Tag Archives: Oil spill

A Dark Ride Into a Dangerous and Unknown Future


Posted by Omnipotent Poobah

It’s been 40+ days and nights since the doomed Deepwater Horizon ark begot The Big Ooze™. BP has exhausted enough of its supply of lame-arsed ‘emergency fixes’ they’re hiring The Big Dick’s™ former PR Czarina so poor BP CEO, Tony Howard, can get “his life back”.

There is no way to describe the revolting arrogance of Howard and his enablers in and out of the private sector. He may want his life back, but thousands of fishermen, resort operators, and just plain folk along the Gulf coast would like their way of life back. Like the botched messes left behind the Exxon Valdez spill, Katrina, and dozens of other failures it’s unlikely to happen in their lifetimes.

Pols and pundits are likening Mr. Brownie’s Boss’s screwing of the pooch named Katrina to The Messiah’s inability to walk on oil. There are similarities and differences, but the path of both disasters was paved with equal incompetence.

Bush the Lesser ran afoul of an unpreventable – though not, as he claimed, unpredictable – natural disaster and grandiosely failed to handle the aftermath with even a smidgen of credibility. The O-Man ran afoul of a preventable man-made disaster that he can now do little about. They are both the victims and perpetrators of the cascading failures of America to make marginally intelligent decisions for several decades.

The electorate consistently votes for the pencil-thin moustache with the best pickup line. Once elected, those suave and de-boner pols go about appeasing the free market Gods at any and all costs, including loss of life or environmental disaster on a global scale. We have outsourced our governance to a cabal of ruthless thugs who would sell thousands of people’s lives to “get their life back” – along with that hefty campaign contribution or quarterly bonus.

The problem of government is not its size and the insistence that the private sector is any better is writ large in dripping oil lights in the dark Gulf sky if only we care to look.

Whether you believe in it or not, the concept of global warming is perhaps the best metaphor. Generations of bad decision making, incompetent risk taking, corporate thuggery, and Le Grande Ineptitude has brought us to a place where there is no way to reverse the process and no way to fix it either.

We’re simply along for a dark ride into a dangerous and unknown future suspended in varying degrees of denial.

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Too Many Regs, Not Enough Regs, Let’s Just Cap the Thing


Posted by Omnipotent Poobah
Beyond Petroleum?

TO STUPIDITY AND BEYOND! - Untold environmental damage, thousands out of work, and no one knows what the hell to do. As usual, there's plenty of blame to go around.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with conservatism or liberalism. A healthy democracy needs both to survive. Perhaps the biggest political disagreements today are over the need for, or lack of, regulation. Generally speaking, conservatives want almost no regulation and liberals want a regulation for every possible contingency – the more punitive the better. Spring-loading the nation’s governance to one or the other is a recipe for disaster.

Speaking of disasters, how about that spew pit at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico? It’s the perfect example – and distressingly easy to find.

Before the hole leaked much more than Jiffy Lube uses on the average oil change, conservatives were chanting “DRILL MORE BABY, DRILL MORE!” They called for BeePee to take care of things themselves because, after all, they were honorable people who’d never bait and switch a fly. Top conservatives cited causes for the problem – from a plot by the O-Man to blow up the well as a way of skipping out on his positive position on offshore drilling to overbearing regulations that choked those poor oilmen like dust belching from a dry well.

Regulate the Thieving British Bastards!
On the other hand, liberals saw the BeePers as a latter day evil empire with a fork-tongued Dick Cheney at the helm of the Death Star. They cried ‘DRILL NO MORE, DRILL NO MORE! – ANYWHERE” and advocated regulating the thieving British bastards within an inch of their multi-national lives.

Guess what? They were both right…and wrong.

The failure in this case isn’t the number or kind of regulations, it’s the failure of BeePee to willingly follow the existing regulations and government regulators too busy watching porn, sleeping with lobbyists, and generally operating like crack heads with an inexhaustible supply of rocks to get any regulatin’ done.

As more becomes known about the events leading up to the disaster, it is becoming clear that allowing BeepPeep to regulate itself was like asking the fox to guard the hen house. They blew through dozens of safety procedures and regulations and lobbied hard to weaken existing precautions. They claimed to have plans for disastrous spills, but it turned out the “plan” consisted mostly of PowerPoint slides containing the BP logo and a “We’re BP, GO GREEN!” slogan in the header. That was followed by the same content on every slide – “TBD”.

Profit of Doom

PROFIT OF DOOM - At BP, profit is sacred.

Now, people are clamoring for the government to step in and clean up BP’s mess. James Carville is apoplectic that The Messiah™ take over lest we have another Katrina PR moment. The problem is one of those “TBD” PowerPoint slides currently represents the “fix”. No one knows what the hell to do because no one has been here before and BP didn’t come up with a plan because the aforementioned fornicating crack heads didn’t make them.

If, and when, the oil stops, hearings are warranted. However, instead of each politician spewing windy soliloquies on the dangers of Big Oil – or how swell those poor, beleaguered folks are – how about they just ask simple, tough questions? If they evade or simply don’t answer, compel the oily suits to. In addition, those miscreants in MMS have some ‘splainin’ to do too. Ask similarly tough questions and get similarly truthful and complete answers from them. If not, slap meaningful fines and make heads roll as appropriate. When all the talking is done and we’re deciding what to do, don’t ask “can we regulate more” ask, “should we regulate more”.

A Fat Man in a Room With Krispy-Kremes
If both parties are truthful to themselves, liberals will find most of the regulations we need are already there. Conservatives should look past that seductress Ayn Rand and her talk of free markets, greed being good, and the perfect order of capitalism and think of corporate behavior from their own perspective. Self regulation is like locking a fat man in a room with 20 dozen Krispy-Kremes.

If you could make millions of dollars a minute by skipping the odd safety check or not issuing safety gear to the clean up people, would you do it? My guess is that if you’re an unrepentant capitalist, you’d convince yourself that is exactly what the market calls for and you’d be doing the world a favor by being so generous as to take the big money and put it to work investin’ and yacht shoppin’, and whatnot.

After that, we need regulators who enforce regulations instead of acting like hormone-crazed freshmen at a frat party. They check and double check to enforce the idea that corporations are part of the market and need to act sensibly, not like Daddy Warbucks on a Red Bull high.

Congress and the President need to ensure both sides are behaving and not spare the rod to spoil the petulant government and corporate children. And we the people must do the same thing with the Congress and President.

Psht! Yeah, like that’ll happen.

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Oil Spill: Never Do Today What You Can Do Tomorrow


Posted by Omnipotent Poobah
Matchstick Wells

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? - In an attempt to answer concerns that offshore oil drilling is too dangerous, the oil industry is promoting a new, safer drilling technology - drilling platforms made of matchsticks so that any spilled oil will burn off immediately. "It's safe, really. Take my word for it," BP's CEO said.

There’s an old saying, “Never do today what you can do tomorrow”. It may be tongue-in-cheek, but it’s a fair summation of why America suffers from so many ills.

The world is a complicated place. Guano, as they say, happens. When it does, there’s usually a great clamoring to do something about the problem in the moment. And as often as not, the obstructionists du jour fight change like it threatens their very souls. Barring that, they do as little as humanly possible under the guise of short-sided, over-simplistic, in-the-moment rationales. In the end, the Bluebird of Paradise keeps right on producing the guano until the nation is covered by the muck.

Eventually, we reach critical mass. The Gulf Oil Volcano is a good example.

For years, America has been firm in its refusal to wean itself from not just foreign oil, but oil period. The automakers’ response – millions of Hummers and SUVs with only slightly better gas mileage than the Queen Mary.

How’s that working out for us?

Instead, our corporate titans repeated The Big Dick’s™ mantra over and over…”You can’t conserve your way out of a shortage…You can’t conserve your way out of a shortage”. Yet when Enron played California’s energy market or when gas reached $4.00 a gallon, VIOLA! People conserved and formerly technologically impossible hybrids started to sprout on the nation’s highways, the lights came back on, and the price of oil dropped.

The response from the oil lobby? American first, we’ll drill the other planets later. Offshore oil leases were handed out like the Republicans’ reviled Food Stamps to the poor. The corporate welfare mothers went to work poking holes in the ocean – holes the best science available warned would eventually spit endless quantities of gelatinous black goo like a zit on a corpulent oil CEO’s arse. The extent of their preparation now seems to have been writing the “regulations” for the regulators while they shacked up with oil company lobbyists in a 24 x 7 x 365 Christmas Party from hell.

“Regulations?! Spill emergency plans?! We don’t need no stinkin’ regulations and plans!”

Now, a thousand regulations ignored, waived, or unenforced later, there’s a floating oil patch that’s somewhere between “tiny” – as BP’s CEO claims – or big as the northern hemisphere. No one knows for sure.

We got here because generations of Americans and their representatives decided to “never do today what they could do tomorrow”. Now here we sit with the “never do today” crowd still dragging their feet.

And, tomorrow bangs loudly at the door.

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Never Trust an Oil Company With Its Fingers Crossed


Posted by Omnipotent Poobah
BP Crosses Fingers

CROSS MY HEART & HOPE TO DIE - BP "promises" they'll pay to clean up the Gulf and The Keebler Elf, Jeff Sessions, thinks that's just so swell there's no need for legislation. Clearly, the Elf has been into the "special" chocolate chips again.

Update GOP Offers New Oil Liability Limit
Update Dems Reject GOP Liability Limit

Keebler Elf Jeff Sessions (R-Hollow Tree) blocked legislation last week to raise the liability for oil spills from $75 million to $10 billion. There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about that. Republicans, and Dems too, have never seen a corporate pocket they weren’t ready and eager to jump into, so Sessions just proves that white men can jump.

What is noteworthy is Sessions’ reason. A reason – within a season of stupendously lame reasons – is that BP gave Sessions their word they would pay for everything. Their word. Cross their heart and hope to suck the life out of the Gulf of Mexico word.

Oops, Jeffy Wandered Away Again
If Sessions truly believes that – and he’s certainly deranged enough to – he shouldn’t be allowed to go into the streets alone. Anyone that stupid is obviously a danger to themselves and others. That goes double for The Messiah™ – who is at least asking for a formal promise and still backs a legal change – if he trusts a company that has “promised” so many things their fingers are permanently warped from the constant finger crossing.

Last week, the world was treated to the spectacle of the three potentially responsible CEOs fighting hand-to-hand combat in an effort to blame the whole oily mess on someone, anyone, but themselves. Those are some mighty fine intentions there Jeffy.

BP has also tried to buy off fishermen too desperate to wait years for a settlement. Yes, BP’s Lord High CEOness, Tony Hayward, did say, “BP will honor all legitimate claims for business interruption”. However, when asked for examples of illegitimate claims, he hedged, “I could give you lots of examples. This is America — come on. We’re going to have lots of illegitimate claims. We all know that.” I won’t argue there will be no illegitimate claims, but not giving examples and backhandedly making that an American characteristic doesn’t make me all warm and fuzzy about the prospects of his promises.

The Elf and Turtle Brain Trust
Sessions and Yertle the Turtle McConnell don’t want to make waves by setting a realistic, though possibly still low liability limit because it would hurt the small drillers (Wow, Mom and Pop oil wells. Who knew?). But the issue here is the same as the banking crisis in reverse. If there are banks too big to fail, there are also drillers too small to not fail.

Small drillers often fail, just ask Dubya about Arbusto Energy. What’s the difference if they fail because they don’t have the resources to do a safe job or they fail because they drill empty holes? The end result is the same – with one important exception – empty holes don’t leak billions of gallons of oil.

In one of history’s lamest PR moves, Hayward called the pesky spill “tiny”. “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”

Tony, think about this: When a snake bites you, the amount of venom released into your body is very “tiny” in relation to the total blood volume.

But in the end, you don’t end up being just a “tiny” bit dead, especially if you drink the snake oil.

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The Gulf of Gelatinous Goo and the Tarball Etouffee


Posted by Omnipotent Poobah
BP Sucks

YA THINK?! - Gulf Coast residents aren't so happy with BP's "commitment to the environment" program these days. Somehow a gulf full of goo doesn't sit well with them.

No matter how green a person is, they leave an environmental footprint on Earth. Not everything can be recycled and sometimes the cleanest and best technology is far into the future. Nature is nature and all of us fail at some level to tame her. Exhibit A, the Gulf of Gelatinous Goo, formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico.

To the Governor of Texas the massive oil spill is “an act of God“, but only if God goes by the nickname British Petroleum. Drilling for oil is a dangerous and dirty business, but there are ways to make it less so. However, it – like every other human activity – will never be totally safe.

Very safe industries, like aviation for example, perform cost/benefit calculus pretty well. There’s a fair balance between turning a buck and turning a buck extraordinarily safely. Accidents happen, but it’s rare and the cause isn’t usually technology, but a short between the headsets not allowing people enough time to recover from it.

Oil drilling – not so much.

The pressure and the power for oil companies to make a buck is astronomical. If there’s a shortcut, they’ll take it. If there’s a regulation, they’ll skirt it. Anyone who expects a company or industry to totally regulate itself is starry-eyed.The pollyanna belief among the unrestricted capitalist set claims markets always equalize things. In this case, the spill became just a messy “market correction”.

In this case, there were regulations and they fell apart. The oil companies skirted them and the former oil industry regulators didn’t enforce them. The result: thousands of fishermen and tourist industry workers slip sliding into the already bulging unemployment line.

Corporate Wellfire

CORPORATE WELL-FIRE

That’s what makes oil company behavior after accidents all the more galling. After the Exxon Valdez spill, Exxon promised to clean up their mess. Their way of doing that was apparently by dragging their feet and suing until everyone just gave in to be rid of the skeevy bastards. The mess still lingers.

BP is already on that path with $5000 for anyone who lets them off the hook and goes away while they put together their world-class environmental cleanup team of high-priced lawyers. The Feds have told them no – for now. But, there’s  little doubt they’ll end up paying laughably few pennies on the dollar, especially with a proposed Federal law to limit their liability – another case of saving a company too big to fail because of their own negligence.

The Obama energy policy to open up drilling is on hold, but it’ll be back. Even with heavy investments in alternative energy, we’re still stuck with burning dino-poop until the new energy sources come on line.

But when the policy gets moving again, it’ll be useful to see if we learned anything from turning the Gulf of Mexico into an oily, seafood deep-fryer. Drilling technology isn’t the issue here, trusting BP, Exxon, et al to use it is.

Now, how about a tarball etouffee and a nice refreshing glass of iced Texas Tea to go with that spill?

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