Why is the mainstream media so spineless and not showing us this? The real news is gathered today by the so called "amateurs" like this or by the beyond the pale organizations such as Rolling Stone.
This footage is breathtakingly disturbing - it is all new as far as I am concerned - have you seen anything like it? What if this was on the news every night - what would happen?
Then ask why we don't see this........?
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.
This idea - that seemed so way out weeks ago - is gaining traction
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.
Plan B isn’t more tar sands production from Canada or Venezuela, or more deep-water production from Brazil or Africa. Whatever comes from those sources will barely cover depletion, and what’s left over will be gobbled up by the exploding oil appetites of the BRIC economies.
Plan B can only be less oil consumption. Whether Americans realize it or not, they are already on that path. The disaster in the Gulf is just putting that reality into sharper focus. Last year there were four million fewer vehicles on the road in the United States than there were the year before. In the next decade, there will be 40 to 50 million fewer cars than today. In the process, an economy that once consumed over 20 million barrels of oil per day will find a way to run on 15 million barrels or even less.
Peak supply defines peak demand. That, in a nutshell, is Plan B.
So what is our own plan to reduce our consumption?
A massive first step on PEI is home heating - 90% plus of our winter heating is oil. About $200 million a year. A strategy to insulate and to shift to biofuels - mainly wood here on PEI could save most of that - offer up a lot of jobs too. $200 million is a third of PEI income tax and nearly 50% of the Federal subsidy. It is 50% of the health care bill. It's a lot of money per annum that leaves the Island and will only get more as oil becomes tighter. $2,300 is the average oil bill for the average home on PEI. Imagine if we could halve that and lock it in?
Food - nearly all our food comes from away. A shift to a local food system based on the principles of permaculture would reduce our risk that the trucks may stop - food security - offer lots of employment - offer better food and in the medium term reduce costs.
The workplace - the tools are now here to enable us to work either at home or in our community. Islanders are the #1 commuters in Canada. The government can trial a more distributed approach. It's not about moving departments to Souris but allowing people who live in Souris to work either from home or from a place in Souris no matter what department they live in. Truly ONE Island. Running a car today costs about $9,000 a year fully loaded. Average wages $23,000. The cash costs are immense. What about the Parenting Issues? Add 2 hours a day on commuting - add the constraints of being far away from your kids and we have what we have - a crisis in attachment and parenting. This goes away too.
This can be exciting. We can all work to become more resilient and have more cash and more time and deeper roots.
Can we please think about going here before it is too late and all we can do is react?
The leak is much much bigger - Matt Simmons recommends that we do what the Russians did and use a nuclear bomb to disrupt the structure - it has come to this.
BP has to be shoved out to do this.
If Simmons is right about the scale of the leak this is the Tipping Point for Oil, for Obama and most importantly for all of us.
So.........
I think that this is a vital story - what it tells us that there is no risk management system that can help in a blow out.
The only conclusion? Stop this.
But then o dear, we are closer than ever to peak oil - yes we are. So the real work is to break our dependence.
This is surely an important future for large buildings? On PEI we spend about $200 million a year on oil heat. If the government really get going and heat all their large buildings this way, they will create the demand to build a solid support industry.
Lots of real jobs that regular folks can do. Money that stays in circulation in the province.
The P.E.I. government is looking to trade in some heating oil bills to jumpstart a biomass heating industry on the Island.
Community Hospital in O'Leary will be one of the sites for the pilot project. (CBC)
Energy Minister Richard Brown is putting out a request for proposals on Friday for long-term contracts to heat six government buildings with biomass instead of oil. Biomass heating uses renewable resources such as wood chips or straw. Brown believes it can be a moneymaker for some Island businesses.
"It's to help start an industry on P.E.I.," said Brown.
"We have to take some risk, we have to do some investments, but in the long run I believe we're going to get a good bio-economy here with the agriculture community, the forestry community, with the woodlot owners, with the saw mills. It's just a win-win situation."
Community Hospital in O'Leary will be one site. The government garage in Summerside may be another. A few schools in Kings County are also possibilities. Companies will be offered five- to 10-year contracts.
This is really good news - this is how we started with wind - build the demand.
Here is how an experiment already on PEI is going - Here is Dick Arsenault taking us around the test of a new Pellet/Chip furnace at the Ecole Evangeline in Western PEI.
You will see that such a furnace
A confidential government report on the unfolding spill disaster in the Gulf makes clear the Coast Guard now fears the well could become an unchecked gusher shooting millions of gallons of oil per day into the Gulf."The following is not public," reads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Emergency Ops document dated April 28. "Two additional release points were found today. If the riser pipe deteriorates further, the flow could become unchecked resulting in a release volume an order of magnitude higher than previously thought."In scientific circles, an order of magnitude means something is 10 times larger. In this case, an order of magnitude higher would mean the volume of oil coming from the well could be 10 times higher than the 5,000 barrels a day coming out now. That would mean 50,000 barrels a day, or 2.1 million gallons a day. It appears the new leaks mentioned in the Wednesday release are the leaks reported to the public late Wednesday night."There is no official change in the volume released but the Coast Guard is preparing for a worst-case release," continues the document.
Drill Baby Drill!
So what's wrong with cheap food and cheap meat — especially in a world in which more than 1 billion people go hungry? A lot. For one thing, not all food is equally inexpensive; fruits and vegetables don't receive the same price supports as grains. A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit. With the backing of the government, farmers are producing more calories — some 500 more per person per day since the 1970s — but too many are unhealthy calories. Given that, it's no surprise we're so fat; it simply costs too much to be thin.
Our expanding girth is just one consequence of mainstream farming. Another is chemicals. No one doubts the power of chemical fertilizer to pull more crop from a field. American farmers now produce an astounding 153 bu. of corn per acre, up from 118 as recently as 1990. But the quantity of that fertilizer is flat-out scary: more than 10 million tons for corn alone — and nearly 23 million for all crops. When runoff from the fields of the Midwest reaches the Gulf of Mexico, it contributes to what's known as a dead zone, a seasonal, approximately 6,000-sq.-mi. area that has almost no oxygen and therefore almost no sea life. Because of the dead zone, the $2.8 billion Gulf of Mexico fishing industry loses 212,000 metric tons of seafood a year, and around the world, there are nearly 400 similar dead zones. Even as we produce more high-fat, high-calorie foods, we destroy one of our leanest and healthiest sources of protein. (See nine kid foods to avoid.)
The food industry's degradation of animal life, of course, isn't limited to fish. Though we might still like to imagine our food being raised by Old MacDonald, chances are your burger or your sausage came from what are called concentrated-animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which are every bit as industrial as they sound. In CAFOs, large numbers of animals — 1,000 or more in the case of cattle and tens of thousands for chicken and pigs — are kept in close, concentrated conditions and fattened up for slaughter as fast as possible, contributing to efficiencies of scale and thus lower prices. But animals aren't widgets with legs. They're living creatures, and there are consequences to packing them in prison-like conditions. For instance: Where does all that manure go?
Pound for pound, a pig produces approximately four times the amount of waste a human does, and what factory farms do with that mess gets comparatively little oversight. Most hog waste is disposed of in open-air lagoons, which can overflow in heavy rain and contaminate nearby streams and rivers. "This creek that we used to wade in, that creek that our parents could drink out of, our kids can't even play in anymore," says Jayne Clampitt, a farmer in Independence, Iowa, who lives near a number of hog farms.
To stay alive and grow in such conditions, farm animals need pharmaceutical help, which can have further damaging consequences for humans. Overuse of antibiotics on farm animals leads, inevitably, to antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and the same bugs that infect animals can infect us too. The UCS estimates that about 70% of antimicrobial drugs used in America are given not to people but to animals, which means we're breeding more of those deadly organisms every day. The Institute of Medicine estimated in 1998 that antibiotic resistance cost the public-health system $4 billion to $5 billion a year — a figure that's almost certainly higher now. "I don't think CAFOs would be able to function as they do now without the widespread use of antibiotics," says Robert Martin, who was the executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production.
Cheap food is very expensive! Think of PEI. The health budget is now 500 million a years for a total population of 140,000. The biggest driver for this? Diabetes, heart disease and cancer - all chronic diseases related to lifestyle and diet. When I came here in 1995 the budget was 300 million. What will it be in 2015? At this rate a $billion! A major factor - cheap food.
What about PEI's rivers, water sheds etc - nitrates in our water, rivers silting up - what will our water system be like in 20 years at this rate?
What about our food system. Now we grow less than 10% of what we eat here. We have given up control of our food to people from far away. When peak oil comes what then?
Time to think more about the cost of cheap food.
