I thought your solution would be banning. I agree whoeheartedly, but the next step has to be cornering the market on sustainable forms of energy. We could lead the planet if we just got off our butts!

The worst oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was the Ixtoc I blowout.

This flowed at the rate of 10 to 30 thousand barrels per day from June 3, 1979 until March 23, 1980.

It is listed as the second largest oil spill at 454,000–480,000 tons of crude oil, exceeded only by the Persian Gulf War oil spill of 1,360,000–1,500,000 tons. Note that most of the 100,000+ ton spills have been tanker disasters near Africa or Europe, and there have been none other than Ixtoc I near the US coast.

One tonne of crude oil is roughly equal to 308 US gallons, or 7.33 barrels.

I have often gotten better information from comments at the NYT than elsewhere.

One said the pipe that sank to the bottom is 'snaking' like your garden hose does when you turn it on high and then throw it on the driveway.

But since the pipe is metal it is fatiguing and getting cracks. If it snaps off completely the gush of oil may increase as it is no longer restrained by the kinks in the pipe.

Ban all offshore drilling forever!

'Nuff said...the debate needs to go no further than that point.

IBM's role in Gulf deepwater drilling:

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/t/r/trblmkr/2010/04/ibms-role-in-gulf-of-mexico-de.php

The Republicans obviously still have the magic touch when it comes to manipulating the "liberal media". This meme has surfaced elsewhere and is, obviously, an idiotic diversion. There's simply no parrallel between this horrendous environmental disaster and Katrina.

But the Obama camp has no one to blame but itself for this theme having emerged since they quite pointedly kept the President out of the story for a week with no major public statement. This was no doubt because it took a week to wipe off all that egg on his face for so stupidly and needlessly announcing his "Drill Baby Drill!" sellout on offshore drilling on the east coast.

Making matters worse, the aversion of Obama and crew to forcefully criticizing anyone with a corporate checkbook makes their technocratic Dukakislike lack of emotion in response to the disaster look like they really don't care all that much and I suspect they don't, but in politics appearances are everything. We need solid, level headed leadership in the cleanup but the public wants to see that the government response is led by people who share their anger and outrage that this occured, etc... Join this situation to the slowly developing story about how the White House press corps really dislikes Obama and his "team" on a personal level and you've got a perfect way for those childish idiots in the White House press corps to needle Obama.

The issue they are diverting attention from is far, far more important and that is the one that is the subject of this post: that it's time to end all offshore drilling forever and how inadequate his political hocus pocus "moratorium" is as a response. The moratorium is nothing but a political device to cover the Pres. for the moment and then, once the heat and light of the disaster has lessened, to offer a few more controls that won't really do much but will give the appearance of having done "something" thus providing political cover as they then resume business as usual and cross their fingers that it won't happen again soon.

President Obama is simply reacting to the situation that was placed before him.

"The situation that was placed before him" was a ban on off-shore drilling, to prevent environmental catastrophes like the Deepwater Horizon spill.

But Obama had a better idea than "the situation that was placed before him."

And if he has handled it in a misappropriate manner, time will show us.

Time already showed us, moron! Hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil are streaming into the Gulf of Mexico every day, and if the well-head fails, the worst-case scenario is 6,000,000 gallons per day.

Agreed 100%!

Sure, good.

Although, in Europe nuclear power is huge and increasing. At the high end, it supplies 77-78% of electricity in France. Eastern Europe is looking more to nuclear solutions as oil and gas (some of it from Under Caspian Sea) through Russia and Ukraine makes them nervous. And China, I think, is going through the roof with it.

IAEA from 2007: http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/PressReleases/2007/prn200719.html

"Of the 30 countries with nuclear power, the percentage of electricity supplied by nuclear ranged widely: from a high of 78 percent in France; to 54 percent in Belgium; 39 percent in Republic of Korea; 37 percent in Switzerland; 30 percent in Japan; 19 percent in the USA; 16 percent in Russia; 4 percent in South Africa; and 2 percent in China.

Present nuclear power plant expansion is centred in Asia: 15 of the 29 units under construction at the end of 2006 were in Asia. And 26 of the last 36 reactors to have been connected to the grid were in Asia. India currently gets less than 3% of its electricity from nuclear, but at the end of 2006 it had one-quarter of the nuclear construction - 7 of the world´s 29 reactors that were under construction. India´s plans are even more impressive: an 8-fold increase by 2022 to 10 percent of the electricity supply and a 75-fold increase by 2052 to reach 26 percent of the electricity supply. A 75-fold increase works out to an average of 9.4 percent/yr, about the same as average global nuclear growth from 1970 through 2004. So it´s hardly unprecedented."

This oil thing we have now? That may make Chernobyl look quaint in the end, I'm really scared. But undersea drilling in the North Sea has been sustainable on a large scale for over 30 years, and the weather there is just terrible (are they lucky, or do they not have shitty Halliburton cement, or what?). And even so, the counterpoint to that, of course, is "Sure it's sustainable now. But what exactly do you do in that terrible weather if you have an accident like the Gulf that seems to have no fix to it?"

Do you know what they do with their spent fuel rods?

Quinn raged about it on Libertine's diary yesterday; woulda made the idiot drill-babies
look idiotic; now?......?

I pray to God you are wrong about that. Jesus! That's a shitload of oil bringing death and destruction to the entire Gulf of Mexico.

RR, there was/is no ban on offshore drilling in the Gulf. Might want to slow down a bit calling people morons.

Libertine; my inquiries about the safety of the emulsifying dispersal agents? Huffpo had a long piece on this morning about the dangers; some scientists say it's a crapshoot, 50-50, whether or not its dangers outweigh benefits. It causes the oil to sink downward as well as outward (3 dimensions, then) onto the sea floor, where phytoplankton ingest it, as well as crustaceans, on whom it has grisly effects. The reason i was unable to find much info is (Duh) because the formulas for the dispersal agents are: TaDa! Proprietary!
Just hunted to find the article again, but i couldn't; sorry. Just one more bummer, though.
Oh--and one person's conviction that the agents DO lend to 'out of sight, out of mind' attitudes.
;-((

There are plenty of safe and renewable forms of energy available for us to easily forego offshore drilling. The easy and dangerous thing to do is to stay addicted to oil. I'm sure you'd endorse that but those of us who are sane don't.

I'm all for finding alternative energy sources. I jsut think that "heavily restrict the use of fossil fuels and hope that something better comes along" is a dangerous way to do it. What the goal seems to be is to forego fossil fuels, nuclear, etc., and place all the eggs in the basket of wind and solar. If those don't work, then we simply go without and the economy takes a very deep plunge.

BS!

Nobody is saying anything of the kind and the technology and alternative sources already exist and they will work. In fact, they are already working all over the world to a far greater degree than here in the most oil addicted nation on earth. It's simply a matter of making the investment and that is all there is to it.

There's a small problem with implementing your suggestion, i.e., you and many others might have to give up a few things you've grown accustomed to, like 1/3 of them:

The Spill vs. a Need to Drill

By JAD MOUAWAD. May 2

In the furor over the Gulf disaster, a hard-to-overlook fact: America needs the oil.

....some environmental groups have demanded an end to offshore exploration and urged President Obama to restore a moratorium on drilling. The White House has already said no new drilling permits will be approved until the causes of the accident are known. Additional government oversight seems inevitable.

But whatever the magnitude of the spill at the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana, it is unlikely to seriously impede offshore drilling in the Gulf. The country needs the oil — and the jobs.

Much has changed since 1969. The nation’s demand for oil has surged, rising more than 35 percent over the past four decades, while domestic production has declined by a third. Oil imports have doubled, and the United States now buys more than 12 million barrels of oil a day from other countries, about two-thirds of its needs....

* Graphic: The Gulf of Mexico, by the Numbers

What's that got to do with Deepwater Horizon? How does Obama's repealing of the ban have any causal relationship with a leak in an area where there was no ban?