Dylan Ratigan on the Gulf Oil Spill

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Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Update

Video - Times-Picayune - NOLA.com
The Times-Picayune's Bob Marshall gives latest news on the oil spill

Gulf of Mexico oil spill update May 22

BP: Mile-long tube collecting less oil than before

By GREG BLUESTEIN, Associated Press Writer
May 23, 2010
Associated Press


AP – Pelicans stand in oily water and grass on island that is home to hundreds of brown pelican nests as …

COVINGTON, La. – Three top Obama administration officials are returning to the Gulf Coast to monitor the massive oil spill that seems to have no end in sight, as BP PLC officials said Sunday that one of their efforts to slow the leak wasn't working as effectively as before.

BP spokesman John Curry told The Associated Press on Sunday that a mile-long tube inserted into the leaking well siphoned some 57,120 gallons of oil within the past 24 hours, a sharp drop from the 92,400 gallons of oil a day that the device was sucking up on Friday. However, the company has said the amount of oil siphoned will vary widely from day to day.

Engineers are working furiously to stem the growing ooze as more wildlife and delicate coastal wetlands are tainted despite the oil-absorbing booms placed around shorelines to protect them.

A pelican colony off Louisiana's coast was awash in oil Saturday, and an Associated Press photographer saw several birds and their eggs coated in the ooze while nests rested in mangroves precariously close to the crude that had washed in. Workers had surrounded the island with the booms, but puddles of oil had seeped through the barrier.

Anger with the government and BP, which leased the rig and is responsible for the cleanup, has boiled over as the spill spreads. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa P. Jackson was headed Sunday to Louisiana, where she planned to visit with frustrated residents.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano were to lead a Senate delegation to the region on Monday to fly over affected areas and keep an eye on the response.

Meanwhile, the official responsible for the oversight of the month-old spill response said he understands the discontent among residents who want to know what's next.

"If anybody is frustrated with this response, I would tell them their symptoms are normal, because I'm frustrated, too," said Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen. "Nobody likes to have a feeling that you can't do something about a very big problem."

President Barack Obama also has named a special independent commission to review what happened. The spill began after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded off the coast of Louisiana on April 20, killing 11 workers, and sank two days later. At least 6 million gallons of crude have spewed into the Gulf of Mexico since, though a growing number of scientists have said they believe it's more.

The visits from top Obama chiefs come as BP said it will be at least Tuesday before engineers can shoot mud into the blown-out well at the bottom of the Gulf, yet another delay in the effort to stop the oil.

A so-called "top kill" has been tried on land but never 5,000 feet underwater, so scientists and engineers have spent the past week preparing and taking measurements to make sure it will stop the oil that has been spewing into the sea for a month. They originally hoped to try it as early as this weekend.

"It's taking time to get everything set up," BP spokesman Tom Mueller said. "They're taking their time. It's never been done before. We've got to make sure everything is right."

Crews will shoot heavy mud into a crippled piece of equipment atop the well. Then engineers will direct cement at the well to permanently stop the oil.

As the spill spreads deeper into vulnerable marshes, some have called for federal officials to take over the response. But Allen said the government must hold BP accountable. After the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker spilled 11 million gallons of oil in Alaska, Congress dictated that oil companies be responsible for dealing with major accidents — including paying for all cleanup — with oversight by federal agencies.

BP has tried and failed several times to halt the gusher, and has had some success with the mile-long tube.

Engineers are also developing several other plans in case the top kill doesn't work, including an effort to shoot knotted rope, pieces of tire and other material — known as a junk shot — to plug the blowout preventer, which was meant to shut off the oil in case of an accident but did not work.

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Scientist's Prediction's Likely Accurate 2 Weeks Ago

Extent of Oil Spill Remains Unclear

May 14, 2010
PBS Newshour

By: Lea Winerman

Nearly a month after BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, one question remains unanswered: Exactly how much oil is spilling into the Gulf from the unchecked leak?

A 30-second video released Wednesday by BP, has provided ammunition for scientists and environmentalists who say the amount of oil spilling into the Gulf may far exceed initial estimates by BP and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. But without more specific data, those scientists say, it's impossible to pinpoint the number with any precision.

Since April 28, the estimate from NOAA has been that about 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons) of oil are leaking into the ocean each day. NOAA hasn't specified exactly how its scientists arrived at that number, though it has said that they used both satellite imagery of the oil slick on top of the water, as well as undersea video footage of the leak.

But that estimate has been criticized as too low almost from day one. Just days later, Florida State University oceanographer Ian MacDonald estimated, based on satellite images of the slick, that the oil was leaking at the rate of about 25,000 barrels (more than a million gallons) per day. NOAA administrators called that number too high, but they've acknowledged that their estimate is imprecise -- NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco told the Washington Post that the estimate should be seen as "5,000 barrels-ish." Meanwhile, the video released this week -- the first footage of the leak made public -- gave outside scientists a bit more to work with.

But many oil exploration experts say that it is impossible to make any good estimate just from eyeballing the BP video. Bruce Bullock, the director of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University and a former oil company executive, explains that what comes out of an oil well is a mixture of oil, water and natural gas, and that the proportions of each can vary widely from well to well and even from the same well over time.

"The first five seconds of that clip, there's a lot of gas coming out. And then the remainder of the clip you see more oil," he says. "And that's normal -- you're going to see bursts of gas. You would need to look at that over a fair period of time to determine how much liquid vs. how much gas there is. And so I think [...] any guess would not be very accurate."

He also pointed out that it was not clear from the video how big the rupture in the pipe was -- another key piece of data.

Still, the NewsHour asked several researchers whether it was possible to estimate the oil flow based on the video. Some gave it a shot, while echoing Bullock's caution that without knowing the proportion of oil to gas and water in the pipe or the size of the rupture, any estimates would have to be very broad.

"Astrophysicist Eugene Chiang, an expert in fluid mechanics at the University of California-Berkeley, said that he'd put the flow at 25,000 to 100,000 barrels per day, judging from the apparent velocity of the oil, gas and water mixture escaping from the pipe." (Editor's bold emphasis)

How Much Oil Has Leaked Into the Gulf of Mexico?

OIL SPILL
PBS Newshour
May 9, 2010

By: Chris Amico

Nobody knows for certain how much oil has leaked into the Gulf of Mexico since last month's oil rig explosion. What we do have are estimates -- from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, from outside experts, from British Petroleum -- of how fast crude is flowing out of two remaining leaks (a third was plugged Wednesday).

Oil has been flowing out of ruptures in the Deepwater Horizon well on the ocean floor since around 10 a.m. on April 22, two days after the BP-leased rig exploded, leaving 11 workers missing and presumed dead.

According to NOAA, an estimated 210,000 gallons (5,000 barrels) a day is coming from the remaining ruptures. At that rate, this leak would surpass the 11 million gallons spilled by the Exxon Valdez in 1989 in mid-June if left unchecked.

Other estimates are far more grim. The New York Times reported that BP told members of Congress the rate could be much, much higher:

In a closed-door briefing for members of Congress, a senior BP executive conceded Tuesday that the ruptured oil well could conceivably spill as much as 60,000 barrels a day of oil, more than 10 times the estimate of the current flow. (Editor's bold emphasis)

A barrel of crude oil contains roughly 42 gallons. In a follow-up story, the Times talked to a BP spokesman for more on the estimate:

"The rate could go up to that," Mr. Suttles of BP said, when asked to verify a report in The Times. "It's not the situation we have at this moment, but it's not impossible."

Based on this range of figures, we built the meter atop this post to give a ballpark figure of how much oil may have leaked into the Gulf based on each scenario (by multiplying the rate of leakage by the amount of time passed since the rupture) and other possible rates between those estimates.

At the low end is NOAA's estimate of 210,000 gallons per day. At the high end is what BP told Congress. Drag the slider between those poles to see other possible rates. Keep in mind that all of this is only an estimate.

Editor's NOTE:

Even if we assume that 50,000 barrels of oil have been leaking into the Gulf of Mexico per day for over 30 days, (2+ million gallons per day) the total to date is at least 5 times (60 million gallons) that of the 11 million gallon Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in 1989.

The catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico is rapidly approaching biblical proportions. To date, the response by BP and the Federal government has been farcical. At the current rate, the ultimate damage done globally is incalculable especially if 60 to 90 more days are required to complete the drilling of one or two relief wells. By then the total spill could exceed 200 millions gallons assuming a current rate of 2+ million gallons per day which seems the most accurate estimate so far.

--Dr. J. P. Hubert

BP And The 'Little Eichmanns'

By Chris Hedges

May 17, 2010 " TruthDig" -- Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction. The oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, estimated to be perhaps as much as 100,000 (now thought to exceed 200,000, JPH) barrels a day, is part of our foolish death march. It is one more blow delivered by the corporate state, the trade of life for gold. But this time collapse, when it comes, will not be confined to the geography of a decayed civilization. It will be global.

Those who carry out this global genocide-men like BP's Chief Executive Tony Hayward, who assures us that "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume''-are, to steal a line from Ward Churchill, "little Eichmanns." They serve Thanatos, the forces of death, the dark instinct Sigmund Freud identified within human beings that propels us to annihilate all living things, including ourselves. These deformed individuals lack the capacity for empathy. They are at once banal and dangerous. They possess the peculiar ability to organize vast, destructive bureaucracies and yet remain blind to the ramifications. The death they dispense, whether in the pollutants and carcinogens that have made cancer an epidemic, the dead zone rapidly being created in the Gulf of Mexico, the melting polar ice caps or the deaths last year of 45,000 Americans who could not afford proper medical care, is part of the cold and rational exchange of life for money.

The corporations, and those who run them, consume, pollute, oppress and kill. The little Eichmanns who manage them reside in a parallel universe of staggering wealth, luxury and splendid isolation that rivals that of the closed court of Versailles. The elite, sheltered and enriched, continue to prosper even as the rest of us and the natural world start to die. They are numb. They will drain the last drop of profit from us until there is nothing left. And our business schools and elite universities churn out tens of thousands of these deaf, dumb and blind systems managers who are endowed with sophisticated skills of management and the incapacity for common sense, compassion or remorse. These technocrats mistake the art of manipulation with knowledge. (The super rich elites have for some time been transferring huge sums of money "off-shore" in preparation for the eventual implosion of the United States when the current imperial project has run its course. These are the true citizens of the world who have no need of nation state, JPH)

"The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else," Hannah Arendt wrote of "Eichmann in Jerusalem." "No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such."

Our ruling class of technocrats, as John Ralston Saul points out, is effectively illiterate. "One of the reasons that he is unable to recognize the necessary relationship between power and morality is that moral traditions are the product of civilization and he has little knowledge of his own civilization," Saul writes of the technocrat. Saul calls these technocrats "hedonists of power," and warns that their "obsession with structures and their inability or unwillingness to link these to the public good make this power an abstract force-a force that works, more often than not, at cross-purposes to the real needs of a painfully real world."

BP, which made $6.1 billion in profits in the first quarter of this year, never obtained permits from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The protection of the ecosystem did not matter. But BP is hardly alone. Drilling with utter disregard to the ecosystem is common practice among oil companies, according to a report in The New York Times. Our corporate state has gutted environmental regulation as tenaciously as it has gutted financial regulation and habeas corpus. Corporations make no distinction between our personal impoverishment and the impoverishment of the ecosystem that sustains the human species. And the abuse, of us and the natural world, is as rampant under Barack Obama as it was under George W. Bush. The branded figure who sits in the White House is a puppet, a face used to mask an insidious system under which we as citizens have been disempowered and under which we become, along with the natural world, collateral damage. As Karl Marx understood, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force. And this force is consuming us.

Karl Polanyi in his book "The Great Transformation," written in 1944, laid out the devastating consequences-the depressions, wars and totalitarianism-that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that "fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function." He warned that a financial system always devolved, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism-and a Mafia political system-which is a good description of our corporate government. Polanyi warned that when nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market, then human beings and nature are destroyed. Speculative excesses and growing inequality, he wrote, always dynamite the foundation for a continued prosperity and ensure "the demolition of society." (A knowledge and application of orthodox Roman Catholic Philosophy and Social teaching would have prevented the current catastrophe from gaining intellectual and practical acceptance, JPH).

"In disposing of a man's labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man' attached to that tag," Polanyi wrote. "Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society. Undoubtedly, labor, land, and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance as well as its business organizations was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill."

The corporate state is a runaway freight train. It shreds the Kyoto Accords in Copenhagen. It plunders the U.S. Treasury so speculators can continue to gamble with billions in taxpayer subsidies in our perverted system of casino capitalism. It disenfranchises our working class, decimates our manufacturing sector and denies us funds to sustain our infrastructure, our public schools and our social services. It poisons the planet. We are losing, every year across the globe, an area of farmland greater than Scotland to erosion and urban sprawl. There are an estimated 25,000 people who die every day somewhere in the world because of contaminated water. And some 20 million children are mentally impaired each year by malnourishment.

America is dying in the manner in which all imperial projects die. Joseph Tainter, in his book "The Collapse of Complex Societies," argues that the costs of running and defending an empire eventually become so burdensome, and the elite becomes so calcified, that it becomes more efficient to dismantle the imperial superstructures and return to local forms of organization. At that point the great monuments to empire, from the Sumer and Mayan temples to the Roman bath complexes, are abandoned, fall into disuse and are overgrown. But this time around, Tainter warns, because we have nowhere left to migrate and expand, "world civilization will disintegrate as a whole." This time around we will take the planet down with us. (Editor's bold emphasis throughout)

"We in the lucky countries of the West now regard our two-century bubble of freedom and affluence as normal and inevitable; it has even been called the ‘end' of history, in both a temporal and teleological sense," writes Ronald Wright in "A Short History of Progress." "Yet this new order is an anomaly: the opposite of what usually happens as civilizations grow. Our age was bankrolled by the seizing of half the planet, extended by taking over most of the remaining half, and has been sustained by spending down new forms of natural capital, especially fossil fuels. In the New World, the West hit the biggest bonanza of all time. And there won't be another like it-not unless we find the civilized Martians of H.G. Wells, complete with the vulnerability to our germs that undid them in his War of the Worlds."

The moral and physical contamination is matched by a cultural contamination. Our political and civil discourse has become gibberish. It is dominated by elaborate spectacles, celebrity gossip, the lies of advertising and scandal. The tawdry and the salacious occupy our time and energy. We do not see the walls falling around us. We invest our intellectual and emotional energy in the inane and the absurd, the empty amusements that preoccupy a degenerate culture, so that when the final collapse arrives we can be herded, uncomprehending and fearful, into the inferno.