Bill Clinton advocates blowing up BP well to stop oil spill

On CNN today Bill Clinton expressed his opinion that the number one priority needs to be shutting off the leak.  “Blow it up” he said, he remarked that no nuclear weapon would be needed but that this well should be blown up and buried under rock and debris.  Given that any help from the relief wells is at least a month away and the containment dome is not currently in place, maybe this is the right solution.  It is as Clinton stated, the one tool fully within the control of the US Government.

I have no faith however that this will happen, we’ll wait to see what happens with the relief wells and if they don’t work we’ll sit around and chat until we finally come back to the conclusion our former president has already arrived at.  Given that hurricane Alex will move even more oil onto the shores of the Gulf of Mexico this week, isn’t it time we really proactively consider stopping this leak!?!

Of course we’re asking this question of two groups, BP and the federal government.  British Petroleum is the company that claimed in its environmental impact statement that they would protect non-existent walruses in the gulf.  In partnership of course with a federal government whose representatives read the environmental impact statement about protecting walruses and was too stupid or incompetent to challenge the statement.  I wonder if it’s appropriate to call mutual incompetence collusion?

Anatoly Sagalevitch comments on BP Oil crisis in the Gulf of Mexico

I wrote a post about two weeks ago after reading a story online that Anatoly Sagalevitch, a world renown Russian Oceanographer, had visited the Gulf of Mexico shortly after the Deepwater Horizon platform managed by BP had exploded and collapsed.  According to the article Dr. Sagalevitch had reportedly said that upon his visit to the site in his submersibles, that he in fact saw over 20 cracks on the seafloor leaking.  You can read my post at: http://zdeaconblue.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/if-this-is-true-bp-may-lead-the-united-states-into-depression/

As you may notice, the post title starts with, if this is true?  That particular question weighed on me for some time and I waited to see if the mainstream media would address this question.  They did not, so I decided to track down the answer myself.  Anyone who tells you it’s easy to track down anyone’s e-mail address on the web hasn’t tried to track down anyone they didn’t already know.  It took me three days of searching but finally I was able to get in contact with Dr. Sagalevitch and as him the very basic question, is this story true?  Dr. Sagalevitch’s response was very prompt and he told me he had not been to the Gulf of Mexico, in fact he was on vacation when the accident occurred and that he couldn’t have possibly surveyed the seafloor of the gulf as his submersibles, the Mir1 and Mir2 are actually deployed in Lake Baikal.  So the definitive answer to my post and the rumor flying around the internet is that no, Dr. Sagalevitch has not reported seeing dozens of cracks on the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico leaking oil.

This information brings two points to bear for me.  First, how fast disinformation can fly around the internet, Dr. Sagalevitch remarked upon this as well.  Secondly, even without this information, we still don’t know what the actual conditions are at the seafloor or whether or not the relief wells will work.  Today we have been given a couple of interesting pieces of information including that the relief well drilling is proceeding as planned and the first tropical storm of the season has formed and is on track for the Gulf of Mexico.    We’ll talk in more detail in my next post about the potential consequences of a large tropical storm or hurricane in the gulf.  Hurricane formation in the gulf is greatly related to the temperature of the gulf and right now the gulf is very, very warm approximately eighty-six degrees Farenheit.  Look out friends the situation in the gulf may drastically change very soon and not for the better.

BP adds a condom to the gusher but it leaks!

So BP’s latest attempt to reduce the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico is once again a containment dome.  But like a young lover who first failed to fit the condom BP has returned with a new and improved containment dome.  This one has ventilated ribs for the gulf’s pleasure!  Ok, so technically we have the first set up all over again, except this time they used the ROV’s to cut the pipe so that the cap would fit better and additionally have vented the dome so that there would be some pressure release.  The pressure being released keeps frozen hydrates from forming and clogging the line to the ship on the surface.  Definitely a technical improvement over the last failed attempt use of a containment dome but as BP has admitted, will at best siphon off 20-30% of the flow leaving hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico each day until the relief wells are finished.  The oil will continue to flow into the ocean currents, fish feeding and breeding grounds, and now onto the shores and the marshes of some of our most productive economic and ecologically important shores.

Like any lover who realizes his condom has leaked, the new “most hated man in America”, BP CEO Tony Hayward has become incredibly apologetic, he feels terrible about his leak and has promised to take care of all of the consequences.  In the meantime, BP has pumped a hundred million dollars in ad time onto TV, which honestly may give us a break in California from having to see Steve Poizner and Meg Whitman ads every four seconds.

We are now seeing the oil come ashore into the wetlands and onto the beaches of the gulf, pictures are starting to emerge of oil covered birds and large fish kills.  Folks, this is about to get very ugly and no amount of ad time is going to help BP out of this mess, it will take years for people to forgive and somewhat forget, but unfortunately we will, I mean when is the last time you heard about an Exxon boycott because of what happened with the Valdez disaster.

So we sit mesmerized by the live footage of the spill and watch the horror unfolding for the people, plants and animals of the gulf and wait to see what new hell hurricane season can bring them.  We’ve got three months before the relief wells are finished, and that’s assuming they are delay free, meaning that no hurricanes make them suspend operations for a time, good luck with that one.