A federal judge in New Orleans has blocked a six-month moratorium on new deepwater drilling projects that was imposed in response to the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The White House said immediately it would appeal the decision.
Several companies that ferry people and supplies and provide other services to offshore drilling rigs had asked U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman in New Orleans to overturn the moratorium.
Steven Newman, Transocean Ltd. president and CEO, is seen during a break at the World National Oil Companies Congress in London on Tuesday.(Lefteris Pitarakis/Associated Press)
U.S. President Barack Obama's administration has halted the approval of any new permits for deepwater drilling and suspended drilling at 33 exploratory wells in the Gulf.
But Feldman said in his ruling that the Interior Department failed to provide adequate reasoning for the moratorium, and accused it of appearing to assume that because one rig failed, all companies and rigs doing deepwater drilling pose an imminent danger.
With tens of thousands of barrels of oil leaking from the well each day, this absence of a backup plan highlights a lack of leadership, resources and expertise on the part of the Coast Guard, which from the beginning was compelled to give BP complete control over the leaking wellhead.
Instead, President Obama needs to create a new command structure that places responsibility for plugging the leak with the Navy, the only organization in the world that can muster the necessary team. Then the Navy needs to demolish the well.
The Coast Guard, of course, should continue to play a role. But it should focus on what it can do well, like containing the oil already in the Gulf and protecting the coast with oil booms and skimmers. It should also use this crisis to establish permanent collaborations with other maritime forces around the globe, particularly those that can get to a disaster area quickly.
But control of the well itself should fall to the Navy — it alone has the resources to stop the flow. For starters, the Office of Naval Research controls numerous vehicles like Alvin, the famed submersible used to locate the Titanic. Had such submersibles been deployed earlier, we could have gotten real-time information about the wellhead, instead of waiting for BP to release critical details.
The Navy also commands explosives experts who have vast knowledge of underwater demolitions. And it has some of the world’s finest underwater engineers at Naval Reactors, the secretive program that is responsible for designing nuclear reactors for nuclear submarines. With the help of scientists in our national weapons laboratories and experts from private companies, these engineers can be let loose on the well.
To allay any concerns over militarizing the crisis, the Navy and Coast Guard should be placed in a task-force structure alongside a corps of experts, including independent oil engineers, drilling experts with dedicated equipment, geologists, energy analysts and environmentalists, who could provide pragmatic options for emergency action.
With this new structure in place, the Navy could focus on stopping the leak with a conventional demolition. This means more than simply “blowing it up”: it means drilling a hole parallel to the leaking well and lowering charges to form an explosive column.
Upon detonating several tons of explosives, a pressure wave of hundreds of thousands of pounds per square inch would spread outward in the same way that light spreads from a tubular fluorescent bulb, evenly and far. Such a sidelong explosion would implode the oil well upstream of the leak by crushing it under a layer of impermeable rock, much as stepping on a garden hose stops the stream of water.
Soon enough, I expect to see lots more of this same kind of appeal – the people my age, who have been waiting our entire working lives for some of the Boomers to move out of the way (so that we can enjoy some of the same kind of benefit they’ve enjoyed their entire lives and build a life of our own) are now faced with the fact that this is never going to happen.
Who is going to pay for our country’s social security and healthcare structures, when the Boomers have taken all they can for as long as they can? Everyone who has come after the Boomers has been living on scraps and leftovers and didn’t-want-that-anyways, waiting for the time when the dream of a secure full-time job could be realized. Having been made to wait this long, most people of Gen X and Later have not been able to build the kind of financial establishment that previous generations have done, and now will be expected to support the social framework with our taxes? At a time when there will be more older (65+) people than young?
Sounds like being asked to make bricks without straw to me. Foolishness – and everyone talks about the entitlement mentality of the young!
As many as five Eastern School District bus drivers have filed complaints with the PEI Human Rights Commission alleging age discrimination due to the school district’s mandatory retirement policy at the age of 65.
The School District has yet to respond to the complaints. Carol White of Murray Harbour plans to appeal the policy. She will be 65 in August.
“The board shouldn’t sit in Charlottetown and say a bus driver is too old to drive,” Ms White said. “If a doctor says someone can’t drive after they’re 65 that’s one thing, but the system isn’t fair. If a driver is fit it should be their choice."
PEI Human Rights Commission executive director Greg Howard said five complaints have been made so far since February, with the most recent one filed on May 27.
Mr Howard said his role would first be to attempt to effect a settlement between the two parties. If a settlement can’t be reached and if an investigation shows the complaints have merit, then Mr Howard would forward the complaints to a panel.
When you say yes to some you say yes to all. So on PEI there is no retirement age any more.
So what does that mean? One of the things it means is that the prior generation is still locked out by the Boomers. I see this as an ethical issue. What about the rights of the next generation?
"The cause of the crash — going uphill on a dry, straight road in good conditions — has not been determined.
Rieder suggested the driver was distracted by a motorcyclist, "but that hasn't been confirmed yet." The driver, a 73-year-old German, tested negative for alcohol and was reported to be unhurt."(CBC - Link)
Do you want your kids to be driven by people who are not up to it or to be taught by people who are not at their best?
Whose "Rights" are we talking about?
It's all so pathetic. HT Shawn Bowman for the lead
Matt Simmons says the the casing in the hole may be gone - if so the relief wells will fail. The risk is to have this oil leaking at this rate for 20 - 30 years.
The only way left is to use the heat of a nuclear device to fuse the top rock.
As BP fails repeatedly in desperate attempts to cap a massive oil leak offshore at 'Deep Water Horizon' in the Gulf of Mexico, suspicion grows over certain 'coincidences.'
Is there really evidence here to support claims of a sinister conspiracy? Financiers Goldman Sachs not only fortuitously dumped millions of its shares in the British oil company, but has strong financial links to the chemical clean up firm tackling the disaster. Moreover, the Wall Street giant's new chairman was boss of BP only three months before.
Sections of the blogosphere are running into overdrive at the stark fact that Goldman Sachs Management (US) sold 6,025,387 of its shares in the British oil giant, BP on March 31, 2010 just days before the rupture of a pipe extracting deep sea oil. Experts variously estimate the spill to be dumping the equivalent of 5,000- 25,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf gravely impacting wildlife.
The sell off represented 43.7 per cent of the total BP stocks owned by the Wall Street powerhouse, reaping $276,770,112. However, the sale accounted for just under 0.5 per cent of the firm’s total investments. BP shares have fallen 12 per cent since the disaster.
‘Lucky’ for Goldman Sachs
The Wall Street sell off was unprecedented and stood out from all other transactions at a time when BP shares were being bought rather than sold. This sell-off may represent the largest single liquidation of petroleum stocks in the history of modern markets.
It should come as no surprise that experts in avoiding and stopping blowouts of oil and gas wells long ago saw the deep-ocean drilling frontier as particularly dangerous terrain.
As often happens in human endeavors, people get complacent and take shortcuts. The only way to prevent this is to make sure there is a cultural focus on doing it right. This often means that some people who fail to follow proper procedure need to be tried criminally.
And not just the poor guys on the platform but their bosses who pressured them.
Yep, I’m a liberal because I believe that might actually work. Well, it would actually work if we ever held anyone accountable. Lack of accountability by those in charge has been a hallmark of the last 20 years.
Richard links to an important article on how risk actually works. People naturally drift to cut corners - the O Ring for Challenger - How BP was finishing the well.
If we recognize this, then we have to make the PERSONAL stakes high for drift.
If BP gets hit with a $10 billion dollar fine as is now possible and The Senior Rig folks and Mr Hayward go to jail - we can be assured that there won't be ANY drift in the future.
Test this - your CEO goes to jail if you mess up - how tough will be the safety oversight?
This short video tells an important story. Real wages have fallen in the last 40 years. Productivity has risen.
A tiny few have a stranglehold on all of us. What we have contributed has gone to them.
They control the system. As it crumbles and more and more of us fall off the perch, they suck more of what is left to them.
I actually don't think that this is a plan. I think it is how the system works.
We have made finance the core process. Not making and doing things that benefit us really.
So in a Finance world BP is rewarded for not being safe. Its cost cutting pays off in earnings and we all pay for their mistake. BP is not in the oil or the energy business it is in the making money for the gang that includes many of our politicians.
In a finance world, medical help is denied to most Americans because, the Insurance companies make more money that way. They pay off the gang.
In the finance world the defence business make stuff that is not use to the troops on the ground such as the F22 and America that spends more than the next 15 countries combined has the oldest, smallest, and least effective inventory of equipment since the end of WWII. The Defence industry is not about defending America but about making the gang, including retired Generals, rich.
The banks are not in the business of funding new business or our needs. They are in the cocaine business of binding us to them as nations, as organizations and as individuals. They are in the vigorish or loan sharking business.
As our culture has become dominated by finance - the real world - the needs of the planet and of us as a species go out the window and are replaced by the needs of the Capos.
We joke about the "Banksters" but look at the model - this is what a real gang does. They exploit our human weakness with sole goal of making the guys at the top rich.
So what to do?
I think that the first thing is to see the truth - that by using the finance lens, we actually don't get what we need. Organizations serve only the bankers. So as the population grows the opportunity to get decent work diminishes. So as our environment gets trashed, the incentive is to trash it more. As we get to the edge of our dependency on oil, we are kept in its thrall.
Worst of all, the leadership of our states and nations have been captured and are working hard to keep on the teat.
This reminds me of the end of the Soviet Union.
People like Havel at first tried to reform the system. They failed. Then they tried to combat it. They failed.
What worked was that they then stood aside and built a new system in parallel. That worked.
Gandhi took the same path in India. How was he to get the Raj to leave? He could not take the British on directly. He could not persuade them morally. What he had to do was to help the mass of Indians recognize that THEY did not need the Raj any more.
So what to do? I think that we have to disengage from the system and start to engage with each other. We have to start in our small local way to build a paralel system that works for the planet and for people
(HT Jevon) CB asks us to look at ourselves - the Greek Deal demands the politically impossible for Greece - reforms and change that no nation could accept in a time line that is impossible.
Would France and Germany dare to reform their own pensions in such a way?
Is it all about money? One of the issues that he points out is the historic and bitter tension between Greece and Turkey that drives both to over invest in arms that both France and Germany sell - billions of Euros worth in the last 5 years.
It's all about the money not about the deeper reality.
Steven Newman, Transocean Ltd. president and CEO, is seen during a break at the World National Oil Companies Congress in London on Tuesday. (Lefteris Pitarakis/Associated Press)
