And yes, if you have not been reducing your carbon footprint over the last 30 years you share the blame. Our ridiculous demand for oil brought this on. The administration’s signing off on the rig, sans protections, is responsible, BP is responsible. Now we have to deal with it. So grow some ovaries, turn off your ac, your plasma screen TV, your smart phone, sell your SUV for parts and get real.

Offshore drilling is more dangerous than ever because the easy oil is gone. BP didn’t drill this deep a well to prove it could, it did it to get at oil not already tapped. It all gets harder from here. You don’t have to like it, but one way or another, you will deal with it.

” The mayonnaise-like oil is being blown ashore into the nursery for shrimp for the whole region ” Nope, not being blown ashore then or now. Yes, some oil balls about the size of your finger nail were found yesterday on some barrier islands but you have to look for them as there are not that many at the moment. Shrimp nurseeries? News to everybody down here. The shrimp and oyster beds are just fine, the problem is that the fishermen cannot get to the beds to harvest them. Good and bad, the bad being that the fishermen are losing money, the good is that we will have some super jumbo seafood when they do open up again.

What most people don’t realize is that Obama suspend new off shore drilling for only 30 days. It might get another 30 day extention but none of it matters as the oil companies do not have anything ready to drill anyway.

Few days ago we learned that the explosion was a result of methane gas from the hole. Learned this morning that the trigger that ignited the gas was the Federal mandated blowout preventer. I can see the blame game now starting to point to Washington as being the responsible party.

And as a closing thought, the Ixtoc I was an exploratory oil well in the Bay of Campeche of the Gulf of Mexico when in just 160 feet of water it had a blowout in 1979 spilling 3,000,000 barrels of oil over the course of 9 months. That too was caused by gas travelling up the pipe because its blowout preventer also failed to work. That is ranked as the second largest spill in history behind the gulf war spills. That oil covered a large part of the Gulf of Mexico and reached the United States.

Gas dropped 23 cents overnight at all the stations in the region, time to fill up.

A new name: how about American Tragedy

If they did everything I am saying they should have, there would not be this spill. What they did was the minimum that they had to by law (law which they and their industry weakened through political means so they did not have to do more).

There should have been procedures in place to deal with every contingency possible, and they should have been ready to go from minute one. The fact that they’ve been taking so long to construct this dome that maybe, hopefully, fingers-crossed, knock wood, might work to solve the problem is indicative that they didn’t do everything right. If they did everything I said they should have, why wasn’t this dome already built and standing by, ready to deploy on day one? Why wasn’t it tested before the well was drilled, in order to ensure that it will work if called up?

It seems to me that, on day one, in thinking of the safety concerns, the first question is “What if we lose everything and the oil’s still gushing out. What do we do then?” It is not an acceptable answer to say “We’ll figure something out,” or “We’ll pay a couple million to clean it up and film more ‘beyond petroleum’ commercials to make the suckers believe we give a damn about the environment”

This dome that they’re building now should have been only one of 10 or 20 different methods to tackle this situation, which were though up, manufactured, tested and made ready to go BEFORE the well was dug. And there should have been an equal number of proven, effective solutions for every kind of situation that may have put oil in the water. THAT is what I’m saying that they should hav done.

But that would have cost money, and the execs in this company and industry would rather put lives and livelihoods on the line (not their own, of course. Let the peons suffer…) rather than spend the money to make it safe. And if they can’t do that, or are unwilling to do that, then they should not be permitted to drill. Period.

Perhaps there should have been more. We’ll have to wait for the inquiries to know more. In any case, I stand by my post.

Actually, the time for the “most rational” thinking was when BP was planning this well and could have put 20 different safety mechanisms to stop this type of occurance from happening, but chose not to in order to put a buck or two in their pockets. They chose not to act rationally in the event that a clearly foreseeable event like this happened. (It takes no great shakes of imagination to say, “what would happen if… this thing caught fire and sank? How could we shut the well down in the first hour?) Instead, they valued their own over-inflated profits over other people’s livlihoods and the eco-system.

So, no, this is not a “shit happens” event; this is a “gross corporate malfeasance” event. Actually, this is corporate criminal negligence on a grand scale and if there were any justice, BP execs would be behind bars right now. But, since this is the grand ol’ U S of fucking A, all those profits from BP and the rig owner were privitized for years, but the true losses to all the locals, fisherman, etc. (save a relative pittance that BP will pay for “clean up”) will be socialized.