oleeb's picture

    100% Failsafe Protection Is Available Against Future Offshore Drilling Oil Spill Catastrophes

    Ban all offshore drilling forever!

    It is the only way.

    We cannot afford to damage our environment with any more catastrophic oil spills.  We simply can't.  Our environment is already under siege as it is.  The Gulf of Mexico is sick and perhaps on it's way to dying as a healthy aquatic environment already due to our pollution (aka poisoning) of the waters as a result of our various industrial activities in and around the gulf as well as upstream in the mighty Mississippi.  We must heed the unmistakable warnings mother nature is giving us.  We have no choice.  It is that or extinction if we continue on the kamikaze course we are on now.  If we are to save the planet for our posterity: our children and theirs, we must stop bullshitting ourselves and start actively moving away from our malignant dependence upon oil.

    The only guarantee of preventing any further disasters like the one in the gulf is to completely cease all offshore oil drilling.  It is the only way to know that we'll never have to face this problem again.  There is no other way to guarantee it will never happen again.  It's a solution that we humans, and all of God's wildlife, can live with.  Offshore oil drilling is a choice.  It is not a necessity.  And by making the right choice of taking offshore drilling off the table we move closer to the day when America is forced to turn her attention seriously to safe, renewable energy like solar, wind and water: something we've known was necessary for at least 35 years and have refused to do because of the power of big oil, the greed of the wealthy and powerful in the corporate world who prosper under the status quo, and the cowardice of our political leaders who refuse to fight them and protect the public interest.  We must insist that our political leaders take this essential step now in protecting our environment and they need to understand it is no longer acceptable for them to continue to gamble with the future of the planet in this way.

    Ban all offshore drilling forever.

    It's the only 100% failsafe way to be sure our environment is protected from oil spills caused by offshore drilling.  There is no other way. 

     

     

    Comments

    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/01/us/01gulf.html

    One official at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in a widely distributed warning on Friday, said the oil flow could grow from the current estimate of 5,000 barrels a day to “an order of magnitude higher than that.”

    Isn't that 2 million gallons a day?


    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!


    I just found some transcripts of testimony given by some oil executives over the past decades to Congress during some hearings:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DayCrQWJXuI


    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.


    Like most of the other "utopian" suggestions by "radical left-wing" writers like Miguelito, banning off-shore drilling is a common-sense reaction to obviously catastrophic dangers to the environment, in the same way that the Glass-Steagall Act of 1932 was a common-sense reaction to obviously catastrophic dangers to the economy, and it was already written into law, like Glass-Steagall, before corporate whores like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had a "better idea."


    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.


    I like how you pin the economic woes on the former President, Bill Clinton, and President Obama.

    The Glass-Steagall Act was decimated by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA, which was the brain child of three Republicans.

    Yes, Clinton could have vetoed it, but he had his own desires in the Community Reinvestment Act. The law, however, emphasizes that an institution's CRA activities should be undertaken in a safe and sound manner, and does not require institutions to make high-risk loans that may bring losses to the institution. The Act was not the free for all that most claimed.

    Though many now blame the Democrats, and specifically, President Clinton for the mortgage fiasco, which is further from the truth than some accept.

    The GLBA destroyed many provisions that safe-guarded the CSA from what became known as the mortgage meltdown.

    President Obama is simply reacting to the situation that was placed before him. And if he has handled it in a misappropriate manner, time will show us.


    Ban all offshore drilling forever!

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


    Nawwww...it is only 210,000 gallons a day.
    .
    I am a bit disturbed by the NYT coverage of this today though. Reading the latest article they look like they are trying to paint this as another Katrina in terms of the government's response, which I feel misses the mark by a mile. Obama has multiple cabinet heads on the ground there and is coordinating the efforts well with Gov. Jindal and the State of Louisiana. And the differences go on and on. This is nothing like the response to Katrina. What the hell is the Times up to trying to push this meme?



    We've sure got a lot of work to do as a country.

    You can make strong arguments that coal should be banned also as inherently unsafe and unhealthy, not to mention *nuclear power.*

    This "leak" we got: will it be fixed, in a week, in a month, in six months? What will the world's oceans look like if this takes six months?


    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.


    In fairness, it is pretty well known and accepted that the Clinton adminstration was in partnership with the Republicans on repeal of Glass-Steagall. Rubin, Summers, and others calling the economic shots during the Clinton years were gung ho for it and so was the Big Dog and it was a massive, massive mistake that cost our people dearly and laid the foundation for the Bush economic collapse of 2008.


    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.


    I don't think there's any real comparison between the risks of coal production and offshore drilling in terms of sudden, catastrophic environmental risks, but there most certainly is no argument that can justify the risk and/or expense of nuclear power which, like offshore drilling, is simply not ever worth the risk taken to operate those plants.


    Agreed 100%!


    I hope that you have the time and the interest to follow the link in my recent blog entry and then leave a response.


    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?"


    Interesting discussion. From a political point of view no one has yet mentioned Obama's missed opportunity. If he had spoken out against off-shore oil-drilling a few weeks ago, instead of authorizing more of it, he'd look like a hero now. From a practical policy point of view, numbers matter here. If, hypothetically, the Gulf of Mexico oil fields were of a capacity comparable to the Arabian peninsula (e.g. 1/3 to 1/2 of the world's total reserves) then it would be a hard case to make that an occasional nasty oil leak is too high a price to pay for ever tapping that immense resource. I suppose the real figure is well below 1% which means the choice is more like picking between a few years of SUV fill-ups and the ecological integrity of a large range of coastline.


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


    Not long after apologizing for the failure of his neo-liberal policies that damaged Haiti so harshly, he tried a faux-apology for CFMA; said he believed Rubin; did not fly with me; he had to know what he was doing. Brooksley Born, the chief whistleblower at the head of the CFTC was a friend of Hillary's; they punished her outspoken warnings by passing those laws, even going so far as to make it illegal for states to regulate derivatives. Bah! He knew; just the same way he knew what NAFTA would do: job retraining the was his lame fix for the consequences. IMHO, that is. LOL!
    ;-)


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


    I don't think that's right. According to this:

    Rear Adm. Mary Landry says that 5,000 barrels a day is now estimated to be leaking. Officials had been saying for days that it was 1,000 barrels a day.


    There are 42 gallons in a standard oil barrel, meaning the estimate has increased from 42,000 gallons of oil leaking into the Gulf each day to 210,000 gallons.

    An *order of magnitude* higher than 5000 barrels a day is 50,000 barrels a day. That goes from 210,000 gallons a day to 2,100,000 per day.


    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.


    I do! The official line they peddled to get us to swallow Yucca goes something like this (from the "Yucca Mountain Site Characterization
    Project").

    But they really just dump a bunch of the shit in former Eastern Block nations and are sitting on tones of the nastiest stuff. They made waste disposal a "national secret" a few years back so it's now illegal for journalists to report on much of the issue. The links in this greenpeace article get into lots of it (but don't seem to address the dumping in other nations).


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


    Wow this is a wonderful idea! The safest thing to do is to ban all offshore drilling.

    Then we can ask the magical energy fairies to meet our energy needs instead.

    Problem solved.


    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.
    ;-((


    Galveston, the total quantity of all reserve of offshore oil in US territorial waters would be enough (except for that spilled instead to kill birds) to supply US consumption for about ten years. Your children and grandchildren will wonder what magical fairies you thought you had to so cavalierly squander their inheritance of natural resources.


    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.


    It's Glaivester, not Galveston. Pronounced "Glave-stir." It's based on the name of the weapon in the movie Krull.


    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.


    It's a classic goof trap. We want the magical energy fairies to appear; capture them, grind them up, it's something like a terra-watt per fairy (not sure where I read that, Scientific American or Gizmodo... one of those).


    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.


    The eastern Gulf of Mexico tract that would be offered for lease is adjacent to an area that already contains thousands of wells and hundreds of drilling platforms. The eastern Gulf area is believed to contain as much as 3.5 billion barrels of oil and 17 trillion cubic feet of gas, the richest single tract that would be open to drilling under the Obama plan.

    Drilling was never allowed on that huge tract in the Gulf of Mexico, trblmkr, you fucking moron!

    And trblmkr replies...

    "Whut? Whut? Just because it was never allowed doesn't mean it was banned. Because banning means... Whut? Whut? Let's change the subject!"


    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


    With all due respect, this is simply a foolish and simplistic argument that ignores the reality of alternatives. The needs of the nation for energy can be met otherwise and it's high time we began the conversion because the oil simply is not going to last forever and it is going to be prohibitvely more expensive in the not too distant future. So you see, we really have no choice but to convert from oil and the sooner the better for us all.


    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?


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