Despite Gulf oil catastrophe, Obama refuses to abandon plans for new offshore drilling

[Karmadillo]

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/04/30/93255/obama-wont-halt-offshore-plans.html

GULFPORT, Miss. — President Barack Obama sent Justice Department investigators and military aircraft to the Gulf of Mexico Friday in response to the growing fear of the environmental damage that a spreading oil slick may cause, but he declined to abandon plans for new offshore drilling because of the unfolding disaster.

As Mississippi officials laid miles of plastic booms to block crude from their state's shores and environmentalists asserted that the spill was far worse than officials have acknowledged, Obama said he'd asked Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to review what went wrong when the Transocean Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in flames April 20 and sank two days later.

Depending on what the review recommends, the president said, "We're going to make sure that any leases going forward have those safeguards," but that, "I continue to believe that domestic oil production is an important part of our overall strategy for energy security" as long as it's done "responsibly."

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[Karmadillo]

1. Kick. Thank heavens the inevitable Atlantic Ocean oil spill will be a "responsible" one.

nt

[Karmadillo]

2. Since the technology doesn't exist to deal with spills "responsibly," what does Obama mean?

http://www.counterpunch.org/grossman04292010.html

<edit>

Various reports filed by Interior in response to the litigation admitted major environmental consequences from the drilling. In one, in 1978, in connection with the leasing of the 529,446 Mid-Atlantic acres, Interior said: “Recovery of the affected area from a large spill will be slow, probably requiring a minimum of ten years.” For the anticipated 20-to-25 year lives of the fields, it forecast four large spills of more than 1,000 barrels, 58 spills of 50 to 1,000 barrels and 3,340 spills of up to 50 barrels.

Much of the Atlantic coast—like that of the Gulf of Mexico where oil from the explosion at British Petroleum’s Transocean Deepwater Explorer rig is expected to arrive imminently—is composed of estuaries, bay backs and miles upon miles of fragile wetlands, the spawning and feeding grounds for the chain of marine life. It’s a “soft” coast that would absorb oil like a sop rag. There’s no way to clean oil from wetlands, to clean it off the bottoms of bays, no way to get it off bay bottoms where shellfish live.

The Department of Interior’s 1978 Mid-Atlantic report warned that “adverse effects on commercial fisheries will be encountered” which would include “smothering of shellfish…Finfish and shellfish will suffer mortality from oil spills and flavor may change because of tainting.”

A leading scientist speaking out on off-shore Atlantic oil and gas drilling was the late Dr. Max Blumer of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. He also noted a human-cancer connection. Oil picked up on human skin or taken in through the eating of marine life that had ingested oil could be cancer-causing, he said. “When oil is spilled into the environment we lose control of it,” Dr. Blumer warned. Countermeasures are “effective only if all the oil is recovered immediately after the spill. The technology to achieve this goal does not exist.”

It still does not exist.

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[Karmadillo]

3. Maybe the Unreccer could explain how this "responsible" oil drilling will work.

nt

[Cal Carpenter]

4. Well, those kind-hearted multinational corporations will certainly invent foolproof safeguards

I mean, we've relied on them for self-regulation for decades and they haven't done any harm to us riff-raff yet!

:sarcasm:

[branders seine]

5. but he's not a corporatist! Not at all!

This is all just chess.

[gulliver]

6. It would be idiotic to do that.

Obama has to keep Dems in power while still working to help the environment. If he fails at the former, we will be unable to do the latter. Thus far, the evidence seems to show that this disaster is yet another result of Republican deregulation of industry. Obama's (and the Dems') position is "regulated industry." Therefore, we have the best possible position. The other positions tend to rely on physics and politics from among the many alternate universes we are not in.

[blindpig]

7. gawd, another chess player

Shit, he's lost Florida already.

And them regulations, they work so well in the coal industry, eh?

It's the capitalism, maximum profits must be pursued, one way or the other.