Remember those oil rigs that President Obama assured us really do not cause spills? Well another one just exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. The explosion of the rig 80 miles off the Louisiana coast further undermines Obama’s insistence on lifting the long moratorium on drilling off our East Coast.
The platform is owner by Mariner Energy of Houston. The rig was not producing oil or gas at the time but it is unclear if there was a spill with this explosion. However, there are reports of a spreading oil spill around the rig. Other reports state that there were four or five active wells on the rig. Update: There are conflicting reports on the sighting of a spill from the explosion.
The Administration is committed to opening up the coast to drilling — even arguing for weeks that the oil from the BP spill had mysteriously disappeared until outside groups pointing to a huge 22-mile-long oil plume under the water.
Despite the President’s assurances, there have been other leaks at rigs — an inconvenient fact for the Administration.
Source: Miami Herald
Thus proving the shortsightedness and egocentric nature of capitalism.
FFN:
my compassion extends to the people who lost their lives and the ones who have lost their livelihoods for the immediate future, I could care a less about a brown pelican or a blue crab.
I didn’t make a generalization, you did. He was obviously deranged.
If I were that Imam I would not build it there but then I am not him.
As for oil field workers, they know the risks of working offshore. They choose to do it and take the risks. It is generally safe but sometimes it isn’t. You can be hit by a car walking across the street, do you quit walking across the street?
“They must be curtailed. They will be curtailed. A revolution in consciousness is slowly but surely taking place in the minds of the masses to an extend that one day in the not too distent future the most endangered of all species will be capitalist pigs.”
Wow, I guess that’s why most of the world is embracing capitalism after about 150 years of the utter failure of Marxist principles. Can I have some of what you are smoking Karl?
”
why is this a problem? accidents happen all the time. Three Mile Island pretty much shut down nuclear power in this country for no good reason. So a little oil gets spilled and a few birds die. What about the people that depend on the good jobs oil companies provide? Save the birds screw the people?
I think the Discovery Channel bomber thought that way.
”
Wow… just… wow. I could not imagine a more callous, ignorant statement. Let’s remember all the people that died on the Deepwater Horizon — they can’t very well enjoy their “good jobs” now, can they? To say nothing of all the fishermen, etc. that lost their jobs because of the disaster. Or all the cleanup workers suffering health problems. Or, yes, the birds. Or the fish, turtles, and whatever other remnants of the ecosystem didn’t manage to survive the disaster — all very conducive to human existence, as others on this thread have pointed out.
Is there no tragedy that you won’t downplay, Byron? Have you no empathy whatsoever?
I almost feel like invoking Godwin’s Law on you with that “Discovery Channel bomber” comment — it’s such a ridiculous generalization. Just because one environmentalist is nuts does not mean all environmentalists are nuts. (I, for one, count myself as someone who deeply cares about the health of the earth.) There’s a very sharp distinction to be drawn between one’s motives and one’s actions. I suppose you also think that the Cordoba House project should be opposed because it is a project headed by Muslims who, after all, are all murderous terrorists. It’s science.
KF,
Seriously man. You’ve been on fire lately. You are very correct that industry versus nature is not a zero sum game.
Byron,
“people don’t need to be interconnected to most of the natural world, we can make our own environment and grow our own food.”
That’s simply wrong. We might be able to some day in the future, but not right now. The closest we have come is the limited success of the Biosphere 2 project and even then they had to change it from a closed system to a flow through system. Read that as “dependent upon imports from nature”. Today we as a species are very dependent upon the natural world and its complex interacting open flow through systems.
Our modern agricultural processes, productive as they are, damage the environment. Without them, people would starve en masse. As it is, pesticide and herbicide run off are killing and mutating amphibians and fish and poisoning what was once potable water with minimal or no treatment. The deforestation of South America is destroying one of the most biodiverse areas on the planet and killing species that have been evolving for untold millennium that could hold cures for disease or chemical processes that could replace toxic processes currently in use.
“The web of life has nodes that act as guardians, in other words they are sentinels against mass extinction. They are chain breakers. They must exist otherwise life on earth would not.” If you’re including humans as ‘guardian node’, that’s simple hubris on your part. If mankind died tomorrow, in 200 years, you’d have to be an alien archaeologist to tell we’d ever existed. But if all the plankton died tomorrow, this planet would be a tomb with our species clawing at the lid. Just like it would be a tomb without potable water or clean air within the tolerances under which our species evolved.
“I think Nature’s imagination is so much greater than man’s that she’s never going to let us relax.” – Richard Feynman
To think that we can at this point in our social, mental and technological development replicate nature’s processes to sustain life for all humans as we know it is incredibly arrogant and misinformed. Technology is by in large destructive to natural processes at this point. Natural processes we depend upon for water, food and air. Nanotechnology may hold the key to changing that fact, but we are just barely wading into that technological pool. And for all its great promise, it’s still a technology that could kill us all if misapplied.
Technology as our “savior” is as false and as killing a God as any of the make believe ones humans have created across the ages. If you count on it to save our species to the point you disregard the stewardship of the Earth as a necessity, you’re a fool.
No Byron, all life is dialectically interconnected through a myriad of unseen feedback loops. Moreover, there is no “nanobee” yet produced at an effective cost to do the pollinating over our land masses. Even if there were such a machine it wouldn’t be nearly as efficient or cost effective as the magnificent honeybee, slowling being wiped out I’d venture to guess by all the odious shit that perfidious companies like Monsanto & DuPont dream up & spew out.
The value of something like a rainforest lies not in clear cutting it for agriculture or teak wood yachts for decadent swine but in its biodiversity, where innumerable undiscovered compounds that might cure cancer or aids lie waiting to be discovered.
The problem with capitalist pigs is they imagine Industry vs. Environment is a Zero Sum game. It’s not. Both can happen in harmony. The problem is that “harmony” takes off a few cents a share off the dividends of greedy stock holders whose short sightedness is a detriment to all.
They must be curtailed. They will be curtailed. A revolution in consciousness is slowly but surely taking place in the minds of the masses to an extend that one day in the not too distent future the most endangered of all species will be capitalist pigs.
Buddha:
people don’t need to be interconnected to most of the natural world, we can make our own environment and grow our own food. If bees die out we will be able to produce some sort of nanobot bee to do our pollinating.
If Polar Bears die or the Spotted Owl disappears it will have no appreciable impact on humans. Species go extinct and have been doing so for as long as life has been on earth. If every thing was interconnected as you say, all life would have died out before it even got started. Humans are able to adapt to our environment, that is we are so successful.
A few birds dead from oil is not going to impact us one way or the other. Anyway oil is a natural product so don’t you think nature has evolved ways to deal with it? It doesn’t just leak because some humans cant control their well heads.
And conversely if humans died out on 9/3 most of the natural world would go on, a few species would probably die having become dependent on us but Polar Bears wouldn’t even notice our passing (even if they could).
The web of life has nodes that act as guardians, in other words they are sentinels against mass extinction. They are chain breakers. They must exist otherwise life on earth would not.
No birds. No people. Just like no bees equals no people or no plankton equals no people. You destroy a node on the web and destroy or cripple adjacent nodes. It’s called a food web because it’s all connected, Byron.
why is this a problem? accidents happen all the time. Three Mile Island pretty much shut down nuclear power in this country for no good reason. So a little oil gets spilled and a few birds die. What about the people that depend on the good jobs oil companies provide? Save the birds screw the people?
I think the Discovery Channel bomber thought that way.
Obviously, JT missed the “Lord of the Rings” scene explaining this heroic beacon in the Gulf. Watch out for Orcs you Louisianians!
And the people of LA will still probably complain about the free oil for life. Damn ingrates…..
Scott B,
It is my understanding that no polar bears have been inconvenienced either. 😉
Drill baby Drill!
We don’t need to steenkin’ regulations!
After all… these companies have plans to save the seals in the event of a rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. And it worked… BP did not harm one seal since its rig blew out!
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/Why-Are-Democrats-Giving-Up-on-Energy-Reform-442 Obama does not have much support for energy reform, and he will have even less after the November elections.
Blouise: I think we can safely say that Barack Obama the Constitutional Lawyer has fully morphed into President Barack Obama the Corporate Lawyer. His principal client, of course, is the Ex-Presidents Mutual Protective Society,Inc., but he has time to serve other corporate clients as well.
tomdarch,
As I understand it, they put concrete plugs in when they’re not using the well – that’s what the Deepwater Horizon was doing a slipshod job of when it exploded. So hopefully this one wont be spewing oil… (or at least not as much)
From the Miami Herald article:
“The platform was not producing oil and gas, according to the operations report.
…
“There were ongoing maintenance activities underway,” she [Melissa Schwartz, spokeswoman for Bureau of Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement] said…”
and:
“A company report said the well was drilled in the third quarter of 2008 in 340 feet of water.”
Huh? A two year old rig isn’t producing anything, AND it explodes?
I guess we’ll get more details as things go on. I hope that the fact that it wasn’t producing means that it’s “turned off” somehow, and that relatively little oil will be spilled here.
Ah, the joy of an under-regulated oil industry – we should all write thank-you notes to President Bush and his sidekick Dickey. I wonder if the cause of this one will turn out to be massive negligence like the Deepwater Horizon seems to be.
Yeh … if the first explosion didn’t wean Obama off of his dependency on the Oil Masters, neither will the second … or the third … or the ……..
The NY Times reported 1 confirmed injury and no deaths … we may all be thankful for that, at least.