Oil Spill

Nope. We're just going to talk sustainable development in the wrong thread and pretend you never said anything.

I can't help noticing that this disaster is much like the Chernobyl explosion and cleanup effort, which was the last major battle the Soviet Union faced in its waning years. This spill into the Gulf will be the US's major ecological disaster.

 

Hopefully it will be the US' biggest ecological disaster and nothing worse will happen.


Black-Tiger, you should write for the Daily Mail, or maybe join the BNP.
And this is all wildly off-topic, if you want to discuss it I suggest you try and get a seperate thread started.

 

If that's not bad enough, the costs of the recovery effort are about the same for both disasters as well. At least the Chernobyl cleanup operation was about equal to $20 billion then and that's about what is estimated from the spill as it is. Taking inflation into account and the oil gushing out until relief wells are ready, this could very well be worse than Chernobyl in many ways.

 

At least the US taxpayer isn't footing the bill for this.

 

So say all politically correct looney left weirdoes, hippies and fat rich people, who believe the concept of patriotism is fascist. There lies another major reason why we have aliens in the New Forest undergoing terrorist training. To the looney left if a non-native English person shouts hate towards us that's alright because we have "freedom of speech" in this country. But if a native English person says we should have patriotism and full integration in the country (i.e. "When in Rome"), then he/she's automatically a BNP supporter or Nazi. I was told recently that people who resort to the ultimate insult have run out of arguement and are getting desperate, so they simply result to calling people a "Nazi" or "BNP supporter". Just to let you know, there's a difference between race and culture. I have no trouble whatsoever with the former, but I do have a LOT of troubles with the later. You can be black and be just as English as me, but then you can be as white as me and be a traitorous little looney-leftie. Maybe you'd be happy once these "friends" of yours cause something like this in one of our city centres?

[image=http://justsick****.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/castle-bravo-atomic-nuclear-bomb-test.JPG]

All in the good name of "multiculturalism", of course.

Oh, and who says I'm racist if I'm against the old British Empire? Wasn't the whole reason for the Empire the exploitation of Third World countries?

 

Back to the oil spill:

NYT today has a great video about the blowout preventer and the failure of the blind shear rams, another direc proximate cause of the oil leak.

Regulators Failed to Address Risks in Oil Rig Fail-Safe Device

the federal agency charged with regulating offshore drilling, the Minerals Management Service, repeatedly declined to act on advice from its own experts on how it could minimize the risk of a blind shear ram failure.

It also shows that the Obama administration failed to grapple with either the well-known weaknesses of blowout preventers or the sufficiency of the nation?s drilling regulations even as it made plans this spring to expand offshore oil exploration.

?What happened to all the stakeholders ? Congress, environmental groups, industry, the government ? all stakeholders involved were lulled into a sense of what has turned out to be false security,? David J. Hayes, the deputy interior secretary, said in an interview.

Even in one significant instance where the Minerals Management Service did act, it appears to have neglected to enforce a rule that required oil companies to submit proof that their blind shear rams would in fact work.

 

I hear there is talk of Nationalising the US Oil Industries. Does anyone think this is a good idea?

 

If it were run like Saudi Aramco, that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, but if it were run like Pemex, not so good.

Resource nationalism is the wave of the future, but I haven't seen any news about nationalizing the U.S. oil industry. I could see Glenn Beck accusing Obama of trying to do it. But Glenn Beck talking about it is not the same thing as anyone seriously talking about it.

 

I had heard that they attempted to engage the blind sheer rams after the platform sunk, but they failed to engage. After seeing that video on the NY Times site, I suddenly thought of a solution I think would have worked. If there was a problem in the hydraulic system in the rams, then it might have been more feasible to create a makeshift system by having minisubs attach makeshift hydraulic pumps and using compressed air canisters to engage the original system by drilling into the lines from the outside. If the makeshift device were secured firmly enough to the base, it might have been able to drive the rams into position.

The complications to this idea would be that a poor weld in the makeshift devices might not withstand the discharge of pressurized air and fluid that this calls for. But I'm no expert, so I wouldn't bet anything on this idea.

 

I agree and it's something that is seen a lot in Europe, but I don't know whether many Americans will support it. Seeing as there are many that fear nationalisation of things as being too Socialist which apparently is as bad as Communism

 

So it seems there is a new "Boycott BP" Facebook page. What does everyone think?

I for one am completely in favor of it. Some say that the money you give them will go to cleaning up the disaster, but I believe they have more than enough to do that already. The American people need to send this greedy company a message, and it seems that slowing down their cash flow may be the only way to do it.

 

Interesting Wall Street Journal article about the oil spill and regulations here

It does highlight the frustration that we have options we could be employing to deal with this, but red tape seems to be blocking pragmatism here.

 

So basically, people are just being lazy.

 

Nice:

The BP Stat That Will Shock You

Just one month before its April 20 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, BP claimed it could skim 491,721 barrels of oil a day in the event of a major oil spill.

So now that it's not merely a thought exercise, how much has it skimmed each day? 900 barrels.

the good news is BP's getting very close on the relief well. We're potentially mere weeks from shutting this baby down so we can finally turn our focus on the long decades of attempted environmental clean up.

 

How do you even boycott BP? That makes about as much sense as boycotting oil from Iran. Sure we could stop buying oil from Iran but then they'll just ship their goods to China or elsewhere, and that in turn frees up oil supplies from Saudi Arabia to be bought by us. And BP being greedy isn't particularly remarkable, they're an oil company so you should expect them to be greedy. I wouldn't be surprised if lots of companies took shortcuts regarding safe engineering design....the only reason we're not hearing about them is because they haven't resulted in catastrophic accidents. And if you think deepwater drilling in general is a bad idea, well let's just say that if this had never happened deepwater drilling might probably be a technological marvel we'd be reading about 5 years from now in an issue of Scientific American.

 

Interesting polling that says the areas effected by the oil spill along the Gulf predominantly oppose the ban on oil drilling, and are more critical of Obama's handling of the situation than the national averages.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/abc-news-poll-bp-oil-spill-impact-gulf/story?id=11163367&page=1
There's some partisan elements that exaggerate the effect though.

 

Criticizing Obama for what though? What could he have done better? Do these people being polled even know what specifically Obama should have done or are they just having political mood swings?

The fact is the federal government has no equipment or expertise for operating on the ocean floor and the whole repair effort is being orchestrated by BP. We're not even in a position to criticize BP because I don't think anyone knows the specifics regarding the technical aspects of trying to plug that damn hole (which has finally been accomplished, thankfully).

 

Well let's not forget that BP consistently took shortcuts which inevitably lead to the oil leak in the first place. People just happen to have their priorities wrong. Let BP do their job and cap the well first; prosecution later. But because Obama had done exactly that, Americans now hate him.

Why do people have to be so irrational?

 

Americans don't hate Obama and this oil spill has barely changed his approval ratings. They remain in the "meh" region of the upper 40s, which is where they basically have been since early this year.

 

Oil spill might not be as bad as it looks.

Sounds almost too good to be true....guess we'll have to wait and see.

 

Coastal damage to the U.S. may not be as bad as feared, but it's difficult to assess underwater environmental damage in our territorial waters and the rest of the Gulf.

Meanwhile, maybe a million gallons of oil has spilled into the Kalamazoo River and could get into Lake Michigan. The environmental damage from this spill will be immediate and perhaps severe.

 

Gotta love those oil-eating microbes, tho. And the fact that this was light crude oil that evaporated easily, not the heavy black stuff that the Exxon Valdez poured forth.