Thanks Captain Hindsight!

South Park:

Coon 2: Hindsight
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The Washington Post:

A 16-month federal investigation has concluded that BP’s efforts to limit costs on its mile-deep Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico contributed to the blowout last year that killed 11 workers, sank the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and created the largest oil spill in U.S. history.
The long-awaited report by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement catalogues dozens of mistakes, misapprehensions, risky decisions and failures of communication that led to the blowout and the 87-day spill that spewed nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the gulf.

Right. I understand a formal investigation was necessary, but it wasn't like these things weren't blatantly obvious on the first day after the spill.

But I Thought It Was a Humanitarian Mission?

We just heart the Libyan people so much more than the Syrians, Yemenis, and Bahrainis and couldn't bear to see the former being gunned down in the streets by their own government. The latter? Meh. Not so much.

On that note, Glenn Greenwald excerpts the following from this Washington Post article:

Yet even before armed conflict drove the U.S. companies out of Libya this year, their relations with Gaddafi had soured. The Libyan leader demanded tough contract terms. He sought big bonus payments up front. Moreover, upset that he was not getting more U.S. government respect and recognition for his earlier concessions, he pressured the oil companies to influence U.S. policies. . . .

When Gaddafi made his deal with Bush in 2004, he had hoped that returning foreign oil companies would help boost Libya’s output . . . The U.S. government also encouraged American oil companies to go back to Libya. . . .

The companies needed little encouragement. Libya has some of the biggest and most proven oil reserves -- 43.6 billion barrels -- outside Saudi Arabia, and some of the best drilling prospects. . . . Throughout this time, oil prices kept rising, whetting the appetite for greater supplies of Libya's unusually "sweet" and "light," or high-quality, crude oil.

By the time Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited in 2008, U.S. joint ventures accounted for 510,000 of Libya's 1.7 million barrels a day of production, a State Department cable said. . . .

But all was not well. By November 2007, a State Department cable noted "growing evidence of Libyan resource nationalism." It noted that in his 2006 speech marking the founding of his regime, Gaddafi said: "Oil companies are controlled by foreigners who have made millions from them. Now, Libyans must take their place to profit from this money." His son made similar remarks in 2007.

Oil companies had been forced to give their local subsidiaries Libyan names, the cable said. . . .

That's more the recent history of American-Libyan interaction. The article states this on the current state of the conflict:

But Libya's oil production has foundered, sagging to about 1.5 million barrels a day by early this year before unrest broke out. The big oil companies, several of which had drilled dry holes, felt that Libya was not making the best exploration prospects available. One major company privately said that it was on the verge of a discovery but that unrest cut short the project.

With the country torn by fighting, the big international oil companies are treading carefully, unwilling to throw their lot behind Gaddafi or the rebel coalition.

Yet when representatives of the rebel coalition in Benghazi spoke to the U.S.-Libya Business Council in Washington four weeks ago, representatives from ConocoPhillips and other oil firms attended, according to Richard Mintz, a public relations expert at the Harbour Group, which represents the Benghazi coalition. In another meeting in Washington, Ali Tarhouni, the lead economic policymaker in Benghazi, said oil contracts would be honored, Mintz said.

"Now you can figure out who’s going to win, and the name is not Gaddafi," Saleri said. "Certain things about the mosaic are taking shape. The Western companies are positioning themselves."

"Five years from now," he added, "Libyan production is going to be higher than right now and investments are going to come in."

So essentially we have a war being waged for the sole purpose of deposing a dictator for the crime of being insufficiently deferent to the needs of Western oil consumption. That WaPo article should terrify anyone who reads it. To me, the fact that we're already a billion dollars deep in yet another war concocted practically overnight in an overwhelmingly toxic political environment, in a predictable complete defiance of public support, and in the midst of a vicious debate on the federal budget and deficit says that our energy supply is much more dire than our leaders are willing to admit. As Greenwald states, Britain and France are much more reliant on Libyan oil, but I still have a feeling that this does not bode well. 

Anniversary of an Uninteresting Event

It never happened, you know, because mutant microbes ate all the oil.

Carcinogenic Water - It's a Gas

Natural gas, frequently hailed as a cleaner, safer alternative to our dependence on oil, is not without its own litany of issues:

Millions of gallons of potentially hazardous chemicals and known carcinogens were injected into wells by leading oil and gas service companies from 2005-2009, a report by three House Democrats said Saturday.

The report said 29 of the chemicals injected were known-or-suspected human carcinogens. They either were regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act as risks to human health or listed as hazardous air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

Methanol was the most widely used chemical. The substance is a hazardous air pollutant and is on the candidate list for potential regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

And this is by far my favorite part about the chemicals used in this process:

The report said many chemical components were listed as "proprietary" or "trade secret."

We have Bush/Cheney to thank for that btw. So we have known carcinogens being introduced into sources of drinking water, and energy companies deem these same chemical mixtures to be proprietary. A trade secret can be defined as information which, if released to the general public or obtained by a competitor, could cause the owner of that information significant, adverse economic harm. In other words, energy companies derive economic benefits and  profits from their continued ability to inject enormous volumes of carcinogenic and otherwise unknown fluids and chemicals into our water tables.

The New York Times had a good story on fracking a few months back, which revealed that the effects on groundwater are not limited to carcinogens, but also radioactivity. That and  public wastewater treatment plants are ill-equipped to properly process these substances, so massive amounts of toxins are being poured into our lakes and rivers:

In Pennsylvania, these treatment plants discharged waste into some of the state’s major river basins. Greater amounts of the wastewater went to the Monongahela River, which provides drinking water to more than 800,000 people in the western part of the state, including Pittsburgh, and to the Susquehanna River, which feeds into Chesapeake Bay and provides drinking water to more than six million people, including some in Harrisburg and Baltimore.

Lower amounts have been discharged into the Delaware River, which provides drinking water for more than 15 million people in Philadelphia and eastern Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania is really the epicenter for all of this, and its new wingnut governor is making sure that the industry is regulated only by the invisible hand:

Gas producers are generally left to police themselves when it comes to spills. In Pennsylvania, regulators do not perform unannounced inspections to check for signs of spills. Gas producers report their own spills, write their own spill response plans and lead their own cleanup efforts.

A review of response plans for drilling projects at four Pennsylvania sites where there have been accidents in the past year found that these state-approved plans often appear to be in violation of the law.

At one well site where several spills occurred within a week, including one that flowed into a creek, the well’s operator filed a revised spill plan saying there was little chance that waste would ever enter a waterway.

Sound familiar?

BP PLC's 582-page regional spill plan for the Gulf, and its 52-page, site-specific plan for the Deepwater Horizon rig are riddled with omissions and glaring errors, according to an Associated Press analysis that details how BP officials have pretty much been making it up as they go along. The lengthy plans approved by the federal government last year before BP drilled its ill-fated well vastly understate the dangers posed by an uncontrolled leak and vastly overstate the company's preparedness to deal with one.

In the spill scenarios detailed in the documents, fish, marine mammals and birds escape serious harm; beaches remain pristine; water quality is only a temporary problem. And those are the projections for a leak about 10 times worse than what has been calculated for the ongoing disaster.

There are other wildly false assumptions in the documents. BP's proposed method to calculate spill volume judging by the darkness of the oil sheen is way off. The internationally accepted formula would produce estimates 100 times higher.

More specifically, Gov. Corbett's early decisions have ensured that there will essentially be no regulation of the natural gas industry whatsoever:

Gov. Tom Corbett wants to hand authority over some of the state’s most critical environmental decisions to C. Alan Walker, a Pennsylvania energy executive with his own track record of running up against the state’s environmental regulations.

Walker, who has contributed $184,000 to Corbett’s campaign efforts since 2004, is CEO and owner of Bradford Energy Company and Bradford Coal, which was once among Pennsylvania’s largest coal mining companies. He also owns or has an interest in 12 other companies, including a trucking business and a central Pennsylvania oil and gas company.

Walker was Corbett’s first appointee—he chose him to lead the Department of Community and Economic Development in December, before taking office. Now, as Corbett stakes much of the state’s economy on Marcellus Shale gas drilling, a paragraph tucked into the 1,184-page budget gives Walker unprecedented authority to “expedite any permit or action pending in any agency where the creation of jobs may be impacted.” That includes, presumably, coal, oil, gas and trucking.

And regulators must now obtain approval from Corbett political appointees before they are actually permitted to do their jobs:

Oil and gas inspectors policing Marcellus Shale development in Pennsylvania will no longer be able to issue violations to the drilling companies they regulate without first getting the approval of top officials.

That’s according to a directive laid out in a series of emails received by the Department of Environmental Protection staff last week and leaked to ProPublica. The emails say the new edict applies only to enforcement actions related to Marcellus Shale drilling and that failure to seek prior approval “will not be acceptable.”

The memos require that each of the hundreds of enforcement actions taken routinely against oil and gas operators in Pennsylvania each month now be approved by the department’s executive deputy secretary, John Hines. The memos are raising concerns that the state’s environmental inspectors can no longer act independently and that regulations could be overridden by the political whims of the state’s new governor, Tom Corbett.

When I read about stories like these, it makes me hopeful that people will eventually realize and remember what colossal assholes Republicans are once they're in power. Certainly voters in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida are starting to get that memo. There's literally no depths to which they won't sink. With the modern Republican party, we are no longer talking about an opposition movement that seeks a more "common sense" version of Democratic policies, no matter how hard they try to market their ideals as such. This current group has moved the party so far to the extreme right that many of their policies have the effect of dismantling swaths of society. They want to codify pervasive income inequality as a central tenet of American society, kick the poor and elderly off of Medicaid and Medicare, prohibit your right to unionize, deny the existence of and do nothing about climate change, dictate to women what they can and can not do with their bodies, substitute religion for science, and turn a blind eye to private enterprise and allow them to do whatever they want because the resultant free market trickle down will always outweigh the societal or environmental cost, even if it means poisoning your water and destroying our oceans. And they are one of our two national political parties.

Realizing this is the start. Remembering it at the ballot box is what really matters, but I am hopeful that the current bunch of teatards and wingnut governors and state legislatures will actually prove to be a Democratic net benefit going into 2012.

We're Sooooooorry

Soooooooooorry!

BP Plc's (BP.L) (BP.N) Chief Executive Robert Dudley issued an industry-wide apology for the worst offshore spill in U.S. history at a high-profile energy conference on Tuesday.

"This is the first chance I have had to address such a large gathering of industry colleagues and the first thing I want to say is that I am sorry for what happened last year," Dudley told the CERAWeek conference in a speech titled "New Era, New Responsibilities."

Well that should clean up some of the totally-not-there-anymore-oil from the spill. Good to know the new CEO is as contrite as the former:

Coon 2: Hindsight
Tags: SOUTH
PARKEric Cartman,more...

And this makes me laugh:

Dudley said BP was working to earn back the trust of the industry, state and federal leaders and Gulf Coast residents, in part by upping efforts to improve safety. That includes shutdowns of two offshore oil and gas production platforms to repair faulty equipment, and shutting down a producing field to enable pipeline integrity work.

The BP Oil Company: earning back the trust of industry, state and federal leaders, and Gulf Coast residents by now doing shit that we should have fucking been doing all along.

No Conflict of Interest Here

Remember that whole BP oil spill thing? Something happened last summer. Anyway, I forget, cuz you never hear about it anymore, and magical fairies cleaned up the entire Gulf of Mexico and there is no more oil anywhere to be found. Hooray!

But even though there's no more oil, whatsoever, and it was all eaten up by microbes and Jesus, there still remains the $20 billion fund set aside to compensate victims of the now-completely-cleaned-up-and-non-existant-nothing-to-see-here-spill. Ken Feinberg was selected to oversee that fund, and you will be glad to know he is taking this shit on pro bono:

Feinberg, a Washington lawyer who previously administered the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, and his law firm negotiated a contract with BP to be paid $850,000 a month for overseeing the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, which doles out compensation to victims of the oil spill. That salary comes up for review every three months, Vitter said. . . . He also said the $850,000 a month salary “seems staggering, particularly in that it’s not tied in any way to any certain number of hours worked by any certain number of people.”

I am sure he'll be completely impartial and empathetic to the victims when he's a paid contractor of BP making $10 million a year. 

As American as a Preventable Heart Attack

Our new objectively pro-pollution Republican controlled House:

The Southern California lawmaker will endorse a draft bill to stymie climate rules from Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) “due to her long-standing concerns regarding the role of the EPA and the overly burdensome California standards,” her office told Politico. Upton and Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) on Wednesday unveiled the draft bill, which would repeal the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act and hamstring California’s authority to issue stricter vehicle emission standards than the federal government.

Latest studies (h/t Yglesias):

Air pollution triggers more heart attacks than using cocaine and poses as high a risk of sparking a heart attack as alcohol, coffee and physical exertion, scientists said on Thursday. Sex, anger, marijuana use and chest or respiratory infections and can also trigger heart attacks to different extents, the researchers said, but air pollution, particularly in heavy traffic, is the major culprit. The findings, published in The Lancet journal, suggest population-wide factors like polluted air should be taken more seriously when looking at heart risks, and should be put into context beside higher but relatively rarer risks like drug use. Tim Nawrot of Hasselt University in Belgium, who led the study, said he hoped his findings would also encourage doctors to think more often about population level risks.

But man does not create pollution, only Jesus can do that, there is unrest in the Middle East and oil prices are rising, so we need to abolish the EPA and expand offshore drilling and double down on fossil fuels. And on a related note, DougJ:

You know the drill: global warming isn’t happening, if it is happening then it’s not caused by human behavior, if it is caused by human behavior then we can’t do anything about it, if it is caused by human behavior and we can do something about it, then that something is too expensive, if it is caused by human behavior and we can do something about it that is not too expensive, then that something is not what Democrats are proposing. And Al Gore is fat, he flies too much, look at his electricity bill, and sometimes when he goes somewhere it snows there, which is very ironic.

And I will also add that Amurikans should have the freedom to have heart attacks from ingesting excessive if they so choose. We don't need the federal gubmint gettin' in our way and tellin' us what ta' breathe and what not ter breathe, dadgummit.

Manbearpig

DougJ sums up the usual back-and-forth of the 'debate' on climate change:

You know the drill: global warming isn’t happening, if it is happening then it’s not caused by human behavior, if it is caused by human behavior then we can’t do anything about it, if it is caused by human behavior and we can do something about it, then that something is too expensive, if it is caused by human behavior and we can do something about it that is not too expensive, then that something is not what Democrats are proposing. And Al Gore is fat, he flies too much, look at his electricity bill, and sometimes when he goes somewhere it snows there, which is very ironic

Pretty much.

Sharp Dressed Man

Very serious vapid ex-beauty queen Gretchen Carlson unleashes some seriously fair and balanced commentary on the Gulf Oil spill:

Also, did you see, President Obama is being criticized for what he had on. When he was standing at the shoreline there, he had on fancy pants and a fancy shirt. Look, what other critics are saying, is that 80% of public perception is image. Not what you say. And he should have had on, like what Thad Allen has on next to him. Something that looked like he was a little bit more at the scene.

I realize that picking on Fox and Friends is fairly low hanging fruit, but it doesn't really get past the stupidity of such a comment. It would be great if our only concern on the Gulf Coast was Obama's dress code, but unfortunately the situation is much more dire. But not for Fox, which has all the time in the world to masquerade their channel as something other than a tabloid propaganda wing of the Republican party instead of actually covering the facts on the ground.

Also, khakis and a button up shirt are now strictly for elitist fags along with arugula and dijon mustard.

Fumes

I wonder if this is going to carry any long-term effects:

Reporting from Venice, La., and Los Angeles

Some fishermen who have been hired by BP to clean up the gulf oil spill say they have become ill after working long hours near waters fouled with oil and dispersant, prompting a Louisiana lawmaker to call on the federal government to open mobile clinics in rural areas to treat them.

The fishermen report severe headaches, dizziness, nausea and difficulty breathing.

[...]

At a recent meeting fishermen complained to a BP representative about illness, Barisich said, but got little response. "BP has the opinion that they are not getting sick," he said. Barisich said the company is not providing respirators because "if they give us that type of equipment then they admit there are health hazards.

I am sure that in the event that it does, these fishermen will receive the proper care for their debilitating injuries, paid for with BP's full cooperation and without any red tape or litigation involved whatsoever. Giving these workers the proper PPE would have probably been entirely too cost prohibitive anyway.

Get Out of Jail Free

More of this please:

Rep. George Miller (D-CA): Every time we have a catastrophic event like this involving British Petroleum or other parts of the oil and gas industry, we’re told that this is an unpredictable cascade of unforeseeable errors, that this is unprecedented, that nobody could have foreseen this. This is sort of like the bankers on Wall Street. Nobody could have foreseen the risks that they engineered themselves, so nobody’s responsible. I don’t believe this was some “black swan” or “perfect storm” event. There wasn’t something that could not have been foreseen. And I don’t think this is something you can promise will never happen again.

The congressman brings up an excellent point. It's too bad that it won't do a bit of good. No matter how big the disaster, no matter how many people are completely ruined by the fall out, the formula remains the same. Congress calls a couple of hearings, summoning the perpetrators before the C-SPAN cameras to talk about how angry they are and wag their fingers in disgust. Perpetrators do their best to act contrite, admit no wrongdoing, and spew banal mea culpas, one of which is almost always, "No one could have predicted." It's the veritable get out of jail free card for storied interests in this country. Throw that line out there, wipe your hands of the situation, and you're back to doing whatever the fuck you want by Monday morning.

They say that sealing the oil spill is only half the battle, and the real work begins with the cleanup efforts. What will be almost as bad as the destruction itself is watching BP walk away from this unscathed.

A New Low

Deeper and deeper:

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) stopped Democrats' efforts on Tuesday of passing a measure to increase oil companies' liability for accidents resulting from offshore drilling.

Menendez tried Tuesday morning to pass, by unanimous consent, his bill to increase the liability cap for oil companies' offshore drilling accidents to $10 billion, up from the current $75 million cap.

Inhofe objected, saying that it was important to calibrate the amount by which the cap should be raised, pointing out that President Barack Obama hasn't even yet set a hard figure.

It's obvious, from his own admission, that Inhofe is objecting out of deeply held conservative principles. And when Republicans unanimously opposed the stimulus bill, that was because of deeply held conservative principles and a new found fetish for fiscal responsibility. When they opposed health care, the same reasons applied. And every subsequent bill and agenda that they have drug their heels on kicking and screaming, from the simple extension of unemployment benefits to financial regulation - it's all because they just want to get it right! It has nothing to do with the fact that they have no interest whatsoever in governing, in offering serious alternatives (no, tax cuts do not cure cancer, sorry), or in allowing the adults to clean up the mess that they created during their eight years of finger painting and nap time.

And for all their free market wankery, there shouldn't even be a limit on liability for oil companies, as John Cole so aptly states. The fact that we can't even get such an obviously necessary bill through the Senate as millions of gallons of oil are spilling into the Gulf just shows how completely screwed we are.

This Seems Familiar

Stop me if you've heard this one before:

Five days after appearing before Congress to testify about its responsibility in one of the worst oil spills in US history, the Swiss company that owned and operated the oil rig that sunk into the Gulf of Mexico announced that it would shell out $1 billion in dividends to shareholders.

The revelation that Transocean is distributing a $1 billion profit to shareholders as one of its drill sites leaks millions of gallons of oil into the sea is sure to inflame an already smarting debate over offshore drilling and the company's role.

Complete abdication of corporate responsibility, gross negligence resulting in systemic catastrophe, large sums of cash paid in spite of the foregoing...ah yes, Wall Street:

One year after the finance industry received its massive government bailout, Wall Street firms paid out 17 percent more in bonuses, amounting to more than $20 billion, New York State’s comptroller said on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press and Reuters.

It is almost as if there is a direct relationship in these industries between shitty performance and outsized compensation.

Minimizing the Egregious

Pro-tip for BP CEO Tony Hayward: relativism is probably not the best PR strategy when your company is responsible for an oil spill that, by some accounts, is already far worse than the Exxon Valdez spill.

Hayward recently added some erudite context to the crisis that likely only stems from years of experience in the industry:

"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"

Lucky for us the Gulf of Mexico is so big! Not just big, but 'very big.' That leaves much more room for the wholesale destruction of the ecosystems while BP bitches about the costs and liabilities of cleaning up their mess and fiddles with top hats, underwater robotic open-heart surgery, untold volumes of toxic chemicals, and God knows what other solutions with which they are currently fumbling.

I wonder what other great analogies could be made from Hayward's logic? Maybe the Iraq war isn't so bad, what with it representing such a tiny slice of the global population. The amount of lives lost and money spent in funding it are tiny in relation!