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Oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico


Siara

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Would that work for the bigger leak/s though?

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That's a good question. Why is it that we control where people drill in the Gulf when we don't own the Gulf? Obviously, I'm glad we can control drilling but-- how is it handled? Through the UN?

The control of minerals extends to 200 miles offshore. The MMS is the governing agency.

http://www.mms.gov/

Edited by Astute One
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UPDATE MAY 8th-

BP's attempt to catch the oil in a massive dome is failing due to a build up of crystals inside the container, which is clogging things up.

Pick your media source:

NBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37008288/ns/us_news-environment/

CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/08/gulf.oil.spill/index.html?hpt=T1

FOX http://www.foxnews.com/topics/oil-spill.htm (not listed yet but, obviously, it will be soon)

The oil continues to flow into the Gulf.

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This is an enviromental disaster no matter how you spin it.....there is no one person, country, corporation or political party responsible for this....all humankind is responsible for our irresponsible pillaging of our natural resources....i am no lefty or righty....i am no tree hugging enviromentalist....I am a human being.....and I am aware when a mistake has been made.....and this one my friends.....is one big ass mistake.....

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This is an enviromental disaster no matter how you spin it.....there is no one person, country, corporation or political party responsible for this....all humankind is responsible for our irresponsible pillaging of our natural resources....i am no lefty or righty....i am no tree hugging enviromentalist....I am a human being.....and I am aware when a mistake has been made.....and this one my friends.....is one big ass mistake.....

So you're saying that a random family living in Africa or Mongolia is also responsible for this oil spill? It's an unfortunate accident yes, but nothing so great that you can blame all of humanity.

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ALL OF US on this planet are dependent in some way or manner dependent on that precious oil spilling into the water......whether its me every time I fill up my tank or the "random" 3rd world country dwellers who depend on the aid workers and food brought to them by gas powered vehicles......unfortunately oil is an evil necessity in our world.....our world is built around it.....also unfortunately we are so deeply entrenched in its use I feel that change on a global scale of not using it to power our vehicles is highly improbable.....a change away from oil is such a difficult but needed change.....a change of this magnitude depends on people as a whole on a global scale.....people would die....economies would crumble....we are all responsible because we are unwilling to make it happen.....whats more important as a global community?......the loss of lives and wealth or the loss of a diverse and important ecosystem that cannot be simply repaired or "replanted" like a forest....these are difficult questions without simple answers.....a change away from oil is just too massive to ever happen in our lifetime.....i am not without humanity but how long until we damage something on our planet bigger and more important than the Gulf of mexico?.....

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That's a good question. Why is it that we control where people drill in the Gulf when we don't own the Gulf? Obviously, I'm glad we can control drilling but-- how is it handled? Through the UN?

To be honest, I'm not totally sure how it's determined outside of the internationally agreed on 200 nautical miles.

As an aside here, I heard earlier today that Obama was considering issuing a ban on all US oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. I wonder how well that's going to go over with the US populace when petrol hits $15 a gallon?

As a second aside, it really sucks when some large company has a disaster like this but, at least we have some ability to control them and make them clean some of it up. We can just tell them clean it up or stop selling fuel inthe US. BIG money at stake there. What are we going to do if we DO ban US companies from drilling the Gulf and say, China starts drilling there? Firstly, we all know that they have sub-par technologies to start with and virtually no concern for the enviroment in their own nation. (TWIN GORGES DAM). How are we supposed to get them to clean up a spill that WILL happen at their hands when they don't have any intention of making a proffit selling it in the US?

I hate it when a US company screws up as much as the next guy but, we at least have a bit of a leash on those. We have NO recourse to make the Chinese clean up any mess they make. In a sence, we're actually better off with the devil we know in this case.

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This is an enviromental disaster no matter how you spin it.....there is no one person, country, corporation or political party responsible for this....all humankind is responsible for our irresponsible pillaging of our natural resources....i am no lefty or righty....i am no tree hugging enviromentalist....I am a human being.....and I am aware when a mistake has been made.....and this one my friends.....is one big ass mistake.....

I agree with you. We should have been pursuing alternative energy technology a long time ago. It's ridiculous to lay all the blame at the door to BP specifically. This was bound to happen eventually with one company or another. The American people allowed this to happen- a decision partly based on the fact that we're been presented with an endless stream of "propaganda" by Big Oil. How can we make good decisions when the data we get is provided by the businesses we're supposed to control? (and now the Supreme Court has removed the restrictions on corporate financing of political campaigns, so our entire electoral process is going to be based on this same caliber of information).

The petroleum industry has been manipulating our government's environmental policy for decades, choosing to keep the country at risk of a disaster while eeking every penny they could out of their businesses. It's an aspect of our system that doesn't work-- big business manipulating Washington. I hope that beyond grieving for the loss of the Gulf ecosystem (which might last the rest of our lives), we address this imbalance in our political system so that another mega-business doesn't create another disaster 10 years down the road.

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What are we going to do if we DO ban US companies from drilling the Gulf and say, China starts drilling there? Firstly, we all know that they have sub-par technologies to start with and virtually no concern for the enviroment in their own nation.

I don't understand what you're saying here. Are you saying that if we don't drill there ourselves, China will jump in and drill there?

Are you saying that if we don't drill ourselves we will simply end up buying oil from China, which will do even more ecological damage, so we might as well do the ecological damage ourselves? You make it sound like oil is our only option as an energy source. Obviously, we can't stop using oil RIGHT NOW but I think it's a mistake to work on the assumption that our addiction to oil is inevitable and unstoppable.

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The optimist in me hopes that this could end up being such a calamity that people could more easily be swayed towards other sources of energy.....lets stop calling these options "alternative" and start calling them them the primary......people are trying to spin this onto the president but lets not forget that the republican motto over the campaign trail was "drill baby drill"......if we leave these decisions to the Right they are gonna leave behind a trail of these types of incidences because of their complete disregard for enviromental impact.....

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I don't understand what you're saying here. Are you saying that if we don't drill there ourselves, China will jump in and drill there?
Well, maybe not China. Perhaps Venezuala or Cuba... someone will fill that vaccuum. Would we rather who ever is drilling there to be a US company that we can apply US law to or some other country that can screw up the environment with no fear of reprecussions?
Are you saying that if we don't drill ourselves we will simply end up buying oil from China, which will do even more ecological damage, so we might as well do the ecological damage ourselves? You make it sound like oil is our only option as an energy source. Obviously, we can't stop using oil RIGHT NOW but I think it's a mistake to work on the assumption that our addiction to oil is inevitable and unstoppable.
Certainly, at some point, we WILL have to stop using oil. We'll either have the technology to develop something better or we'll go back to riding horses. No two ways about it. Nonethelss, for the foreseeable future, petroleum is the only best source of fuel available to us.

Alcohol based fuels made from plants seem like an answer but, here are some of the shortcomings:

1). Expencive, WAY morso that petrol

2). Not as efficient. It takes approximately three gallons to do what one gallon of petrol does.

3). Arible land limitations. With 6 billion people on the planet, what do we do? Use that farm land to make hooch for our cars or feed our people?

4). Pollution. You have to burn three times as much of it, thereby releasing just as much carbon, (more by some studies), into the environment.

Solar power:

1). Half the planet is dark half the time.

Electric Cars:

1). You still have to make electricity somehow/some way. In short, instead of cars and trucks spreading that pollution out some, it'd be concentrated around the power plants... do YOU want to live there?

2). Battery Tech still isn't up to par. Petrol is still cheaper and far more efficient.

3). Re-fueling/Re-charging. Do you want to sit around a service station for two hours so that you can drive for two?

Sure, one day, we'll have the problems licked. Until then though, I kind of like to know that the tractors are plowing the fields and the trucks are delivering that produce to a market near me. Nonetheless, and mark my words here, for the rest of OUR lives, we'll see petroleum as our primary fuel source. There simply isn't anything better on the horizon. Either we drill it or we buy it from those who do. There really isn't any way around that yet.

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The optimist in me hopes that this could end up being such a calamity that people could more easily be swayed towards other sources of energy.....lets stop calling these options "alternative" and start calling them them the primary......people are trying to spin this onto the president but lets not forget that the republican motto over the campaign trail was "drill baby drill"......if we leave these decisions to the Right they are gonna leave behind a trail of these types of incidences because of their complete disregard for enviromental impact.....
Perhaps you are forgetting that the LEFT was in office during the Carter years and that didn't work out so good for us. The price of oil started sky rocketing during the last 18 months of Clintons administration. His plan for fixing the problem was to try to get Congress to dip into the "Strategic Oil Reserves". Even that didn't bring the price at the pump down enough to secure the White House for Gore.

It's pretty simplistic to simply say that "It's all Bushes/The Rights fault!". Simplistic but, not honest. The Left has done just as much over the last fifty years to get us in this fix as anyone else.

Something else to consider is that "Drill baby, Drill" also means "rely less on self important tin horn dictators on the other side of the planet". By extenstion, it also means not having to worry so much if another Saddam rears his ugly head and tries to take control of a sizable amount of the oil produced somewhere else in the world. In a few years, a lot of those nations are going to have pretty nasty weapons. Either designed by them or bought from elsewhere using money they got by selling oil to us.

As much of a stink as was let off by going over there to secure inexpencive fuel shipments, imagine how much worse it would've been, (read "will be in about ten years"), if doing so involved locking horns with a nuclear armed state run by suicidal mad men. When you consider the options, now is the time to stake our claims on this limited resource. Then, in ten years when the middle east is dry and nuke armed, we don't have to fool with them anymore. We'll have a steady supply of fuel coming from drills owned by the home team.

Edited by Lord Umbarger
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Well, maybe not China. Perhaps Venezuala or Cuba... someone will fill that vaccuum. Would we rather who ever is drilling there to be a US company that we can apply US law to or some other country that can screw up the environment with no fear of reprecussions?

Certainly, at some point, we WILL have to stop using oil. We'll either have the technology to develop something better or we'll go back to riding horses. No two ways about it. Nonethelss, for the foreseeable future, petroleum is the only best source of fuel available to us....

Good post.

I think that a huge percentage of our current fuel usage isn't necessary (I include myself in this, I drive everywhere). I realize that we're all spoiled rotten and feel that we HAVE to go to our favorite restaurants, bars, stores, theaters, etc. rather than close ones. We don't carpool because we don't want to coordinate with our friends & neighbors. What if we want to leave for work 15 minutes later than our friend is leaving for work? I suspect that if we got really serious we could make a HUGE dent in our oil usage almost instantaneously.

A huge number of jobs could be conducted online from home. Basically all middle management, paper shuffling type jobs.

We drive immense cars that get terrible mileage for no reason at all. We like the image of ourselves as going off-road, and being "free" so we drive around in huge heavy pickup trucks and SUVs. How many times do you pull up to a restaurant and think "oh my God, this place is going to be jammed" only to find 10 customers in the building? Each one drove independently down a comfortable, paved highway. Each one drove a massive vehicle that seats 6 and was capable of climbing a dirt road up a steep mountain.

And then there are the McMansion, poorly built houses. I know this is going to make me sound like some creaky old dinosaur, but when I was a kid we didn't heat every room in the house at all times. If rooms weren't being used we'd turn the radiators off and close the doors. Those rooms would get down to 50-something degrees. In the winter, windows were sealed shut with masking tape. No leaks.

I realize people today wouldn't be willing to live that way, but it would take a huge chunk out of the amount of energy we used. We don't NEED to consume the amount of energy we do.

Edited by Siara
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Good post. I think that a huge percentage of our current fuel usage isn't necessary (I include myself in this, I drive everywhere). I realize that we're all spoiled rotten and feel that we HAVE to go to our favorite restaurants, bars, stores, theaters, etc. rather than close ones. We don't carpool because we don't want to coordinate with our friends & neighbors. What if we want to leave for work 15 minutes later than our friend is leaving for work? I suspect that if we got really serious we could make a HUGE dent in our oil usage almost instantaneously.

A huge number of jobs could be conducted online from home. Basically all middle management, paper shuffling type jobs.

We drive immense cars that get terrible mileage for no reason at all. We like the image of ourselves as going off-road, and being "free" so we drive around in huge heavy pickup trucks and SUVs. How many times do you pull up to a restaurant and think "oh my God, this place is going to be jammed" only to find 10 customers in the building? Each one drove independently down a comfortable, paved highway. Each one drove a massive vehicle that seats 6 and was capable of climbing a dirt road up a steep mountain.

That's quite true. We could make a major dent in it if we all put forth an effort but, I really don't see us doing so until we flat out can't afford to live the way we do. SUV's have always been a pet peeve of mine anyway. I know so many folks who have them and have never even driven across the grass in their front yards. I have driven a pick-up truck for most of my adult life but, I also worked construction so, it was pretty handy to have for that.

Of course, another thing to consider is that a large portion of the US fuel expenditure is for tractor trailers... some are virtually never shut off. Did you know that a lot of those only get like two miles to the gallon? Of course, there is no way that we can do with out those though. In the long run, they actually save fuel by reducing the distance that each person has to drive to pick up supplies.

I never did understand why oil tankers couldn't be solar powered though. Speed really isn't that much of an issue when the product you're carrying is millions of years old already.

The truth is that evenyually, we WILL have to change how we do things and that's going to be a really bad fifty years. I don't think that any of us will be around to see it but, those that are will probably have to learn to live with living closer to where they work, not taking their cars on long drives for vacations, maybe even learning to use horses again for some local travel.... of course, I like horses so, it might not be all bad!

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One could get around the battery station charging time issue if they're willing to go communal on the batteries. Use electrics for local travel only and have all the spare batteries stored at the station, ready to swap out at a moment's notice, so that instead of charging one up, you're swapping out for a pre-charged one and the charging station attendant puts your used up battery on a charger for someone else.

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Fresh off the Washington post... With video of the leak itself...

oil video

And a new one of some costs and other numbers today...

up to 450 mil and counting

Just thought the gulf disaster deserved a bump with fresh news.

In related news... There is new climate bill, energy bill action going on as of this week.... bunches of sites about it all.

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video of BP oil problem reveals the fact that the estimate of the spill volume was way understated. It's 14 times worse than BP told us. The leak could be 70,000 barrels a day (previous estimate: 5,000 barrels per day). Is BP covering things up?

This is a CNN video so... it's got a CNN spin. Watch the video. What do you think? Conservatives, how is your media reporting it?

http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2010/05/14/must-see-ac360%C2%B0-video-oil-spill-worse-than-expected/?iref=allsearch

-----------------------------------------

edited to add: Here we have an issue of catastrophic national importance. As always, we can't tell what's going on because the political spin (not to mention BP's "saving our a$$" maneuvers) makes clear concise reporting impossible.

The video is the public's first opportunity to view the biggest leak & my impression is that every fluid mechanic expert in the world thinks the 5,000 barrel estimate was ridiculous.

Edited by Siara
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Does anyone know... why is the oil gushing like that? Is it under pressure in the earth. It seems like it must be.

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Does anyone know... why is the oil gushing like that? Is it under pressure in the earth. It seems like it must be.

Yeah! It's under tremendous pressure down there. Firstly, oil is normally found in porous rock and the drilling actually gives the oil and escape hole. Think of it as being kind of like a wet sponge in a plastic bag under a load of books. Punch a hole inthe bag and the water (oil) spurts out.

In the cases where the oil is in a large cavern like setting, they don't actually pump it up as much as they pump it down... what I mean is that they pump sand, mistures of clay and other stull along with water into the bore hole. This increases the pressure and out comes the oil. Sort of like having a cup filled to the brim with coffee and dropping too many spoonfuls of sugar in it.

In most oil wells, they're also under pressure from various natural gases that form along with the oil. In this case, it's sort of like shaking up a bottle of Coca-Cola, Pepsi or your favorite beer and pointing it at your pals when you open it.

There are some where we actually have to pump the oil out of the ground but, most of the ones like that in the US are in the deep south west and that's normally done when the oil field is almost drained.

All that said, I'm no expert on oil drilling. Never worked at it or took any courses on geology or anything. Just a little of what I've picked up watching Discovery Channal and the like.

I just read a little bit ago that they are now planning to set some kind of concrete doom over the busted part of the well and are also trying to reduce the pressure by sinking a series of new oil wells close to where the destroyed one was. Hopefully, this messure will relieve some of the pressure down there and if not stop the flow, at least slow it enough for them to come up with another plan.

As a side note, on some boards and news stories, they are already saying that this could be the worst oil related disaster in history and that in the worst case outcome, it could take GENERATIONS to clean up the mess and heal the enviroment along the coast. If you've never been to Panama City, Florida or the surrounding areas, you may have missed out on one of the most beautiful places on Earth. And I'm seriously not just saying that.

Edited by Lord Umbarger
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I agree with you. We can't stop using oil.

Obviously, this is a tragic disaster and everyone feels sorry for the families of the dead and sorry that it happened.

I guess a point I wanted to make is that when the news came out about the oil spill half of the country reacted with "Oh shut up, ****ing liberals". If they had thought for one minute they would have realized that the oil spill could be a secondary disaster effecting thousands of families. But the impulse react politically was so strong and so instantaneous that the obvious fact that this was a disaster too faded into insignificance.

It would be good if the people who react that way could stop for a second and reflect on how stupidly they reacted to this situation because they saw nothing but politics. Could this be a lesson? As in, hysterical political extremism is making us STUPID? No. Probably not.

Your first mistake was reading those blogs and second taking them to heart the way you did. I quit reading those blogs along time ago, most of them are morons on both sides trying to raise someones blood pressure. I am a conservative and yes it is a disaster but to start yelling to shut down drilling is not the right thing either. This will be cleaned up and everthing back to normal, will it take time yes but it will be fixed. This too shall pass.
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Always takes time. But, in the long run, this disaster is a blip on the radar, nothing more. At least 95% of all species to ever exist have already died off. Even if we all fell, it'd be like nothing to the world. For our own sake, we just need to work on solving this problem and find out what lead to this particular disaster so we can keep others from happening.

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  • 2 weeks later...

5/26/10 A few thoughts on the day that BP is doing the final test of it's "top kill" strategy to stop the leak. In some ways this should go in a blog. It's just my helpless thoughts. But it's so issue oriented that I thought I'd put it here.

What on earth is going to happen if the top kill doesn't work?

The extreme politicization of this catastrophe is SO painful to watch. It reminds me of the saying "Nero fiddled while Rome burned". In the case of Rome, Nero was the government. He was so absorbed in his own **** that he couldn't take in what was happening around him. In our case, since we are a democracy WE are the government. We're so busy pointing fingers and berating each other's incompetence that we are relatively oblivious to the fact that this is a disaster.

I am as much to blame as anyone else, if not more so because I'm so political. I personally feel that the alliance of Big Oil with our government is mainly a Conservative thing. I scream, "Look at that!!! I told you so!!!", because I feel sad and frustrated. I personally feel that Conservative politics (actually, not "Conservative politics" as Reagan would have defined it, but specifically G.W. Bush and Dick Cheney) is to blame and I don't want that to go unnoticed. I don't want it to go unnoticed because I don't want it to happen again. Horrified Conservatives are going through a similar thought process. They're screaming, "Obama, for Christ's sake do something". They can't control the impulse to assign blame, just as I can't. It's a scream of horror.

I and everyone else need to drop our preoccupation with politics and try to figure out what to do. Maybe there's nothing we can do. Maybe our insistence on maintaining our fun, energy consuming lifestyles has caused us to make a horrible, irreversible mistake. We kept pushing the limit, taking more and more chances. It might be that the best we can do now is cryogenically preserve the DNA of the many species that are going to be wiped out and learn from our horrible mistake.

But I have a feeling that we're all too spoiled, political and removed from reality to learn from our mistake. I haven't given up my political anger about this at all even though I know that it's counterproductive.

Anyone else have a thought about this? (I realize this is a somewhat weird post)

Edited by Siara
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Political anger?

???

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Political anger?

political anger= compulsion to assign blame. Look at the press. It's full of it

------------------------------------

Maybe I'm wrong (I'm wrong a zillion times a day...). But this strikes me as more than an ordinary disaster.

Edited by Siara
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