"One of the husbands -- who was married -- took a one-week job in Grand Isle -- a very toxic place, Grand Isle, unfortunately. And -- one week only -- came home, came home in the middle of August...[snip]...he dropped his mother off at work, he dropped his child off at school, his wife turned around because she heard a strange noise, and he dropped over dead. [snip] I am dealing with about 3 or 4 autopsies right now, and people are wondering, what exactly was the problem? I know of people who are down to 4.7 percent of their lung capacity and have an enlarged heart -- to make up for the reduced lung capacity. I know people whose esophaguses are dissolving -- disintegrating. Now, all of these people have oil in their bodies in the upper 95th percentile. This isn't one or two..."

Labels: 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, atrocities, corporatism, greed

BP is warning Congress that if lawmakers pass legislation that bars the company from getting new offshore drilling permits, it may not have the money to pay for all the damages caused by its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The company says a ban would also imperil the ambitious Gulf Coast restoration efforts that officials want the company to voluntarily support.

BP executives insist that they have not backed away from their commitment to the White House to set aside $20 billion in an escrow fund over the next four years to pay damage claims and government penalties stemming from the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. The explosion killed 11 workers and spewed millions of barrels of oil into the gulf.

The company has also agreed to contribute $100 million to a foundation to support rig workers who have lost their jobs because of the administration’s deepwater drilling moratorium. And it pledged $500 million for a 10-year research program to study the impact of the spill.

But as state and federal officials, individuals and businesses continue to seek additional funds beyond the minimum fines and compensation that BP must pay under the law, the company has signaled its reluctance to cooperate unless it can continue to operate in the Gulf of Mexico. The gulf accounts for 11 percent of its global production.

Labels: 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, BP, corporatism, greed

Indeed, PhD toxicologist Ricki Ott noted in a New York Times Op Ed that dispersants like Corexit can persist in the ocean for decades:

[Dispersants] can linger in the water for decades, especially when used in deep water, where low temperatures can inhibit biodegradation.

Some experts have also said that the use of Corexit has prolonged by decades the presence of toxic crude oil, because the dispersant sinks the oil beneath the ocean surface, where it cannot be quickly broken down by sun, waves and microbes.

And the head of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Ecology Department - Terry Hazen - argues that the use of dispersants can delay recovery of ocean ecosystems by decades:

Hazen has more than 30 years experience studying the effects of oil spills. He says the oil will be damaging enough; toxic dispersants will just make it worse. He points to the 1978 Amoco Cadiz Spill off the coast of Normandy as an example. He says areas where dispersants were used still have not fully recovered, while areas where there was no human intervention are now fine.

As Hazen has noted:

"The untreated coastal areas were fully recovered within five years of the Amoco Cadiz spill," says Hazen. "As for the treated areas, ecological studies show that 30 years later, those areas still have not recovered."

Admittedly, chemicals other than Corexit were used in the Amoco Cadiz spill. But the precautionary tale still holds: chemicals should not be applied to oil spills unless scientists are positive that they will provide a net long-term benefit.

Disturbingly, Corexit is apparently still being sprayed in the Gulf. See this, this and this

Labels: 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Barack Obama, Democratic sellouts, environmental death watch

Labels: 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, BP, corporatism, greed

Most Americans oppose President Barack Obama’s ban on deepwater oil drilling in response to BP Plc’s Gulf of Mexico spill, even as they hold the company primarily responsible for the incident.

Almost three-fourths, or 73 percent, say a ban is unnecessary, calling the worst oil spill in U.S. history a “freak accident,” according to a Bloomberg National Poll. Barely more than a third say they support drilling less than they did a few months ago. The BP rig sank in April. The administration issued a new moratorium this week after a court rejected a six-month one imposed in May.

“A ban will destroy the economy in that area over nothing,” said poll respondent Ron Smallcomb, 64, a used-car dealer in Mountaintop, Pennsylvania. “This is crazy. If there’s a plane crash you don’t ground all the airlines and stop flying completely.”

Eight in 10 of those questioned in the July 9-12 poll say London-based BP should pay for all damage caused by the spill. Six in 10 say BP, not the federal government, should reimburse wages lost by oil workers laid off because of the moratorium, with 56 percent saying even the possibility of bankruptcy shouldn’t allow the company to escape paying.

Asked who was most to blame for the spill, 44 percent say BP, and 19 percent say lax federal regulations and oversight. One in five say no one is to blame.

Labels: 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, American Idiots

For more than two months, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana has made it clear that he considers the response of the federal government and BP to the gulf oil leak a failure on many fronts.
Gov. Bobby JindalReuters Gov. Bobby Jindal

But elected officials in Louisiana and members of the public seeking details on how Mr. Jindal and his administration fared in their own response to the disaster are out of luck: late last week the governor vetoed an amendment to a state bill that would have made public all records from his office related to the oil spill.

[snip]

For more than two months, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana has made it clear that he considers the response of the federal government and BP to the gulf oil leak a failure on many fronts.
Gov. Bobby JindalReuters Gov. Bobby Jindal

But elected officials in Louisiana and members of the public seeking details on how Mr. Jindal and his administration fared in their own response to the disaster are out of luck: late last week the governor vetoed an amendment to a state bill that would have made public all records from his office related to the oil spill.

Labels: 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Bobby Jindal, morons

Labels: 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, bloggers

Labels: 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Bobby Jindal, Republican lies

Labels: 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, American Idiots

Clinton has done an incredible job as secretary of state. First of all, she has worked harder than anyone should ever be expected to. She has managed to do the impossible: She is the ambassador of the United States to the world, maintaining her credibility while playing the bad guy to President Obama's good guy, such as with North Korea, Iran and Israel, and still looking good. She has been a true team player. If Clinton is dissatisfied with her role, you would never know it. She has been loyal and supportive to the president and has maintained a good relationship with him and with others in the White House. If she is being left out of the policymaking, or being sent on trips to keep her out of town, she has not shown it. She is cheerful, thoughtful, serious and diligent. There are no horror stories about her coming out of the State Department. Most notable, though, is that Bill Clinton has not been the problem that so many anticipated. He has been supportive of her and of Obama, and he has stayed out of the limelight and been discreet about his own life.

Sally Quinn: In terms of entertaining being partisan, it started with Clinton. The people who were seen as “hostesses” were people who had money or were raising money.… When the stuff about Clinton and women started appearing, in the second term, things shut down. Everybody wanted to go hide in a cave. For people willing to defend him, it became intolerable for them to go out.

In 2000, after being elected to the Senate, Hillary Clinton bought a fashionable house near the British and Italian Embassies. Before her run for the presidency, she added on to the house in order to have more space for entertaining.

Since Hillary has been here in the Senate for the last eight years, I think I’ve seen her twice. Otherwise, she is at fund-raisers. She entertains constantly, but it is all political. It is people who work for her or raise money for her.

Labels: 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, hack journalism, Joe Biden, populism

Labels: 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, BP, comedy, incompetence

Labels: 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill

Many would assume that BP—the company responsible for the Gulf Coast disaster—will cover the entire cost of cleanup. But we learned from the Exxon Valdez spill that the reality is very different:

The Exxon Valdez tanker spilled more than 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound, which eventually contaminated approximately 1,300 miles of shoreline. The total costs of Exxon Valdez, including both cleanup and also “fines, penalties and claims settlements,” ran as much as $7 billion. Cleanup of the affected region alone cost at least $2.5 billion, and much oil remains.

Yet Exxon made high profits even in the aftermath of the most expensive oil spill in history. They made $3.8 billion profit in 1989 and $5 billion in 1990. And this occurred while Exxon disputed cleanup costs nearly every step of the way.

Exxon fought paying damages and appealed court decisions multiple times, and they have still not paid in full. Years of fighting and court appeals on Exxon’s part finally concluded with a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2008 that found that Exxon only had to pay $507.5 million of the original 1994 court decree for $5 billion in punitive damages. And as of 2009, Exxon had paid only $383 million of this $507.5 million to those who sued, stalling on the rest and fighting the $500 million in interest owed to fishermen and other small businesses from more than 12 years of litigation.

Twenty years later, some of the original plaintiffs are no longer alive to receive, or continue fighting for, their damages. An estimated 8,000 of the original Exxon Valdez plaintiffs have died since the spill while waiting for their compensation as Exxon fought them in court.

Labels: 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill

"This is the first significant amount of oil residue to hit Mississippi since the Deepwater Horizon explosion six weeks ago," Gov. Haley Barbour said. "While it's the first, it won't be the last."

During a news conference in Jackson on Tuesday, Barbour said this is no reason for "anybody to panic." The state's beaches and ports remain open, and Barbour said, "We're told that it's not toxic."

"But it is a reason for everybody to remember that there is a likelihood that there is going to be more intrusion of some form of depleted oil, tar balls, tar mats, emulsified oil, that's going to reach the barrier islands," Barbour said.

Barbour said it appears the strand broke off Sunday from a patch of emulsified sheen situated some 11 miles off Mississippi's Horn Island.

The strand that came ashore Petit Bois had sunk slightly below sea level, and it went undetected in flyovers on Monday, he said.

Barbour said state officials have asked the Coast Guard to increase the number of vessels testing for oil sheens below the surface.

"I'm not blaming anybody or criticizing anybody," Barbour said of the fact it was not detected before washing onto Petit Bois, the easternmost of Mississippi's barrier islands, located near the Alabama border.

"We all understand that we should have found that this oil had broken off from the rest before this (Tuesday) morning," the governor said.

Labels: 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, corporatism, Greedy Republican Bastards, scumbaggery

Mr. Obama had hoped to spend his summer creating jobs, passing financial reform, promoting his health care program, getting a Supreme Court justice confirmed and an arms control treaty with Russia ratified, pressing for international sanctions against Iran and jump-starting the troubled Middle East peace process. While not abandoning any of those goals, Mr. Obama now must find ways to continue pushing them while demonstrating to the nation that he is concentrating on a spill he has called “our highest priority.”

“This has hijacked his entire legislative agenda,” said Douglas Brinkley, a historian at Rice University who has written about Jimmy Carter, whose presidency was consumed by the Iran hostage crisis. “The White House felt they were on a roll. They were looking to be a new New Deal or new Great Society and they were just getting momentum going. Something this awful has sidetracked the agenda.”

Sara Taylor Fagen, White House political director under President George W. Bush, said the failure to contain the spill would make it hard for Mr. Obama to accomplish anything this year. “He’ll likely be managing the fallout for years to come,” she said. “Not until his re-election campaign will he have an opportunity to press reset.”

Labels: 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, tinfoil

BP Plc’s failure since April to plug a Gulf of Mexico oil leak has prompted forecasts the crude may continue gushing into December in what President Barack Obama has called the greatest environmental disaster in U.S. history.

BP’s attempts so far to cap the well and plug the leak on the seabed a mile below the surface haven’t worked, while the start of the Atlantic hurricane season this week indicates storms in the Gulf may disrupt other efforts.

“The worst-case scenario is Christmas time,” Dan Pickering, the head of research at energy investor Tudor Pickering Holt & Co. in Houston, said. “This process is teaching us to be skeptical of deadlines.”

Ending the year with a still-gushing well would mean about 4 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf, based on the government’s current estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels leaking a day. That would wipe out marine life deep at sea near the leak and elsewhere in the Gulf, and along hundreds of miles of coastline, said Harry Roberts, a professor of Coastal Studies at Louisiana State University.

So much crude pouring into the ocean may alter the chemistry of the sea, with unforeseeable results, said Mak Saito, an Associate Scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

Extreme Greenies:see now why we push"drill,baby,drill"of known reserves&promising finds in safe onshore places like ANWR? Now do you get it?

Labels: 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, American Idiots, Gulf of Mexico R.I.P., Sarah Palin

Holiday travel on the rebound

DOWNTOWN — Thousands of area residents renewed travel regimens this Memorial Day weekend, pouring onto highways and into airports as the nation officially ushered in the summer travel season.

Be it falling gas prices, enticing hotel and car rental rates or a slight uptick in consumer confidence, the Southland was expected to see nearly an 8% increase in the number of residents traveling over the holiday weekend, according to the Automobile Club of Southern California.

Memorial Day weekend brings lower gas prices in Denver

Gas prices in Denver have dropped a few cents this week as motorists fuel up for Memorial Day weekend driving.

The price of a gallon of regular gas in Denver costs an average of $2.636 cents Friday, down from $2.68 a week earlier, according to the American Automobile Association's Daily Fuel Gauge Report.

Mid-grade gas averages $2.819 in Denver on Friday, while premium is $2.946 and diesel is $2.984 -- all a few cents below prices of a week ago.

Expect heavier traffic during holiday weekend

Traffic for the entire holiday weekend is expected to increase compared to last year.

It’s the first time since 2005 that experts anticipate heavier Memorial Day weekend volumes on the region’s highways and roads.

About 4.3 million people say they plan to travel by automobile in the West Coast states, according to AAA of Washington.

AAA forecast: Cheaper gas, more travelers over Memorial Day

The American Automobile Association is projecting Memorial Day weekend travel to increase by more than 5 percent this year, fueled by lower gas prices.

About 32 million Americans will travel over the weekend, compared with 30.5 million last year, AAA said. More than 1.1 million Ohioans will travel 50 miles or more, up from 1 million a year ago.

A recent decline in gas prices is a key factor in the expected upswing in drivers hitting the road, AAA said. Regular gas prices in the Columbus area on Friday averaged $2.48 a gallon, down from $2.76 a month ago and below $2.60 in the same weekend last year. Average gas prices across the state were at $2.55 a gallon, unchanged from a year ago.

N.J. gasoline prices drop in time for Memorial Day weekend travels

New Jerseyans can travel to their picnics, beaches and Memorial Day ceremonies this weekend on fuel that is much less expensive than originally feared.

Despite dire predictions earlier in the year that gas would hit $3 a gallon this weekend — the unofficial start of summer — the average price for a gallon of regular gas in New Jersey fell 11 cents over the last three weeks, from $2.81 to $2.70.

That paralleled a national drop from $2.92 to $2.78.

Consequently, AAA of New Jersey is forecasting a 7.5 percent increase in the number of New Jerseyans traveling more than 50 miles from home this Memorial Day, compared to last year. At the same time, the New Jersey Turnpike Authority expects about a 2.5 percent traffic increase on both the Turnpike and Garden State Parkway.

"We have indications from our businesses that reservations are good," said Diane Wieland, Cape May County’s director of tourism. "It’s been one cold winter and we keep hearing that people can’t wait to get out and do something fun."

Local shrimpers helping the cleanup effort in Louisiana are reporting health problems after a plane spraying chemical dispersants on the oil spill passed within a mile of their boats. They claim that despite attending classes on petroleum waste management, they were not given protective gear, and are still using their old fishing boots.
BP responded that it is conducting constant air quality studies, and they appear to be within safe limits.

Another group of relief workers were taken to a New Orleans hospital, after bouts of nausea, vomiting, and severe headaches, in spite of having been properly trained and wearing protective gear. The hospital said they had been exposed to some unknown irritant.

Labels: 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, American Idiots

Labels: 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, people who are brilliant not just at breakfast

Labels: 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Twitterati

The bigger lesson in all of this, though, is that 30 years of deregulation and letting maggots in suits do whatever they damn well please will inevitably lead to disaster and death whether it’s under the land, in our mines, or under the sea in our wells. Dubya and his 8 years of “voluntary compliance” in the area of mine and well safety was, by far, the most egregious example of deregulation gone way overboard, but he didn’t start it. Ronald Reagan and every President since should share blame. The arrogance of having Big Oil people oversee and pseudo-regulate the oil business is like having Charlie Manson investigate who killed Sharon Tate. Let’s not forget that it’s the wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate world that sit in Congress, in the White House, on the courts, and in every cabinet level department of “our” government that enable such situations as the one we find ourselves in. They all share in the criminal negligence in both the pollution disaster and the deaths of the workers on the Deepwater Horizon. Planning on eating any seafood in the near future? Going to the beach this summer?

To me, we have to look at this disaster as an event that came about because our government has been infiltrated by an outside power. Whether that power is another nation or a multi-national corporation, there is no difference. The bottom line is the same. Our government has been bought off by foreign agents and compromised.

Labels: 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, bloggers, just another outrage