In the immense new report to the President, "The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling," from the National Commission on such, there's just about one whole paragraph that's getting people all riled up.
Yay! We made the biggest (unintentional!) oil spill in human history! (Bonus: the second-largest oil spill ever was also in the Gulf of Mexico.) What do we win? Is it a new planet? Called Pandora? With flying ladies and dragons and magical sources of energy? Even better news: according to the NOAA forecasts, as you can see in their most recent forecast, all the oil is gone! Hooray. Oh… all the surface oil. Hmm. Also: "The annual summertime dead zone caused by low oxygen levels in water along the Gulf of Mexico shoreline this year is twice as big as last year's." It's the size of Massachusetts. [...]
"Studies show that dispersants, which break down oil into tiny droplets and can also break down cell membranes, make oil more toxic for some animals, like baby birds. And the solvents they contain can break down red blood cells, causing hemorrhaging. At least one fresh dolphin carcass found in the Gulf was bleeding from the mouth and blowhole, according to Lori Deangelis, a dolphin tour operator in Perdido Bay." -Scientists have done autopsies on the 1,866 birds, 463 turtles, 59 dolphins and one sperm whale who have turned up dead in the Gulf of Mexico this summer.
"Florida Keys, Miami and Fort Lauderdale areas" have a "61 to 80 percent" chance of being "oiled," "due to the potential influence of the Loop Current. Any oil reaching this area would have spent considerable time degrading and dispersing and would be in the form of scattered tar balls and not a large surface slick of oil."
Dan Horton, a friend and former colleague, works on tugboats out of the New York Harbor for a living. Two weeks ago, he flew down to Louisiana to take a job on a barge unloading crude oil from the skimmer boats that clean the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. Crew are only allowed to send and receive one email a day; his girlfriend, Lori, passes along his daily email to friends and family. With their permission, we're passing them along to you. -Dave Bry
Convenient: an "underwater robot" apparently "bumped into" the venting system that was channeling the Gulf oil spill, and the whole cap system is being rejiggered. According to the AP: "The current worst-case estimate of what's spewing into the Gulf is about 2.5 million gallons a day." Thanks, machines! And here is a weird thing that will make all the people who think Hillary Clinton murdered Vince Foster sit up and take note: Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen "said two people related to the spill response have been killed, one in a swimming pool accident and another on a vessel conducting oil skimming. He had no further details of the [...]
Every science fiction book I have ever read suggests that letting fertilizer-fueled oil-eating microbes loose in the world to clean up our disgusting oil spills ends very terribly. And also: "There's already a 6,000-square-mile dead zone in the Gulf off the mouth of the Mississippi River, created years ago by the same fertilizers washing down from upriver farms."
Six months ago, BP's stock price had been halved from its January high. It seems that pumping 50-odd thousand barrels of oil per day into an open ocean is not a profitable use of oil? (Though, as we'll soon demonstrate, it can be.) With its stock under $30 and Congress sending out hearings e-vites to oil executives, we wondered where BP's stock would be six months later.
At the time, it was already two months after the April 20th rig explosion. Who knew how long it would be until BP could stop the open flow of oil? (Remember when setting the Gulf of Mexico on fire was [...]
The Houma Nation, about 17,000 people who live on the Louisiana coast who are not recognized by the federal government, somehow, are a fishing community! Which, hoo boy. Their principal chief tells NPR: "We are discussing the future of our communities. Our people are not able to go out on their fishing vessels anymore. The season has been closed and that's the way that they earn their living. Where other people live check to check, we live catch to catch."
"In the 77 days since oil from the ruptured Deepwater Horizon began to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, BP has skimmed or burned about 60 percent of the amount it promised regulators it could remove in a single day. " -EMPHASIS MINE. Go ahead. Freak out on them.
Dan Horton, a friend and former colleague, works on tugboats out of the New York Harbor for a living. Two weeks ago, he flew down to Louisiana to take a job on a barge unloading crude oil from the skimmer boats that clean the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. Crew are only allowed to send and receive one email a day; his girlfriend, Lori, passes along his daily email to friends and family. With their permission, we're passing them along to you. -Dave Bry
You know who sucks? James Cameron. He didn't stop the Gulf Oil Spill. Kevin Costner and his "Ocean Therapy Solutions"? Screw that dude. And Brad Pitt hasn't even started to try, but you know he's thinking about it, so to hell with him too. So now Bill Clinton says we're gonna have to blow that shit up. Celebrities! We're just at their mercy to fix our environmental disasters. Also watch how inane Wolf Blitzer is as he talks to old Bill about FEELING PEOPLE'S PAIN. You know what? Maybe each generation gets the environmental disaster that it deserves. They certainly get the media coverage of it that [...]
The Gulf Oil Spill: it's only 1/7th of the Superdome! But it's more than 15 Washington Monuments! It's only 9,200 average-size living rooms! By my new favorite metric, that I just did the math on, the amount of oil spilled would fill the gas tanks of 5,985,781 2010 Mercedes Benz E350 sedans! How should we feel about these numbers? "If 15 ½ Washington Monuments only fill the Superdome one-seventh of the way, then you could actually fit 93 more Washington Monuments in there. But shouldn't you clean up the oil first?"
According to "Proud to Buy BP," a strange Tumblr that supports the "bravery" of folks filling up their cars at BP pumps, today's Miami Herald claims that BP franchises have "no closer relationship to the crude oil company than" they do "to Coca-Cola." (Which means… the franchises… buy BP's product and resell it, just like Cokes, we're pretty sure!) So, you protesters and boycotters? You're just destroying one franchisee's American dream, not actually hurting BP, according to the media. BP gas stations just buy their gas from "a distributor," and then only pay "some money" back to BP. All over the country, the media is explaining this! [...]
Some of us turn to nola.com each day, the online presence of the New Orleans Times Picayune, to stay up to date on, like, New Orleans, and news of the Gulf. Apparently they have a football team-information regarding which blankets their front page. If you dig inside, you can find a news section though! There you can learn that the six-month federal deepwater oil drilling moratorium-the one that affected just 33 of the new Gulf oil drilling locations-is destroying America's small, family-owned businesses. In other news, the Deepwater Horizon well was, after five months, finally permanently sealed over the weekend.
So goes the Washington Post news alert: "BP says oil has stopped leaking into the Gulf for the first time since April. BP has been slowly dialing down the flow as part of a test on a new cap. Engineers are now monitoring the pressure to see if the busted well holds." The Times says: "Oil Flow From Well Has Stopped as Cap Is Tested, BP Says."
Dan Horton, a friend and former colleague, works on tugboats out of the New York Harbor for a living. Two weeks ago, he flew down to Louisiana to take a job on a barge unloading crude oil from the skimmer boats that clean the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. Crew are only allowed to send and receive one email a day; his girlfriend, Lori, passes along his daily email to friends and family. With their permission, we're passing them along to you. -Dave Bry
Dan Horton, a friend and former colleague, works on tugboats out of the New York Harbor for a living. Two weeks ago, he flew down to Louisiana to take a job on a barge unloading crude oil from the skimmer boats that clean the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. Crew are only allowed to send and receive one email a day; his girlfriend, Lori, passes along his daily email to friends and family. With their permission, we're passing them along to you. -Dave Bry
There's no pique quite like the British kind. The eyebrows arch, the throat clears, the spittle flecks, and the rhetoric swells portentously. It's not for nothing that the coronation robe of the country's wheezing monarchy is purple.
But when you combine this tradition of jowly hauteur with the smug shibboleths of neoliberal free-trade dogma, well, then the royal fireworks really start combusting. Just witness the Economist's June 17 opinion leader on the White House's deal with BP to create an escrow fund of $20 billion to cover the company's liabilities in the enormous Gulf oil spill.
