Showing posts with label oil spill. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oil spill. Show all posts

Friday, April 19, 2013

Wasted Capital and Stranded Assets

Today the Guardian put a story on its front page about the biggest gamble in human history. 

Governments, corporations and pension funds have $6 trillion worth of unburnable carbon assets on the books -- that means that either their investments pay off and the planet tanks, or we avert climate catastrophe and those investments are worthless.  -350.org 

Needless to say, if Obama allows KeystoneXL, then he is directly complicit in this economic idiocy/global suicide.

A summary and link to the full report is here:  http://www.carbontracker.org/wastedcapital 

Monday, April 23, 2012

Half the shrimp have no eyes

Turns out Corexit isn't such a good thing after all, 3 people are shocked to discover: http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/23/gulf_oil_spill_bp_execs_escape

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Last post on the BP/Halliburton/TransOcean Macondo well blowout



"We're stuck doing what we've done ever since we lived in caves. Whenever we want some energy we light fire to something. The United States is stuck in a debate that says that harnessing the eternal sources of energy that run the planet is too expensive and too impractical. But China is not under that delusion, neither is Germany, Denmark or Spain. Nor Canada.

All these countries are ahead of us in developing clean technologies, diversified energy sources, creating the jobs that go with it and the infrastructure that goes with it...as we pretend that it's impractical, while our factories rust and we complain about high unemployment."


The whole show is worth watching. Meanwhile in Japan...


See also new site, CounterSpill.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Fun facts vs. Republican lies

Domestic oil and gas resources are nowhere near enough to fulfill US need, no matter where or how deep we drill, and that is just a stubborn fact (whether NPR has any actual journalists on its staff to report on it or not).

Let me repeat that: There is NO CONCEIVABLE SCENARIO in which the U.S. becomes oil-independent from Saudi Arabian dictators by drilling (and inevitably polluting and despoiling), or expanding natural gas production (which is also dirty) more domestically than it already does.

On the other hand, government land in the mid-west of the United States alone has the potential to supply enough solar and wind energy for 1/3 of the entire current US demand.

And that's only on government-owned land.

What about now?

Tuesday, December 07, 2010

Last post on the BP oil blowout, cont.

Everything is dead within 80 miles, four inches of oil coat the ocean floor, etc. Don't expect to read about it on The Oil Drum, or for BP to ever pay as much as half of its already criminally modest and deflated fines.

Friday, October 29, 2010

Last word on the 2010 BP Macondo Oil Well Blowout Gulf of Mexico Atrocity

Don't expect to read about it on The Oil Drum:

There is a flood of information coming out on the Gulf oil spill.

Why?

The reappearance of huge plumes of oil is making it hard to pretend that it has all gone away.

Here’s a roundup of some of the Gulf oil headlines from just the last 4 days

(via Digby)

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Last word on the 2010 BP Macondo Well Blowout Gulf of Mexico Atrocity

The Spill airs this evening on PBS. After which BP will need to buy some more face-saving ads.

...Proof having surfaced recently that just like The Koch brothers and Home Depot, BP is all up in the same mix funding climate change-denying Tea Baggers.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Last word on the 2010 BP Macondo Well Blowout Gulf of Mexico Atrocity


Apparently calm weather is creating oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico:

Boat captains working the BP clean-up effort said they have been reporting large areas of surface oil off the delta for more than a week but have seen little response from BP or the Coast Guard, which is in charge of the clean-up.

[...]

On Friday reports included accounts of strips of the heavily weathered orange oil that became a signature image of the spill during the summer. One captain said some strips were as much as 400 feet wide and a mile long.

The captains did not want to be named for fear of losing their clean-up jobs with BP.

[...]


"...when the weather calms and the water temperatures changes, the oil particles that have spread along the bottom will recoagulate, then float to the surface again and form these large mats."

Overton said it is important for the state to discover the mechanism that is causing the oil to reappear because even this highly weathered oil poses a serious threat to the coastal ecology.

"If this was tar balls floating around, that would be one thing, but these reports are of mats of weathered oil, and that can cause serious problems if it gets into the marsh," he said


(Part of a continuing, mockingly-titled "last word" series.)

Monday, September 27, 2010

BP Oil Spill Update

Update Again: No fucking shit.

Update: Researchers Found 40-Fold Increase in Carcinogenic Compounds in Gulf.


As the truth finally will out, and informed bloggers everywhere (this one included) scream "we told you so"...read the whole damn thing (with citations), as they say:

...As one of Lehr's fellow panelists, Ian MacDonald, put it: "5,000 barrels was not in the right ballpark, for whatever reason." MacDonald, a Florida State University oceanographer and one of the independent scientists who questioned the federal estimates early on, further noted that "It took a long time to catch up to reality."

Meanwhile, contrary to White House assertions that "the vast majority of the oil is gone," MacDonald warned that more than 50 percent of the oil remains in the Gulf of Mexico in the form of "highly durable material" that is now buried along the coast and on the sea floor....

Graham and Reilly both acknowledged that they still don't understand why government officials were so wrong, and for so long. Graham generally raised the issue of "deference to the industry." Reilly recalled a scribble on a NOAA white board during the early days of the spill indicating that officials immediately realized the leak could be much bigger...

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Last post on the BP Macondo oil spill/blowout, for now

...though the fallout will undoubtedly continue for decades to come.

BP's atrocity is now officially estimated at having reached 16 times worse than the Exxon Valdez, by as early as the end of June 2010...(and certainly much worse, for being so deep underwater), Dan Froomkin absolutely gets the final word in my book. Read the whole thing.

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Naomi Klein

• On the BP Macondo Blowout atrocity.

• And a giant TOLD YOU SO. Turns out BP's own internal documents estimated the blowout spill rate at 100,000 barrels/day. I believe there are a bunch of arrogant, corporate-grovelling tools on The Oil Drum who owe some independent experts an apology.

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Oil Spil/Political Notes: Thomas Friedman still preaches the happy slave gospel from his mansion, UK pensioners versus American workers

• Update 6/15: Mixed metaphor king's idiot Thomas Friedman jumps on TOD blame-fallacy bandwagon, as predictable as it is pathetic. In John Emerson's apt appraisal:
"This isn’t BP’s or Transocean’s fault. It’s not the government’s fault. It’s my fault."

This kind of bullshit comes up every time a large corporation does harm "Don't ask who killed the Kennedys, when after all, it was you and me." In the same way, how could anyone blame Enron or anyone in finance for the destruction ...of the global economy, since some of us have been known to steal pencils from work?

When it's you or me or a schoolteacher, it's "accountability". But when it's a large corporation, it's "the blame game".

It's not just that corporations are persons, with the same rights that the rest of us have. Corporations are immaculate persons and can never be blamed for anything.

Sort of like Jesus and the Virgin Mary....

If you want to say that we should all look at our oil consumption and way of life, that's a good point, but on the other hand, some of us already have, and have changed our way of life. A lot of us strongly opposed offshore drilling, but the DrillBabyDrill people won the political argument. Others live the way they do because there's not much choice (for example, living in a town without a decent bus system).

BP was guilty for cutting corners on safety, which they're on record as doing as a matter of policy. The US government is guilty of lax regulation, which they did as a matter of policy, and of approving offshore drilling in the first place. A lot of politicians and voters (but not all) are guilty of supporting offshore drilling and the weakening of safety regulations. These are the people who actually caused the problem.

If you want to go beyond that to say that we have to reduce oil consumption, fine. I agree. But saying that it's everyone's fault is just bullshit, and it's the most recent lie that the defenders of BP, the bush administration, and the Obama administration have picked up in order to absolves themselves of the actual responsibility they have for the actual things they did.


Indeed. As I may have mentioned in a comment at TOD, any analysis that fails to account for the functioning of power is pretty well just pulling the blanket over the collective citizenry's head (and in the process rendering our just and righteous fury at those precise targets which might actually be vulnerable to such pressures and compelled to change, dangerously impotent). Of course expecting literary hacks like ex-billionaire, now multi-millionaire Thomas Friedman to do anything except buttress and slather the status quo in poshlost', with superficially "clever" and "profound" analysis, would probably be about as productive as polishing a turd. I was saddened to see The Oil Drum take this line. It's probably one reason the site remains so ineffective, and frankly, self-congratulatory, and insular.

• Update 6/14: OK so I've skimmed The Oil Drum, and this comment is essential reading.


(image of one-ton tar ball via)

• A message about Obama's new position on BP, and what to watch for to determine who's in charge.

• Robert Reich: still pushing temporary receivership, and rather convincingly.

More on Helen Thomas (via):
The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Press You're Stuck
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full EpisodesPolitical HumorTea Party


To be honest I haven't read TOD since they started (thankfully, finally) discussing the various Corexits, as I had been prodding them to do (whether any professional consensus was reached, I have no idea...) As soon as I have a spare six hours, I may check it out.

Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Someone should just publish comments from TOD




...Comments that deserve to be read by people not obsessed enough (yet) to spend hours wading 300-400 comments in. Posted with the strong caveat, of course, that these are taken out of context!

Here:
Interested_public on June 9, 2010 - 11:32am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Parent subthread | Comments top

This is the problem with trying to do science in a crisis - really an impossible task. A responsible study will take time (6 months to a year) and quite a bit of sampling as the gulf is a big place. A fundamental problem will be the lack of pre-spill baseline data for comparison. We don't know how the oil might change in composition and character over time as it interacts with seawater and the gulf biota. We don't know that much about underwater currents in the gulf, although there is some data on this and I expect more will be forthcoming now that there is a perceived need for it. This is also one of the reasons that knowing the leak rate is very important - there needs to be some reasonable estimate of the proportion of oil that is not reaching the surface.

As with the lack of pre-accident technical means to deal with a deepwater blowout - despite ample fore knowledge that such a problem might arise and documentation of specific problems that should be addressed - there is a similar lack of baseline data with which to evaluate the current problem, despite the extensive underwater development of oil resources in the Gulf and the likelihood of a major leak occurring at some point.

Trying to play catch-up over a few weeks or a month or two will not produce satisfactory answers to many rather important questions - we will end up realizing how much we really don't know about the Gulf ecosystems and watching the experiment play out as we work to understand what we are seeing. People with agendas will take preliminary results to say "See, no problem, why all the hand-wringing?" or "The Gulf will become a dead zone!" when the reality is "Wow, we really don't know that much about the consequences of our actions and their effects on the environment because we really never bothered to look or try and understand any of this stuff ahead of time. Only the most grossly obvious effects like oily birds or soiled beaches will be immediately apparent.

Hopefully the end result, in a few years, will be a more mature understanding of this bit of the world and a more responsible approach to extracting the resources we find useful for our needs. One can hope anyway.



Here:
[new] Paleocon on June 9, 2010 - 11:16am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Parent subthread | Comments top

Obama is the Mediocrat president.

Anger here isn't from a media-driven frenzy, but from a growing, 6-week debacle that aptly illustrates BP's approach to situations and people. Americans are reacting to disdain, sloth, and weaseling -- attitudes which are worse than negligence. Obama said the gov't was in control, and that's his 'style', so now the gov't will earn just ire as well. Obama will join the "make it up as we go" perception if he's not careful. He will increasingly struggle to blame BP while saying the gov't is doing all they can -- it's a tricky corner he chose to paint himself into.

Why I've moved from "BP is handling things" to "BP should be skewered":

1) By intentionally not measuring flow, and then acting solely on low estimates, they have assets in place that are inadequate for the situation now at hand. They have had 6 weeks to marshall resources, and yet are now leaking oil solely due to inadequate top-side resources. There is zero reason not to already have resources to deal with max flow of an unconstrained BOP already on-site. Who cares if an FPSO is already working elsewhere? Shut the site down and worry about that production later.

2) After the fact, the history of BP as a corner-cutting, law-flaunting, risk-taking company is now becoming obvious. This points blame at MMS as much as BP, as this was permitted to continue. Blame also goes to the administration -- anytime you have an obvious rogue outlier it is up to those with oversight to reign them in.

3) General defensive posture, and "wait and see" approach. While engineering work seems to be properly parallel, BP drags their feet on everything else. They are slow to provide video, capture details, date estimates, spill resources, response coordination, and a general tone of "it's not that bad" while each aspect continually gets worse. The only logical reason for a CEO to make stupid statements on air is that the company doesn't think it's important not to.

Tuesday, June 08, 2010

Gulf of America Update ("we broke it, we own it" -Colbert)

• As fellow blogger John Emerson pedantically, and correctly notes: "'Awed' is the wrong word" here. (It only took the feds two months to catch on; surely companies like Exxon bound to be responsible for future atrocities will take note.)

This comment about what caused the BP Macando blowout deserves widespread recognition.

• Also, read the articles in the left-hand column at McClatchy, one of the most reliable and reputable investigative journals out there. Particularly this one, this one, this one and last but certainly not least, this one (cf. last week).

• And, the plot thickens.

Meanwhile every day that passes BP fails to make meaningfully better what they gambled to make significantly worse last Thursday morning, or even to make it back to just as bad as it was the for the first 48 goddamn days....they aren't even going to try another approach, for another month. This would appear to be an acceptable state of affairs for BP, nearly two months on:



Can't help but notice BP is spraying carcinogenic dispersants like never before at the immediate opening (you can actually see the oil exploding into droplets on impact), most conveniently on the side being monitored by the most highly-publicized and most easily accessible feed (that is, the side most people are watching):


Once again, for all twelve BP Macondo blowout oil spill feeds, see this page for listed links: http://www.bp.com/genericarticle.do?categoryId=9033572&contentId=7062605




• I seem to have begun the occasional habit of leaving comments at TheOilDrum, sometimes with what I determine to be necessary and useful provocation partly in mind, I admit.

Sunday, June 06, 2010

Some interesting links

This feed right now is a pretty clear indication of just how well British Petroleum's mostly cosmetic "top hat" is not functioning (braced on top of a gusher BP deliberately made worse–nearly five days ago–worse by a degree of magnitude which remains undisclosed and certainly appears to be significant) (best live 24-7 discussion at TOD, as usual):

eho on June 6, 2010 - 3:14pm Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

My first post ... there is good exchange here at TOD... better than I have seen anywhere else. Unfortunately there is a lot of conjecture but this seems to be the result in the large part on a lack of transparency on BP's part (if we don't have the facts to discuss, we'll d - well make them up!)... unless they are operating in the dark ... which could be very well true.
I worked 15+yrs in offshore oil starting in the late 70's. A good joke then was Q - Ya'know the two things that f -d up the oilfield? A - engineers and o-rings. ... so it appears things haven't changed much. By my recollection most 'company' engineers with any authority were cost oriented, risk management (avoidance) guys. Innovation on the operational side was left to contractors. I think there are structural reasons (mainly liability) for this. The blame game. The highly skilled work for the majors where they hope to keep their butts well covered for a fruitful and uneventful 35 yr career.
So everything in this heroic response so far looks to me like a delaying game, a some what pathetic dog and pony show ... letting the clock run out until the Relief (with a capital 'R') Well is completed.
End of Rant ... Sorry ...





And here is some of that purely "anecdotal evidence," according to BP (as they continue to deny the very existence of vast underwater plumes despite more and more scientific evidence):

http://gulfblog.uga.edu/

I give this current hat another 24 hours, before they pull it off because it has been corroded useless, and replace it with another, equally ineffective "fix."

Friday, June 04, 2010

Bleg

Sincere thanks to the many people who've commented and emailed over the course of the past week. Unfortunately though, and despite receiving more traffic than ever before in this humble blog's rather prolonged life, unless someone out there wants to drop $160 in my account via the "donate" paypal button on the sidebar there, I cannot afford to continue doing this. (I do have lots more video from live feeds saved, should anyone have any specific requests.)

(I am a woodworker by trade. In between and after crew time building cabinets or installing finish trimwork, I work overtime on my own little business (+ our old house, animals and extensive locust raised-bed gardens/greenhouses). Please feel free to visit my online shop, if interested.)
Thanks again.

Update June 5: No further "progress" to report. The blowout remains substantially worse than it was nearly two months ago, essentially the same since BP ripped it wide open and pinned a floating flower to its side/polished the turd, Thursday morning. It seems likely BP has just given up. Certainly most experts in the field were never very optimistic about any "solution" not involving relief wells, months hence, from the beginning.

Some light reading...

June 6: Honestly, the only serious effort BP appears to be making anymore is buying up search engine terms like "oil spill" and lying to the press. Their numbers don't exactly add up, either.