Environment, Politics, Society

Drill, Baby, Drill

As expected, President Obama is planning to lift the drilling moratorium and to return to his planned drilling program off pristine areas of the East Coast. While Obama is no longer claiming that oil rigs really do not spill much, it really does not matter much. Bureau head Michael Bromwich has announced that the six-month ban is unlikely to be renewed in a blow to environmentalists. One lasting change? The Obama Administration changed the name of the scandal-laden Minerals Management Service to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.


The Administration has been putting on a full court press with officials expressing relief that they can find no large amounts of oil left — brushing over the millions of gallons of toxic chemicals that they allowed BP to dump into the ocean to disperse the oil. Experts have objected that the Obama Administration has been actively downplaying research showing these chemicals remain in the food chain for many years. Administration officials have said that the health impact of these chemicals remains uncertain — leading others to question the decision to dump millions of gallons into the ocean.

The recent public offensive appears calculated in part to lift the ban. In the ultimate example of “out of sight out of mind,” Bromwich insists that he can “see no information so far that would justify extending the moratorium.”

Source: CNN

280 thoughts on “Drill, Baby, Drill”

  1. SM:

    Still unindicted, but still under investigation, I believe. Probably still working for Shell.

  8. Jill–

    “Yes indeed, if Bush had done this people would have been in his shit, but not to worry, Obama did it, so everything’s just fine. I’ve completely changed my ethics now that the new brand is in office.

    “Here’s a story for people who think right and wrong still matter, everyone else, just ignore reality please, or use distraction and talk about the tea bag menace. Whatever you do, don’t think about what Obama is actually doing and evaluate that, because it just means you’re on drugs.”

    **********

    I don’t think that’s what most of us here are saying. I think we’re just starting to get at the truth of the matter about the cover-up of the negative impact of the Gulf oil spill…about what’s been happening to journalists and scientists. You may believe most of us have changed our ethics–but I don’t think that is so.

    I believe there are lots of liberals/progressives who have spoken out about some of the things that the Obama administration has done/not done. Why do you think Robert Gibbs has been complaining about the “professional left?”

  9. Jill,

    That seems a little odd being placed as a comment to a post criticizing President Obama.

    Slarti,

    I think you might get a kick out of Lem’s “The Chain of Chance.” Especially as an avid science fiction fan (It’s not science fiction, but Lem might very well be my favorite Science fiction author).

  10. I am sure you are very familiar with Packing Mud

    you mean Mud Packin, there’s a difference between the two.

    When your Packin Mud it’s like Packin Heat, except you walk Bow legged.

    Mud Packin is, well, you know.

  11. re: percentages

    It isn’t just an exercise in randomness of course. If you turn off the alarms so people can sleep it raises the odds.

    So even if it happens once, you want to check to see what else they were doing to cut corners, and then check the other guys to see if they are doing the same or worse.

    The idea that you should just take people’s word that everything is hunkydory shows an unrealistically sunny view of human nature.

  12. Byron:

    “How much of this has to do with the political climate in Africa and the influence that money has in the form of bribes?”

    100% It is entirely about bribes, which don’t just make corrupt politicians rich, but are what keep corrupt governments in power. I’m not sure if this is what you meant, but the source of the corruption is the oil industry. Who else would it be?

    What bribes really do is make the government an agent of the oil company, so the government never does anything which might harm the oil company’ economic interests. Therefore there is zero environmental protection. This is, uncontroversially, what happened in Nigeria.

    To the extent the US government becomes a corrupt agent of the oil companies, the same thing happens here. Money talks. It’s always a matter of degree. In the case of offshore drilling licenses issued by the “scandal-laden Minerals Management Service” the degree of corruption seems to have been, as in Nigeria, 100%

    What we have in the US, because the corrupting power of corporate money is not yet absolute as it is in Nigeria, is some chance to push back against the propaganda, and against the political influence, that corporate money buys. If that ability to pushback, or the will to use it, isn’t there, then we end up living in Nigeria.

    (I find these long posts a bit much sometimes, but I figure everybody here is a lawyer so they aren’t even a light snack, verbiage wise.)

  13. Byron 1, August 11, 2010 at 3:01 pm

    Tony C:

    the analogy was in punishing all for the actions of one. The probability of a major spill, based on historical evidence, is very small. Zero if you take out the Mexican spill. Granted I suppose you could give each well a probability but how do you come to the probability with no data points? You can flip a coin a hundred times and determine heads and tails, but you are still basing your probability on experience. Isn’t all statistics based on historical outcomes? And don’t you need a data set of something to compare to?

    ————————————————–

    Wow. How does one look at the situation and say “if we ignore the examples of event x actually occurring, then the probability of event x occurring in the future is 0”?

    Here’s a nice, if incomplete, list of oil spills:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills

    That’s all types: ruptured pipelines, crashed tankers, failed storage tanks, and, yes, a bunch of underwater drilling rigs that failed.

    The lessons here are:
    – underwater wells DO blow out
    – when they do, the spills are very hard to stop
    – when spills happen, they cause lots of damage
    – we really don’t have the technology or methods to reduce the harm when the spills happen

    Try as hard as you might to confuse yourself looking at particular trees, there is a forest here.

    Even if the odds of any one particular well blowing is low, if we increase the number of wells, then we obviously increase the odds of another blown well.

    If we had spent the last 30 years developing really good methods for capping wells and cleaning up the spilled oil, then we’d be having a totally different conversation. But as it stands, we now know that we are essentially defenseless when a well does blow, therefore it’s nuts to drill more wells that we really don’t need.

  15. Jill Are you still celebrating from last night? The tea party beat those republican chamber of commerce types. Still take Obama over your tea party.

  16. Yes indeed, if Bush had done this people would have been in his shit, but not to worry, Obama did it, so everything’s just fine. I’ve completely changed my ethics now that the new brand is in office.

    Here’s a story for people who think right and wrong still matter, everyone else, just ignore reality please, or use distraction and talk about the tea bag menace. Whatever you do, don’t think about what Obama is actually doing and evaluate that, because it just means you’re on drugs.

    “It’s tempting to believe that the Gulf spill, like so many disasters inherited by Obama, was the fault of the Texas oilman who preceded him in office. But, though George W. Bush paved the way for the catastrophe, it was Obama who gave BP the green light to drill. “Bush owns eight years of the mess,” says Rep. Darrell Issa, a Republican from California. “But after more than a year on the job, Salazar owns it too.”

    During the Bush years, the Minerals Management Service, the agency in the Interior Department charged with safeguarding the environment from the ravages of drilling, descended into rank criminality. According to reports by Interior’s inspector general, MMS staffers were both literally and figuratively in bed with the oil industry. When agency staffers weren’t joining industry employees for coke parties or trips to corporate ski chalets, they were having sex with oil-company officials. But it was American taxpayers and the environment that were getting screwed. MMS managers were awarded cash bonuses for pushing through risky offshore leases, auditors were ordered not to investigate shady deals, and safety staffers routinely accepted gifts from the industry, allegedly even allowing oil companies to fill in their own inspection reports in pencil before tracing over them in pen.

    “The oil companies were running MMS during those years,” Bobby Maxwell, a former top auditor with the agency, told Rolling Stone last year. “Whatever they wanted, they got. Nothing was being enforced across the board at MMS.”

    Salazar himself has worked hard to foster the impression that the “prior administration” is to blame for the catastrophe. In reality, though, the Obama administration was fully aware from the outset of the need to correct the lapses at MMS that led directly to the disaster in the Gulf. In fact, Obama specifically nominated Salazar – his “great” and “dear” friend – to force the department to “clean up its act.” For too long, Obama declared, Interior has been “seen as an appendage of commercial interests” rather than serving the people. “That’s going to change under Ken Salazar.”

    Salazar took over Interior in January 2009, vowing to restore the department’s “respect for scientific integrity.” He immediately traveled to MMS headquarters outside Denver and delivered a beat-down to staffers for their “blatant and criminal conflicts of interest and self-dealing” that had “set one of the worst examples of corruption and abuse in government.” Promising to “set the standard for reform,” Salazar declared, “The American people will know the Minerals Management Service as a defender of the taxpayer. You are the ones who will make special interests play by the rules.” Dressed in his trademark Stetson and bolo tie, Salazar boldly proclaimed, “There’s a new sheriff in town.”

    Salazar’s early moves certainly created the impression that he meant what he said. Within days of taking office, he jettisoned the Bush administration’s plan to open 300 million acres – in Alaska, the Gulf, and up and down both coasts – to offshore drilling. The proposal had been published in the Federal Register literally at midnight on the day that Bush left the White House. Salazar denounced the plan as “a headlong rush of the worst kind,” saying it would have put in place “a process rigged to force hurried decisions based on bad information.” Speaking to Rolling Stone in March 2009, the secretary underscored his commitment to reform. “We have embarked on an ambitious agenda to clean up the mess,” he insisted. “We have the inspector general involved with us in a preventive mode so that the department doesn’t commit the same mistakes of the past.” The crackdown, he added, “goes beyond just codes of ethics.”

    Except that it didn’t. Salazar did little to tamp down on the lawlessness at MMS, beyond referring a few employees for criminal prosecution and ending a Bush-era program that allowed oil companies to make their “royalty” payments – the amount they owe taxpayers for extracting a scarce public resource – not in cash but in crude. And instead of putting the brakes on new offshore drilling, Salazar immediately throttled it up to record levels. Even though he had scrapped the Bush plan, Salazar put 53 million offshore acres up for lease in the Gulf in his first year alone – an all-time high. The aggressive leasing came as no surprise, given Salazar’s track record. “This guy has a long, long history of promoting offshore oil drilling – that’s his thing,” says Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. “He’s got a highly specific soft spot for offshore oil drilling.” As a senator, Salazar not only steered passage of the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act, which opened 8 million acres in the Gulf to drilling, he even criticized President Bush for not forcing oil companies to develop existing leases faster.

    Salazar was far less aggressive, however, when it came to making good on his promise to fix MMS. Though he criticized the actions of “a few rotten apples” at the agency, he left long-serving lackeys of the oil industry in charge. “The people that are ethically challenged are the career managers, the people who come up through the ranks,” says a marine biologist who left the agency over the way science was tampered with by top officials. “In order to get promoted at MMS, you better get invested in this pro-development oil culture.” One of the Bush-era managers whom Salazar left in place was John Goll, the agency’s director for Alaska. Shortly after, the Interior secretary announced a reorganization of MMS in the wake of the Gulf disaster, Goll called a staff meeting and served cake decorated with the words “Drill, baby, drill.” from Rolling Stone via Glenn Greenwald. Oh, and don’t forget we’re trying a person we picked up as a child and tortured. Yes indeed, that Obama is the best Republican president ever.

  17. Byron,

    You’re missing my point (and by your logic the odds would be zero since the engine didn’t fail, the O-ring in the SRB did). The probability of engine failure on a mission is a number between 0 and 1 (presumably less than 1 since failure didn’t occur on any shuttle mission). The engineers ESTIMATED this number as 1:300 (presumably based on their knowledge of the engines) while the managers ESTIMATED the same number as 1:100,000. Statistics and probability are two separate things – you handicap yourself if you use statistics as the only means of estimating probabilities. Also, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find a similar engineer/management split in estimating probability present in BP since management thought the odds of a spill were zero (the engineers were thus either incompetent or they must have thought differently).

  18. Dredd:

    “Now that Iraq will become the number one oil producer in the world soon, do you think the war was not really about oil now?”

    does that mean we can get paid back with interest now?

  19. Slarti:

    I personally think BP has some issues and should be temporarily restrained from drilling in the US until they can determine what went wrong and whether it is a systemic problem with BP’s operations or just a tragic accident.

    The Challenger odds were 1:1. But there is no real way to determine the odds of something that hasn’t happened. Mr. Spoke excepted. I think it is an educated guess rather than probability. With coin flips you have some way to measure the odds, with BP it is based on the opinions of experts. As your post demonstrates the odds were actually 1:1 not 1:300 or 1:100,000. The engineers and managers were engaging in speculation not probability.

  20. YISSIL:

    Thank you for that information. I was focusing on the US and Gulf area since this has to do with drilling in our territorial waters. I believe the environmental record in the US is pretty good, this spill notwithstanding.

    I also think oil companies should be good stewards of the environment and need to remediate well sites once they are finished drilling. There really is no excuse for soiling someone else’s nest.

    How much of this has to do with the political climate in Africa and the influence that money has in the form of bribes?

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