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Hydrogeologist Lyle Bruce spent a career with BP, and the company called him back into service after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Bruce's new role is community outreach -- meeting with ordinary folks along the Gulf of Mexico and explaining what's happening miles off their coastline. On May 12, Bruce told a crowd in the Orange Beach, Alabama, city hall:
[L]et me tell you, this area is rich in oil. The deep water Gulf of Mexico could possibly rival Saudi Arabia in the amount of oil they got out there. Only it's in deep water. It had been out of reach. Because that bounty is out there, there have been numerous studies to say, "What can the Gulf of Mexico take?"... To make it short, there's enough oxygen in the Gulf right now that if all the oil that we've discovered to date -- about 10 billion barrels were released at once, we'd use less than one percent of the available oxygen.
When I asked him about it last week, Bruce pointed to a study from Texas A&M that was published in 2005, "Deepwater Program: Understanding the Process that Maintain the Oxygen Levels in the Deep Gulf of Mexico."
But a co-author of that study disagrees with the relatively sanguine picture Bruce projects. Steve DiMarco says the research, funded by the Bush-era Minerals Management Service, wasn't designed to consider the direct impact from toxic oil on wildlife -- let alone to say it would be OK to dump all the known oil in the Gulf straight into the water. "I would think it's a little bit self-serving to say it that way," says DiMarco, a professor of oceanography at Texas A&M. "Releasing all that oil that way, we weren't looking at the biological implications of that. You're essentially poisoning their environment."
DiMarco's work for the Minerals Management Service was part of a string of projects commissioned by MMS as part of opening the Gulf of Mexico to deepwater drilling. Since the Deepwater Horizon collapsed, the Obama administration has criticized the federal service for lax management and cozy relationships with the oil industry it's supposed to regulate. Last night on The Rachel Maddow Show, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) called a 2007 MMS study "scandalous."
Looking back, DiMarco says that whatever management or political problems exist within MMS, the agency got better at basic science. He says they insisted on having the research peer-reviewed, for one thing. And yet DiMarco also remembers that it took a while to understand exactly what question MMS wanted his team to answer. It turned out that regulators wanted to know about the effect of an oil spill on oxygen levels in the water. Naturally occurring bacteria do eat naturally seeping oil -- though Bruce's calculation of the volume of the Deepwater Spill is wishfully small. If the bacteria were to bloom too quickly, they'd potentially take up all the oxygen, leaving a dead zone in the Gulf.
"As we were doing the study, it became apparent that within MMS, they were worried about a spill in the deep Gulf of Mexico, and whether that would make the Gulf of Mexico go anoxic," he says, meaning the water would have no oxygen left for creatures to breathe. He adds, "I don't think they really wanted to outright express that concern at the moment."
Over the course of the project, DiMarco's team did find that it would be incredibly difficult to render the entire Gulf of Mexico anoxic (summary/full report pdf's). His team did write that you could dump all the known oil in the Gulf into the water at once and scarcely make a dent in the oxygen supply. But he says that doesn't make it OK -- even in the case of a single oil reserve spilling into the water day after day.
Since he learned of the Deepwater Horizons spill, DiMarco has worried about the sperm whales who use the water around the well to feed. He worries about the Flower Banks National Marine Sanctuary, where coral waits, completely vulnerable, for oil moving westward toward the Texas coast. Knowing what he knows, he says, the Deepwater Horizons spill represents a catastrophe. "This is a really bad, bad thing," he says. "I think everyone is realizing that."
Except for BP, which continues to take ads saying it will make the situation right. They've got years of MMS studies on their side. "There is an ecosystem developed in the Gulf of Mexico to degrade and destroy oil," Bruce told me. "Overall, these long plumes we see in the deep sea, although there will be local effects, most of that is going to be destroyed before it gets too far along."
(Thanks to Mirjam Lablans for the video, using audio sent by a TRMS viewer. If you've got stuff to send, send it!)
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BP is so arrogant. Hubris will hopefully be their downfall.
Someone might want to consider if this "hydrogeologist" is properly licensed.
I bet his license was from Falwell's Liberty University and is co-signed by Cheney.
We watched Maddow in New Orleans last evening when she met with an ecologically astute professor from Texas A&M. They were touring a healthy, alive wetland ecosystem not yet impacted by oil. What was significant is, in conclusion, we watched Maddow looking at a wetland more dead and more deprived than those struck by oil. She was shaking her head, stunned.
This wetland had been drained, all the vegetation and wildlife/biological diversity extirpated, and the entire system slathered over with a new housing tract, which has no chance of redeeming itself. Far many more wetlands and shorelines and wildlife have disappeared because of houses, streets, shopping centers, resorts and parking lots than oil spills.
Interesting how America thinks. While the oil spill slaps us in the face because of death and destruction to our Earth, nary a word spills from the tongue while mankind concretes the Earth, entombing, terrestrial, shoreline and wetland and riverine and riparian ecosystems for apartments, office complexes, liquor stores and Wal-marts.
Wake up; it all spells the same holocaust, the destruction and death of the Earth and her ability to support all life, including man's.
Is the man a registered geologist in the state of Louisiana? I couldn't find him listed. He has his doctorate.
As a hydrogeologist, I am embarrassed to be of the same species. It is obvious that he has been employed by BP for far too long.
I work with many hydrogeologists. They all know this is a major disaster. Hydrogeologists deal with water flow, pumping, contamination, etc. As to actual effects on wildlife, you need an ecologist (and/or toxicologist) to answer those questions. Small changes in (dissolved) oxygen levels can cause major problems, including die offs for a number of species.
Being less than truthy is a lucrative profession.I wonder just how lucrative ?What sort of money can make a man stand up in front of a very concerned population & lie like a "hairy egg" knowing how many people have died in this disaster & how many peoples lives will be forever altered by it's affects?
Truth is always the first casulty in war ,politics & business.
Thank you for showing the rest of the country why our wetlands are so important.
I don't believe him, but I hope he's right.
I suspect that the water around the oil has a much better chance to evaporate than the oil does.
Water evaporates. Oil is a complex mixture of many different organic compounds, and the heavier ones (re: more toxic) do not readily evaporate the way water does. A small amount of oil will readily dissolve in water, as the natural seeps likely do because of their slow rates of release. But a big release will exceed the capacity of the water to dissolve the oil (supersaturation), and you end up with floating pure product (oil).
IMO, it means nothing to say the Gulf can "handle" this spill. It has no choice. Many creatures and maybe some species will die. Will others flourish? Of couse, nature does adapt, always. But for anyone to suggest that this is not a big deal and will not cause significant impact, injury, and death to the flora and fauna and take many years to re-populate would be just plain foolish.
Rachel what can I say, I am a Earth Scientist, working at an research strategy and urban planning consulting firm. I am so proud of the work you are doing. Your show last night for me was nothing new but for most folks it was an enlightening. I encourage you to continue your fight. Barbara Boxer is exactly right we need to push the clean energy policies right now while we have the political backdrop already in place. Hit them where it hurts girl.
Much love and thanks for your work.
Zach
Zach, clean energy is great. The problem is, will our heat islands carry this burden of the new energies or do we rape and plunder our most endangered ecosystems, terrestrial.
Bulldozers, chain saws, earth movers, roads, deforestation, housing tracts, freeways, shopping malls and parking lots and windmill factories and dead solar fields, which consume vast masses of land for low energy yield are as deadly and Earth killing as an oil spill. While the marine ecosystem will bounce back in so many years from an oil spill, not so for our ecosystems entombed in concrete.
Far more ecosystems have gone extinct on the land by deforestation and miles of concrete and dead planet products than all oils spills added together.
Skor, you may have heard of this thing called population growth. I agree that the typical strip-mall design of Anytown USA is awful for the natural environment. However, many states in the US have cut and fill requirements. i.e., if you fill X acres of wetlands for a development, then you have to cut X acres of wetlands elsewhere (often in the same watershed). In those states, such developments results in no net loss of wetlands.
Putting up windmills and solar panels (even with roads and buildings) is not plundering our environment, in my humble opinion. We're not really hunter/gatherers anymore.
OK, I admit that I have a passionate love affair with nature, and feel particularly attuned to the water on our planet. For some reason, water pollution is my least favorite type of environmental ruin.
So, when I go to the beach or a lake, I am especially careful not to step on plants or animals and try not to leave a footprint behind. And BP doesn't have a conscience about spilling a 15,000 barrels a day?
Give me a break!
Don't you all understand? A clean energy push won't hurt BP or any other Big Oil company. Clean energy, whatever that is, is too expensive. It will hurt all of the regular people. We need oil, we cannot live without it and we won't be able to for a long, very long, time. The facts are not pleasant but they are true. We have to have oil, and coal, and natural gas. Sorry.
Rick I don't think you understand. We are all screwed and the price of all energy just went up and will become more expensive. Deepwater drilling off our coasts will not happen now for decades and there will be so many people affected by this disaster, there will be few that will support "drill baby, drill." If you own that boat of an SUV, I would recommend selling it. 4000 sq. foot house for two people. sell it while you can. Large boat or jet ski that sucks gas, find a rich person to take it off your hands. Do you think we are going to keep supporting war in the Middle East to protect our oil interests there forever? Will you send your sons and daughters into harms way so we can waste valuable resources ? I for one vote no on that one. Iraq and Afghanastan are not worth it. We can not occupy them and expect things to work out.
Deep water drilling will happen and is happening. This was just one platform of many. They'll learn from this situation and carry on. This is how real progress is made; too bad so called "progessives" don't understand that.
I agree,but what i cannot understand is....
Since Transocean has robots and so does the US NAVY,that are capable of turning nuts an bolts,sawing an shearing,welding and torching,then why haven't they replaced the blow out preventer.
Personally i beleive they are afraid the the existing preventer when retreived,will show more damaging evidence like tampering or so forth.
Randy,
You are an idiot. It serves no ones interest (BP, Transocean or Halliburton) to tamper with the blow out preventer. In case you missed the big explosion part of this disaster, that is what the preventer part of that term is supposed to prevent.
Better, cleaner, safer methods exist and are in some cases actually cheaper than oil. Well, that's not entirely true. Best example I know of is oil--of a different kind. Vegetable oil, actually. Biodiesel. The main reason it hasn't been widely implemented is because of the steep initial cost: you need to first have a diesel engine, which most environmentally conscious people don't, and second, you need to convert it to run on biodiesel, roughly $1,000. Long term, however, it would cost significantly less to buy gas, and we produce the fuel domestically, on shore, and quite safely. My former landlady worked for a company that kept prices low because restaurants paid them to take the used cooking oil, and they then made money selling it to consumers. A fine profession for any "regular" person.
Now, if we took the subsidies we put in oil and got that going, we could easily have our automobiles running on clean energy, and eventually move toward other solutions for other industries that consume oil. Put THAT in your pipe and smoke it. Environmentally safely, of course.
Rick, No we do not have to have oil, coal and gas it is a luxury we want to have! What we have to have is breathable air, drinkable water and the ability to continue to grow food. By blindly siding with these large corporations making billions of dollars annually, we are risking these very things. So lets just keep attacking the scientists credibility instead of spending the money needed on R&D to help us end our addictions!
Rick, you sound like the people back in the mid-1800's who were using whale blubber to fuel their lives. They said the same things as you - we NEED whale blubber, we can't LIVE without it, we will just have to kill every last whale in the ocean. Lucky for the whales, oil was discovered and our society changed to use of oil. We are on the same energy threshhold now. We MUST walk away from fossil fuels and move to the next thing. We can do it. We just have to get tough and decide that fossil fuels are simply too costly.
Rick we don't have to have oil and coal. We are use to it and the world has formed a love of it and big business has made millions with it.Yes it will be expensive at first to get all the green things for energy, but once established the expense will go down. It will also make jobs for people. We are destroying our planet.
Yes, Karen you are correct. Excellent commentary. If we were to take a 24 hour clock and place the worldview and lifestyle of humans of today, it would be 2 minutes until midnight. How did mankind survive the aeons without oil, cars, strip malls and liquor stores?
And, everything that the 2 minutes until midnight humans do is merely one monstrous Earth killing machine. We are in the business of killing the planet and are clueless as how to stop. Perhaps a look at ancient societies would enlighten us.
An award winning book, dealing with this very debate, illustrates how to save the world, and every answer comes from the Native Americans, who had twice as much leisure time as modern man. If they had been as land devouring as we, this nation would not have had the resources to hammer out civilization [I love this misnomer as we are truly so civil. lol]
It is the time to seek answers from the ancients. Native Californians were not want to destroy the trees, waters and mountains because these things were not their's to kill because the Gods had made them, and thus, Holy Creation belonged to the Creator. The mountains, seas and trees were meant to last always and were sacred to the people.
Nothing is sacred for today's man but paper money. The frog does not drink up the water on his pond, and when all the trees are gone, man cannot eat and drink paper money.
They lived short brutish lives, that's how.
Kudos Rachel. Your were the first that brought the 1979 Gulf spill and predicted that present "efforts" (really smoke curtain) will fail because they didn't work 30 years ago at 400 feet deep. You also interviewed the Shell CEO and he suggested to suction the oil-tainted water with tanker ships but nobody listened...they still can do it but the question is: now or after the nesting and fishing areas are destroyed?
You really are taking journalism to a dignifying level. Wolf and Cooper and fine and serious but they are not fighters like you. In case that somebody ask "what fight", it is the fight for those without a voice, AKA, 99% of the population. This is what I try to do, at a small scale, in my website: www.psychiatricanswers.com
Sorry, I meant Wolf and Cooper "are" fine.
A way to stop this oil, is that you mount a brand new fully opened Blowout Preventer on top of the improper functioning Blowout Preventer that is currently on the sea floor. After this is firmly secured on top of the improper functioning BOP you close this newly installed BOP, and stop this oil. The current faulty BOP should have activated itself automatically when the rig burnt and sank. X-ray imaging done on the BOP on 5/12/10 and 5/13/10 showed that this current BOP’s internal valves were only partially closed, restricting the flow of oil. The head of BP’s drilling and completion operations in the Gulf of Mexico, Charlie Holt, said that (after the explosion and sinking of the rig) there were some hydraulic leaks that were fixed on this BOP, now allowing a full closure of this six ram BOP. Clearly, this BOP is not stopping the oil. This Blowout Preventer was not and is not currently doing it’s job.
So, to stop the oil, you remove the top half of the Blowout Preventer Stack, which is called the Lower Marine Riser Package, along with the recently sawed off small riser pipe stub which is bolted on top of it. After this LMRP is out of the way, you get a brand new 18-3/4” six ram Blowout Preventer. You then fully open this new BOP. You then stack this new BOP on top of the improper functioning 18-3/4” BOP. After this new BOP is firmly secured on top, you close it. This new functioning Blowout Preventer will completely stop the oil.
Da....Do you really think they haven't thought about that.....ha! What do you think are going to eventually do? It's the pressures and depths that are in the way of your solution. All's good but starting at your "After this new BOP is firmly secured on top" is the whole dang problem genius. Solve that and you'd get yourself a metal...ha! Good luck....the very best engineers in the whole world will solve this problem if you just hold down the arms on your chair. Oh and how do you feel about Brett Favre playing this year? You can probably do that too!
You notice how they are briging out all of the studies showing that it is OK if a spill were to happen in the deep water part of the Gulf Of Mexico. However no one is focusing that in the past two years the oil companies ahve made BILLIONS in profit and they said they were investing it back into technology. However it appears that this technology they were investing in was not related to what could happen if an Oil Rig explodes and then sinks. It amazes me that Companies like these are just as nieve as our government was about space travel back in the 60's, 70's, and 80's. they always claimed that since they had "tripple redundancies" that situations like Apollo 13, Skylab, and Challenger could not happen. What BP needs to do is hire a few scientists that belive wholeheartly in "murphy's law" and have them set up scenarios for thier groups to practice.
Join the new facebook page, "Drill baby Drill In Lake Lucille, Alaska."
Link: http://www.facebook.com/williehammel#!/group.php?gid=122133324489967&ref=ts
People,
I realize this is a terrible thing and it's going to have a lasting effect for a few years to come but, it's not the end of world. Assuming that BP doesn't have a conscience and similar comments like that are ridicules. This was an accident folks. They don't like it anymore than you, the fishermen or the birds and whales. If anything BP feels worse than anyone about what's happened. BP will eventually fix the leak, or someone will, put it that way. We will clean this mess up, recover the oil, clean the birds, and do what we can for the whales and everything else that has been effected by this. Please use some common sense and realize that everyone feels bad about it and quit accusing BP or anyone else of not caring. We'll get through this and the survivors, humans, fish or birds alike will be ok. The worst thing about this is the humans that didn't survive the explosion. Say a prayer for them and their families, that's the real tragedy! 1 human life lost doesn't compare to a temporarily closed beach we can clean up, or some dead birds or fish either....come on, be reasonable!
It was an accident that could have been prevented had the platform been fully staffed, had inspectors been filling out their own paperwork instead of letting the people being inspected do it, if Halliburton had performed all the tests it was supposed on the new casing it had installed, if the blowout preventer had been installed according to specs and tested. You know "Reasonable," you really have to work hard to get this perfect cascade of incompetence. To do everything that happened INTENTIONALLY is so complicated that it would be hard to pull off. So let me congatulate BP, Halliburton, and Transocean on being the colossal jackasses and f***-ups to be able to kill 11 of your employees and devastate the water of the Gulf, the Wetlands, all the beaches from Louisiana to Florida, and a rare deep water coral reef system 250 miles away from Deep Water Horizon. That is such a monumental accomplishment in terms of sheer yardage that the only way it can be justly commemorated is to tattoo on the forehead of all responsible parties exactly who they are and what role they played. So yeah "Reasonable," tell us how it was just an accident and how sorry you all are, and how we need to just get back to life as usual. Except of course the fish, dolphins, shellfish, birds, Wetlands, beaches, the fisherman who make their living off of them, the tour guides who will lose their livelihood because no-one wants to sit in a boat heaving its way through an ocean of TAR, all the communities and businesses that will lose money because no-body wants to go to beaches covered in BP's Transoceans's and Halliburon's Accident.
I don't think anyone is feeling Reasonable right now. Nor should we.
The fact that BP has misled both the public and the government from day 1 shows that they dont feel bad, but guilty, as they should. Like Don Quixokie said, the cascade of incompetence was just the start, and after BP figured out they screwed up royally, they decided to be INTENTIONALLY DISHONEST.
BP cares about their bottom line, and nothing more. Its the whole reason they waited so long to try the top-kill, because that would actually shut the well down, instead of just mitigating the flow. If they truly cared, they would have tried top-kill immediately, as that is the only plan they have come up with so far in the short term that was able to kill the flow, and kill the well.
Have to agree with reasonablejay on this one... This is not something BP did on purpose. With time and loads of money BP will correct this. They have to. We can say should of, could of and would of's all, day but you cant turn back time. Whats done is done. Now its figuring out how to stop it the most safe and logical way.
Yes, even 1 human life is precious (tho because of my love of wetlands, I can't even begin to try to weigh them as you do). Now you should consider how many human lives will be lost because of the continuous bombardment of our coastal wetlands, which actually reduce the strength of hurricanes. Remember how many people died in hurricane Katrina and the ensuing chaos. Every hurricane will be worse than it would have been otherwise, because of this disaster, for at least the next few DECADES. The anger toward BP is absolutely necessary, and the momentum is needed to hold them accountable for this crime. This is a possible death sentence for New Orleans. This cannot be taken as lightly as you would have people take it. When you accidentally murder someone, it's still manslaughter.
And even given the accidental nature of BP's disaster, it at the very least to be chalked up to gross negligence. BP knew about the risks, knew about the malpractices, and certainly knew about the poor regulations and the dodging thereof. This is far worse than a simple accident, I'm afraid.
That said, BP and all other oil companies should never have been allowed to create a rig under circumstances that they could not contain and without safety measures to prevent loss of life both immediate and long-term. So in that sense, we need to direct our energy toward preventing this disaster from reoccurring. And that means we must put an end to BP's malpractices and the malpractices of every oil company before it ruins our country. We cannot afford not to be angry.
Yes, let's be reasonable. Quite reasonably pissed.
Reasonable, you have got to be kidding me....... You should have just said "Oh it's only the bottom of the food chain, don't worry we will always have cannibalism"... What are you thinking?
Reasonablejay This is a whole lot more than a temporarily closed beach and BP put countless human lives and the life of the gulf at risk. Somebody will just stop the leak, somebody will just clean the ocean and somebody will just recover every gallon of oil ...... yes that sounds reasonable. Who is that someone? If its just birds and just whales and just fish than its just humans so lets just keep doing what were doing and whatever dies will come back eventually, oh but not in your lifetime.
Angry doesn't even begin to express the feelings stories like this elicit in me - I highly suggest all TRMS readers read the following CNN Opinion article by General Russel Honore (Army, Ret) regarding the BP PR on-slot, and what his suggestion is regarding that and the BP oill spill itself:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/05/25/honore.oil.spill/index.html
While I completely agree with the Gen, I still think jail is too easy a penalty for the likes of BP's Lyle Bruce - sell out your profession, sell out your country, sell out your fellow human kind, all for the honor of being a bought and paid for protector of a lowlife piece of hot steaming pooh and furthering it's cause deserves a much more salacious penalty - rough justice - having spent a bit of time in that region, I think the Gulf coast locals could come up with some very interesting scenarios for what rough justice looks like...yeah, I think I'm a little upset reading these kinds of articles.
Remember folks, when we talk about this, the correct way to identify it is just as the Gen stated, it's the "BP oil spill" - they created it, they are manufacturing it's course, and they are the ones trying everything but an invisibility cloak to get away from it.
Kudos Gen Honore
No they are not.....ignorant and redicules!
???
Thank you for that article. It was a clear concise point of view of what needs to be done.
Keep asking the questions ... keep asking the questions and don't stop till you get an answer that is firmly bedded in FACT rather than the best spin any of the usual suspects can cue up. We who live way down the Gulf food-chain are depending on you to ask our questions and demand our answers. Infrastructure is not only bridges (though we do have 43 of them) and roads (only one in, one out) but it can also be our Everglades, back country flats and the mangrove islands that dot the horizon. The Gulf of Mexico is infrastructure.
ps: Long live the true geek in all of us.
We don't need oil. We don't need electricity. We don't need power in general. Maybe we need a utopian society where everyone gets back to nature and the simple way of life. Television is totally horrible for the environment. Technology is the worst thing that ever happened to the Earth. Now if you will excuse me I left my Unicorn double parked at the end of the rainbow where the fairies are pouring dust on my pot of gold. Wow are you Gaia loving , tree hugging hippies unrealistically stupid. lol Madcow needs to go!
Where did this ass hole come from ?
Jew, did you realize that social scientists maintain the most successful lifestyle for mankind was small scale hunting and gathering. They had almost twice as much leisure time and did not have to work and slave so hard for the basics of food and shelter.
And, Jew, you do enjoy breathing, right. Then you are also a tree hugger. There was little oxygen on the Earth until the advent of green plants and trees. You exist only because of the Earth's ecosystems and their biological diversity or native animals and plants. Ecosystems regulate, service and create every aspect of all life on the Earth. While mankind might actually survive without hummers and oil, he will fall extinct quickly if the nitrogen cycle were to fail, a circulatory system that flows from animals to plants.
If you don't love Gaia, why not rocket ship to Mars and attempt to survive there. No trees, little oxygen, no fish, no birds, no flowers, no butterflies, no bison, no wolves, about as life-gifting as oil, concrete, metals, bricks and asphalt.
Long before civilization, mankind arose to dominance. If he wanted an onion, he took a stick and dug it up. If he grew cold, he built a fire. Shell mounds in California indicated that for multi-thousands of years, the Native peoples experienced no famine, no major wars and no pandemics. And, they had no coal, no oil, no grocery stores, no cars, no freeways. But, they had all the basics of life, given free gratis by the Earth's natural systems and biological diversity/native plants, trees and animals.
And man cannot eat and breathe paper money, banks, oil and cars. All the civilized man knows about life on an ecosystem dependent is, how to kill it. Even a bird doesn't destroy his own nest for a few pieces of silver, right!
Skor, u paint a beautiful picture but let's face the truth about living hundreds and or thousands of years ago. the ancients were either suffering from to much heat or to much cold and surviving was tough. no one had a life span long enough to pass on much of that they had learned so progress was slow.
I don't think u or i will give up creature comforts but we know that we cannot exist on our present path. that being said my thoughts are for an all out tech push to rid ourselves of corporate kings and slaves. We can do it and do it we must. No more politics as usual and no more BS from BP.
Why not just rape the entire earth and make it uninhabitable for everyone. Your logic makes about this much sense.
Well, let's hear your illuminated opinion of how ancient homo sapien societies existed through, almost totally, man's presence on Mother Earth? Have you taken Native American studies and are literate in the science of ecology?
Social scientists maintain the most successful lifestyle for man was small scale hunting and gathering as they didn't have to work and slave most of their lives away for food and lodging. And, they fished and played in veritable paradise. And they lived their entire lives with their families, and their children weren't taken away at age 4 and 5 and placed in a confining, unnatural institution, spending most of their childhoods away from their mothers.
These indigenous peoples weren't merely surfs and slaves for the top wealthiest as well. Freedoms to spend the vast majority of your existence separated from loved ones, slaving at a job for the majority of your life, to keep the rich king bees arollin in the clover and honey and the rest as brainwashed worker bees, slaves to their bosses and their jobs.
Aww, to live in paradise with loved ones, all your life. Shell mounds in CA show that the Native Californians lived for multi-thousands of years with no major crisis -- no famine, no major wars and no deadly pandemics. They did not experience the deadly viruses released, upon ecosystem death because when man kills ecosystems, deadly viruses and bacteria "behave like rats jumping off a sinking ship."
Yup d, a bad day of fishing is always better than a good day as a slave on the job. Freedoms.
WBEng: Yea ... local justice along the Gulf equals ....... Gator Bait!
Hey LKP - it's kind of funny you mention that - my mind was actually in that arena. I was remembering a story told to me by my boss from my first "real" job - he had this issue of not having anything nice to say about his dad, and hadn't talked to him in years even. He then volunteered what his father used to do with him when he was a little boy and his father took him "hunting" in the bayou's. FYI, both he and his father are Cajun with roots in La that go to the early 1700's. Turns out his dad would tie a rope around his waist and toss him overboard, start the boat on a slow crawl forward, and then tell him he'd better swim faster than the boat was going if he didn't want to have issues with the gators that started after his baited self (they were gator hunting obviously). He even gave a few recounts of how close the shots over his backside got at times as he was trying with everything in is sole to swim faster...not a good story...that's where I learned to not ask a question that I wasn't prepared to hear an answer to when inquiring about some of the local ways...so, I was thinking, if some can use their own blood for gator bait, I was wondering what some could come up with when they actually didn't like the person...
Is there an engineer in the house?
I have a suggestion on how to stop the leak, but given that am not an engineer I don't know how realistic it is.
I cobbled together rough schematic of it:
http://www.endy.info/Suggestion/well_suggestion.pdf
I know it is as very crude diagram, but it is the best I can do. l am aware that it would definitely not work if there was a leak in the lower part of the BOP, but from what I've seen the leak is at the top.
I am only submitting this because it seems we are running out of ideas in a desperate situation. I may be armchair quarterbacking here, but I 'm figuring that at least it could not hurt to put another idea out there.
So all the Gulf Oxygen won't get used up. This moron mentions nothing about all the seal life, coral etc that will be destroyed. The oxygen level is the least of the damage. But spin doctors never bring everything out do they. Just like the politicians wordmiesters
The only way to stop polluting is to stop production and manufacturing of all material items and get back to nature or this planet is doomed along with its inhabitant's....
And this is coming from someone surfing the web on a computer. LOL, that's a good one.
Jay, according to some of this nation's top eco-scientists, there is not enough nature left to eke out a life. Almost everything modern man does, kills the Earth.
I believe that a 2-ship program would allow BP to work/recover at the same time. One ship has a vacuum type system that pulls water (and oil) from leaking area.it tranfers it over to another ship which seperates the water from oil and either offloads oil into barges or has a mini pipeline of soft hose back to land based recievers. any type of hose will work.(that is based on psi output). They could even run many small hoses to compensate for weight/managablity.
just a thought
anyone know if it is possible? or they could possibly have an incenerator on 2nd ship so no pipes would be needed.
You know, I was watching the same video you were and wondered the same thing. Looks like it comes apart. Now, undoing those bolts a mile under the sea might be problematic.
The cure for the whole problem is to remove the limits on liability that currently exist. If they have to buy insurance for a 10 billion dollar clean up the insurance companies will have very stringent rules and recommendations on stopping this kind of disaster. If you can't buy the insurance, you can't drill. Putting BP out of business right now is not going to help anyone.
But it would serve as a bright little reminder why its much better to play by rules and have relief well drilled simultaneously. Making an example out of offenders is a time honored tradition in criminal justice.
Having some kind of realistic contingency plan at all would have been a wonderful idea. But it would have cost money to do the research, and BP worries about their bottom line, nothing more.
Anyone claiming we need oil is delusional. We could satisfy every bit of our energy needs through renewable energy. Geothermal is safe and effective, and never has down time. Tidal power is the same way, as the moon isnt going anywhere any time soon. Wind is a good supplement to those two, as is solar, but those are not sufficient as a base for our infrastructure. Another option is more hydroelectric. Also, nuclear power may be dirtier than other options, but nowadays, with current technology, its relatively safe, really effective, and the waste can even be recycled in some cases, depending on the reactor and fuel type.
If we actually TRIED to break the stranglehold of the oil companies and really moved money into R&D for renewables, we would have a clean energy infrastructure that could be a model to the world, and would create a ton of jobs in the process.
There are problems with hydro power and nuclear. Nobody wants a nuclear generator in their back yard, and the environmentalists want every dam torn down. The other options you listed do not put out nearly enough energy. I agree that more R&D needs to be done, but that doesn't mean that we don't need oil to satisfy our energy needs until other options become viable. Until the day we have viable alternatives, drill baby drill!
Unfortunately every one of the options you listed requires oil to implement.All manufacturing does.Worse,our system of creating,packaging and transporting food is completely dependent on oil.In fact,the first thing that would happen if oil disappeared would be a massive die-off of people everywhere in the world except perhaps the most primitive,non-technological societies.
I agree we need to break the strangle hold that big oil has on the U.S. and the world, but the oil lobby is too powerful, and our elected leaders do not have the political will to stand up to this powerful organization. The Drill Baby Drill mentality of this country is now coming back to bite us. Pretty much all the "EASY" oil is gone, contrary to what many think. In order to keep the world economy churning along, Big Oil has to drill in areas that are more dangerous or environmentally too sensitive. The gulf disaster is just another wake up call to all of us that Big Oil does not have sufficient safety measures in place. Also the government agency that was to oversee safety was asleep on the job. Americans can only use the energy that is available to us, but we need to also take some of the responsibility of this disaster. We need to be willing to stand up and force our elected leaders, ( and I use the word leader loosely), to come up with an energy policy that will move us beyond oil . We will eventually get there, but if big oil has their way, it won't happen until every drop of oil is out of the ground. I am not so naive to believe that this will happen in the next 5-10 years, but it needs to happen sooner, not later. Our planet will suffer more than it already has if we wait too long. We need to find out where our leaders stand on oil, an energy policy, and the environment, and start to hold them accountable. Future generations will judge us.
There is an old saying that necessity is the mother of invention. Well now, necessity is here. Like with the space program, if we as a nation can embrace the need for energy and technological innovation, the results will spin off new technologies and products we haven't begun to dream of yet...because we need to.