Discussion: Global Warming and Other Environmental Issues

[Nivek]

i'm not far from the coast myself, so we will see how this goes...

 

[chaseter]

*Sigh* Here we go again...two times in two pages:

Why can't you guys go with the clear and obvious analogy to nuclear power? Chernobyl, perhaps? This is far, far bigger than a coal mine, guys, or a plane crash.

I don't see how my coal mine example is faulty. We are excavating natural resources and although there are many regulations on each industry, accidents happen. We can further regulate them but there are still going to be accidents. Just because these accidents occur, they are still rare. Because one accident occurs, it doesn't mean that all future ventures in that field should be halted. We use coal as an energy source. We use oil as an energy source. Both ventures impact the natural environment in which they are stationed.

How is that apples to oranges? Yes nuclear energy is a good example but look at Three Mile Island. One accident occurs and our ignorant society bans new nuclear power still 30 years later. So I don't see how that example would back up the claim that because one accident occurs, we shouldn't stop seeking that energy source because it is still very safe. Because Three Mile Island is the exact opposite of that.

 

[chaseter]

i'm not far from the coast myself, so we will see how this goes...

I would buy all the seafood you want for the next few months and freeze it if you want any

I was going to go to the Bahamas this summer but now that is called off.

 

[Anita18]

I don't see how my coal mine example is faulty. We are excavating natural resources and although there are many regulations on each industry, accidents happen. We can further regulate them but there are still going to be accidents. Just because these accidents occur, they are still rare. Because one accident occurs, it doesn't mean that all future ventures in that field should be halted. We use coal as an energy source. We use oil as an energy source. Both ventures impact the natural environment in which they are stationed.

How is that apples to oranges? Yes nuclear energy is a good example but look at Three Mile Island. One accident occurs and our ignorant society bans new nuclear power still 30 years later. So I don't see how that example would back up the claim that because one accident occurs, we shouldn't stop seeking that energy source because it is still very safe. Because Three Mile Island is the exact opposite of that.

It's apples to oranges because when there's a coal mine collapse, it's a tragedy but only the workers are affected. It isn't like there's a 10-mile radius of destruction where every town collapses too. If that were the case, I'd bet we'd be thinking VERY hard about where to put new coal mines.

Oil spills and nuclear plant accidents have far-reaching effects, not only because they can physically get farther (dispersed by wind and water), but because those effects will also last for years and years.

 

[chaseter]

Mines/excavation sites of any size cause huge impacts on the environment they are stationed at. Trucks driving back and forth, roads being built, trees and vegetation being removed.

The mentality that because one accident happens for a still relatively safe and excellent source of energy then all future endeavors should be shut down. Three Mile Island is an example for that. I am on the side that accidents will happen no matter what and because they do, we shouldn't shut down future endeavors into that field. We learn from our mistakes and go forward. Why would I then use nuclear power as an example for my position???

 

[Carcharodon]

Mines/excavation sites of any size cause huge impacts on the environment they are stationed at. Trucks driving back and forth, roads being built, trees and vegetation being removed.

...and? What on earth does that have to do with the discussion at-hand, particularly with respect to context? These environmental damages you mention with the coal-mines aren't the result of accidents or failure. They're the result of the mining itself.

The fact of the matter is still this:

It's apples to oranges because when there's a coal mine collapse, it's a tragedy but only the workers are affected. It isn't like there's a 10-mile radius of destruction where every town collapses too. If that were the case, I'd bet we'd be thinking VERY hard about where to put new coal mines.

Oil spills and nuclear plant accidents have far-reaching effects, not only because they can physically get farther (dispersed by wind and water), but because those effects will also last for years and years.

The mentality that because one accident happens for a still relatively safe and excellent source of energy then all future endeavors should be shut down. Three Mile Island is an example for that. I am on the side that accidents will happen no matter what and because they do, we shouldn't shut down future endeavors into that field. We learn from our mistakes and go forward. Why would I then use nuclear power as an example for my position???

Because a failure in nuclear power safety is far more similar to this off-shore drilling accident than a plane crash or coal-mine collapse for the reason stated by Anita18. This isn't rocket-surgery or brain science. Come on, now.

 

[Carcharodon]

I don't see how my coal mine example is faulty. We are excavating natural resources and although there are many regulations on each industry, accidents happen. We can further regulate them but there are still going to be accidents. Just because these accidents occur, they are still rare. Because one accident occurs, it doesn't mean that all future ventures in that field should be halted. We use coal as an energy source. We use oil as an energy source. Both ventures impact the natural environment in which they are stationed.

How is that apples to oranges? Yes nuclear energy is a good example but look at Three Mile Island. One accident occurs and our ignorant society bans new nuclear power still 30 years later. So I don't see how that example would back up the claim that because one accident occurs, we shouldn't stop seeking that energy source because it is still very safe. Because Three Mile Island is the exact opposite of that.

If you can't see why the comparison you made is completely inaccurate then I'm not going to discuss this further. It's pretty obvious. I wasn't commenting on your overall position, or your point: I was criticizing a lazy, dishonest comparison.

 

[redmarvel]

It's apples to oranges because when there's a coal mine collapse, it's a tragedy but only the workers are affected. It isn't like there's a 10-mile radius of destruction where every town collapses too. If that were the case, I'd bet we'd be thinking VERY hard about where to put new coal mines.

Oil spills and nuclear plant accidents have far-reaching effects, not only because they can physically get farther (dispersed by wind and water), but because those effects will also last for years and years.

Actually coal mine tragedies can be a lot worse than just the death of the workers... it can actually cause the death of a town. Ask the folk that used to live in Centralia, PA - the population there went from 2000 down to 9, because of a fire in a coal mine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania

 

[chaseter]

You can't get through thick skulls redmarvel. I can't believe that someone called the coal mine comparison lazy and dishonest...how is it dishonest???

In fact oil drilling and coal mining are excavation of natural resources, they are more closely related than oil drilling and nuclear power. All three have the chance for massive disaster and huge environmental impact. But I guess that is lazy and dishonest

Coal mine fires can burn for a very long time, they release ash and toxic chemicals in the surrounding areas that can kill everything like the link redmarvel posted. They could also release toxic gases that are more dense than air and linger on the ground, killing people and animals. They can also cause the leeching of chemicals into underground water supplies that then poison everything down stream.

So yeah, total inaccurate comparison. I think the lazy part was thinking coal mine disasters are only cave ins.

 

[Carcharodon]

You can't get through thick skulls redmarvel. I can't believe that someone called the coal mine comparison lazy and dishonest...how is it dishonest???

In fact oil drilling and coal mining are excavation of natural resources, they are more closely related than oil drilling and nuclear power. All three have the chance for massive disaster and huge environmental impact. But I guess that is lazy and dishonest

Coal mine fires can burn for a very long time, they release ash and toxic chemicals in the surrounding areas that can kill everything like the link redmarvel posted. They could also release toxic gases that are more dense than air and linger on the ground, killing people and animals. They can also cause the leeching of chemicals into underground water supplies that then poison everything down stream.

So yeah, total inaccurate comparison. I think the lazy part was thinking coal mine disasters are only cave ins.

I said it was dishonest because I (ignorantly) thought that the effect of a coal mine disaster was more contained than it apparently is. That's my mistake, but I still don't believe for one second that any such coal mine disaster can be placed on the level of the oil spill we're discussing.

In any case, THIS argument:

In fact oil drilling and coal mining are excavation of natural resources, they are more closely related than oil drilling and nuclear power. All three have the chance for massive disaster and huge environmental impact. But I guess that is lazy and dishonest

...misses the point entirely, and I can't help but smile at the irony of your "thick skulls" comment. So here, let me get some heavy machinery to break through yours:

- The point I was making has NOTHING to do with the precise nature of any of these three activities (excavation vs. non-excavation). The fact that you're hung up on this demonstrates quite clearly your lack of understanding of the argument at-hand.

- The point I was making has EVERYTHING to do with the spread and magnitude of effect of potential disaster. Only a moron would argue that a coal-mine fire is on the same level, in this sense, as a nuclear meltdown, for example. I'm still of the opinion that only a moron would argue that a coal-mine failure is on the same level as the disaster we're discussing presently. To ignore the scale and magnitude in favor of the argument that, "All three have the chance for massive disaster and environmental impact," is a gross oversimplification...and would qualify quite nicely as "lazy."

On the other hand (and to my own discredit), in light of the new information (thanks, redmarvel ), I guess we can't really call the comparison apples v. oranges...now we would need to look at it as a continuum rather than as discrete categories. Still, the larger point I'm making with this post is not affected by this concession.

I really can't make it any simpler than that for you, Chase. You're right, in a sense, but unfortunately it is irrelevant to the discussion we're having. So I'm forced to conclude that either you're intentionally ignoring the context of the discussion (hence the dishonesty), or you're too naive to figure it out. You pick.

As for me, I've given more than my $0.02, so I'm done. When you became insulting I kind of lost interest.

 

[Hobodeluxe]

A common spin in the coverage of BP's oil spill is a gleeful suggestion that the gulf blowout is Obama's Katrina.
In truth, culpability for the disaster can more accurately be laid at the Bush Administration's doorstep. For eight years, George Bush's presidency infected the oil industry's oversight agency, the Minerals Management Service, with a septic culture of corruption from which it has yet to recover. Oil patch alumnae in the White House encouraged agency personnel to engineer weakened safeguards that directly contributed to the gulf catastrophe.
The absence of an acoustical regulator -- a remotely triggered dead man's switch that might have closed off BP's gushing pipe at its sea floor wellhead when the manual switch failed (the fire and explosion on the drilling platform may have prevented the dying workers from pushing the button) -- was directly attributable to industry pandering by the Bush team. Acoustic switches are required by law for all offshore rigs off Brazil and in Norway's North Sea operations. BP uses the device voluntarily in Britain's North Sea and elsewhere in the world as do other big players like Holland's Shell and France's Total. In 2000, the Minerals Management Service while weighing a comprehensive rulemaking for drilling safety, deemed the acoustic mechanism "essential" and proposed to mandate the mechanism on all gulf rigs.
Then, between January and March of 2001, incoming Vice President Dick Cheney conducted secret meetings with over 100 oil industry officials allowing them to draft a wish list of industry demands to be implemented by the oil friendly administration. Cheney also used that time to re-staff the Minerals Management Service with oil industry toadies including a cabal of his Wyoming carbon cronies. In 2003, newly reconstituted Minerals Management Service genuflected to the oil cartel by recommending the removal of the proposed requirement for acoustic switches. The Minerals Management Service's 2003 study concluded that "acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly."
The acoustic trigger costs about $500,000. Estimated costs of the oil spill to Gulf Coast residents are now upward of $14 billion to gulf state communities. Bush's 2005 energy bill officially dropped the requirement for the acoustic switch off devices explaining that the industry's existing practices are "failsafe."
Bending over for Big Oil became the ideological posture of the Bush White House, and, under Cheney's cruel whip, the practice trickled down through the regulatory bureaucracy. The Minerals Management Service -- the poster child for "agency capture phenomena" -- hopped into bed with the regulated industry -- literally. A 2009 investigation of the Minerals Management Service found that agency officials "frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives." Three reports by the Inspector General describe an open bazaar of payoffs, bribes and kickbacks spiced with scenes of female employees providing sexual favors to industry big wigs who in turn rewarded government workers with illegal contracts. In one incident reported by the Inspector General, agency employees got so drunk at a Shell sponsored golf event that they could not drive home and had to sleep in hotel rooms paid for by Shell.
Pervasive intercourse also characterized their financial relations. Industry lobbyists underwrote lavish parties and showered agency employees with illegal gifts, and lucrative personal contracts and treated them to regular golf, ski, and paintball outings, trips to rock concerts and professional sports events. The Inspector General characterized this orgy of wheeling and dealing as "a culture of ethical failure" that cost taxpayers millions in royalty fees and produced reams of bad science to justify unregulated deep water drilling in the gulf.
It is charitable to characterize the ethics of these government officials as "elastic." They seemed not to have existed at all. The Inspector General reported with some astonishment that Bush's crew at the MMS, when confronted with the laundry list of bribery, public theft and sexual and financial favors to and from industry "showed no remorse."
BP's confidence in lax government oversight by a badly compromised agency still staffed with Bush era holdovers may have prompted the company to take two other dangerous shortcuts. First, BP failed to install a deep hole shut off valve -- another fail-safe that might have averted the spill. And second, BP's reported willingness to violate the law by drilling to depths of 22,000-25,000 feet instead of the 18,000 feet maximum depth allowed by its permit may have contributed to this catastrophe.
And wherever there's a national tragedy involving oil, Cheney's offshore company Halliburton is never far afield. In fact, stay tuned; Halliburton may emerge as the primary villain in this caper. The blow out occurred shortly after Halliburton completed an operation to reinforce drilling hole casing with concrete slurry. This is a sensitive process that, according to government experts, can trigger catastrophic blowouts if not performed attentively. According to the Minerals Management Service, 18 of 39 blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico since 1996 were attributed to poor workmanship injecting cement around the metal pipe. Halliburton is currently under investigation by the Australian government for a massive blowout in the Timor Sea in 2005 caused by its faulty application of concrete casing.
The Obama administration has assigned nearly 2,000 federal personnel from the Coast Guard, the Corps of Engineers, the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, EPA, NOAA and Department of Interior to deal with the spill -- an impressive response. Still, the current White House is not without fault -- the government should, for example, be requiring a far greater deployment of absorbent booms. But the real culprit in this villainy is a negligent industry, the festering ethics of the Bush Administration and poor oversight by an agency corrupted by eight years of grotesque subservience to Big Oil.




p.s. Obama isn't innocent in all this . He voted for that bill.

 

[StorminNorman]

A common spin in the coverage of BP's oil spill is a gleeful suggestion that the gulf blowout is Obama's Katrina.
In truth, culpability for the disaster can more accurately be laid at the Bush Administration's doorstep. For eight years, George Bush's presidency infected the oil industry's oversight agency, the Minerals Management Service, with a septic culture of corruption from which it has yet to recover. Oil patch alumnae in the White House encouraged agency personnel to engineer weakened safeguards that directly contributed to the gulf catastrophe.
The absence of an acoustical regulator -- a remotely triggered dead man's switch that might have closed off BP's gushing pipe at its sea floor wellhead when the manual switch failed (the fire and explosion on the drilling platform may have prevented the dying workers from pushing the button) -- was directly attributable to industry pandering by the Bush team. Acoustic switches are required by law for all offshore rigs off Brazil and in Norway's North Sea operations. BP uses the device voluntarily in Britain's North Sea and elsewhere in the world as do other big players like Holland's Shell and France's Total. In 2000, the Minerals Management Service while weighing a comprehensive rulemaking for drilling safety, deemed the acoustic mechanism "essential" and proposed to mandate the mechanism on all gulf rigs.
Then, between January and March of 2001, incoming Vice President Dick Cheney conducted secret meetings with over 100 oil industry officials allowing them to draft a wish list of industry demands to be implemented by the oil friendly administration. Cheney also used that time to re-staff the Minerals Management Service with oil industry toadies including a cabal of his Wyoming carbon cronies. In 2003, newly reconstituted Minerals Management Service genuflected to the oil cartel by recommending the removal of the proposed requirement for acoustic switches. The Minerals Management Service's 2003 study concluded that "acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly."
The acoustic trigger costs about $500,000. Estimated costs of the oil spill to Gulf Coast residents are now upward of $14 billion to gulf state communities. Bush's 2005 energy bill officially dropped the requirement for the acoustic switch off devices explaining that the industry's existing practices are "failsafe."
Bending over for Big Oil became the ideological posture of the Bush White House, and, under Cheney's cruel whip, the practice trickled down through the regulatory bureaucracy. The Minerals Management Service -- the poster child for "agency capture phenomena" -- hopped into bed with the regulated industry -- literally. A 2009 investigation of the Minerals Management Service found that agency officials "frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives." Three reports by the Inspector General describe an open bazaar of payoffs, bribes and kickbacks spiced with scenes of female employees providing sexual favors to industry big wigs who in turn rewarded government workers with illegal contracts. In one incident reported by the Inspector General, agency employees got so drunk at a Shell sponsored golf event that they could not drive home and had to sleep in hotel rooms paid for by Shell.
Pervasive intercourse also characterized their financial relations. Industry lobbyists underwrote lavish parties and showered agency employees with illegal gifts, and lucrative personal contracts and treated them to regular golf, ski, and paintball outings, trips to rock concerts and professional sports events. The Inspector General characterized this orgy of wheeling and dealing as "a culture of ethical failure" that cost taxpayers millions in royalty fees and produced reams of bad science to justify unregulated deep water drilling in the gulf.
It is charitable to characterize the ethics of these government officials as "elastic." They seemed not to have existed at all. The Inspector General reported with some astonishment that Bush's crew at the MMS, when confronted with the laundry list of bribery, public theft and sexual and financial favors to and from industry "showed no remorse."
BP's confidence in lax government oversight by a badly compromised agency still staffed with Bush era holdovers may have prompted the company to take two other dangerous shortcuts. First, BP failed to install a deep hole shut off valve -- another fail-safe that might have averted the spill. And second, BP's reported willingness to violate the law by drilling to depths of 22,000-25,000 feet instead of the 18,000 feet maximum depth allowed by its permit may have contributed to this catastrophe.
And wherever there's a national tragedy involving oil, Cheney's offshore company Halliburton is never far afield. In fact, stay tuned; Halliburton may emerge as the primary villain in this caper. The blow out occurred shortly after Halliburton completed an operation to reinforce drilling hole casing with concrete slurry. This is a sensitive process that, according to government experts, can trigger catastrophic blowouts if not performed attentively. According to the Minerals Management Service, 18 of 39 blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico since 1996 were attributed to poor workmanship injecting cement around the metal pipe. Halliburton is currently under investigation by the Australian government for a massive blowout in the Timor Sea in 2005 caused by its faulty application of concrete casing.
The Obama administration has assigned nearly 2,000 federal personnel from the Coast Guard, the Corps of Engineers, the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, EPA, NOAA and Department of Interior to deal with the spill -- an impressive response. Still, the current White House is not without fault -- the government should, for example, be requiring a far greater deployment of absorbent booms. But the real culprit in this villainy is a negligent industry, the festering ethics of the Bush Administration and poor oversight by an agency corrupted by eight years of grotesque subservience to Big Oil.




p.s. Obama isn't innocent in all this . He voted for that bill.

Posting the words of another without credit is plagiarism

 

[Hobodeluxe]

Posting the words of another without credit is plagiarism

sorry bout that I thought the link went back to the original piece and not the nyt.

attribution

 

[chaseter]

As for me, I've given more than my $0.02, so I'm done. When you became insulting I kind of lost interest.

I became insulting

This isn't rocket-surgery or brain science. Come on, now.

I was criticizing a lazy, dishonest comparison.

 

[DACrowe]

You can't get through thick skulls redmarvel. I can't believe that someone called the coal mine comparison lazy and dishonest...how is it dishonest???

In fact oil drilling and coal mining are excavation of natural resources, they are more closely related than oil drilling and nuclear power. All three have the chance for massive disaster and huge environmental impact. But I guess that is lazy and dishonest

Coal mine fires can burn for a very long time, they release ash and toxic chemicals in the surrounding areas that can kill everything like the link redmarvel posted. They could also release toxic gases that are more dense than air and linger on the ground, killing people and animals. They can also cause the leeching of chemicals into underground water supplies that then poison everything down stream.

So yeah, total inaccurate comparison. I think the lazy part was thinking coal mine disasters are only cave ins.

Well here's the thing you are glaringly ignoring...

While a mine collapsing is unacceptable and tragic. It usually (though not always) ends with the poor workers who were not properly protected by their company dying in the mine.

If the safety procedures are not in place and no plan Bs (or Cs, Ds, Es, etc.) are in place when an oil rig explodes or a nuclear power plant melts down, the damage goes far beyond the death of those who work there. If a nuclear plant goes down, the area around the power plant is severely affected and even ruined by radioactive contamination depending on the extent of the crisis that could leave thousands dead (ask Ukraine about that). Or it could be worse and lead to many more dead if the plant blows.

If an oil rig explodes...well you see the result. The damage is far beyond the poor workers at the site who took the risk of being there. Hundreds of thousands of oil barrels are spilling into the Gulf Coast and ruining fisheries, killing off wildlife and destroying precious marshland and estuaries. The damage is catastrophic for the entire region.

And so an oil spill is far more like a nuclear meltdown in its scope of damage than a mining accident. And you know this as you (poorly) try to compare this to the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina. It is dishonest to compare the damage to a hurricane and saying that this is as isolated an incident as a mining accident to defend offshore drilling.

And in all honesty, WTF do you want to defend it? We gain nothing from offshore drilling. It won't bring down oil prices and it won't curb our addiction to foreign oil. At best it pacifies Big Oil lobbyists to get real climate change regulation passed for the 21st century pushing green technology...like almost all of the rest of the world. Instead, Americans get caught up on "drill, baby, drill."

If there was no danger, then I'd accept it. Or if the danger was remote enough and the benefits were great enough (like nuclear power), I would also accept it. But it is clearly not as safe as nuclear power and has no benefits other than for the shareholders of oil companies looking for a little more money to not go to OPEC. Hardly a winning argument.

 

[Carcharodon]

I became insulting

It's okay. You can cry on my shoulder if you want. I don't judge.

The first comment was meant in jest, by the way. Difficult to convey over the web, I know, but I meant no harm. In fact, I thought I went to some small length, at least, to make it more apparent by purposefully misnaming both disciplines/procedures.

Oh, well. I'll try harder next time.

The second wasn't meant to be a commentary on YOU, the poster. Rather, it was (again) a commentary on the idea of such a comparison. I didn't mean for you to take it personally. I think that smart posters have stupid opinions all the time. I make something of an effort, usually, to distinguish between the idea and the poster, and try to be careful with my wording.

But "thick skulls?" How am I supposed to interpret THAT? That's a direct commentary on the poster, not the idea.

But we're off-topic now, aren't we?

 

[Majic Walrus]

I say we drain the gulf water and all and replace it with the tears from ******** internet posters.

 

[chaseter]

It's okay. You can cry on my shoulder if you want. I don't judge.

The first comment was meant in jest, by the way. Difficult to convey over the web, I know, but I meant no harm. In fact, I thought I went to some small length, at least, to make it more apparent by purposefully misnaming both disciplines/procedures.

Oh, well. I'll try harder next time.

The second wasn't meant to be a commentary on YOU, the poster. Rather, it was (again) a commentary on the idea of such a comparison. I didn't mean for you to take it personally. I think that smart posters have stupid opinions all the time. I make something of an effort, usually, to distinguish between the idea and the poster, and try to be careful with my wording.

But "thick skulls?" How am I supposed to interpret THAT? That's a direct commentary on the poster, not the idea.

But we're off-topic now, aren't we?

The second wasn't a commentary on me? I didn't quote you when saying thick skulls so why assume I was talking about you? How is having a thick skull worse than having a lazy and dishonest opinion Lazy? So the commentary on the idea was lazy? An opinion isn't lazy or dishonest, the person giving that opinion would be lazy or dishonest. An opinion cannot have a thick skull and an opinion cannot be lazy or dishonest. It reflects the person from which the idea originated. And now it is stupid opinions???

If I get to cry on your shoulder, I will bite it

 

[chaseter]

Well here's the thing you are glaringly ignoring...

While a mine collapsing is unacceptable and tragic. It usually (though not always) ends with the poor workers who were not properly protected by their company dying in the mine.

If the safety procedures are not in place and no plan Bs (or Cs, Ds, Es, etc.) are in place when an oil rig explodes or a nuclear power plant melts down, the damage goes far beyond the death of those who work there. If a nuclear plant goes down, the area around the power plant is severely affected and even ruined by radioactive contamination depending on the extent of the crisis that could leave thousands dead (ask Ukraine about that). Or it could be worse and lead to many more dead if the plant blows.

If an oil rig explodes...well you see the result. The damage is far beyond the poor workers at the site who took the risk of being there. Hundreds of thousands of oil barrels are spilling into the Gulf Coast and ruining fisheries, killing off wildlife and destroying precious marshland and estuaries. The damage is catastrophic for the entire region.

And so an oil spill is far more like a nuclear meltdown in its scope of damage than a mining accident. And you know this as you (poorly) try to compare this to the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina. It is dishonest to compare the damage to a hurricane and saying that this is as isolated an incident as a mining accident to defend offshore drilling.

And in all honesty, WTF do you want to defend it? We gain nothing from offshore drilling. It won't bring down oil prices and it won't curb our addiction to foreign oil. At best it pacifies Big Oil lobbyists to get real climate change regulation passed for the 21st century pushing green technology...like almost all of the rest of the world. Instead, Americans get caught up on "drill, baby, drill."

If there was no danger, then I'd accept it. Or if the danger was remote enough and the benefits were great enough (like nuclear power), I would also accept it. But it is clearly not as safe as nuclear power and has no benefits other than for the shareholders of oil companies looking for a little more money to not go to OPEC. Hardly a winning argument.

So you are for no more nuclear energy because of Three Mile Island?

 

[Hobgoblin]

So much for "change." Obama was the biggest taker of BP money in 2008. So it was "Big Oil" Barack or "Drill Baby Drill!" Sarah Palin. Oh, and Hillary Clinton is working for an Indian gas industrialist named Mukesh Ambani.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/36783.html

While the BP oil geyser pumps millions of gallons of petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico, President Barack Obama and members of Congress may have to answer for the millions in campaign contributions they’ve taken from the oil and gas giant over the years.

BP and its employees have given more than $3.5 million to federal candidates over the past 20 years, with the largest chunk of their money going to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Donations come from a mix of employees and the company’s political action committees — $2.89 million flowed to campaigns from BP-related PACs and about $638,000 came from individuals.

On top of that, the oil giant has spent millions each year on lobbying — including $15.9 million last year alone — as it has tried to influence energy policy.

During his time in the Senate and while running for president, Obama received a total of $77,051 from the oil giant and is the top recipient of BP PAC and individual money over the past 20 years, according to financial disclosure records.

An Obama spokesman rejected the notion that the president took big oil money.

“President Obama didn’t accept a dime from corporate PACs or federal lobbyists during his presidential campaign,” spokesman Ben LaBolt said. “He raised $750 million from nearly four million Americans. And since he became president, he rolled back tax breaks and giveaways for the oil and gas industry, spearheaded a G20 agreement to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, and made the largest investment in American history in clean energy incentives.”

In Congress, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who last week cautioned that the incident should “not be used inappropriately” to halt Obama’s push for expansion of offshore drilling, has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of BP’s largesse. Her comments created some blowback, with critics complaining that she is too blasé about the impact of the disaster, even though she was among the first lawmakers to call for a federal investigation into the spill.

As the top congressional recipient in the last cycle and one of the top BP cash recipients of the past two decades, Landrieu banked almost $17,000 from the oil giant in 2008 alone and has lined her war chest with more than $28,000 in BP cash overall.

“Campaign contributions, from energy companies or from environmental groups, have absolutely no impact on Sen. Landrieu’s policy agenda or her response to this unprecedented disaster in the Gulf,” said Landrieu spokesman Aaron Saunders. “The senator is proud of the broad coalition she’s built since her first day in the Senate to address the energy and environmental challenges in Louisiana and in the nation. This disaster only makes the effort to promote and save Louisiana’s coast all that more important.”

Several BP executives have given directly to Landrieu’s campaign, including current and previous U.S. operation Presidents Lamar McKay and Robert Malone. Other donors include Margaret Hudson, BP’s America vice president, and Benjamin Cannon, federal affairs director for the U.S. branch. Donations ranged from $1,000 to $2,300 during the past campaign cycle.

Environmentalists complain that Landrieu has played down the impact of oil spills.

“I mean, just the gallons are so minuscule compared to the benefits of U.S. strength and security, the benefits of job creation and energy security,” Landrieu said at a hearing last month on offshore drilling. “So while there are risks associated with everything, I think you understand that they are quite, quite minimal.”

 

[Marx]

It looks like the first attempt to cap the oil leak failed.

 

[chaseter]

So sickening to me that it took this long to figure out that they needed to cap it.

 

[Marx]

Yeah...it's being estimated that upwards of 3.5 million gallons have spilled into the gulf so far.

 

[Marx]

According to the AP, an attempt to siphon oil from a blown out oil-well has been successful.

Sadly, it's also being reported that the spill is likely worse than anyone thought possible.

 

[Marx]

'HEAVY OIL' HAS INVADED THE LOUISIANA WETLANDS
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/19/gulf.oil.spill/index.html?hpt=T2