I’m typing this from a place freshly ravaged by Tropical Storm Irene.  “Tropical” and “Vermont” don’t belong in the same sentence, but there they are.  Helicopters buzz overhead as they leave to drop supplies in stranded communities.  This is the second hundred-year flood we’ve had this in the last four months and yet it is not these events so recently past that prompt my dire prediction.  It’s what two events of the past week bode for the future.

Friday, the State Department ruled that the 1,700 mile long Keystone XL pipeline – which, if allowed to proceed, will carry tar sands crude to refineries in Texas – will have minor environmental impact.  Experts disagree.  James Hansen, the NASA scientist and leading expert in global warming says that should the pipeline be built, there will be no way to reverse catastrophic global warming.  One would think that’s a significant environmental impact, but the oil companies want it and what the oil companies want….

If you haven’t already learned about the tar sands, extracting oil from them requires massive abuse of forests, clean water and energy, so the tar sands as a whole is a global warming machine gone berserk.  If oil is an addiction, the tar sands are the dirty needle we heedlessly plunge into our arm.

Thousands of people – citizens – have protested in front of the White House, hundreds have been arrested.  Barack Obama likely believes environmentalists have no choice but to vote for him next year, thus revealing himself to be another calculating politician, who’d rather retire in glory as a two-term president than actually accomplish anything of value in either of his terms of office.  In the addiction analogy, he’s the clueless enabler.

Yesterday, ExxonMobil and Russia – two of the planet’s evil entities – announced an agreement that will open the Russia arctic to oil exploration by Exxon.  Exxon – with help from us – has already gone a long way toward “opening” the arctic.  Global warming has meant the retreat of polar sea ice to the point that the Ruxxons can drill for more oil, to melt more ice, drill for more oil, etc., etc.

Exxon maneuvers at its peril, as Russia is famous for shafting its partners after it’s gotten what it wants.  Maybe Rex Tillerson will end up in a cell next to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch and oil billionaire.  Might be a pleasant meditation for a holiday weekend.

Researching something else last night, I came across an article describing the dumping of nuclear waste and over a dozen vessel-sized reactors in the western Kara Sea – where Exxon just won the right to explore.  The currents in the Kara carry water from west to east; that is, from the radioactive taint all across the rest of the local ocean.  Can’t beat those Soviet smarts.

If the tar sands are the dirty needle of oil addiction, then Tillerson and Vlad Putin are the thuggish pushers who will take our money, beat us senseless and leave us for dead.

Cold turkey is starting to look good.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

I’m escorting two Germans – Joerg and Daniel – documenting the effects of BP oil on the gulf as we approach the one-year anniversary. I’m part guide, part fixer, part cultural interpreter.

The results of their investigation are what you’d expect. I’m not going to blow their surprise if I tell you. The oil is still here, everywhere one looks. The effects on the environment are clear for those with eyes to see past three speeds of spin.

Fast spin is from BP and the other oil companies. “The oil is almost gone, thanks to our efforts and Mother Nature’s oil-eating microbes.” There are still work crews around. In the Louisiana bayous yesterday we saw them and counted 10 workers sitting on boats or driving around for every one actually raking up oil-covered vegetation.

Medium spin is from the government and mimics the corporate spin. It spins faster at the federal level and slows closer to truth the more local it gets. These folks just want it to be over, so they can move on to the economy. They’d like tourists to come back and feel safe spending money; they worry about their constituents’ livelihoods.

Slow spin is from the people themselves. They’re clearly ambivalent when they see us. Last year they were so grateful to know we were telling the world of their plight. Now they’re tired and depressed. Post-traumatic stress disorder is not just for returning soldiers here.

Yellow-ribbon magnets are still on cars here, reminding me this region bears much of the burden of our two wars, the ones we’ve mostly forgotten. They also remind me of the unrest in Middle Eastern countries pushed off the news by the disaster in Japan.

The Germans and I spend our days driving around in boats and cars. We start early and end late. We grab a meal at an IHOP or Waffle House (where cultural interpretation comes in). By the time we get to a cheap motel we’re tired but can’t sleep. We open our laptops and download the latest news from the melting reactors. We’re environmentalists and these are the disasters – massive oil spill, huge radiation leak – we warned against for so long. We talk about radiation poisoning and myriad defects of the GE boiling water reactor with the Mark I containment, a design I know too well, since it’s the same reactor type we’ve been fighting to close at home in Vermont.

I hope I appreciate nature as much as the next Greenpeacer, but I didn’t get into this business because I’m a tree-hugger. I do this for people in the small towns and rust belt cities who bear the brunt of the pollution and degradation (ecological and social) that corporate power delivers. We know the same suffering that continues in the gulf is now visited on Japanese people, only worse.

People here are wary of us this year in ways they were not in 2010. They’re tired; they’re panicking about the future. The tourists aren’t coming back. Maybe it’s oil; maybe it’s just the bad economy. They’ve lived for the last year on handouts they never wanted from a corporation that damaged them in a way they never thought possible. They’re depressed and angry.

They realize the attention of the world has now passed them by. That’s OK, they don’t want attention. They just want things to go back to the way they were before but it’s just starting to sink in that The Ways Things Were Before is a land they will never see again. Their depression and anger grow profound.

While we drive the Germans and I compare the wrecked economies of Europe and the US. We wonder what the effects will be from the blow suffered by the third-largest economy, Japan. It couldn’t have come at a worse time.

The economy, wars, oil spills, nuclear meltdown. The machine we’ve built is broken. It was poorly designed and we’ve run it carelessly for too long; it’s coming apart everywhere. The Gulf of Mexico is one place where the welds have ripped open.

I’ve been using my high school German this week. It gives Daniel and Joerg a chance to laugh, to release stress. We’re bearing witness, as our Greenpeace philosophy says we should. Along the passes of Bayou Batiste yesterday, bottlenose dolphins swam so close to the boat I could hear them breathe. Later, we came across a bottlenose corpse on the bank, its eyes gone, its jaw exposed where the flesh had rotted away. We breathed stench of its decay, bearing witness.

Maybe it’s remembering high school German, but high school poetry has been coming back, too: the apocalyptic Yeats of a century ago and the weltschmerzed Wordsworth of a century before that, at the moment we began this industrial revolution. Mr. Wordsworth was right, the world is too much with us – and we’re too much with it.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

So it is with deepwater and/or high pressure oil drilling. Most of the time, it goes well, or well enough to prevent catastrophe, but when things go wrong, as they did on April 20, then 11 men lose their lives and an ecosystem and an economy it supports will never be the same.

“We’ve learned our lesson. We’re going to redouble our efforts to make sure this never happens again.” I could attribute that quote to either BP (or any of its sister oil companies) or the federal government (regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans are holding down the White House and Congress). It’s a choral number.

A few weeks ago, as I was floating around the Gulf of Mexico with marine conservationist Rick Steiner, he told me this story: “The newspaper stories about the Macondo well say the guys drilling it were calling it ‘The Well from Hell’ because of all the gas kicks. You can tell when you’re drilling if the well is going to give you trouble. There’s another well in the gulf, called Blackbeard that ExxonMobil was drilling a few years ago. Even though their tests indicated that there’s a huge amount of oil in the field, the drilling was going so badly that the engineers told Exxon, ‘This is just too dangerous. We can’t control this.’”

“To their credit, Exxon did the smart and responsible thing: they cancelled the drilling and pulled the rig out. Then they did something that was smart – in a way – but extremely irresponsible: they sold the rights to a smaller operator who is drilling the well, but doesn’t have anywhere near Exxon’s resources if everything starts to go wrong.”

I got home from the gulf and checked out the story and sure enough, Blackbeard West (South Timbalier Block 168) is a very deep, very high pressure, potentially lucrative field in the gulf Exxon was drilling in 2006, but then sold to McMoRan Exploration, which resumed drilling on the well in 2008. By 2009, the well was nearly 33,000 feet deep; the deepest drilled to date. Tests indicate that pressure in the field is around 28,000 pounds per square inch (psi). In June, BP’s Macondo blowout was reported to be at 9,000 psi. The only saving grace for this well is that, although it’s six miles down to the oil, the wellhead is in 70, rather than 5,000 feet of water.

What I haven’t seen is any indication on the web that the well has completed its tests and begun production. The two factors which might be keeping the well off line are 1) the BP oil disaster (of course) and 2) the (relatively) low price of oil ($82 per barrel this morning).

It’s that second factor you’ll want to watch, because it’s what drove Exxon and then McMoRan into ultradeep drilling in the first place. If the money’s right, Blackbeard West and other fields – some high-pressure, some deepwater – will be drilled. There will be more incidents – perhaps less; perhaps more devastating than BP’s Macondo. In the end, the factors it will all come down to are oil and money. As long as we keep burning oil at unsustainable rates, the price will rise and exploration companies will go further, drill deeper – and more dangerously – to get it.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

“The technology, of course is unprecedented,” she said, knowing already what subject I’d come to discuss, “The other aspects, well…” She gestured toward the piles of parchment. “I’ve seen it all before.”

Clearly, she was happy to have company. “I have so few visitors anymore. I thought Mr. Santayana’s comment would help, but it was about then that things really started to get quiet. The Romans used to come all the time. This place was practically empty in those days. Now my dad has to double the size of the cave every 18 months and I still can’t keep up.”

“But I’m sorry, you came to ask about the oil spill,” Clio said.

“The president has appointed a commission to study what went wrong,” I said. She smiled and pointed to a heap of scrolls. “Those are the commission reports I haven’t gotten around to filing yet.”

“The thing is,” I said, “the commission hasn’t even met yet and everyone’s arguing over when we’ll start drilling in deep water again. People are filing lawsuits, the president’s people keep saying ‘This is a pause, not a stop,’ but we don’t know how – or if, even – we can figure out how to drill safely in deep water.”

“There’s more to it than that,” Clio said, pulling out a copy of yesterday’s New York Times. She shrugged. “I still get cave delivery of the print edition.” She pointed to a story about a BP drill rig off the north coast of Alaska that federal regulators are not considering “offshore” because it sits on a 31-acre gravel island built by BP. The rig, one of the most powerful ever built, is supposed to drill down two miles, then horizontally for six to eight miles to tap a reservoir of oil. This type of drilling has never before been attempted.

“Like I said, unprecedented technology, but get this,” Clio said, “The feds let BP write its own environmental review. This, from the same company that in 2006 caused the largest oil spill ever on the North Slope. That spill was caused because BP failed to run maintenance on its pipeline. According to the Times, the oil from this new well will pass through a pipeline that federal regulators say has not been properly maintained. But, nooo, oh no, it’s gonna be different this time. Yeah, right.”

Clio was clearly agitated. “Better still, this type of horizontal drilling is expected to create substantial gas kicks – y’know, like the one that blew out the Deepwater Horizon? But don’t worry, it’s BP, the company with the worst safety and environmental record in history. But what would I know about history?”

Tossing the newspaper aside, she stood and walked to the entrance to the cave. “Look at that water,” she said. “I’m lucky to live where I live.” She rolled her eyes. “OK, I know the Aegean is not nearly as pristine as it was when I moved here but at least there are no plumes of oil suffocating all the marine life and yes, the Greek financial regulators could easily compete with the Minerals Management Service for the gold medal in obtuseness.”

“History is not just a list of discrete facts,” she said. “There are trends, too. Your young nation has fought three resource wars in the past 20 years, where do you think that’s heading? My sister, Urania, has been whispering in the ears of planetary scientists for years about the effects of burning oil, but no one listens to them either.”

“Earl Long took credit for this, but it was I who told it to him 50 years ago,” Clio said. “You can only judge the future by the past.”

© Mark Floegel. 2010

The next day, President Barack Obama announced the formation of a commission to investigate the Deepwater Horizon blowout oil disaster and the safety of offshore drilling. He appointed former Florida Senator Bob Graham (D) and former EPA Administrator William Reilly to head the panel.

Flash forward ten years. It’s 2020. Will Sen. Graham and Mr. Reilly be sitting before a congressional committee, testifying that, six years after their commission completed its work, the federal government still has not acted on the key recommendations of its report? The more immediate concern is: Will the commission even make the right recommendations about America’s energy future?

“Blue ribbon” commissions are not the only things 9-11 and the BP disaster have in common. The 9-11 attacks were indirectly – but profoundly – about oil and America’s energy policy, or lack of one.

As the president took to the airwaves Tuesday, his administration was again releasing a new estimate of how much oil is actually spurting from the seabed in Mississippi Canyon 252. Now we’re told it’s as much as 60,000 barrels a day – 30 times more than BP and the government told us initially.

Speaking from the Oval Office, Mr. Obama was clearly a man on the horns of a dilemma. On one hand, his duty to American citizens and stewardship of our environment point clearly in one direction. On the other hand, any progress is retarded by the overwhelming political power of the oil companies. The POTUS may be the most powerful man in the world, but the world runs on an oil economy and oil logic. Beltway observers ask why Mr. Obama can’t make up his mind, but indecision is not the issue. The issue is that even a president cannot simultaneously satisfy two constituencies. Mr. Obama will have to choose and choose soon.

Which leads to the third similarity between the 9-11 attacks and the BP Gulf of Mexico disaster: in each case the sitting president found himself with significant support from the American public to take bold steps to remedy the situation. George Bush squandered his moment, using the 9-11 tragedy to launch opportunistic wars. What will Obama do with his moment?

So far, the BP Deepwater Disaster commission is off to a poor start. Two of the panel’s seven members — Mr. Reilly and Alaska’s Fran Ulmer — have strong oil industry ties.

Mr. Reilly is on the board of directors at Conoco-Phillips and has been for 12 years, three times as long as his EPA tenure. In an August 2009 sale, Conoco-Phillips finished second — right behind BP — in snapping up deepwater leases in the Gulf of Mexico. Surely, Conoco has an interest in seeing deepwater drilling continue.

Ms. Ulmer, Alaska’s former lieutenant governor and outgoing chancellor of the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA), has a long history of accepting campaign contributions from the oil industry, including contributions from BP going back to her 1990 candidacy for the Alaska House of Representatives. As chancellor of UAA, Ms. Ulmer presided over the stifling of marine conservationist and oil spill expert, Professor Rick Steiner, who was harassed into resigning over his warnings about the environmental hazards of offshore drilling.

As if that doesn’t cast enough doubt on the impartiality and independence of the commission, last Friday Mr. Obama’s energy and climate czar, Carol Browner, told The Hill that she hopes the administration can persuade the yet-to-be-named commissioners to curtail the six-month moratorium on offshore drilling.

As Ms. Browner was busy undermining the commission, Louisiana’s Sen. Mary Landrieu (D), Congress’s top recipient of BP campaign contributions in the 2008 election cycle ($17,000), sent a letter to the White House claiming that the six-month moratorium will mean the loss of 38,000 jobs. Which begs two questions: 1) Did Ms.. Landrieu take into account the effect of Gulf cleanup jobs? And 2) Why not just send the bill to BP?

Across the environmental movement, activists cringe with anticipation that Mr. Obama will use the catastrophe in the gulf to justify more loan guarantees to the nuclear industry. Even though the documented carelessness and incompetence of nuclear engineers rivals their oil industry counterparts, the nuclear crowd doesn’t have an active disaster up and running this week.

President Obama has a unique opportunity to have a “clean slate” discussion with Americans about energy policy. Will he bungle his chance the way Mr. Bush did? If the establishment of commissions is any guide, the outlook isn’t hopeful.

© Mark Floegel. 2010

Margaret is our master gardener, dispensing advice. Last week she helped me prune a young plum tree so it will crown out and have sturdy limbs to support heavy crops of fruit in years to come. She lectured as she cut, telling me that by being selective, the tree would react in certain ways and side growth would be privileged over upward growth.

The world “privilege” stuck in my head. Here we were, Margaret and I, blithely interfering in nature with our bypass shears. The idea was to take certain actions in hope of obtaining particular outcomes.

We all do it, all the time. We choose one thing over another and we change the course of our personal history. Or we refuse to choose and our history is written for us, but it is written whatever we do or fail to do.

The executives at BP privileged profits over stewardship and look where they are now. Their corporation’s stock yesterday stood at half the value it had the day the Deepwater Horizon exploded and the slide continues today. Business pundits are wondering if perhaps the world’s fourth-largest corporation may be broken up and sold for spare parts. What color is your parachute, Tony Hayward?

Barack Obama, like every other US president before him, has privileged fossil fuels over every other form of energy. Tax breaks, incentives, oil depletion allowances, the list goes on forever. Greedy executives like Mr. Hayward have been allowed to regulate themselves and worse, to determine the America’s energy policy.

Mr. Obama, like every president before him (although Jimmy Carter should be recognized – finally – for his straight talk), uses “our dependence on foreign oil” as an excuse for more asinine drilling and less oversight of the drillers.

The United States consumes 25 percent of the world’s oil. The United States has two-three percent of the world’s oil under its territory. We cannot reduce our dependence on foreign oil unless we reduce our dependence on oil. If government-run lotteries are a tax on people too stupid to do simple arithmetic, then “drill, baby, drill” is a slogan for people too stupid to be running for office.

“Do something! Do something! Show some emotion!” the press screams at the president. The hell with emotion. Change our energy policy! Start privileging efficiency, conservation and renewables over fossil fuels and nukes! We’ve already killed the Gulf of Mexico on your watch; do you want to go for the whole planet now? If you can’t act like a president, could you at least try for “adult”?

This week we’ve been told that the siphon BP installed on the blown-out wellhead is working, although the numbers BP puts out keep changing. We do know that to install the siphon, BP had to cut away part of the well’s riser, thus increasing the flow of oil. It’s been reported that the flow of oil may now be as many as 100,000 barrels per day or 42 million gallons per day. That’s four Exxon Valdez spills a day – but BP’s siphon is taking as much 15,000 barrels per day, because that’s all the boat at the surface can hold. (Are there no supertankers available, anywhere in the world, at any price? One would think every oil executive on this soiled planet would have an interest in seeing this tragedy end.)

One of this fiasco’s enduring tragedies will be the height at which the bar is now set for oil spills. As big as 10 Exxon Valdez spills? Ha! That’s nothing! Tony Hayward used to spill more than that from his 10 a.m. teacup.

© Mark Floegel. 2010

As I mentioned two weeks ago, BP’s doing a much better job on the news censorship front than it is on the stopping-the-oil-spew front (although it’s hard to imagine how it could be worse on the latter).

The Washington Post (among other outlets) is reporting Southern Seaplanes of Belle Chasse, LA was temporarily banned from airspace over the spill until they raised hell and called attention to what was up. When I was in Louisiana, our folks rode with Southern Seaplanes a few times. Southern took numerous media personnel up. A Plaqumines Parish official who tried to charter a Southern Seaplane during the ban was told that if he wanted to fly the spill zone, he’d have to contract with a seaplane outfit approved by BP. (Disclosure – I got the story about the official second-hand, but it fits with the general pattern that’s been reported.)

Daniel Beltra, a photographer contracted by Greenpeace to document the oil was given the ground level run around. After being sent to two different offices to get a permit to walk on the beach (!), he was told he had to apply to BP. So he did, and they allowed him to visit a beach, one they chose (not very dirty), as long as he had a BP escort, who decided when the visit was over. Again, this fits the general pattern, as Mac McClelland of Mother Jones reports. (What’s that First Amendment thing again?)

As sickening as censorship is to a free society, there’s actual sickness around the BP spew, too. Fishermen hired by BP to drag booms and sorbent “pom-poms” through the slick have been reporting nausea, vomiting, eye and lung irritation – all classic symptoms of exposure to volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Crude oil contains VOCs, which evaporate at low temperatures, much lower than those out on the waters of the gulf. There’s more at stake than just a story for these folks, but once again, BP is putting its needs ahead of those people whose lives have already been wrecked by BP’s callous carelessness.

Tony “I want my life back” Hayward attributes the fishermen’s illness to food poisoning – a mass outbreak of food poisoning among the fishermen who are sitting on top of BP’s oil spew, breathing VOCs.

When I was in Louisiana, I was given a copy of a contract BP wanted fishermen to sign, if they wanted work cleaning the spewed oil. It included a section called “Appendix 8 Voluntary Release and Waiver” which called for the fishermen to grant BP prior indemnification should they be injured using BP’s equipment (because, you know, BP’s equipment never fails).

I was later told BP withdrew the appendix in the face of protests by the fishermen. Again, the news of that withdrawal is second hand. Who knows what kind of bogus contracts and gag orders BP’s attorneys have passed around to victims and may or may not try to enforce? And maybe enforcement later on is beside the point; maybe the point is intimidation now.

The latest news is that Corexit, the toxic dispersant BP has pumped into the gulf (almost a million gallons now), is being found in air samples. The federal EPA ordered BP to stop using it. BP ignored the order.

The Gulf of Mexico is where the new Gulf War is being fought. We’re losing.

© Mark Floegel. 2010

a) proof of global warming
b) just deserts for middle-aged idiots who decide to start running again after 30 years
c) all of the above
d) none of the above
e) maybe the above

The correct answer is e) maybe the above. A May heat wave on the Canadian border doesn’t prove global warming any more than a February snowstorm in Washington, DC disproves it. The fact that DC snowstorms are increasingly rare and Vermont heat waves are increasingly frequent, however, reminds us that we burn fossil fuels at our peril.

Down in the Gulf of Mexico, crude oil may have finally stopped gushing from the seabed at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gallons each day. News reports today are cautiously optimistic that the “top kill” attempt has been successful. We all hope so.

I’ve been talking to scientists who are frustrated that they can’t get a fix on the size of the oil spill because the flow of information – unlike the flow of oil – has been quickly and effectively blocked by BP and the federal government.

Still, their frustration is tinged with despair. Even if the spill – whenever it finishes spilling – is at the low end of the range, experts are having a hard time getting their minds around the enormity of the volume of floating oil and the damage it is causing and will continue to cause to the marine ecosystem in the gulf.

Three weeks ago, when I was on the gulf with marine conservationist and oil spill expert Rick Steiner, he told me, “If there’s anything good that comes out of this, maybe it will be a greater awareness of the risks of offshore drilling, the way the Exxon Valdez made us realize we need double-hulled tankers and Chernobyl made us aware of the risks of nuclear energy.”

From my own involvement with this spill, I think none of us will know for some time just how big and devastating this will be, but we’ll be shocked when the full extent is realized.

Monday, seven Greenpeace activists were arrested after boarding an offshore drilling support ship in Louisiana. The vessel was bound for Alaska to support Shell Oil’s planned offshore rig in the Chucki Sea, north of the 49th state. The Greenpeacers used oil from BP’s spill to paint “Arctic next?” on the front of the ship’s bridge. They were arrested and quickly charged with two felonies each.

Note the difference. When an oil company assaults the environment, the government is slow to respond and leaves the oil company in charge. When environmentalists protest the oil company’s crimes, the government’s reaction is swift and merciless.

I’m sure my friends arrested Monday will say it was worth it. President Obama will declare today that Shell’s offshore rig will not be allowed to drill this year. (Note the emphasis on “this year.”) This is a delay, not an outright victory.

I’m eager to hear what Mr. Obama has to say, although I’m not optimistic. Some talkers on the right have tried to brand the BP spill as “Obama’s Katrina.” I disagree. I think it’s “Obama’s 9-11.”

After 9-11, George Bush had the nation’s attention and support. He could have used that support to significantly wean us away from the oil addiction that was a prime – albeit indirect – root of the terrorist attacks. He failed to do that and instead chose to deepen our addiction and plunge us into a foolish war.

Barack Obama has a similar opportunity today. Public disgust with corporate malfeasance is at an all-time high; we may truly appreciate the magnificence of the Gulf of Mexico only as we watch it destroyed. Americans want to do the right thing – it’s the corporations and the politicians they fund that hold us back.

The BP spill is a watershed event – in an ecological sense, in an historical sense – and if Mr. Obama plays his cards right, maybe in a hopeful sense, too.

© Mark Floegel. 2010

If you’ve been paying attention, the answer is clearly: BP. There’s some justification there – it’s BP’s mess, BP should clean it or at least pay to have it cleaned. But BP executives shouldn’t be in charge; they’ve proved their incompetence. Yet everything we’ve seen to date indicates BP is firmly in charge and is making decisions based not on what needs to be done, but what will protect its corporate interests. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is taking orders from the oil company. Consider:

Censorship. The US Coast Guard is pushing journalists and environmentalists away from oil-soaked beaches. You can follow the various links (Coast Guard press people deny it), but CBS News has the Coast Guard on tape says “These are BP’s rules, not ours.” Greenpeace has had first-hand experience with this one. A few days ago, one of our crews arrived at such an oil-soaked beach near the mouth of the Mississippi. The Coast Guard arrived and told our people to get off the beach. “Why?” they asked.

“It’s not safe,” the guardsman responded.

“But we’re wearing protective gear.” Surely the guard could have seen that for himself.

“Well, there’s a cleanup operation underway.”

“Where? We’re the only ones here.”

In the end, he was the guy with the gun, so our people left.

Video. As I mentioned last week, it took three weeks for the federal government to get permission from BP to release any video of the underwater oil plume. (Seeing the video might allow experts not on the BP payroll to tell us there’s a whole lot more oil in the Gulf than we’re being told.) Who’s in charge? Finally, yesterday, on the eve of the month anniversary, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) got BP to send him the live feed, which he’s posted on his committee’s web site.

Damages. Meanwhile, Congress is debating whether to raise the cap for economic damages from an oil spill from $75 million to $10 billion. The oil company is on the hook for cleanup costs; this pertains to economic damages suffered by fishermen, coastal residents, etc. If an oil company is found to have acted in a grossly negligent way – as BP and Transocean seem to have – there is no damage cap.

Nonetheless, why is there a damage cap at all? If a corporation wants to engage in an inherently risky practice, should it not bear the full risk? This, of course, is the same Congress that does not require operators of nuclear plants to have insurance.

As we saw in the Exxon Valdez spill, ExxonMobil eventually got its damage award knocked down to 10 cents on the dollar, so again – why the cap?

The oil companies say that if they do not receive prior indemnification for the consequences of their actions, they’re not going to look for oil. Good, maybe we can get a real energy policy in America now.

Self-Regulation. It’s not just the US. The Associated Press today reports that all over the world, nations increasingly put oil companies in charge and the regulators do as the oil barons tell them.

“It comes down to granting flexibility for oil companies to select the best technology and practices to ensure safety on their offshore installations, as long as they meet the regulator’s minimum standards,” the report says. But in the case of the Deepwater Horizon, “best technology and practices” were not driving decisions – speed and cost savings were. What else can one expect from self-regulation?

Sure, it’s difficult and expensive to adequately oversee offshore rigs, but given that today’s oil corporations are the most profitable entities ever devised by humans, you think they could afford to pay the kind of taxes that will fund adequate regulation.

I – and millions of other Americans – had hoped this kind of rule-by-oil-companies would have ended in January 2009. There’s a bumper sticker I have to scrape off my car.

© Mark Floegel. 2010

How much oil is flowing / has flowed into the Gulf of Mexico?
The figure we keep hearing is 5,000 barrels or 210,000 gallons per day. After 23 days, that adds up to 4,830,000 gallons. A week into the spill, there was speculation that the rate of flow might actually be 25,000 barrels (or 1,050,000 gallons) per day. If that’s true, then 24,150,000 gallons of oil are now in the gulf, a spill more than twice as large as the Exxon Valdez. Recent news reports stress that no one knows how much oil is flowing, but everyone seems to accept the 5,000 barrels per day figure. We know from past experience that oil companies tend to minimize the amount of oil spilled and unlike a tanker spill, there is no finite amount of oil that can be spilled in the worst case scenario.

Why are we just now seeing images of the leak?
Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) have been working at the site of the spill since the first days after the rig sank. They transmit photos and video to their operators at the surface. Of course, the ROV operators have their hands full, but surely these images must have been passed along to the Coast Guard and other federal agencies that are – we’re told – in charge at the scene. Surely we understand why BP might be slow to release these images, but one would hope the federal government would have more respect for the public’s right to know what’s happening in a publicly owned resource.

Why is the federal government continuing to exempt offshore oil rigs from environmental standards?
Thanks to the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), we learned late last week that the Minerals Management Service has granted categorical exclusions to 27 offshore rigs since the Deepwater Horizon exploded. “Categorical exclusions” mean that the projects do not have to pass the environmental review required by the National Environmental Policy Act. Categorical exclusions were built into the law for project that clearly have limited environmental impact, like hiking trails, not oil rigs capable of wiping out entire ecosystems. And by the way, what would have happened had CBD not blown the whistle?

Speaking of other rigs, what’s up with the other 3,000-plus rigs in the gulf?
At Wednesday’s hearing in the House Energy Committee’s subcommittee on oversight, Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) revealed the “fail-safe” blowout preventer had 1) a dead battery in its control pod 2) a leak in its hydraulic line 3) a “useless” test version of a key component and 4) a cutting shear that wasn’t strong enough. We have no reason to think other oil companies are more devoted to environmental protection than BP, so why should we not expect this to happen again and again and again? How do we know it won’t? Why should we think the federal government is providing adequate oversight?

Why did BP not have emergency plans ready in advance?
BP has already tried – and failed – to put a containment dome on the biggest leak. We all sat around for days while BP fabricated the dome on shore. If such domes – in effective as it proved to be – are the best response for such leaks, why are they not pre-made and standing by on every rig? Now we sit and wait as BP fabricates a “top hat” plug. (Memo to BP: why don’t you start work on Plans D and E now instead of waiting for your latest contraption to fail?) Perhaps Plan D is the famous “junk shot,” in which BP will attempt to inject shredded tires, golf balls and knotted rope into the well. That’s 21st century technology? The best you can do? Golf balls and shredded tires? This is why we cannot afford to drill in the ocean. This is why we especially cannot allow incompetents to drill in the ocean.

What’s going on with the environment?
We’ve seen press releases from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) about taking samples in the gulf, but we haven’t seen what the results are. True, science does not move at the pace of the 24-hour news cycle, but NOAA should have something to tell us. What concentrations of oil are they finding at various depths? How far from the wellhead are they finding oil? (It would help establish an estimate of how much oil has leaked so far.) What about EPA? The oil spilled is light crude, which contains low-molecular weight volatile organic compounds (VOCs). In acute exposure, VOCs lead to headaches, nausea, vomiting and upper respiratory inflammation. Like NOAA, EPA is testing for VOCs, but where are the results? After 9-11, EPA infamously told people the air in lower Manhattan was safe to breathe. It wasn’t. Now they’re not telling us anything. I suppose it’s an improvement, but not much.

When will gulf residents begin to see restitution?
This spill happened at the worst time of year. Everything that swims, flies or crawls in the Gulf of Mexico is laying eggs and raising their young right now, if they can. Many of the commercial and sport fishing seasons were about to kick into high gear when the fishing grounds were closed. People are out money right now. They need help paying their May bills. And don’t tell me fishermen can get work from BP towing booms back and forth across the gulf. That’s like being invited to attend the funeral of your livelihood, your father’s livelihood and what you had hoped would have been your children’s livelihood. In the Exxon Valdez spill, Exxon kept the damages case tied up in court for 20 years (and got the verdict reduced to ten cents on the dollar). Twenty percent of the Valdez plaintiffs died before they received compensation. Will BP’s executives be as heartless as ExxonMobil’s? Will the Department of Justice stand by and watch as gross injustice is done? Does the federal government respond to citizens or corporations that make campaign contributions?

Why is the Department of Justice not investigating all the legally specious forms BP and Transocean are pressuring people to sign?
The media has reported that Transocean, which owns the now-sunken Deepwater Horizon, tried to force the survivors to sign waivers promising not to sue Transocean for damages before they were allowed to leave the hotel they were brought to after their rescue. Alabama Attorney General Troy King had to step in and stop BP from distributing waivers to Alabama coastal residents, in which they would promise not to sue BP for damages in return for a small sum of cash. BP tried to get fishermen to sign gag orders, preventing them from speaking to the media, if they wanted work helping with the cleanup. I’m told most of these documents won’t stand up in court, but its not just about court, it’s the intimidation factor of predatory corporate attorneys going after victims in their hour of maximum anxiety.

© Mark Floegel. 2010