Academia, Environment, Science, Society, Torts

Spill, Baby, Spill: White House Remains Committed To Off-Shore Drilling Plan As Spill Destroys Gulf Coast

The White House is under attack on its plan to open up areas for drilling off the East Coast — a plan long opposed by environmentalists and now attracting renewed criticism with the growing disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

The spill is now believed to exceed the Exxon Valdez but some experts — gushing 200,000 gallons a day, here.

The first lawsuits by fishermen have been filed over the devastation to the Gulf. The White House is reportedly reconsidering its plan to open up sensitive areas off the East Coast to drilling. It appears that it only takes a massive environmental disaster to get the Obama Administration to reconsider such plans. Hypothetical examples of a massive oil spill from an oil rig a few weeks ago were viewed as simply too speculative by the Administration.

UPDATE: After first defending the policy, the White House is now saying that the disaster was sufficient to get it to take the new drilling off the table — at least for the moment, here.

111 thoughts on “Spill, Baby, Spill: White House Remains Committed To Off-Shore Drilling Plan As Spill Destroys Gulf Coast”

  3. here is some information on the event from someone on the rig at the time. he appears to know what he is talking about from my knowledge of the oil industry. The rig had a BOP on the ocean floor which would have had to have been connected to the rig floor and probably to the control room of the rig itself.

    http://www.marklevinshow.com/Article.asp?id=1790422&spid=32364

    info on rig:

    http://www.deepwater.com/fw/main/Deepwater-Horizon-56C17.html?LayoutID=17

    Mike Papantonio, in my opinion, is nothing but a charlatan looking for a big payday. He also appears to be a political hack or someone who understands that the way to agitate the masses is to blame Bush and Cheney.

    I used to work for TransOcean and all the people I knew were well trained and we had constant training and safety drills for all aspects of rig safety. It was a good paying job and that company put many people to work. This was an accident in my opinion and it is a shame that it will be used by the Obama administration to shut down offshore drilling.

    Certainly the shrimpers and other people who make a living on the Gulf have a right to sue BP and TransOcean but Papantonio is nothing but an ambulance chaser. But he will be rich by the end of this. To bad he has a political/environmental ax to grind as well.

    “In Western Europe, in the preindustrial Middle Ages, man’s life expectancy was 30 years. In the nineteenth century, Europe’s population grew by 300 percent—which is the best proof of the fact that for the first time in human history, industry gave the great masses of people a chance to survive.

    If it were true that a heavy concentration of industry is destructive to human life, one would find life expectancy declining in the more advanced countries. But it has been rising steadily. Here are the figures on life expectancy in the United States (from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company):

    1900—47.3 years
    1920—53 years
    1940—60 years
    1968—70.2 years
    [2010-78.2 years wiki]

    Anyone over 30 years of age today, give a silent “Thank you” to the nearest, grimiest, sootiest smokestacks you can find.”

    “The Anti-Industrial Revolution,”
    Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 278

  4. Some of you might remember the explosion of the Piper Alpha offshore platform in 1988, 110 miles from Scotland killing 167 men. That was 22 years ago and we still have not learned all of the lessons of safety violations that occurred that day.

    Please watch the 3-Part video series of the safety violations, death, and distruction if you want to get another perspective of the dangers associated with Offshore oil/gas drilling. (I viewed these videos for the first time yesterday)

    Part 1 follows (Part 2 & 3 are easy to find on YouTube)

  5. Bdaman said:

    “I’m still trying to figure out what MSUT is.”

    It’s called a typo. While I try to avoid them, I don’t obsessively proofread my posts (except on the 9/11 thread…).

    Sorry I forgot to add this to my statement 🙂

    I knew what it was, was just trying to pull your strings. BTW I still like you. 🙂

  6. From Video Café, 4/30/2010
    Papantonio: Thank Dick Cheney and His Meetings With Oil Industry Execs for Lack of Safeguards on Oil Rigs

    Excerpt:
    Papantonio laid the blame squarely in Dick Cheney’s lap and said this was one of the deregulations of the energy industry that was negotiated during his secret meetings with oil industry and other energy executives during George Bush’s first term in office and called this the biggest under-reported aspect of this disaster. It would be nice if the media would look into this and start asking some more questions about why these companies were allowed not to have this last resort safeguard. I’m not holding my breath with most of them but maybe we’ll see more information on this from the likes of Amy Goodman, Ed Schultz, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.

    http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/papantonio-thank-dick-cheney-and-his-meeti

    The post includes a segment from the Ed Show with the host interviewing Mike Papantonio.

  7. Slarti,

    As John Astin once said, “Shoot low, Sheriff. They may be riding Shetlands.”

  8. Bdaman said:

    “I’m still trying to figure out what MSUT is.”

    It’s called a typo. While I try to avoid them, I don’t obsessively proofread my posts (except on the 9/11 thread…).

    And my point about homeland security regarding this as a terrorist attack until proven otherwise doesn’t mean the same goes for you – as Buddha just pointed out.

    Buddha,

    Thanks for mentioning Ockham’s razor – I’m a little gunshy from the lengths to which I had to go to justify the last time I casually used the term…

  9. bdaman I misread your post. I thought you were blaming eco-terrorists. Sorry

  10. A little Joni Mitchell for the Drill, Baby, Drill “who-cares-about-the-environment” crowd:
    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWwUJH70ubM&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

  11. Smom,

    Oil rigs are inherently dangerous and complex pieces of machinery. More parts always means more room for error. While prudence merits an investigation, application of Occam’s Razor suggests simple mechanical or other systems failure and/or human error as the most likely cause as in all industrial accidents.

    Mark this as one of the very few time I have agreed with bdaman (even though he’s agreeing with Slarti whom I am often in agreement with).

  12. Oh Hi Dr. Slarti nice timing

    Slartibartfast 1, May 1, 2010 at 11:24 am

    Bdaman 1, May 1, 2010 at 11:24 am

    🙂

  13. No Swathmore Mom, it is a theory in which it can not be discounted at the moment, hence the action by the president to dispatch Swat Teams to the rigs. As Dr, Slarti has pointed out.

    Secretary Napolitano MSUT assume that this was an act of terrorism until it is proved otherwise – to do anything else would be negligent on her part.

    I’m still trying to figure out what MSUT is.

  14. Bdaman,

    As I pointed out earlier, the authorities must assume that this was an act of terrorism until they can prove otherwise. I think that the probability of terrorism (at least eco-terrorism) in this case is very low. I doubt that fervent eco-terrorists would create a spill that will cause massive ecological damage to the Gulf of Mexico. The hypothesis that the continuing leak is a product of lax and malfunctioning safety equipment (in the largely self-regulated offshore drilling industry) seems much more likely (whatever the cause of the original explosion – and, by the way, explosions are not exactly unheard of in the oil industry…).

  15. bdaman Is that the right wing spin on this? I guess oil companies never do anything wrong. Al Gore was right.

  16. The explosion occurred on April 21st, the day before “Earth Day.

    Al Gore had previously encouraged environmental nutjobs to engage in civil disobedience against the construction of coal plants that don’t have carbon capture technology. “Eco-terrorists” exist and have done millions of dollars worth of criminal damage. Fire is one of the main tools of their evil trade.

    The platform exploded, despite redundant safety features, plus something apparently also happened on the Gulf floor at the opening of the well to prevent engineers from being able to stop the flow of oil from it.

    The timing was just too “coincidental” for various reasons such as the recent Russian Cuban joint drilling agreement in the Gulf. I don’t know what the truth is behind this terrible event, but I’m certain it’s more than what we’re being told. At least Obama has sent Swat Teams to all other rigs.

  17. The poster asserting the continued felininity of Woosty,

    What I’m doing is more ‘basic research’ (an attempt to understand the biology) than something with applications to dialysis, but a post-doc in my advisor’s group was building a model of dialysis in an attempt to make it more efficient (which, having had a friend on dialysis – he’s since gotten a kidney transplant, would be a mercy to a great many people dependent on this technology).

    The picture you linked is very cool – if I had to guess I’d say it was a Julia set over the quaternions (the 4 dimensional analog to the complex numbers) with one dimension suppressed and the remaining 3 dimensions projected into the plane. For my money, the father of fractal geometry was Henri Poincare (or Gaston Julia and Pierre Fatou). These guys understood how cool this stuff was before you could generate the images on computers… I’ve been fascinated by fractal geometry and chaos theory since high school (and know a great deal about it – I studied ergodic theory with a student of Smale for several years). I even have my own fractal (an image of the Newton’s method basins of attraction for the characteristic equation of my coupled time-delayed hyperbolic PDE system). I’ll send you a copy of it if you send me an email (my address is (first name)@(last name).net – you can find my name on the link I posted at 1:37 am).

    As far as I can tell neither my advisor nor his advisor (also on my thesis committee) have any demonic traits. As for me, you’ll have to judge for yourself…

    J Smith,

    I agree. We need to reclaim the manufacturing ability to make wind turbines and other green technologies (it’s a national security issue). We should also put more money into controlled fusion research – in my opinion the technology with the best chance of generating enough clean power to make burning fossil fuels obsolete.

    Marxwasright,

    I say let’s continue to ignore the problem until we’ve managed to extinguish most of the biodiversity of the planet and turn it into a poisonous cesspool of our own waste. All that’s standing in our way are people who are willing to face up to the consequences of our actions…

  18. It seems to me that now we have no choice. After the mining disaster and this oil spill, we have to get off of coal and oil. This filthy stuff is killing us. We will be forced into wind farms and solar electricity. Like we are being pushed into financial reform – we must deal with this or it will totally ruin us.

  19. ‘I did my thesis research on (and continue doing research on) the effects of coupling two copies of a mathematical model of chloride concentration in a single nephron (the functional unit of the kidney). ‘

    I’ll take c.; application in dialysis?…final answer 😉
    _____
    ‘I barely grasped the differential and retreated at the integral,’

    I still haven’t a clue really, but it has a lovely poetic meter and I may have to go paint a picture later…maybe like this one:http://www.neatorama.com/2008/01/10/mandelbrot-fractal-art-contest/
    _____
    ‘Leibniz advised Malebranche who advised Bernoulli who advised Bernoulli who advised Euler …’

    Thirteen demons known as the Malebranche, “Evil Claws”, guard the fifth bolgia of the Malebolge. Their leader is Malacoda (“evil tail”), while the others are Scarmiglione (“ruffle-haired”), Barbariccia (“curly beard”), Alichino (derived from Arlecchino, the harlequin), Calcabrina (“one who walks on brine”)…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malebolge

    OH! Scusa! I have opined the wrong door by most unintentional mistake…scusa, carry on…[running away with hair afire….]

  20. Wootsy what the professor from UF is saying is a very probable scenario. When looking at the image it brings it all home. I thought the video and the words to the song I posted is appropriate. I now live about 45 minutes from Atlantic Beach where I grew up. It’s known as the arm pit of the East Coast. It is the furthest point away from the Gulf Stream on the East Coast of the U.S. Where are you if I may ask.

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