Until now I’ve avoided showing graphic images of the damage to the Gulf of Mexico; today I am revisiting this policy.
I’ve been learning a lot this weekend about the situation in the Gulf of Mexico: in particular, about the dispersants being used and what company manufactures them (in particular, its astonishing criminal history, on which I have extensive files from my prior career); how most of the damage is in an underwater plume, not a surface issue; and the extent to which BP is understating the problem. It is being treated as a superficial issue — since ‘oil floats’, as something on the surface, containable by booms. The problems at the bottom are much more serious. The tons of what amounts to antifreeze being dumped into sensitive Gulf of Mexico waters will themselves cause agonizing deaths to sea life.
The video above is painful. Once you’ve seen it there is no going back.
Tomorrow there has been a call to prayer action by a Council of Grandmothers in South America. Later in the day I will post information about that worldwide event — please check back. Thanks.
“The parents are lazy and don’t want to have to bring their kids home; this is the big sendoff (most are frosh). They don’t want to succumb to “alarmism.” They are stupid. There are a lot of reasons, not the least of which is they are being told it’s safe. And before that we were told for decades that the economy would collapse if PCBs were banned. Just like we’re told now that the economy requires oil.”
Eric, you have said something that I have seen in action so much since I became a parent myself. People seem to follow the path of least resistance; if they are lied to, they don’t want to do the work of seeing the lie. Parents that told you to fuck off were doing that. They don’t want to believe those dorms were bad for their kids because they have been taught, like all of us have been taught from grade school on up, that they are helpless. If you could have gotten even one to admit the dorms might be contaminated, their next question to you would have been “what can I do about it?”
We are also an overworked, over stressed society. Our public schools have a hidden curriculum; they teach us to be fearful, competitive consumers. They do. They teach us not to question and to believe what we are told. It is still happening. As my husband does his student teaching, he is being taught to create lesson plans in which the students are never allowed to question. No time is built in for any questioning by the students. They are assessed on what they already know (to cover the teacher’s ass by showing that they learned something) and then taught stuff. After that, they are assessed again so the teacher has written proof that s/he did their job; “see, the student knew X when we started but after I taught this lesson, the student learned Y.”
So we are raising the next generation of people to believe the lies. We glorify financial success and make having and getting money the be-all of our lives; the more stuff you have that you can brag about, the better person you are. We perpetuate this mindset.
Part of that same mindset is that we can rape the earth to get what we want. That comes directly from the Judeo-Christian biblical concept that God gave Adam (humans) “dominion over the earth and all the creatures in it.” We are paying dearly for that particular mythology.
This is oil spill and the web of lies it hides is the result of how we have been raised and what we value. It will continue. A quick and easy way to see how we think in this country is to listen to the news anytime a disaster is reported; they ALWAYS tell how much money the damage will cost or has cost Sometimes they tell that part even BEFORE they say the human death toll. They mention the animal and habitat death toll last, almost as an afterthought. Money is the focus; always. It has become our God.
These lies are nothing new. Attempts at exposure is nothing new. Failure of exposure to change things, is nothing new. People ingesting toxins because its just too hard to find alternatives or seek the truth in a structure of society that strangulates alternatives and truth, is nothing new. Threats to the planet, nothing new….
Could have blown up the planet generations ago, quickly! but no, as our beloved ocean life dies a slow and painful death, and it rises to the skies and sinks below the earth and spreads throughout the biosphere, so we all …. there is nothing left to do, but pray and mourn.. the only alternative to denial.
on a second read through i understand what you were saying about the fake truth only stretches so far
Yes, and feeling like the truth has been fractured can add up to just about that until you realize otherwise.
This Chinese doctor (TCM) was talking to me about the monkey whose arm gets caught in a clamp when he reaches for an apple. If he lets go of the apple, he’ll be freed from the trap, but he doesn’t want to let go of that good apple. I think that it’s not only about losing the apple, for human beings, the apple of “wealth” or your kid happily packed away at college, it’s also about what happens when you open up a space, when you reject something or shut something down that isn’t working, which is poisonous, which is screwing us up, people are afraid of that vacuum. They fear something worse will fill that space. I think this is the “short-sightedness” that Miss Hell is referring to below. But I don’t know whether this is an inherent human trait or not. It certainly seems like a sort of survival instinct, something that out to be transcended sooner than later, or a long time ago. But it doesn’t even make sense since these kinds of stubborn graspings lead to cancer and your monkey arm caught in a clamp. And you wonder what was up with that monkey’s brain anyway, after living in a cage… a wild monkey would probably just let go of that thing and keep moving. One of my friends thinks that when human beings first got to — oh let’s just use Tibet again as an example, they lived pretty happily, because they were these weird people anyway who were happy living in a crazy high elevation place with cold winters and blinding sunshine. There was plenty of space there for sheep and yaks and stuff. But then more people started coming there and people had lots of babies and then there started to be government and religion and stuff like that, people started to do more than just kill someone because he wanted his yak or something, rather there became classes and oppressors and such. So perhaps in the early stages of humanity, some amount of relative social harmony wasn’t so hard to accomplish. Then things became tenser and now they are really fucked. But if we could unfuck ourselves before we get destroyed by PCBs the a-bomb, and global warming and then refuck ourselves in a good way, that would be sort of a really grand success, right?
I think the scary thing is that the dual impediments, emotional and chemical, only compound one another and the problem.
The truth is not fractured, but a parallel reality is born; which is real as far as it goes. These guys believe their own lies and then a lot of other people, such as Murdoch, get on board.
It works a little like the Sabian symbols. The first degree of Aries is “a woman risen from the sea” because we all agree that’s what it’s about — and an energy field forms, and others can invest themselves in it.
The problem with chemicals is that while a yogi may be able to escape the danger, a college freshman who drinks and smokes and takes the pill and lives on pizza is far less likely to. So it’s a ‘pretend’ dimension — real as far as it goes.
Damn, I can’t believe he cited a case in which 1,600 people and their unborn children were POISONED as an example of how PCBs are not harmful. It’s a terrifying combination of stupidity and evil
And so then we have to ask well, why is that organism not acting in a healthy way? When I start thinking about how unhealthy it must be… I start to feel a little sick.
The parents are lazy and don’t want to have to bring their kids home; this is the big sendoff (most are frosh). They don’t want to succumb to “alarmism.” They are stupid. There are a lot of reasons, not the least of which is they are being told it’s safe. And before that we were told for decades that the economy would collapse if PCBs were banned. Just like we’re told now that the economy requires oil.
I forgot about this incredible quote — from the campus physician, a few years ago. The campus physician thought PCBs were used in food products! And this is someone who has assured countless families that it’s safe to live in the dorms; who no doubt wanted to be told it’s safe to live there.
===
Here is my earlier coverage of the Yusho Incident, from Sierra magazine:
I want to add that I’ve begun to SEE the lying in a whole new way. Before it was almost as though when corporations or the government lied, even though I knew it was a lie, it felt almost as though the incredible weight and power and inertia of these institutional machines somehow fractured the Truth and a parallel reality was born. Now the BS these assholes are spewing is just so horribly visually BS in this case that it feels like something totally different. It reminds me a lot of Christian missionaries in Tibet. It’s like those people have a kind of illness, which is a sort of malignant parallel reality context for describing and understanding what happens in the world, and they want to infect everybody else with their illness. Only they’re in denial about being sick and in fact think or pretend to think that being sick is the only and best way to be. So ok, Christian missionaries are afraid of the real power of the world, of their bodies, definitely afraid of change. Mostly it’s about control. But what about the SUNY parents? Hopelessness is what comes to mind immediately. There’s nothing to fight for or against because there’s no hope for the world, no hope for oneself. That seems to me about deadened desire. It’s like ok so maybe your mom thinks that you will go to hell if you masturbate, but you don’t have to think that is true or give it any more weight than a half of a feather. And then it’s like once you don’t give it any weight then you ought to do something constructive with your desire or your anger. Saturn issues, right? The healthy human organism’s response would seem to be acknowledging emotional reaction and then taking appropriate action.
The parents and the dorms, I mean
Why do you think they do that? I’d really like to know.
Simultaneously submitted responses to a response…
Thanks, Sam.
Here is a bit of news Tracy just sent in:
The chief executive of BP has told Sky News he believes the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill will end up having only a “very, very modest” environmental impact.
http://bit.ly/bNL6Kk
Get it: these guys live on a DIFFERENT DIMENSION than you and me.
Once I was accused by a NYS Department of Health official of quoting him out of context. I could hardly believe he talked to me in the first place but…anyway…my response was: yes, out of context. In your context, it’s okay to shuffle students into a dormitory contaminated with dioxin and tell them it’s safe.
In my context, it’s not. Here is that article. New Paltz is a perfect cell-biology situation because the lies and obfuscation will follow the exact same pattern.
http://dioxindorms.com/content/wheres_your_data.html
The real question is: why do parents leave their kids there, even when they know? When they are told and warned? And not just a few — nearly EVERY parent; I can think of about five over the years — 18 years so far — who have taken some action. The dorms in question hold about 1,300 students (overcrowded) so over 18 years that’s more than 20,000 families involved. One little college.
I don’t want to sidetrack this conversation, but just want to comment that it’s funny how much like a loose canon these online forums can feel to be. Or how much I feel like a loose canon in one. It’s totally different than talking to someone face to face. Different than writing email. So I usually abstain. And now misunderstanding emerges from my very first comment…
The point I was making is that human beings and dolphins alike are worthy of living on a planet with unpolluted water. But some humans beings — those involved in certain roles in BP, Nalco, etc etc — are behaving villainously, and that is the issue we ought to keep our finger on in my opinion. I am not sure if a species wide mea culpa is helpful. I mean, I know that the other side of the story is of course the number of us sitting around on our butts consenting to being lied to, as you mentioned in an earlier post Eric. So that also needs to be addressed. But even that is not an incentive to vilify humans in my opinion. It’s cause to ask a lot of questions and to keep asking questions and hopefully do more than ask questions.
Oh no no no. I was responding to Miss Hell’s comment below mine about our un-civilization.
Sam, to be clear: are you suggesting that exposing the fraudulent practices of Nalco, which go back generations, is vilifying human beings? Or were you referring to something else? These guys don’t need to be vilified; they are villains, except for the part about there being no hero for them to be at odds with. We don’t question their perception of their God-given right to make profits at any expense to the rest of us, to the future, to the life on the sea floor, or our whole habitat. Will the world rise to an effective level of anger as oil subsumes the Florida Keys, Cuba, the Bahamas and the East Coat? Oil that you can see, and oil that is deadly to sea life at the parts per million level.
We need to understand, and get really clear, that we are in the midst of a massive lie here. Difficult to face, yes, but extremely basic. It’s not well known that Nalco was involved with one of the most stunning scientific frauds ever – Carol van Strum is probably the last reporter on the planet who remembers.
IBT still affects us because many products approved and certified safe by the lab are on the market to this day. We can be sure their dispersant chemical is no “safer” than any other product they’ve handled. Among the chemicals being used, one is basically antifreeze being poured by the tonne into the Gulf of Mexico. So we have three spills — the crude, the dispersants (there are several – Nalco’s is being used the most) and 700,000+ gallons of diesel that went down with the rig that nobody is mentioning (I saw it on a White House press release, that must be why).
Now, do we really think these people cannot stop an oil well leaking? That is for you to decide, and for the facts to bear out; if they eventually stop this, we get to see how they did it, and we can ask if they have that solution now. Since none of the parties involved, so far, demonstrates the ability to tell the truth, why do we believe anything they say?
Then comes the real question — what do we do in the face of an impossible situation?
I don’t know. I feel pretty bad for myself in relation to this, and I live about 180 degrees around the globe away from this atrocity. I feel bad for everyone on the planet in relation to this, and I don’t think that there’s any point in vilifying human beings, because it just obscures the fact that certain human beings fucked this up and are fucking the rest of us and the dolphins and the oysters and everything else. But of course, the dolphins can’t fight back. A friend of mine recently wrote a story about radioactive mustangs that grow wings and when the government tries to shoot them down with helicopters, the mustangs cause the helicopters to crash and it leads to the downfall of world governments. I mean, that was a really inspiring story. But in the meantime…
I couldn’t stop crying when I first saw this video. Fucking chemical companies. All I can think of is the dolphins, and whales and turtles and everyone else. I wish them quick deaths. THEY are the ones who matter here, not us and our shortsighted, greedy un-civilization.
Well then. As horrifying as all this is; we are at the tip of the opportunity to tear down this house of lies.
Let us pray we can open the ‘can of worms’ all the way (assuming the worms are not too sick from cancer or gmo’d frankenworms); it’s been happening a bit with banking fraud; can it happen here?
NOT too easily it would seem, with Elena on the Supreme Bench.
And now for who is Nalco:
They owned Industrial Bio-Test Labs. This is an issue everyone needs to know about. And I mean everyone, like we teach everyone how to cross a street.
http://planetwaves.net/contents/faking_it.html
The article above is by Keith Schneider. I recovered it and re-published it from the basement of the NRDC in Manhattan a couple of years ago. Below is a quote from my own coverage of IBT Labs, from the PCB story — one of the most horrendous angles to the story, since IBT’s fraudulent studies kept the chemical on the market long after the chemical and electrical manufacturers knew that it was deadly. Their role was to create fake safety testing data on PCBs and…everything. On products you use today. On products you used as a kid. On products you feed to your dog. Many other labs were involved — IBT led the way, and they were owned by Nalco.
Starts second paragraph. I’ve left the Westinghouse paragraph for a bit of context.
== from Conspiracy of Silence by Eric Francis, SIERRA magazine ==
At Westinghouse, another special committee met to discuss the growing PCB crisis. The December 28, 1971, minutes of the meeting (stamped “PROPRIETARY CLASS 1 — DESTROY BY BURNING OR SHREDDING”) acknowledged the problems of PCB accumulation in wildlife, and indicated that PCBs caused reproductive disorders in chickens and birth defects in victims of the Yusho Incident. They also acknowledged that Yusho might have involved dibenzofurans, which are created when PCB oil is heated.
At this point, the crisis entered its darkest hour. In order to maintain its 1971 position that “PCBs are not and cannot be classified as highly toxic,” Monsanto engaged Industrial Bio-Test Labs of Northbrook, Illinois, to do safety studies on its Aroclor PCB products.
Seven years later, IBT Labs would be at the center of one of the most far-reaching scandals in modern science, as thousands of its studies were revealed through EPA and FDA investigations to be fraudulent or grossly inadequate.
One of IBT’s top executives was Dr. Paul Wright, a Monsanto toxicologist who took a job at IBT Labs in part to supervise the PCB tests, and then returned to Monsanto. Wright was eventually convicted of multiple counts of fraud in one of the longest criminal trials in U. S. history – with his legal fees paid by Monsanto.
While fraud on the PCB tests was not raised in the IBT trial, it is strongly suggested by memos and letters that came to light in later civil lawsuits. Several of these show how, at Monsanto’s request, IBT Labs customized its studies. “I think we are surprised (and disappointed?) at the apparent toxicity at the levels studied,” Monsanto’s Elmer Wheeler wrote in March 1970 to IBT president Joseph Calandra. “I doubt that there is any explanation for this but I do think that we might exchange some new thoughts.”
In a letter to IBT Labs two months later commenting on a set of PCB test results, Wheeler wrote, “We would hope that we might find a higher ‘no effect’ level with this sample as compared to the previous work.”
In later years, Monsanto’s requests would become even more blatant. “In two instances, the previous conclusion of ‘slightly tumorigenic’ was changed to ‘non-carcinogenic,'” Monsanto wrote in July 1975. “The latter phrase is preferable. May we request that the Aroclor 1254 report be amended to say ‘does not appear to be carcinogenic.'”
Two weeks later, Calandra responded: “We will amend our statement in the last paragraph on page 2 of the Aroclor 1254 report to read, ‘does not appear to be carcinogenic’ in place of ‘slightly tumorigenic’ as requested.” Testimony about the IBT Labs scandal in a Texas lawsuit against Monsanto indicates that IBT was aware that PCBs caused extremely high numbers of tumors in test rats, with 82 percent developing tumors when fed Aroclor 1254 at 10 parts per million and 100 percent at 100 parts per million. Yet with a stroke of a pen, IBT Labs certified PCBs a noncarcinogen.
Working behind the scenes of such scientific miracles was Paul Wright. In July 1976, after returning to Monsanto, he was given a $1,000 award for “forestalling EPA’s promulgation of unrealistic regulations to limit discharges of polychlorinated biphenyls.” A year later, IBT Labs was found out, and Wright, Calandra, and another IBT exec were eventually convicted of federal fraud charges.
Posted by Alex Seitz-Wald at 12:48 pm
May 17, 2010 1 COMMENT BP Chose More Toxic, Less Effective Oil Dispersant — Guess Why …
This post originally appeared on Think Progress.
As BP believes it has finally made progress plugging the massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, it has managed to prevent much of the oil already released from washing onshore by using huge quantities of oil dispersants. BP rounded up a “third of the world’s available supply of dispersants” and has been deploying them aggressively. But Greenwire reports that the chemical BP is using is more toxic and perhaps even less effective than other available dispersents:
So far, BP has told federal agencies that it has applied more than 400,000 gallons of a dispersant sold under the trade name Corexit and manufactured by Nalco Co., a company that was once part of Exxon Mobil Corp. and whose current leadership includes executives at both BP and Exxon. And another 805,000 gallons of Corexit are on order, the company said, with the possibility that hundreds of thousands of more gallons may be needed if the well continues spewing oil for weeks or months.
But according to EPA data, Corexit ranks far above dispersants made by competitors in toxicity and far below them in effectiveness in handling southern Louisiana crude.
Of 18 dispersants whose use EPA has approved, 12 were found to be more effective on southern Louisiana crude than Corexit, EPA data show. Two of the 12 were found to be 100 percent effective on Gulf of Mexico crude, while the two Corexit products rated 56 percent and 63 percent effective, respectively. The toxicity of the 12 was shown to be either comparable to the Corexit line or, in some cases, 10 or 20 times less, according to EPA.
BP “shares close ties” with Nalco. A BP board member who served as an executive at the company for 43 years also sits on Nalco’s board, and critics suggest there may be a conflict of interest in BP’s choice of Corexit. “It’s a chemical that the oil industry makes to sell to itself, basically,” said Defenders of Wildlife’s Richard Charter. While use of dispersants helps keep oil off beaches and out of wetlands, “[s]cientists warn that the dispersed oil, as well as the dispersants themselves, might cause long-term harm to marine life.” Even Nalco admits the chemicals pose “moderate” environmental hazard, but Pro Publica noted that dispersant ingredients are kept secret under trade laws, so it’s difficult to know the potential fallout from using them. A Corexit product was used to cleanup the Exxon Valdez spill, and workers suffered health problems “including blood in their urine and assorted kidney and liver disorder.”
UPDATE
Climate Progress’ Joe Romm notes that as toxic as Corexit is, dispersed oil is more toxic.
By Lisa Margonelli for the Atlantic Monthly:
The End of Magical Oil
May 14 2010, 3:51 PM ET | Comment
Until this horrifying video of oil barreling out of the well drilled by the now drowned Deepwater Horizon rig surfaced a few days ago, few Americans had given the deepwater wells of the Gulf much thought — but all of us were getting more and more dependent upon them.
Between 1995 and 2004, deepwater production grew by 535 percent — an unimaginably high, Madoff-like rate in a country with tapped oil reserves and a driving habit that gobbles up a quarter of the world’s oil production. If we glimpsed these wells at all, they were in a Jules Verne-like dreamscape of triumphant technology presented in an oil company ad. Dangers? We didn’t think of them. These wells were not on the east and west coasts, where the politically-empowered environmentalists worry about their views. And they weren’t in the pristine white north, so dear to many of us who’ve never been there.
Deepwater wells were in the Gulf — the official sacrifice zone for U.S. energy policy — where a critical mass of our refineries, a tangle of marine terminals, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and many decades of oil exploitation have sullied waters and local politics as far back as anyone can remember. Until it appeared on YouTube, this was “magic” oil, miraculously plugging the gap in our unspoken energy policy of increasing imports while yakking ineffectually about energy independence. Magically, too, its seemingly sacrifice-free growth was projected to jump by 62 percent to 2.1 million barrels a day by 2016 — nearly 43 percent of the whole U.S.’s straggling domestic oil production in 2008.
Now, as BP eerily prepares to drop a “top hat” over this ever larger spill, it’s time to re-examine this magic oil, and the trick that brought it to us.
Deepwater drilling had an improbable, unbelievable, giddy rise from its birth in 1993. Every well was pushing the envelope, either of depth in the water or the depth of the drillbit beneath the crust. “Every well I did was the deepest ever,” an oil industry professional told me, yesterday. “I worked on 20 wells that set records. Every guy that did my job had worked on 20 wells that set records. We were sprinting, breaking records right and left. Everything they did had never been done before.” For 17 years the deepwater rigs were jamming on the edge of the envelope.
As the demand for deepwater oil grew, so did the demand for deepwater rigs, each differently designed than the last. “A year and half ago there were 35 drillships like the Deepwater Horizon,” an officer on a Transocean drillship told me, “and by 2016 there will be 65. There’s a very limited number of people with the experience to be officers on them. And that pool is getting diluted.The age of the captains on these ships is falling from the mid 40’s to the mid-30’s.” The International Association of Drilling Contractors recently bemoaned a coming shortage of professionals.
And they were drilling into trickier and trickier formations. By 2008, 25 to 30 percent of remaining reservoirs in the Gulf had pressure issues, which the industry and the MMS were trying to figure out how to manage.
Deepwater was, in other words, an increasingly risky business in risky conditions, with new equipment, people, and practices. If it sounds a bit like the conditions that led to the financial meltdown, perhaps it was, particularly when you factor in the behavior of the regulator. The MMS, the proxy for American citizens, had put its faith in magic rather than in regular inspections and regulation. Like those of us driving around madly on land, who preferred not to think about the risks of this oil, the MMS didn’t pay much attention to the details, and sometimes even violated the law to assist in oil extraction.
As industry sprinted, the MMS shuffled. Since 1997, it appears to have issued only one notice on Deepsea BOP (Blow Out Preventer) inspections ( NTL No.2009-G07). Puzzlingly, this notice issued some clarifications on modifications to the BOP’s, which include an interesting sentence: “Failure of a choke line installed below a bottom ram could result in a blow out.” (Perhaps that has something to do with some of the info on the lack of schematic drawings for the BOP’s and the fact that they’d never been “emergency” tested since they had been placed on the seabed, according to Congressman Bart Stupak’s statement.) In any case, here was a regulator trying to stay on top of an industry that was moving the needle with every well, and it only issued one notice on the BOP in 13 years.
In addition to the famous scandal around sex and drugs, the MMS had more insidious issues with industry. In 2001 it worked on Project Deep Sea Spill, which modeled an underwater spill much smaller than the Deepwater Horizon, but kept the information proprietary among the 12 cooperating oil companies for four years.
And so now, we are not only faced with an extraordinarily large, frightening, and nearly unthinkable oil spill, we are also facing the end of magical oil. Like the financial crisis, there are physical issues to deal with now, but in the future there will be a crisis of confidence in the oil industry and in government’s ability to regulate it. And at the same time, all of that new oil will not flow magically toward our shores, lubricating our lifestyle, allowing us to glide on without an explicit energy policy. We shouldn’t kid ourselves that this is merely a large oil spill. It is much more.
And I suspect I will not be surprised.
Just sick.
Oh my God. Do you mean the chemical industry that produced the chemicals to gas the people? If you meant weapons and arms you would not have said ‘chemical’ industry.
There is some piece that I miss here. Hitler depended on the chemical industry in the sense that he was paid by it?
Otherwise, the chemical industry could produce the most horrible things, but it’s him who decided to use them and how to use them.
Hitler was little cheese compared to the chemical industry that he depended on so dearly.
How could it be WORSE than Hitler? Now I can’t imagine what it can be.
I used to believe in fraud, Len. But my nearly two decades of dealing with the denial of students and parents in the New Paltz dorms cured me of that. Caveat emptor was thrown out by the courts ages ago, but that’s really what it comes back to. I have met countless parents who, when I warned them about the dorms, simply told me to fuck off. Then I tried recruiting middle aged ladies to talk to the other middle aged ladies (in case people were discounting me, and not my information), and again, no results.
The greatest issue here is, [we] want to be lied to. No, I don’t include myself. I can speak as a witness: many, many people want to be lied to, and will DEFEND this right. Perhaps BP is not a good example, since those events are sufficiently distant from our awareness; but our obsession with oil is not. Nor is our our obsession with our economic model. And our total, intractable obsession with doing absolutely nothing about a problem. How many people supported the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that it would keep gas prices down? A majority of Americans? We all knew that was the [supposed] reason for the war — all that oil under Iraq. A lot more than is under the Gulf of Mexico.
I could tell you many stories from my tours of duty on the environmental front. The resounding motto is, LIE TO ME. Show me a guy in a suit and sweet talk me and tell me it’s all gonna be fine.
Then, when a bunch of students who lived in Scudder Hall get various cancers, including a cluster of brain cancers, there’s no interest in social action; there is just grief. Someone else is supposed to fix the problem. Someone else is supposed to warn the new students. Take on the administration. One of the kids with brain cancer admitted: I was probably one of the guys telling you to fuck off.
When I write my description of who exactly is manufacturing the chemical being used to break up the oil, you will shit. I may not get to it for a while but let me put it this way: there’s no way it could be worse. Not if Hitler himself were doing it in the prime of his life.
Yes both Eric and Len. Sadly (sad that I say “sadly”) I believe I am a member of the small percentage that is VERY informed.
But only so far as I can dig (to use the idea another way). There is yet much too much hidden from view and each day bring new choices, new observations, new awareness and most of the time (sadly) only the choice of one “lesser evil” over another. Toxic water, toxic food, toxic air, toxic people.
Yep. We dun dug too deep.
Maybe if we keep digging into this pile of shit we’ll find the pony -?
You nailed it Eric. Then, there is what we can’t see and have not been told.
Agast,
-Len
The sad truth is, most people are only interested in results — not in process, nor in consequences.
We may wonder why nearly every industry in the world demonstrates its willingness to take these incredible risks. And then we can ask why we accept reassurances of safety, and being told that something is “unlikely.”
Have you asked any questions about the sunscreen you wear?
Do you assume that citrus based cleaning solution is safe?
Have you looked up the repercussions of every medication you take?
And so on. In LOTR, Tolkien makes the point that the average hobbit doesn’t give a hoot, or have a clue, what’s going on.
(In vanity) we have dug too deep and unleashed the nameless terror.
Why is it that LOTR resonated with the world so…yet we continued on our merry chase?
I have gone to tears.
xo
BP knew the equipment was faulty weeks before the incident.
This is criminal negligence and will most likely blow off the $75 million damage cap that’s the legal framework for environmental disaster as determined by the Exxon Valdez post spill federal legislation.
I’d say its no-holds barred on BP. ’60 Minutes’ may have done us a great national service.
This is from Keith Pickering’s diary at Daily Kos, summarizing the 60 Minutes special report on BP’s amazingly reckless gamble for profit:
1. This was the second attempt to drill a well in about the same spot. The first well had to be abandoned because the well had been drilled too fast (under pressure from BP to bring the well in quickly). Result: the rock fractured, causing loss of control of pressure in the well. Twenty-five million bucks down the drain, said BP to the crew. So they had to try again, in a rock formation known to be problematic.
2. Early on while drilling the second well (the one that eventually blew up) an accident damaged part of the blowout preventer (BOP). According to Williams, they were conducting a routine test of the annular, a ring of rubber that closes around the well at the top of the BOP stack. While the annular was closed, thus closing off the well, a driller accidentally pushed a joystick, which pulled the pipe casing up through the rubber seal at very high pressure. A short time later, after drilling had resumed, pieces of rubber began coming up from the bottom of the well. A drilling supervisor told Williams that the rubber debris was “no big deal”.
3. The BOP has two redundant electronics boxes, called pods, which communicate with the surface. These are critical devices which trigger the BOP to close the well in emergency. One of the two pods was problematic and occasionally inoperable. The batteries on the BOP were also weak.
4. The well was in the process of being closed with cement plugs when the blowout occurred. The day of the blowout, there was a disagreement between the Transocean supervisor and the BP supervisor over how that should be accomplished. The Transocean guy wanted to keep mud in the well (i.e., keep pressure in the well) during the cementing. The BP guy wanted the mud pulled from the well for cementing, because it was faster and they were already behind schedule. The BP guy won the argument. If pressure had been maintained in the well during the cementing operation, the blowout would not have occurred.
The embedded video is in Jed Lewison’s diary at Kos as well, with the 60-Minutes interview of Mike Williams, one of the Deepwater rig’s crew.