Plan
Indian media report says the state government of Madhya Pradesh will “chalk out an action plan in the next two months for providing drinking water, adequate healthcare and economic and environmental rehabilitation to survivors of the Bhopal gas tragedy….”
Nov

U.S. Federal District Court Dismisses Last Claim in Sahu Case
Federal District Court dismisses remaining claim in Janki Bai Sahu case, which sought to hold UCC liable for the acts of UCIL. Case originally was filed in November 2004. Two other claims associated with the case were dismissed in December 2005.
Dec

Appeal Filed in Janki Bai Sahu Case
Plaintiffs file appeal in the case before Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Awaiting date for oral arguments.

2007

Mar
New Class Action Lawsuit Filed in New York Federal Court
Jagarnath Sahu et al v. UCC and Warren Anderson seeks damages to clean up six individual properties allegedly polluted by contaminants from the Bhopal plant, as well as the remediation of property in 16 colonies adjoining the plant. Suit has been stayed pending resolution of appeal in Janki Bai Sahu case. This new suit may be dismissed if the Court of Appeals affirms the decision of the District Court in the pending appeal of the Janki Bai Sahu case.

2008

May
Arguments Heard in Janki Bai Sahu Appeals Case
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York hears oral arguments in Janki Bai Sahu appeals case. Original case filed in November 2004. Two claims associated with case were dismissed in December 2005 and the last remaining claim was dismissed in November 2006.

Nov
Sahu Appeals Case Remanded to District Court for Further Limited Activity
Second Circuit Court of Appeals sends back the Janki Bai Sahu case to the U.S. District Court in Manhattan for limited further activity based strictly on procedural grounds. The Second Circuit did not discuss the merits of the case or the merits of the trial judge's ruling of dismissal.

2009
Feb
Court Rejects Mediation Request in Janki Bai Sahu Case
U.S. Federal District Court in New York declines to order mediation in the Janki Bai Sahu case as requested by plaintiffs. The ruling affirms Union Carbide’s position that after years of court proceedings, this case in now in its final stages and, given the time commitments already made the courts, the Sahu case should complete its course through the courts.

CHRONOLOGY

Walk-away?

roachboy · 06-30-2010, 10:43 AM

ace: don't waste my time with union carbide sourced material on this.

but do feel free to start other threads in which you worship whichever captain of industry you like.

Business & Human Rights : Union Carbide/Dow lawsuit (re Bhopal)

CorpWatchomg

mgPartial Chronology of Union Carbide's Bhopal Disaster

Bhopal Justice Page[COLOR="DarkSlateGray"]

Willravel · 06-30-2010, 11:58 AM

There are some topics so disgusting, so horrifying, and so evil that I can't bring myself to really think about them. I feel like if I start looking into the utter destruction of ecosystems or the mass burning of sea turtles or the lies about the size and number of leaks or the hundreds of thousands of people suddenly out of work or the soon-to-be negligent homicides of countless people that will be poisoned and then come to the conclusion that the people responsible knew full well how dangerous these risks were when they decided against necessary safety steps, I'm going to fucking kill someone. I'm not a violent person, in fact I consider myself basically pacifistic. I don't hit back in unavoidable fights and I capture spiders from my home so I can let them free outside. I don't want to become something other than nonviolent, so I can't think about the oil spill. Maybe that makes me a coward.

roachboy · 06-30-2010, 01:05 PM

i don't think anyone finds it easy to look at or think about this fiasco brought to you courtesy of the normal operations of petro-capitalism when subjected to a disastrous accident that the normal operations of petro-capitalism made it impossible to deal with. so now we're 70-odd days into watching the effects of this arrangement, which is the framework within which a quite substantial dimension of contemporary capitalism works

(oil was the leading edge of the drive away from nation-state based organization from the 1920s forward, pushing toward multi-national orderings in ways that were quite different from the older colonial forms associated with imperialism in it's old skool usage....this quite apart from the ways in which petroleum is tied with modern engines and plastics and by extension almost everything else. a petro-chemical mode of production you might call the fantasyland we live in)

and as it unfolds more and more of that framework becomes public to those of us who have not for professional or political reasons researched the arrangements.

i find it boggling that anyone defends the arrangement itself given the self-evident problems it created. and i find it boggling that even the most benighted cheerleaders of capitalism at all costs cannot see in the gulf of mexico situation a Problem for petro-capitalism itself. it's hard to say what it'd take to get through. maybe this:

Quote:

Biologists find 'dead zones' around BP oil spill in Gulf

Methane at 100,000 times normal levels have been creating oxygen-depleted areas devoid of life near BP's Deepwater Horizon spill, according to two independent scientists

* Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
* guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 30 June 2010 19.49 BST

Poggy, or menhaden, fish lie dead and stuck in oil in Bay Jimmy, near Port Sulpher, Louisiana Poggy, or menhaden, fish lie dead and stuck in oil from the BP spill in Bay Jimmy, Louisiana. Fish are fleeing the area of the Deepwater Horizon spill, biologists say. Photograph: Sean Gardner/Reuters

Scientists are confronting growing evidence that BP's ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico is creating oxygen-depleted "dead zones" where fish and other marine life cannot survive.

In two separate research voyages, independent scientists have detected what were described as "astonishingly high" levels of methane, or natural gas, bubbling from the well site, setting off a chain of reactions that suck the oxygen out of the water. In some cases, methane concentrations are 100,000 times normal levels.

Other scientists as well as sport fishermen are reporting unusual movements of fish, shrimp, crab and other marine life, including increased shark sightings closer to the Alabama coast.

Larry Crowder, a marine biologist at Duke University, said there were already signs that fish were being driven from their habitat.

"The animals are already voting with their fins to get away from where the oil spill is and where potentially there is oxygen depletion," he said. "When you begin to see animals changing their distribution that is telling you about the quality of water further offshore. Basically, the fish are moving closer to shore to try to get to better water."

Such sightings – and an accumulation of data from the site of the ruptured well and from the ocean depths miles away – have deepened concerns that the enormity of the environmental disaster in the Gulf has yet to be fully understood. It could also jeopardise the Gulf's billion-dollar fishing and shrimping industry.

In a conference call with reporters, Samantha Joye, a scientist at the University of Georgia who has been studying the effects of the spill at depth, said the ruptured well was producing up to 50% as much methane and other gases as oil.

The finding presents a new challenge to scientists who so far have been focused on studying the effects on the Gulf of crude oil, and the 5.7m litres of chemical dispersants used to break up the slick.

Joye said her preliminary findings suggested the high volume of methane coming out of the well could upset the ocean food chain. Such high concentrations, it is feared, would trigger the growth of microbes, which break up the methane, but also gobble up oxygen needed by marine life to survive, driving out other living things.

Joye said the methane was settling in a 200-metre layer of the water column, between depths of 1,000 to 1,300 metres in concentrations that were already threatening oxygen levels.

"That water can go completely anoxic [extremely low oxygen] and that is a pretty serious situation for any oxygen-requiring organism. We haven't seen zero-oxygen water but there is certainly enough gas in the water to draw oxygen down to zero," she said.

"It could wreak havoc with those communities that require oxygen," Joye said, wiping out plankton and other organisms at the bottom of the food chain.

A Texas A&M University oceanographer issued a similar warning last week on his return from a 10-day research voyage in the Gulf. John Kessler recorded "astonishingly high" methane levels in surface and deep water within a five-mile radius of the ruptured well. His team also recorded 30% depletion of oxygen in some locations.

Even without the gusher, the Gulf was afflicted by 6,000 to 7,000 square miles of dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi river, caused by run-off from animal waste and farm fertiliser.

The run-off sets off a chain reaction. Algae bloom and quickly die, and are eaten up by microbes that also consume oxygen needed by marine life.

But the huge quantities of methane, or natural gas, being released from the well in addition to crude presents an entirely new danger to marine life and to the Gulf's lucrative fishing and shrimping industry.

"Things are changing, and what impacts there are on the food web are not going to be clear until we go out and measure that," said Joye.

Biologists find 'dead zones' around BP oil spill in Gulf | Environment | The Guardian

or maybe it doesn't matter as capitalism uber alles is headed the way of all other discarded relics of an outmoded past.

btw this is a quite lovely photo exhibition about the mississippi delta region, the very end of it, birdfoot.

BIRDFOOT

tightly intertwined oil and economy and geography. all kinds of problems on all fronts posed by the nature of petro-capitalism itself. it'll likely be changed, perhaps quite considerably, from a regulatory perspective, petro-capitalism will. but it's not going anywhere any time soon.

i dont blame anyone for not looking. sometimes i don't quite understand why i trawl for information about this when it'd be easier, maybe, not to. maybe it's just another way of dealing with the same sense of helplessness and despair. hard to say.

The_Dunedan · 06-30-2010, 01:11 PM

Some interesting perspectives on this issue over at "The Libertarian Enterprise."

From Jim Davidson, "Murder," which analyses BP's culpability not only in the spill but the deaths of its' 11 roughnecks:

Murder, by Jim Davidson

Quote:

Special to The Libertarian Enterprise

It now appears that Tony Hayward and his associates committed mass murder. It has been previously thought that the British Petroleum company, formerly known as Anglo Iranian Oil company, had been negligent in its actions with regard to the Deepwater Horizon rig. Hayward has been caught on camera belly-aching that he wants his life back. I say he should spend the rest of his life paying compensation to his victims.

From Rob Sandwell, an analysis of BP's history and corrupting ties to various Gov't entities. "Agency capture" is old hat for these cats, all part of the grand Mercantilist game.

Who's to Blame for Spilt Oil?, by Rob Sandwell

aceventura3 · 06-30-2010, 02:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

ace: don't waste my time with union carbide sourced material on this.

but do feel free to start other threads in which you worship whichever captain of industry you like.

You brought this issue into the discussion. You demonstrate a lack of understanding of the roles of the judiciary and government enforcement authority, or you purposefully ignore those roles.

---------- Post added at 10:53 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:45 PM ----------

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

or maybe it doesn't matter as capitalism uber alles is headed the way of all other discarded relics of an outmoded past.

It seems to me that your problem is really with those who establish and make the rules, not the capitalist who play by those rules. If the judicial system assigns a value to legal damages, what is your issue with the company that complies with the judicial determination?

---------- Post added at 10:58 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:53 PM ----------

Quote:

Originally Posted by The_Dunedan

Some interesting perspectives on this issue over at "The Libertarian Enterprise."

From Jim Davidson, "Murder," which analyses BP's culpability not only in the spill but the deaths of its' 11 roughnecks:

Murder, by Jim Davidson

From Rob Sandwell, an analysis of BP's history and corrupting ties to various Gov't entities. "Agency capture" is old hat for these cats, all part of the grand Mercantilist game.

Who's to Blame for Spilt Oil?, by Rob Sandwell

If true, the next steps are simple. Criminal charges should be filed. This is not complicated and the system is in place to address criminal activity. If you believe BP is guilty of mass murder, your outrage should be with our government for not bringing them to justice. We have a liberal in charge of our government, and he gets a free pass on stuff like this, right? I have mentioned it before - what a difference it would be if this happened while Bush was President.

{added}Roach,

From one of the links you sourced:

Quote:

...the Indian government further victimized the people of Bhopal. India settled out of court with Union Carbide for $470 million.

http://www.umich.edu/~snre492/lopatin.html

Why did the government settle at this amount? Why did the government assume control of the legal actions? Rather than a capitalism problem, isn't this a centralized government problem? Why was the government slow to release the money to the damaged people? I think some "aggressive" private market lawyers may have done a better job for the people.

roachboy · 07-01-2010, 06:41 AM

some satellite images and area estimates for the oil slick and sheen in the gulf from 25 and 26 june:

area 25 june: 24,453 square miles
area 26 june: 23,049 square miles

SkyTruth: BP / Gulf Oil Spill - Satellite Images Show Oil Impact From Gulfport to Destin

an interactive geo-spatial map from noaa:

ERMA

here's an interactive map from the lousiana bucket brigade that colllects reports from local residents/folk of oil and/or damage and/or problems along the gulf coast. this is an interesting resource. people working their way out from under the thick veneer of corporate managed infotainment.

Oil Spill Crisis Map

---------- Post added at 02:41 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:20 PM ----------

more granular resources....

up to now i've been working mostly with national/international sources that have a variable relation to the granular---that is to what's happening on the ground in various localities affected by the bp disaster.

from the bucket brigade site, a collection of links to resources:
Oil Spill Crisis Map

one of which is:
2010 Gulf Coast Oil Spill - CrisisWiki

which takes you to any number of places, one of which is the sun herald from gulfport mississippi where people just don't seem terribly impressed with the captains of industry. i know it's hard to believe that anyone would not be impressed with the captains of industry on this day 73 of the largest oil spill yet to happen.

but you know certain questions have yet to be answered by the captains of industry:

Quote:

WHERE WILL OIL WASTE GO?
By KAREN NELSON
BILOXI — Bags and bags of tar balls, gooey oil, oiled boom and workers’ oil-stained clothing are waiting in large containers at sites along the Mississippi Coast for a decision by BP on where to dump them.

The Harrison County Board of Supervisors has asked BP, the state DEQ, Waste Management “and any other entity involved” not to put it in the Pecan Grove landfill near Pass Christian.

But Supervisor Marlin Ladner said he’s afraid they’re going to do it anyway.

The decision is expected this week.

“Waste Management and BP are well aware of the Board of Supervisors’ and my objections to us receiving oil waste whether it’s hazardous or non-hazardous,” Ladner said.

“It’s like someone dumping this stuff in our front yard and apologizing for it, picking it up and then turning around and dumping it in our backyard.”

“If they put it here, they’re taking action in opposition to the Board of Supervisors as well as the citizens,” Ladner said.

“They know that every time they go against the citizens and their government, it’s not a good policy.

“I think they’re waiting to see just how much flak they’re going to catch.”

“It’s in our minutes — we oppose this,” Ladner said. “I don’t know what else we could have done to express our displeasure.”

BP has a contract with Waste Management for two landfills in Mississippi — Pecan Grove and Central Landfill in Pearl River County — but it can take the oil waste there only if the material is deemed non-hazardous.

Ladner said Harrison County issued the permit for Pecan Grove, but had the county known what was coming it wouldn’t have signed off on it receiving oil-spill waste.

Now the county has little recourse on the issue, he said, even though its attorneys have looked for an out.

If the state Department of Environmental Quality finds the material unsuitable, that could stop it from going in either landfill. But that’s not likely.

DEQ Director Trudy Fisher said Wednesday so far testing of the oiled material in the Gulf “has shown that it’s below the limits for what is considered hazardous material,” making it technically OK for Pecan Grove.

In the oil-spill disposal plan, EPA requires BP to randomly test the material to “demonstrate” it’s non-hazardous waste before it can go there, Fisher said. She said her agency will be involved in that testing.

“It’s between BP and the EPA, but the landfill program is a state program, so we have to agree that the material is suitable for the landfill,” she said, “to protect the citizens.

“We’re not going to rely on BP or the federal government,” she said. “I do care.”

But she added, “Pecan Grove has a clay and synthetic liner and is fully capable of handling the waste.”

She promised oil-spill waste won’t be brought in from other states.

She said each state will handle its own, which has been an issue because the Pecan Grove landfill’s intake area reaches all the way to Baldwin County, Ala.

But Wednesday, René Faucheaux with Waste Management said Mississippi oil-spill waste has already been hauled off to Louisiana.

Faucheaux said last week the company hauled loads of it to the Colonial Landfill in Ascension Parish near Gonzales, La.

Faucheaux said the firm is awaiting DEQ’s decision, it’s a matter of protocol, but even if DEQ gives the thumbs-up for Pecan Grove, that doesn’t mean the oil-spill waste will go there.

“We haven’t agreed to anything at this point,” he said.

“When we get information from DEQ, we’ll make a decision at that point,” Faucheaux said. “We’re working with instructions from BP.”

WHERE WILL OIL WASTE GO? - Biloxi - SunHerald.com

and other questions, pretty fucking important ones....well the captains of industry seemed to have no real interest in posing at all:

Quote:

Health of Exxon Valdez spill workers was never studied
By KYLE HOPKINS
ANCHORAGE — You’d think more than 20 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, scientists would know what, if any, long-term health dangers face the thousands of workers needed to clean up the Gulf of Mexico spill.

You’d be wrong.

“We don’t know a damn thing,” said Anchorage lawyer Michael Schneider, whose firm talked with dozens of Alaska cleanup workers following the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in preparation for a class-action lawsuit that never came.

In New Orleans last week, U.S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin delivered a similar, if more subtle, message to a gathering of health experts meeting to talk about how to protect people working on the massive BP oil spill still gushing in the Gulf of Mexico.

“Current scientific literature is inconclusive with regard to the potential hazards resulting from the spill,” Benjamin said. “Some scientists predict little or no toxic effect … while other scientists express serious concerns about the potential short-term and long-term impacts the exposure to oil and dispersants could have on the health of responders and our communities.”

That lack of published, peer-reviewed study of the Exxon Valdez cleanup workers has made protecting the growing number of workers in the Gulf of Mexico all the more difficult and has Alaska watchdogs warning BP and government regulators are repeating mistakes that made people sick a generation ago.

“We don’t have the good answers that we could have had from the Exxon Valdez to either know that there are problems or to reassure people that there were not,” said Mark Catlin, an industrial hygienist who visited the cleanup in 1989 and said some Gulf workers aren’t receiving enough training to protect themselves.]

Safety plan left to BP

Critics have questioned whether the Obama administration has left too many decisions about the health and safety of the oil-spill workers to BP’s discretion as a growing number of workers complain about exposure to toxins.

Earlier this month McClatchy reported records released by the state of Louisiana showed BP wasn’t recording most worker complaints of illness after exposure to oil. Louisiana records described at least 74 oil-spill workers complaining of becoming sick, but BP’s official recordkeeping noted just two such incidents.

That followed a McClatchy story that said BP’s plan to protect workers, which the Coast Guard approved May 25, exposes them to higher levels of toxic chemicals than generally accepted practices permit.

The plan also doesn’t require BP to give workers respirators, to evacuate them from danger zones, or to take other precautions until conditions are more dangerous.

BP’s plan also fails to address the health effects of more than 1 million gallons of dispersants used so far in the cleanup.

Catlin was part of a Laborers International Union team of specialists who shortly after the Exxon Valdez spill warned Alaska’s state labor department that spill workers could face lingering kidney and nervous-system damage from prolonged exposure to oil and called for long-term monitoring of worker health.

Valdez ills not followed up

No formal follow-up study apparently was ever undertaken, however, or if it was, its results weren’t published, three of the original reports’ authors said.

In the years since, Alaska workers have reported ailments ranging from flu-like symptoms to chemical sensitivity to neurological damage.

Exxon has consistently maintained there’s no evidence spill workers experienced any adverse health effects as a result of the cleanup. Spokeswoman Cynthia Bergman said she isn’t aware of any long-term study the company conducted on its own.

“The challenge is largely due to the fact that cleanup workers tended to be transient, temporary workers, which made any medical follow-up difficult,” she said.

Sandee Elvsaas, who was director of the spill-response operations for oil-services firm Veco Corp. in the village of Seldovia, disputes that. She said she still has names of workers she sent out to spray beaches and boats fouled by the spill and who got sick.

“The people from the village are still here. … We’re here. They just haven’t come to ask,” Elvsaas said.

“Terrible rashes and headaches and vomiting. They were nauseated … These were not the same people I sent out,” she said.

A 1993 study conducted on the mental-health fallout of the spill on workers and communities and published in the American Journal of Psychiatry concluded people living in Alaska communities touched by the spill were more likely to suffer generalized anxiety disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.

No similar studies have been published on physical ailments, however.

Fred Blosser, a spokesman for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said NIOSH hasn’t done any research on long-term health effects on Exxon Valdez workers.

Riki Ott, a biologist, activist and fisher from Cordova, Alaska, who’s written two books about the Exxon Valdez spill, said the link between respiratory problems and exposure to oil and chemicals used in the cleanup was explored in an unpublished 2003 pilot study by a Yale graduate student.

The phone survey of 169 workers concluded those who performed jobs with high oil exposure or exposure to oil mists, aerosol and fumes were more likely to report symptoms of chronic airway disease than workers with less exposure.

Based on the findings, Ott has told Congress roughly 3,000 former cleanup workers are likely suffering spill-related illnesses.

Studies of other oil spills report similar trends.

A report on the 2002 oil tanker Prestige spill in Spain concluded “participation in cleanup work of oil spills may result in prolonged respiratory symptoms that last one to two years after exposure,” according to the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

Exxon’s own internal medical reports, which surfaced in court documents years after the spill, showed an unspecified number of spill workers made thousands of clinic visits for upper-respiratory illnesses.

Exxon later moved to seal the records. NIOSH had the legal authority to subpoena the records but never did so.

Volunteers unprotected

Eula Bingham, an assistant secretary of Labor for occupational safety and health during the Carter administration, was part of the union team that visited the cleanup site in 1989.

Bingham, now a professor of environmental health at the University of Cincinnati, said she worries about the apparent lack of a plan to protect volunteers from toxic exposure in the gulf.

“I think there are community people going out and scooping up the tar balls and doing some work that probably will never get paid by anybody,” she said. “Who is looking after them? Who is measuring how much exposure they have to these toxic chemicals?”

One thing regulators learned from the Exxon Valdez spill and health concerns raised after the World Trade Center cleanup is the need for a database of workers whose health can be tracked in the future, said Blosser, the NIOSH spokesman.

“You need basically a way of knowing who was working at the site and information for contacting those workers over time,” he said.

When BP chief executive Tony Hayward appeared before Congress on June 17, Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., pressed him on what he called BP’s failure to provide a roster of spill workers despite multiple requests.

“The equivocation in your answer is something that is not reassuring to those workers … who potentially have been exposed to these chemicals in ways that can impact on their health,” Markey said, according to a transcript.

Blosser said BP provided the worker information last week.

Illnesses a legal issue

Basic worker-health information could also play a role in future court cases against BP.

About 50 lawsuits were filed against Exxon over the Valdez spill, said Bergman, the company spokeswoman. She said she didn’t know how many were settled out of court, though a separate case involving insurance companies revealed one worker was paid $2 million.

Schneider said his firm interviewed dozens of workers after the spill. Erin Brockovich, the environmental activist portrayed in a 2000 movie, had gotten involved. There was talk of a class-action lawsuit.

“There wasn’t a class of participants that stood up. Just folks who had been around the project and the process — many of whom had claims that they had became ill and stayed ill after working on the oil spill,” Schneider said.

Most complained of respiratory problems, he said.

The lack of independent proof, including a proper study of workers’ health that could show the employees got sick directly because of the spill, scuttled the lawsuit.

“If you’re the oil industry, you may or may not have this data. Lord knows, you’re not going to want to publish it,” Schneider said.

Health of Exxon Valdez spill workers was never studied - Oil Spill - SunHerald.com

but there are persistent reports that the captains of industry at bp are quite concerned that people working on doing whatever cleaning up means (bulldozing the oil into the sand so cameras don't see it?) aren't wearing respirators because

well

that looks bad.

Ourcrazymodern? · 07-01-2010, 07:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Willravel

I capture spiders from my home so I can let them free outside.

!

I don't like thinking about the spill, either, but it's hard to avoid.

roachboy · 07-05-2010, 06:13 AM

a lack of co-ordination and/or information sharing and/or overarching framework for parsing information all combine to make it curiously difficult to say things. so they say:

Quote:

Determining oil spill's environmental damage is difficult

By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 5, 2010; A04

How dead is the Gulf of Mexico?

It is perhaps the most important question of the BP oil spill -- but scientists don't appear close to answering it despite a historically vast effort.

In the 2 1/2 months since the spill began, the gulf has been examined by an armada of researchers -- from federal agencies, universities and nonprofit groups. They have brought back vivid snapshots of a sea under stress: sharks and other deep-water fish suddenly appearing near shore, oil-soaked marshes turning deathly brown, clouds of oil swirling in deep water.

But, with key gaps remaining in their data, there is wide disagreement about the big picture. Some researchers have concluded that the gulf is being spared an ecological disaster. Others think ecosystems that were already in trouble before the spill are now being pushed toward a brink.

"The distribution of the oil, it's bigger and uglier than we had hoped," said Roger Helm, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official and the lead scientist studying the spill for the Interior Department. "The possibility of having significant changes in the food chain, over some period of time, is very real. The possibility of marshes disappearing . . . is very real."

Helm said that his prognosis for the spill had worsened in the past week -- as the amount of oily shoreline increased from Louisiana to Florida, despite cleanup efforts. "This just outstrips everybody's capability" to clean it up, he said.

This research has mainly occurred in the background, as public attention has focused on the "open-heart surgery" at BP's leaking wellhead.

The patient is a 600,000-square-mile sea, which contains swirling currents, sun-baked salt marshes and dark, cold canyons patrolled by sperm whales. Complicating matters is that even before the spill began in late April, the patient was already sick.

In recent years, Louisiana has been losing a football field's worth of its fertile marshes to erosion every 38 minutes. In the gulf itself, pollutants coming from the Mississippi's vast watershed helped feed a low-oxygen "dead zone" bigger than the entire Chesapeake Bay. Measuring the spill's damage, then, requires distinguishing it from the damage done by these other man-made problems.

So far, even the simplest-sounding attempts to measure the spill's impact have turned out to be complex.

The official toll of dead birds is about 1,200, a fraction of the 35,000 discovered after the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. But this, too, has been called into question. Officials can only count the birds they can find, and many think a number of oily birds have sought refuge in the marshes.

"It's an instinctive response: They're hiding from predators while they recover," said Kerry St. Pé, head of a government program that oversees Louisiana's Barataria Bay marshes. "They plan to recover, of course, and they don't. They just die."

Other scientists have focused on more subjective measures of the gulf's health -- not counting the dead, but studying the behavior of wildlife, the movements of oil and the state of larger ecosystems. For them, solid answers are even more elusive.

For example: Is the oil killing off Louisiana's coastal marshes? state officials have said in interviews that they've seen it coating the grasses and mangroves that hold the region's land in place.

"The marsh grasses, the canes, the mangrove are dying. They're stressed and dying now," said Robert Barham, secretary of the state's Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. "There's very visible evidence that the ecosystem is changed."

But Paul Kemp of the National Audubon Society said he flew over the same area and saw a different picture: The oil's damage was relatively small, at least in comparison with the marsh's existing problems.

"Here, we have a patient that's dying of cancer, you know, and now they have a sunburn, too," Kemp said. "What will kill coastal Louisiana is not this oil spill. What will kill coastal Louisiana is what was killing it before this oil spill," including erosion and river-control projects that have reduced the buildup of new land.

Further offshore, federal scientists and university researchers have disagreed about the existence of "plumes" or "clouds" of dissolved or submerged oil. Several educators have reported finding underwater oil dozens of miles from the spill: Sometimes, they reported it was so well dissolved that the water appeared clear. In other situations, they found what they thought to be oil globs the size of golf balls.

Just around the leaking BP wellhead, a Texas A&M University scientist reported finding pockets of water with very low dissolved oxygen. That might be a sign that bacteria were consuming oil from the spill -- but, in the process, the water became suffocating for other sea life.

The government has presented a very different picture of the deep gulf.

An official at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said his agency had found evidence of significant submerged oil -- 1 to 2 parts per million -- from the BP spill only within six miles of the well. In addition, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has said it has not seen "large scale" problems with low dissolved oxygen around the submerged oil in the gulf.

Doug Inkley, senior scientist at the National Wildlife Federation, said he did not think the government had studied these areas well enough yet.

"I've been frustrated with the calm reassurances that we've been receiving, because . . . I don't know what they're based on," Inkley said. In particular, he said he was worried that submerged oil might kill deep-water coral colonies that had grown over the course of centuries.

"Think of going and cutting down a giant Sequoia tree. . . . If these corals are killed, then those areas will be vacant for some time," Inkley said.

For those who study fish -- literally, moving targets -- the data so far are a confusing hash of anecdotes and sightings.

In Sarasota, Fla., scientists found an 11-foot tiger shark, normally an open-water fish, drifting near the surf. That, plus sightings of whale sharks and other creatures outside their normal environmental range, raised concerns that oily water or low oxygen in the central gulf might be driving fish toward land.

"It would be like, to these fish, almost like an island, a huge island rising up in the middle of the gulf," said Bob Hueter of the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota. Seeing this and other strange patterns in fish, Hueter said, "I just, all of a sudden, just felt this impending sense of doom, that the place that I loved was going to be changed in a very dramatic way."

Federal scientists, however, say that they've seen evidence that even plankton -- some of the smallest, most sensitive creatures in the gulf -- are living in the area around the leaking well.

"Right now," said John Valentine, who studies the gulf from the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama, "we should be more impressed by what we don't know than what we do know."

washingtonpost.com

meanwhile, yet another glimpse of the extent of petro-oligarchy:

Quote:

BP has steady sales at Defense Department despite U.S. scrutiny

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 5, 2010; A01

The Defense Department has kept up its immense purchases of aviation fuel and other petroleum products from BP even as the oil company comes under scrutiny for potential violations of federal and state laws related to Gulf of Mexico well explosion, according to U.S. and company officials.

President Obama said last month that the company's "recklessness" in the gulf contributed to the disaster, and he promised that BP will "pay for the damage." Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said on June 2 that Justice Department lawyers were looking into possible violations of civil and criminal statutes. "If we find evidence of illegal behavior, we will be forceful in our response," he said.

BP, meanwhile, remains a heavy supplier of military fuel under contracts worth at least $980 million in the current fiscal year, according to the Defense Logistics Agency. In fiscal 2009, BP was the Pentagon's largest single supplier of fuel, providing 11.7 percent of the total purchased, and in 2010, its contracts amount to roughly the same percentage, according to DLA spokeswoman Mimi Schirmacher.

"BP is an active participant in multiple ongoing Defense Logistics Agency acquisition programs," Schirmacher said, without providing details. BP spokesman Robert Wine said he was aware of at least one "big contract" signed by the U.S. military after the oil rig explosion on April 20, involving the supply of multiple fuels for its operations in Europe.

So far, members of Congress have discussed barring BP from any new oil and gas drilling leases, not from fuel sales to the government. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), who co-chairs the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, said last week that he would introduce legislation to shut BP out of such leases for the next seven years, as punishment for what he described as "serial" legal violations. But Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on oversight and investigations, said in a statement that "the U.S. government needs to look at all possible options when it comes to showing BP, or any corporate bad actor, that a continued culture of cost cutting and increased risk taking will absolutely not be tolerated."

Even before the gulf debacle, the Environmental Protection Agency had begun to explore cutting off BP from all federal contracts -- including those with the Defense Energy Support Center (DESC), which buys all fuel for the military services. The EPA plays the lead role in debarment proceedings related to the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, and its probe was sparked by BP's 2006 oil spill in Alaska and a 2005 explosion at a refinery in Texas.

The EPA's deliberations, however, are suspended until the gulf spill investigations conclude, according to an EPA spokeswoman. The agency may decide to shut off federal contracts with specific divisions within BP, or with the whole company "if it is in the public interest to do so," it said in May. Any such action would be meant to punish "environmental noncompliance or other misconduct," it said.

Jeanne Pascal, a former EPA lawyer who until recently oversaw the review of BP's possible debarment, has said she initially supported taking such action but held off after an official at the Defense Department warned her that the Pentagon depended heavily on BP fuel for its operations in the Middle East. "My contact at DESC, another attorney, told me that BP was supplying approximately 80 percent of the fuel being used to move U.S. forces" in the region, Pascal said. She added that "BP was very fortunate in that there is an exception when the U.S. is involved in a military action or a war."

Pascal then sought a settlement to allow contracting with BP while forcing the company to elevate an internal office dealing with health, safety and environmental issues within its corporate structure. She also demanded that the company keep an ombudsman, retired federal judge Stanley Sporkin, whom BP first hired after the Alaska spill but had sought to let go. BP resisted both demands, and the talks were stalemated when the Deepwater Horizon rig sank, Pascal said.

"At some point, debarment attorneys throughout the government need to look at BP's record," she said. "This is one of the wealthiest corporations in the world. . . . Do we want to do business with this foreign corporation, which has a horrendous record of chronically violating U.S. law? You have to look at the overall behavior pattern."

A spokeswoman for the Defense Department, Wendy L. Snyder, gave a different account of the internal debarment discussions. She said the Defense Logistics Agency "informed the EPA that there are adequate procedures and processes to protect the U.S. military missions should EPA determine that BP should be debarred." That claim was reinforced by Schirmacher, who said that "none of BP's current energy contracts are in direct support of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan" and that the department could meet its requirements without BP fuel. But she indicated that the Pentagon had no intention of taking such action in the absence of an EPA decision.

Wine, the BP spokesman, said that although he is not familiar with details of the company's negotiations with EPA, Sporkin's tenure was extended earlier this year until the middle of 2011. He did not challenge Pascal's claim that BP's health, safety and environmental unit had been moved lower on the corporate structure before the gulf spill, reporting to the head of a business unit instead of directly to the top executive. But, Wine said, "what difference does that make?"

"Safety comes through the organization through every root," he said, and remains "paramount in every part of the business."

Several federal agencies have continuing contracts with BP, although none worth as much as the Pentagon's. Since 2008, the Federal Aviation Administration has contracted to spend at least $2.26 million to station weather, communications and aerial surveillance devices on several BP platforms in the gulf, including the Atlantis oil production platform roughly 100 miles from Deepwater Horizon's former location. Critics, including a former BP contractor, have alleged that the Atlantis was built without proper safety controls, which BP denies.

FAA spokeswoman Laura J. Brown said that BP's environmental and legal record was not a consideration in her agency's contracts. The Atlantis platform was selected "based purely on how it would support air traffic," she said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn.../04/AR20100704 03632.html?hpid=topnews

meanwhile bp tries billing transocean and anadarko for some of the damages.

BP asks oil spill partners to pay $400m | Business | guardian.co.uk

and the weather is not co-operating:

The Oil Drum | BP's Deepwater Oil Spill - July 5 - and Open Thread

and it continues.

roachboy · 07-06-2010, 07:43 AM

if there wasn't already a considerable quantity of information in this thread about the control of information about the gulf i wouldn't post this article simply because of the inflammatory-sounding title.

but read on:

Quote:

The BP/Government police state
ABC/CNN
In June, Adm. Thad Allen told ABC, "Media will have uninhibited access anywhere we're doing operations." The new rule contradicts that statement.

Last week, I interviewed Mother Jones' Mac McClelland, who has been covering the BP oil spill in the Gulf since the first day it happened. She detailed how local police and federal officials work with BP to harass, impede, interrogate and even detain journalists who are covering the impact of the spill and the clean-up efforts. She documented one incident which was particularly chilling of an activist who -- after being told by a local police officer to stop filming a BP facility because "BP didn't want him filming" -- was then pulled over after he left by that officer so he could be interrogated by a BP security official. McClelland also described how BP has virtually bought entire Police Departments which now do its bidding: "One parish has 57 extra shifts per week that they are devoting entirely to, basically, BP security detail, and BP is paying the sheriff's office."

Today, an article that is a joint collaboration between PBS' Frontline and ProPublica reported that a BP refinery in Texas "spewed tens of thousands of pounds of toxic chemicals into the skies" two weeks before the company's rig in the Gulf collapsed. Accompanying that article was this sidebar report:

A photographer taking pictures for these articles, was detained Friday while shooting pictures in Texas City, Texas.

The photographer, Lance Rosenfield, said that shortly after arriving in town, he was confronted by a BP security officer, local police and a man who identified himself as an agent of the Department of Homeland Security. He was released after the police reviewed the pictures he had taken on Friday and recorded his date of birth, Social Security number and other personal information.

The police officer then turned that information over to the BP security guard under what he said was standard procedure, according to Rosenfield.

No charges were filed.

Rosenfield, an experienced freelance photographer, said he was detained shortly after shooting a photograph of a Texas City sign on a public roadway. Rosenfield said he was followed by a BP employee in a truck after taking the picture and blocked by two police cars when he pulled into a gas station.

According to Rosenfield, the officers said they had a right to look at photos taken near secured areas of the refinery, even if they were shot from public property. Rosenfield said he was told he would be "taken in" if he declined to comply.

ProPublica's Paul Steiger said that the reporting team told law enforcement agents that they were working on a deadline for this story about that facility, and that even if DHS agents believed they had a legitimate reason to scrutinize the actions and photographs of this photographer, there was no reason that "should have included sharing them with a representative of a private company."

These are true police state tactics, and it's now clear that it is part of a pattern. It's been documented for months now that BP and government officials have been acting in unison to block media coverage of the area; Newsweek reported this in late May:

As BP makes its latest attempt to plug its gushing oil well, news photographers are complaining that their efforts to document the slow-motion disaster in the Gulf of Mexico are being thwarted by local and federal officials -- working with BP -- who are blocking access to the sites where the effects of the spill are most visible. More than a month into the disaster, a host of anecdotal evidence is emerging from reporters, photographers, and TV crews in which BP and Coast Guard officials explicitly target members of the media, restricting and denying them access to oil-covered beaches, staging areas for clean-up efforts, and even flyovers.

The very idea that government officials are acting as agents of BP (of all companies) in what clearly seem to be unconstitutional acts to intimidate and impede the media is infuriating. Obviously, the U.S. Government and BP share the same interest -- preventing the public from knowing the magnitude of the spill and the inadequacy of the clean-up efforts -- but this creepy police state behavior is intolerable. In this latest case, the journalists were not even focused on the spill itself, but on BP's other potentially reckless behavior with other refineries, and yet there are DHS agents and local police officials acting as BP's personal muscle to detain, interrogate, and threaten a photographer. BP's destructive conduct, and the government's complicity, have slowly faded from public attention, and there clearly seem to be multiple levels of law enforcement devoted to keeping it that way, no matter how plainly illegal their tactics are.

UPDATE: More evidence here (h/t bamage):

Journalists who come too close to oil spill clean-up efforts without permission could find themselves facing a $40,000 fine and even one to five years in prison under a new rule instituted by the Coast Guard late last week.

It's a move that outraged observers have decried as an attack on First Amendment rights. And CNN's Anderson Cooper describes the new rules as making it "very easy to hide incompetence or failure". . . .

[S]ince "oil spill response operations" apparently covers much of the clean-up effort on the beaches, CNN's [] Cooper describes the rule as banning reporters from "anywhere we need to be" . . . .

A "willful" violation of the new rule could result in Class D felony charges, which carry a penalty of one to five years in prison under federal law.

The new rule appears to contradict the promises made by Adm. Thad Allen, the official leading the Coast Guard's response to the oil spill.

"Media will have uninhibited access anywhere we're doing operations, except for two things, if it's a security or safety problem," Allen told ABC News in June. . . .

"[T]o create a blanket rule that everyone has to stay 65 feet away from boom and boats, that doesn't sound like transparency," [said Cooper].

The rule has come under severe criticism not only from journalists but from observers and activists involved in the Gulf Coast clean-up.

"With this, the Gulf Coast cleanup operation has now entered a weird Orwellian reality where the news is shaped, censored and controlled by the government in order to prevent the public from learning the truth about what's really happening," writes Mike Adams at NaturalNews. . . .

Reporters have been complaining for weeks about BP, the Department of Homeland Security and the Coast Guard working to keep reporters away from wrenching images of oil-covered birds and oil-soaked beaches.

We've frequently heard excuses that the Federal Government has little power to do anything to BP, but they certainly seem to have ample power to do a great deal for them. Public indifference about such things is the by-product of those who walk around like drones repeating the mantra that political officials know what's best about what must be kept secret, and that the Threat of Terrorism (which is what is exploited to justify such acts) means we must meekly acquiesce to such powers in the name of Staying Safe.

UPDATE II: From The New York Times, June 9, 2010:

Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials.

To some critics of the response effort by BP and the government, instances of news media being kept at bay are just another example of a broader problem of officials’ filtering what images of the spill the public sees.

This is clearly a deliberate and systematic pattern of preventing access and coverage that has been going on since the beginning of the spill. And, as we find in so many realms, it's impossible to know where government actions end and corporate actions begin because the line basically does not exist.

The BP/Government police state - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

back in the day, a marxist analysis of capitalism would use crisis as a device for seeing--that is for selecting and ordering information about the nature of the dominant structures---and that's been one of the main things i've been interested in so far about the gulf disaster---the extent to which through it we can see the structures that shape the ambient, the taken-for-granted, structures which in alot of cases are kinda new and have taken shape over a generation dominated by reactionary-to-neofascist politics of information control and paranoia coupled with a disastrously blinkered view of political economy.

while we were being entertained a strange new world of infotainment management has taken shape. welcome to it. look around. private control is a radical collapse of the space of political freedom. its a fun domination though. commodities are cheap and we can buy them so we must be free.

welcome to the world.

aceventura3 · 07-06-2010, 07:47 AM

The line between BP and the government covering thing up get pretty thin. We can expect BP to do what they do to minimize the damage, but why does our government do this?

YouTube - First Amendment Has been Suspended

roachboy · 07-06-2010, 08:40 AM

because, ace, the state and corporations on the scale of bp are aspects of the same system. they operate symbiotically. the maintain each other. this is reality. there is no opposition between the private sector and the state. never has been. the state developed as a mechanism for externalization of costs on the one side and production of consent on the other (a governor in the sense of something that limits how fast a motor can go on the one side, a system of social reproduction on the other).

it's about opinion management, really.
control the frame of reference people think through you control their world.

it's bad for bidness when capitalism fucks up so badly that it can't be fixed in an easy peasy way. it's bad for bidness when a crisis persists and the outlines of the actually existing order start to become obvious.

ring · 07-06-2010, 10:05 AM

That's why radio might be a lasting bastion for info,
but:

I believe the next WRC conference will be a Hoppin' Muscle Fest.

http://www.itu.int/net/itunews/issues/2009/08/36.aspx

Now where did I store that roll of copper wire?

06-24-2010, 05:51 AM	#448 (permalink)
Cimarron29414 Still Free Location: comfortably perched at the top of the bell curve!	What sort of jackass government licensing board thinks it is safer to drill two miles down, and then 8 miles horizontally than just positioning the rig directly over the oil?!?! I mean, if you are going to let them drill, let them drill directly for it - the safest possible way! If they can't prove they can repair a leak in < 24 hours at the proposed drilling depth, then the answer is "No." Watch how fast R & D spins up a solution, then! __________________ Gives a man a halo, does mead. "Here lies The_Jazz: Killed by an ambitious, sparkly, pink butterfly."

06-28-2010, 12:22 PM	#456 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	gee, ace, i don't know what you're all in a snit about. i'm just trying to figure out what the term "bp" refers to. it's an interestingly decentered operation that's destroying the gulf of mexico as a result of the manly man way in which it tried to make boatloads of money. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

06-28-2010, 01:03 PM	#458 (permalink)
Ourcrazymodern? still, wondering. Location: South Minneapolis, somewhere near the gorgeous gorge	You're making me cry. I can taste blood. This boondoggle resulted from our belief in the almighty dollar, multiplied by seeing no need to earn it. Corporations aren't people. I have doubts about people who see money as truth. As usual, what's going to happen is outside our control. Is that what makes us so desperate to tell ourselves we know what's going on? Our resident bacteria do. Have you tickets to the gulf yet? __________________ BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

06-28-2010, 01:05 PM	#459 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	it's funny how unencumbered by problems of ethics and law your cheerleading for capitalism allows you to be, ace. attempting to corner a market in commodity futures--not a problem. markets magically correct. fraud is a distortion introduced by an irrational state and made into a Problem by a hysterical media apparatus. and none of its necessary because of the mystical self-regulating capability of magickal markets framed through the circular magickal thinking of cheerleaders like yourself. whatever. here's a strategy document from march in which bp indicates just how big a deal deepwater drilling is (was?) for it's long-term strategy: BP Strategy Presentation, March 2010 \| ProPublica the hall of mirrors: BP Document: Big Plans for Deepwater Drilling - ProPublica BP 'staked future on expanding offshore drilling' \| Environment \| The Guardian __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

06-28-2010, 01:37 PM	#460 (permalink)
Ourcrazymodern? still, wondering. Location: South Minneapolis, somewhere near the gorgeous gorge	His cheerleading seems to have gotten your goat. It HAS NOT diminished your conduit. __________________ BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

06-22-2010, 02:47 AM	#441 (permalink)
filtherton Junkie Location: In the land of ice and snow.	The problem seems to be that the ecology of business is fucking up the ecology of the planet. Maybe the idea is that if we can just use the same terms it will be easier to convince ourselves that it's okay to poison parts of our planet for money? Sorry, your honor, but this state's speed limit laws are fucking up the ecosystem of my afternoon commute. And OH NO! the oil companies might take their rigs and go home! Somehow I suspect that the ecosystem of the oil industry would have them back ASAP (or someone else would take their place).

06-22-2010, 11:03 AM	#444 (permalink)
wing870 Upright	Its just so sad that greed leads to such a huge mess.

06-28-2010, 03:33 PM	#461 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	ace just says goofy things. they rarely if ever actually get to me, that is to the person who drives the roachboy machine. anyway, here's a link to the ongoing collection of stories about the oil disaster from the new orleans times-picayune: Oil Spill Gulf of Mexico 2010 - NOLA.com which updates quite frequently. meanwhile out in another sector of the bp fiasco: BP Oil Disaster Costs U.S. State Pensions $1.4 Billion in Value - Bloomberg the article is a list of various pension funds which had invested in bp stock and the amounts each has lost. i still think it's lunacy that pension funds are allowed to play anything more risky than long-term bonds with peoples retirement money. you know, little people, the ones who are always fucked over when things go south. my suspicion has long been that pension funds were allowed to start playing the market as a function of the professionalization of investment advising/spread of computer technologies and as an attempt to purchase social solidarity by tying the interests of working people directly into the fluctuations of stock prices. the fordist idea transposed to a post-industrial reality. and so long as the various forms of bubble creation created conditions that gave the impression that growth was a steady state, the lunacy of this idea could be forgotten about. but here it is again. bad idea. bad policy. bad outcomes. but i digress. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

06-30-2010, 09:56 AM	#467 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	right. in the way that union carbide did not walk away from bhopal. in the way that royal dutch shell did not walk away from the niger river delta. it never happens. capitalism is wonderful. ask the people who live in the delta or bhopal. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

06-30-2010, 10:43 AM	#469 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	ace: don't waste my time with union carbide sourced material on this. but do feel free to start other threads in which you worship whichever captain of industry you like. Business & Human Rights : Union Carbide/Dow lawsuit (re Bhopal) CorpWatchomgmgPartial Chronology of Union Carbide's Bhopal Disaster Bhopal Justice Page[COLOR="DarkSlateGray"] __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 06-30-2010 at 10:45 AM..

06-30-2010, 11:58 AM	#470 (permalink)
Willravel ... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.	There are some topics so disgusting, so horrifying, and so evil that I can't bring myself to really think about them. I feel like if I start looking into the utter destruction of ecosystems or the mass burning of sea turtles or the lies about the size and number of leaks or the hundreds of thousands of people suddenly out of work or the soon-to-be negligent homicides of countless people that will be poisoned and then come to the conclusion that the people responsible knew full well how dangerous these risks were when they decided against necessary safety steps, I'm going to fucking kill someone. I'm not a violent person, in fact I consider myself basically pacifistic. I don't hit back in unavoidable fights and I capture spiders from my home so I can let them free outside. I don't want to become something other than nonviolent, so I can't think about the oil spill. Maybe that makes me a coward.

07-06-2010, 08:40 AM	#479 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	because, ace, the state and corporations on the scale of bp are aspects of the same system. they operate symbiotically. the maintain each other. this is reality. there is no opposition between the private sector and the state. never has been. the state developed as a mechanism for externalization of costs on the one side and production of consent on the other (a governor in the sense of something that limits how fast a motor can go on the one side, a system of social reproduction on the other). it's about opinion management, really. control the frame of reference people think through you control their world. it's bad for bidness when capitalism fucks up so badly that it can't be fixed in an easy peasy way. it's bad for bidness when a crisis persists and the outlines of the actually existing order start to become obvious. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

07-06-2010, 10:05 AM	#480 (permalink)
ring ░ Location: ❤	That's why radio might be a lasting bastion for info, but: I believe the next WRC conference will be a Hoppin' Muscle Fest. http://www.itu.int/net/itunews/issues/2009/08/36.aspx Now where did I store that roll of copper wire?