Monday, May 31, 2010

Obama's Oil Spill Response: The Story Behind The Story

Robert Singer - I have received a number of emails about the environmental impacts of the BP oil spill. The size of the spill and the impacts on wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico ecosystems have prompted a number of readers to write:

“Bob, it looks like you are right, the environmental damage and pollution are the goal and not the unintended consequences.”

Others have noted the irony that the leak is believed to have started on Earth Day, April 22, when the Deepwater Horizon sank. [1]

Dana Milbank, at the Washington Post, appears to realize there is story behind the story of Obama’s bizarre behavior at his lengthy news conference yesterday at the White House.

“For eight years we had a president who refused to accept blame. Now we have one who seems to enjoy it.

He decorated the East Room with wuddas, cuddas and shuddas: “We should have busted through those constraints. . . . pre-deploying boom would have been the right thing to do . . . I do think our efforts fell short. . . . They should have pushed them sooner. . . . I think that it took too long. . . . Where I was wrong was in my belief that the oil companies had their act together.”

As I sat in the fourth row on Thursday, I was struck by the weirdly passive figure before me.

He delivered lawyerly phrases and spoke of his anger about the oil spill but showed none in his voice or on his face.

He was, presumably, there to show how aggressively he has handled the disaster, but he seemed cool, almost bloodless.

CBS’s Chip Reid asked about the resignation hours earlier of Elizabeth Birnbaum, head of the MMS, or Minerals Management Service. “I found out about her resignation today,” Obama replied. Interior Secretary “Ken Salazar has been in testimony throughout the day, so I don’t know the circumstances in which this occurred.”

That’s very clear, sir. But why not share some with the guys at BP who actually are responsible for the spill?”

The leak, instead of being 210,000 gallons of the Earth’s vital fluids being extracted, the Los Angeles Times is now reporting that BP admits “that the leak rate is around 2.5 million gallons a day.

In 2005, world oil-production alone (not including natural-gas) was an incomprehensible 80 — 100 million barrels of oil per day.

USGS coastal geologists understand these factors cannot be ignored as far as influencing earth crust stresses andconfirm the earth’s response to extracting by force 3,360,000,000 — 4,200,000,000 gallons of the planets vital fluids every single day: Earthquakes and tsunamis.

While disagreement abounds on this topic, scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) say that oil production at plate boundaries where hard, rocky slabs slide against each other to releases tremendous amounts of energy and could be the cause for the 2004 quake that triggered a deadly tsunami in Sumatra.

“Here’s how it works: With high-tech equipment, oil companies pinpoint oil-rich areas and use large drills to puncture the surface below the sea, sometimes as deep as 10,000 feet. As this pricey fluid gets sucked from the sediment pores, the surrounding rocks shift positions to fill in the newly vacated spaces. At a large scale, for example the volume displaced when millions of barrels of oil are produced, the land movement can actually cause a mini-seismic earthquake, said Robert Morton, a USGS coastal geologist.

During these various stages the globe of the earth is gradually being depressurized and cooled internally, causing contraction for both of these reasons. When objects cool down, they automatically shrink/contract in size. If you let high-pressure air or gas out of a cylinder, it forms ice around the outlet, and cools the entire cylinder. If you let some of the air out of a football, or basketball, the ball shrinks and goes badly out of shape.”

“Apply that to the Earth and you have earthquakes — simple common-sense — not rocket-science. A fact so simple that anyone who understands the oil-extraction process would understand, but, because they are insanely-blinded by their insatiable greed and avarice, they often overlook the obvious.”

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