Cleaning Up Some Messes

BP announced that the well in the Gulf of Mexico is killed. I'm very pleased to hear this, but you think maybe they could have killed he well before they killed the Gulf?

Thad Allen, the retired Coast Guard admiral who oversaw the government's efforts to contain the oil leak, was on the PBS NewsHour tonight, and he admitted that the Coast Guard and BP still have to continue working on cleaning the oil as much as possible. I only hope they keep up the not-so-good work. Many livelihoods have been lost already.

(Correction: Last night I wrote that Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell said she "dabbled in witchcraft" on Bill Maher's show in 1997. The clip is from 1999. October 29, 1999, in fact, two days before Halloween. Maybe that explains her admission. Well, if the [evil] spirit moves you. . . .)

Gone, Gone, The Damage Done

BP finally stopped the gushing of oil from its damaged well in the Gulf of Mexico yesterday, but it's only a temporary solution. The well is being capped for the time being while a relief well continues to be drilled for a more permanent solution. For many, it's a case of too little, too late. Numerous marshes and coastlines have been destroyed, wildlife has been adversely affected, and the tourist business at Gulf resort towns have dropped sharply. The oil that has already leaked out will take years, if not decades, to clean up. And Joe Barton and possibly David Vitter will continue to apologize to BP for inconveniencing them.

Meanwhile, the Senate finally passed a financial reform bill that President Obama will now sign into law. The legislation will create a consumer financial protection bureau to regulate the trading of derivatives but small businesses to keep using them to mitigate risks. It also establishes establishing a new authority to liquidate large Wall Street firms and force shareholders and creditors rather than taxpayers to assume any costs involved. What the bill will not do is get rid of any and all speculation by large banks, and companies will still be big enough to cause a lot of misery if they do fail. An amendment sponsored by Democratic senators Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Carl Levin of Michigan would have addressed those points, but it was never allowed to come up to a vote. The new regulations fall far short of what the British, for example, have done to regulate their financial sector in the wake of 9/15, and the law will take awhile to implement. I suppose it's better than nothing, and without the support of three Senate Republicans - Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and Scott Brown of Massachusetts, who in this case are the "New England Patriots" - nothing is exactly what Obama would have gotten.

The law comes too late for those affected by the 9/15 Wall Street meltdown, as Senate bill sponsor Christopher Dodd (D-CT) woefully admitted. And for those for whom it's not too late, it may not help much.

Even after BP and 9/15, Americans will still be addicted to cheap oil and easy money.

And every junkie's like the setting sun.

Oily Situation

Democrats are still expected to lose seats in Congress and possibly their majority in the House - so the corporate media keep telling us - but Representative Joseph Barton of Texas, the ranking Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee, may have helped the Democrats in their efforts to cut their losses in the November midterm elections. Heck, he may have helped Charlie Melancon in his bid to unseat Louisiana Republican senator David Vitter. Barton's apology to BP for President Obama's demands on the company to pay compensation to people adversely affected by the Gulf oil leak may have revitalized the Democratic party's energy for the fall campaigns. His comments put the Republicans philosophically on the side of Big Oil, a point White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Representative Anthony Weiner (D-NY) have made. Emanuel added that even if Barton were to step down from his House committee post to save face for his party, his replacement would be no less a stooge for the petroleum industry, and that it's important that voters understand that.

Meanwhile, BP chief Tony Hayward got his life back. The BP chief still has his job but no longer directly oversees cleanup efforts in the Gulf of Mexico. Instead, he's taken part in another maritime situation - namely, a yachting race off the Isle of Wight. For those people who only know of this place as the source of a Beatles lyric and the site of an annual rock festival, the Isle of Wight is a picturesque island in the English Channel about four miles of the coast of England and a popular tourist destination for the leisure classes - think of it as a British Nantucket. Pictures of Hayward racing his yacht leaked to the press faster than the oil coming out of the Gulf of Mexico, displaying his utter insensitivity to struggling fishermen in Louisiana and hoteliers in Florida, among others. As ordinary people are trying to save the shoreline of the U.S.'s southern coast, Hayward is enjoying the lap of luxury on England's southern coast.

Meanwhile, BP is beginning to collect oil directly from the leak. How much do you want to bet that they still try to refine that oil into gasoline? There's another reason to boycott BP service stations. Who wants seawater in their gas tanks?

Yes, I'm being facetious.

Obama Makes BP Pay

I can go on lamenting President Obama's speech last night, and I can even wonder aloud if he should have even bothered with it, but I can't argue with success, which is exactly what the President had when he made BP cough up $20 billion to compensate fishermen, shrimpers, restaurant owners and others for their nasty mishap. BP also added that it would not pay dividends to shareholders for the remainder of the year to allow BP to pay damages and keep the company from going broke. Kenneth Feinberg - the Boston-bred bureaucrat who oversaw 6/11 victims' compensation and oversees executive pay for firms bailed out by the government - will administer the new fund.

You'd think the Republicans would be humbled by this deal, but sure enough, many of them - Rush Limbaugh, Michele Bachmann, the other usual suspects - are complaining about BP going through a government shakedown and the increasingly long arm of Washington. I don't think Gulf Coast residents care how they get help - from the government, from BP, from the Tooth Fairy - so long as they get it. And this fund will allow them to get it. Nor will it come from the taxpayers, which was a ludicrous suggestion offered by House Republican leader John Boehner.

Obama won't get much relief from his coup, though. Not as long as the oil keeps gushing out. But it's a start.

Now about that energy policy. . . .

BP - Boycotted Product

In light of the latest failure to plug the leak in its Gulf of Mexico oil well, BP is facing numerous complaints - mostly of the scathing variety - and a large boycott of its products, which include BP and Arco gasoline and Castrol motor oil. I, of course, am steering clear of BP gas after having spent twenty years of going out of my way to buy it.

Let me explain. Buying gas from BP or Amoco, which BP merged with, has been a time-honored practice in my family. My maternal grandfather would always get gasoline from Amoco gas stations back when Amoco was called American (Amoco was an acronym for American Oil Company) and gas stations were called service stations. More recently, I had long bought Amoco gas when it merged with BP in 1998, and I would make it a point to buy BP gas largely because they were just the about the only oil company that advocated doing something about global warming and because they were investing in alternative fuels. Or so they said.

BP acted the part of good citizen for so long, but, well, you know what great actors the British are. Simply put, BP + PR = BS. They're a voracious oil company, pure and simple, and even though they may have a couple of alternative fuel programs going on, they're primarily out for the oil. They'd bent and broken rules for years to get oil off American shores and refine it into gasoline with no regard to the environment or worker safety, and the oil well in the Gulf they'd been leasing ended up compromising both in a big way. I don't think I'll miss going to a BP gas station for a long time to come.

Side story: One New Jersey motorist told the Newark Star-Ledger that he intends to keep buying BP gas because it's reasonably priced, and BP can't be blamed for "a mistake they didn't intend to make." Uh, since when is a mistake made on purpose? It wouldn't be a mistake, then, would it? But the atrocious business practices that made this mistake possible were clearly deliberate.

BP - Botched Priorities

As British Petroleum tries once again to stop the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, one can only guess what's going through the minds of BP executives.

My guess is that they're getting very upset and wringing their hands. Not because of the environmental degradation and disruption of livelihoods on the Louisiana coast. No, they're probably upset because all this oil has been wasted, when it could have been made into gasoline and made them more money.

One good has come out of this crisis so far: After Rush Limbaugh told his listeners that the Sierra Club forced oil companies to drill for oil farther out where it was less safe, donations to the Sierra Club skyrocketed. And just for the record, BP would have been out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico drilling for oil even if they could have drilled ten feet from shore. BP and other oil companies will always go where the oil is. If they could drill in the Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean - at 35,000 feet deep the deepest ocean on the planet - they'd do so.

Dumb, Baby, Dumb

First of all, let me make a correction regarding a statement I made earlier about the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. I stated that eighteen workers were killed in the blast. The actual number was eleven.

Anyway, it appears that the oil slick is likely to have an impact on more than just the Louisiana and Mississippi coastlines, or even the Florida Panhandle. The Gulf Stream, the warm oceanic current that runs up the Atlantic Ocean from the Gulf of Mexico, could carry the oil slick - which is growing exponentially due to the ongoing well leak - to the Atlantic and possibly deposit all that oil on Florida's eastern coast. This oil spill is not a disaster anymore; it's an apocalypse.

I earlier lampooned Sarah Palin for having supported oil drilling in the past. Apparently, she still does. Not even an oil slick the size of Maryland that could destroy ecologically sensitive shorelines and fisheries have moved her from her position. This is what the former governor of Alaska - a state that had its own oil spill in Prince William Sound twenty years and change ago - had to say about the Gulf disaster on her Facebook page:

"No human endeavor is ever without risk – whether it’s sending a man to the moon or extracting the necessary resources to fuel our civilization. I repeat the slogan 'drill here, drill now' not out of naiveté or disregard for the tragic consequences of oil spills – my family and my state and I know firsthand those consequences. How could I still believe in drilling America’s domestic supply of energy after having seen the devastation of the Exxon-Valdez spill? I continue to believe in it because increased domestic oil production will make us a more secure, prosperous, and peaceful nation."

So far, increased domestic oil production has made us more volatile to international petroleum price swings, diverted badly needed investment in alternative energy sources, and has caused unrest among people affected by such disasters.

Oh yeah, and that's not the only idiotic statement made about the BP disaster. Rush Limbaugh has actually opined that the initial explosion may have been caused on purpose by environmentalists to make offshore drilling look bad.

Sarah Palin continues to believe in offshore drilling - and she's not repeating the slogan "drill here, drill now," the original slogan was "drill, baby, drill" - in spite of the Exxon Valdez spill that affected Alaska because she either doesn't care or doesn't want to admit she's wrong. But mostly because she doesn't care, despite her (or her ghostwriter's) protests to the contrary. What's it to her if all of those poor birds end up getting saturated in oil? How would Sarah Palin like being covered in oil?

Hmm, I think I just offered a scenario some tea partiers fantasize about on a regular basis. :-O

BP - Beyond Putrid

The company known as British Petroleum spent more money on public relations campaigns to promote their alleged commitment to environmentally friendly policies and their warm and fuzzy support for energy alternatives to oil then it did to secure  an oil well in the Gulf of Mexico that's emitting 200,000 gallons of oil daily and now washing onshore in Louisiana and Mississippi, and possibly Alabama and Florida. Apparently it could have installed a mechanism in the well that would have prevented this nightmarish mess for a mere $500,000 - this a company that records profits in the millions - but chose not to because the United States does not require it. How many other countries allow oil companies to do without this mechanism in drilling off their shores? Zero!

President Obama continues to believe that oil exploration off our shores can still be done, but that it must be done responsibly and with greater efforts to protect the welfare of oil rig workers and the environment. While Obama's statement seems reasonable enough, it does not take into account that accidents can happen even under strict rules and regulations, and how such accidents can do damage that far outweighed the benefits of offshore oil exploration. Do we really need to risk and possibly ruin the economic and environmental well-being of the Gulf region - ruining the livelihoods of fishermen and destroying pristine wildlife areas as a result - so we can have cheap gasoline to fuel SUVs?

Jonathan Alter of Newsweek hit the nail on the head speaking on MSNBC earlier today, saying that this should serve as a wakeup call for Congress to develop a cleaner, greener energy policy that provides more incentives for wind and solar power. Instead much of the debate is focusing on assigning blame and figuring out how to continue including oil exploration in energy development.

Oh yeah, here's a question for Sarah Palin: How's that "Drill, baby, drill" thing workin' out for ya?