Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for June 07, 2010

bp DESERVES ANYTHING THAT ANYONE “DUMPS” ON THEM. tHEY MADE THSI MESS & NOW THEY DON’T WANT TO CLEAN IT UP. The blame game, sotps at the “B” accofding to some of our conservative friends,

Duke may be the only person in the world that sympathizes with the BP exec who thinks making their logo “greener” was the solution to poor construction and shoddy performance. What everyone wants from them is an end to this ecological catastrophe. The Gulf Coast states are barely recovering from Katrina and are being threatened with more disaster.

I’m definitely not excusing BP, but I AM wondering how Deep Horizon managed to win a US government safety award last year and blow up this year…

Orion

This is the first offshore drilling blowout since Ixtoc I in 1980. Somebody figured out how to do it right, and offshore drilling went fine for 30 years until this incident. We don’t need to stop future drilling; we need to find out what was different between Deepwater Horizon and all those other missions.

Since DH hasn’t been known to blow up in the past, and since we have no reason to believe that there’s some Deepwater Throat whistleblower that the award givers should have been aware of, I’m not puzzled by the safety award. Heck, we don’t even know how it happened - we know that the cement and/or casing failed (per Transocean CEO Steven Newman’s testimony*) but what caused that failure?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/us/11hearings.html?sq=halliburton&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=all

I had to stop watching the news yesterday when birds were being pulled out of the water all covered with oil. Sickening!

..top managers in the oil industry MUST have their fat annual bonuses… so let’s save on valves and equipment. This is not capitalism, this is suicidal imbecility…

AKHenderson said “…Somebody figured out how to do it right, and offshore drilling went fine for 30 years until this incident. We don’t need to stop future drilling; we need to find out what was different between Deepwater Horizon and all those other missions.”

What should be clear is that getting it right 99.99% of the time isn’t good enough. Even if we never repeat this particular error, eventually some other accident will happen - perhaps next year, perhaps 30 years from now. Either way, the environment can’t sustain this sort of abuse.

ALL officials from bp should be forced to the gulf and made to clean up the mess.

@wndwrthg: Sure, but they’re not going to. That how it is with big business.

That pelican doesn’t look nearly pathetic enough. Here’s the real thing:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/06/caught_in_the_oil.html

(Warning: Horrifying photos.)

The news this morning reported that two oil-soaked birds were found in Texas. TWO! The Horror! The Horror!

Oh come off it. Some sad photos shouldn’t derange everyone’s judgment. And least of all should it cause anyone to side with those who have always hated oil companies, big business, capitalism, industrial society, and mankind in general. (Think the Unabomber in his cabin.)

Kicking BP while it’s down doesn’t help anyone (except by providing easy shots for cartoonists).

You know, if they hadn’t been forced to drill so deep, this would not have happened. But people who can afford beachfront property convinced a lot of suckers that their sunset views shouldn’t be compromised. Did I say sunset views?

Be sure to attend the rally against those ugly cell phone towers they want to errect on this prime real estate. Keep em in the city.

Plenty of parking so car pooling isn’t needed.

Chrisnp, I’m not really sure that it all went fine for 30 years. Certainly there was nothing like the current blowout, but I suspect there have been a number of smaller “incidents” that never reached the eye of the public.

pschearer said: “Oh come off it. Some sad photos shouldn’t derange everyone’s judgment. And least of all should it cause anyone to side with those who have always hated oil companies, big business, capitalism, industrial society, and mankind in general. (Think the Unabomber in his cabin.)”

Excuse me? Which country have you been living in the past several years? And which comic’s page are you visiting?

You expect anything different?

Doesn’t seem like your contact with reality is as solid as you think.

Yeah, I know: you said “should.” Makes you sound like a liberal telling the “unenlightened” what they should think.

Edit: On re-reading, it seems I crossed the line to insulting. Apologies. No-one should be insulted first thing in the AM, especially someone you basically agree with.

But your first paragraph is, as the Japanese say, regrettable: there are LOTS of badly oil-soaked birds and other (less charismatic) wildlife in Louisiana; what they’re probably reporting in Texas is the FIRST two birds found, of what will likely be lots more. And, due to the circulation pattern in the Gulf, Texas is unlikely to get “much” oil compared to other places.

You don’t have to belittle the actual, terrible, disaster: the fact remains that something like this was always a possibility, and the American people never mustered the political will to do anything about it. Even today, the only thing they’re even TALKING about doing is some tiny (statistically insignificant) but still ruinously expensive “nibbling around the edges” of petroleum dependency, and shifting production from pipeline-supplied North America to the tanker-supplied Arabian Peninsula. I don’t know how that’s a good idea, either, except that it shifts the bulk of the ecological risk to places in the world that we obviously care less about. (Sure, they SAY that’s not the case, but actions speak louder.)

June 13, 1979. Ixtoc. Well built by Sedco (now known as TransOcean). Blow-out preventer malfunctioned. Similar? Dispersants spread by plane. Booms used to contain the slick. Oil-skimming boats. Attempted to cap the well with a giant cone (2010: Top Hat, 1979: Operation Sombrero). 1979: shoot metal spheres into the well, 2010: Junk Shot. 1979: pump cement and salt water into the well, 2010: Top Kill. Of course, in 1979, the well was in 200 feet of water, not 5000. In 1979, two relief wells were drilled to allow engineers to cap the well. That wasn’t finished until March of 1980. 30 years later, and the only technology that has changed is the technology to drill deeper - no advances on how to fix it when it breaks.

Well, many members of this forum pitched for G.B. Trudeau to write about B.P.’s oil spill. His strip is more contemporary than is any other. I cannot wait to see where this week is going.

As far as this spill goes, the fault is B.P.’s, Transocean’s, Halliburton’s, & Bush-Dick’s lack of regulation enforcement. President Obama’s America (which means us, whether we voted for him or not) inherited two bloody, perpetually expensive foreign occupations; a badly-run, so-called “war on terror”; the worst economy in thirty years; a yawning gulf between rich & poor; a booming federal debt; and eight years of lax regulations on the oil industry.

You can see the B.P. spill as a physical emblem of what we got from Bush-Dick.

OT:

So the Berzerkistan account has put Duke back in the green? Is BP his 2nd client now? I’m assuming he had his trip paid for? Oh here’s atwist, perhaps he can hook up BP with no-bid contracts in Berzerkistan!

This strip brings back memories of the film “Groove Tube,” particularly this commercial for “Uranus Corporation”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0usiztmtxA

As for this particular spill: I hate to beat on this point, but if this well had been drilled in Canadian waters it would have been corked in a day or two. This is because the Canadians (and, I believe, the countries who govern drilling in the North Sea) require that relief wells be in place before the production well bores into the oil-bearing formation–specifically so that, in the unlikely-but-not-impossible case of a gas burp and a blowout-preventer malfunction, the well can be shut off quickly. Alas, the US never enacted such regulations, because (of course) the safety precautions might cut profits (or executive bonuses) by a tiny fraction of a percent. While it’s true that there is always some risk of spillage in oil exploration, it’s also true that this specific spill did not have to be anywhere near as serious as it is. The severity of this spill is the direct consequence of cost-cutting decisions made by BP, with the assent of the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Cheney–I mean, Bush administrations.

Ground Zero US (aka United Corporations of DickinBush - “a dick in the bush - they brought it on”)….we pooped where we ate and the proof is in the pudding and the pudding is the oilocean and the fish ‘r’ us and it’s the Whiffenpoof Song writ large……..

wonder when Canada will seal its borders against emigres from its neighbor?

As a New Orleanian, I’m more worried about hurricane season this year than ever before. I can’t stop thinking about how even the smallest tropical storm will push the oil even further inland. If we get a full on hurricane, houses and business will be coated with it. And I just don’t believe all that stuff about how the oil won’t cause any health problems. sigh one week of worrying past, 24 weeks to go…

To those who want to say “accidents happen” I would ask, if everyone expected something like this could happen (like it did with Ixtoc I), why wasn’t BP prepared to handle it? By Tony Hayward’s own admission, BP didn’t have the right tools in their tool-kit to deal with this kind of catastrophe.

In the 20 years since Exxon Valdez, Big Oil has spent billions of dollars researching ways to drill deeper, in deeper water. During that same period it appears they’ve spent next to nothing on more effective procedures for responding to the inevitable oil spill.

Considering all of the shortcuts and exemptions from the rules tied to this project, I have a hard time thinking of it as an “accident”. But even if it turns out to be an accident, the fact remains that nobody was ready for the resulting disaster.

@pschearer (if you’re still around):

“Kicking BP while it’s down doesn’t help anyone.” But GT is not kicking a fallen giant. BP is dead, and GT is helping to bury its oily corpse.

Claims for indemnification have already mounted to $35 billion–twice what BP earned last year. (The total breakup value of BP is around $80 billion.)

Birds - shmirds, coastline - shmostline. What do I care, I live thousands of miles away. I can’t run my car on birds! Keep the oil coming. Pump, pump!

Better stock up. I heard that there may be a shortage of DAWN dishwashing detergent coming up.

A big THANK YOU to all those volunteers who scrub those oily birds and animals.

Not an “accident”. This was the direct result of BP bean-counters pushing for faster completion of the project, and their refusal to accept the warnings of their technical experts. The only action that could conceivably be ruled an accident was the mistake that caused the shredding of the gasket during testing. But that could have been remedied if they’d listened to the technicians who reported shards of the gasket being pumped up the shaft.

Greed, greed, greed was the ultimate cause.

ChuckTrent64

Glad to see you found the Caps Lock key. Your yelling was givin me a headache.

pschearer’s typically ignorant rant: ” Oh come off it. Some sad photos shouldn’t derange everyone’s judgment. And least of all should it cause anyone to side with those who have always hated oil companies, big business, capitalism, industrial society, and mankind in general.”

I love capitalism … that is why I HATE oil companies Oil is the most socialistic and anti-capitalist business in the history of mankind.

I love the industrial society .. which is why I HATE the oil companies. They are focused on brainwashing idiots so that they can continue to sell obsolete 19th century technology that is hideously expensive, dwindling in supply, hopelessly inefficient, while destroying the development of sane, efficient, cheap alternate energy sources.

I love mankind … which is why I HATE the oil companies. It simply isn’t necessary to murder Muslim children to provide gas for SUVs that sit idling FOR HOURS with their AC units running while wifey shops at WALMART.

pschearer wrote: “Think the Unabomber in his cabin.) ”

No …. I think of Raygun giving hundreds of millions in cahs to the Taliban. I think of him giving top secret electronic timers to Afghan warlords so they could make car bombs to blow up civilian movie theatres. I think of him using the US Navy to escort Saddam’s oil tankers and providing top secret intelligence to him. I think of Bush invading Iraq for oil. And then I think about the future wars over oil with every single solitary country in the world.

Be sure to check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLJHTTOSkpg&feature=related it tells the truth of what happened

At least they’ve done a great job fixing the leak!

http://tinyurl.com/bp-oil-leak-feed

Did Duke quit smoking?

The technology and science involved in deepwater drilling is remarkable, too bad Big Oil was so criminally lax about the planning, technology and science required when things go wrong, as they inevitably do. Until the stranglehold of Big Oil and its legislative minions on our economic, environmental and security future is broken, this is what we’ll have. Until oil companies become energy companies this is the nightmare we’ll always get. Until oil companies stop spending billions on technologies pegged to a dying, dirty and unsustainable resource, we’re stuck in a nightmare. Think how far along we’d be if instead of spending all those billions on deepwater drilling over the years they spent it on developing and producing renewable and alternative energy. ok, i’m dreaming - sometimes dreams do turn nightmares around.

There is a lot more known about this combination of greed, negligence, and blunder than one can pick up in 3-minute news bites. Check out this thorough article from Saturday’s NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/us/06rig.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all

AKHenderson- are you kidding or are you just a BP mothpiece? go look at the real info- there are less than 50 wells like this in 5000+ feet in the Gulf. They said they could drill in that depth- they lied.

Really glad to see GT get through with reruns and start with the Gulf

With a name like BP shouldn’t be have expected to Be Peed on?

Simple truth that image is everything until reality sets in. BP and O seem to be learning that at the same time. TPers never seem to.

Might want to consider how careful they would have been if the repub administration hadn’t gotten a law passed to limit their liability. Hey, likely stopped those evil lawyers from suing them for billions. Thank goodness, they’re safe!

Oil and gas development, like “fracting” for gas, or thousands of spills on land and in the ocean- occurring daily, make ALL oil and gas plus mining- “BP” for Big Pollution. Deregulation has given them carte blanche to destroy, like mountain top removal, deep water drilling without controls, and poisoning grasslands and water sources for natural gas production.

No, BP just got caught with their pants down, while the whole industry is doing to us what folks commonly do with their pants down, the world is their privy.

I had to laugh at the ad BP keeps running in the Chicago Trib. It seems like they’re too cheap to splurge for color. The problem is, in the b&w version of the ad their logo is all black – just like everything their oil is sliming in the Gulf…

I was looking to see which American companies BP bought (excuse my use of wiki):

“British Petroleum merged with Amoco (formerly Standard Oil of Indiana) in December 1998, becoming BP Amoco. In 2000, BP Amoco acquired Arco (Atlantic Richfield Co.) and Burmah Castrol. In 2001 the company formally renamed itself as BP and adopted the tagline “Beyond Petroleum,” which remains in use today.”

Wiki BP History

No wonder BP changed it’s name to Beyond Petroleum - all those mergers & acquisitions have made it “the third largest energy company and the fourth largest company in the world” (per wiki ref).

There’s also a list of Incidents that BP has been involved in over the years. Makes BP look like a Bad Petroleum company.

It’s also self insured - wonder how deep it’s pockets are when it comes to claims payments. From Bloomberg Business Week (posted June 3)

“BP, which had leased the Deepwater Horizon at the time of the explosion, has spent $1 billion trying to stop the spill and is still struggling to contain the leak. Lloyd’s of London, which insured the rig’s owner Transocean Ltd., asked a U.S. judge last month to rule it has no obligation to cover BP’s clean-up costs. BP, based in London, is self-insured against losses and damage claims resulting from the spill, spokesman Scott Dean said last month.”

Business Week

Yeah, it’s Bush’s fault. It didn’t take long to reach that tired conclusion. In fact, that declaration was made before the spill even happened!

However, our president said that he was on this issue since day one. He says that he’s in charge, not BP. And he says he has his boot on the throat of BP to make sure they do what he tells them to do.

So… while BP is responsible for the spill itself.. who’s responsible for the aftermath when nothing was done in 45 days to prevent or mitigate the on-shore damage?

what happened in the gulf was an accident in the same way that most car crashes are “accidents” - which is to say, not at all. it seems to have been almost inevitable that something like this would occur. as for being forced way off shore due to powerful people not wanting their sunset views ruined, the same arguments are made against placement of windmills for electric power. it’s called NIMBY-ism, and too many suffer from it.

So are all of you screaming for offshore drilling to stop planning to sell your SUVs and rely on public transportation, carpooling, bicycles and shoe leather?

No, I thought not.

Probably a lot of you are among those who’ll fight to the death any wind turbine you could see in your daily routine, too.

If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

The “What if?” question raised by Nemesys is unanswerable, as GT surely knows. A disaster can place the president in the impossible position of having to predict accurately the outcome of his ameliorative action–an outcome that God herself probably cannot foresee.

Bush hesitated to fully intervene after Katrina because, respectful as he was of the Constitution, he didn’t want to pre-empt the Governor of LA.

Obama can’t take over the responsibility for stopping the leak because his engineers depend on BP’s.

And as for doing something effective about the “aftermath [of] the spill itself”–such as building up levees on the barrier islands–Obama has got to make sure that any expedient is likely to succeed before he gives it a green light. If it fails, he’ll just look foolish, like Bush.

Since neither Obama, nor BP, nor God knew for sure how to stop the leak (unless maybe God knows, but keeps it gushing to punish us all?), how can we expect Obama to mitigate the spill? Who can say what toxic effects the detergents are having already? What happens if we build levees and the next hurricanes obliterate them (oops, engineering error)?

Whatever action the president takes can (and no doubt will) be made to look shortsighted in retrospect. The only way to avoid looking foolish is to do NOTHING and wait until the crisis has past; then we can all play the Monday-morning armchair coach, or quote wise editorials from the NYT.

No wonder we hold our presidents accountable as if they were gods. SOMEONE has to be omnipotent–doesn’t she?

Don’t forget BP’s messy little hands had a leak in the Alaska pipeline, too…they don’t design and maintain except for profit

Don’t forget BP’s messy little hands had a leak in the Alaska pipeline, too…they don’t design and maintain except for profit

PD - Re: “No wonder we hold our presidents accountable as if they were gods. SOMEONE has to be omnipotent–doesn’t she?” I agree.

I think another problem is assuming Engineers are “god-like” too (male gender implied here). I realize we have to depend on someone’s expertise, but now we know they don’t know what the h#!! they’re doing either.

Given the Government’s non-response to this event (not Obama’s, but the great Bureaucracy), what makes you think that the current rules/regulations were even followed in this instance, or that if another law/regulation were in place, that this Bureaucracy could enforce it?

We are good at placing blame, but not very good at actually enforcing regulations nor responding to disasters. Killing the companies that did this isn’t going to happen because they also feed the great political and bureaucratic machine that runs (poorly) this government.

The only sane response to this and other disasters is to replace/deconstruct the current political and bureaucratic power base and replace it with a more streamlined, effective force. One that can be held accountable for its actions or non-actions.

Note: as previously stated by more than one of us here and in earlier columns: O has no ships or experts to handle this problem and, if he had paid for them, neo-cons would have been griping every step of the way about wasted taxes since there “would never be a spill.” If he’d jumped in quickly to help, they would be crying like some of you about him wasting their tax money on it. Even if he does send relief, most of you are going to cry too little too late. One thing none of us will ever do is have to actually worry about the problem since we all seem too busy complaining to actually do anyone any good.

News of a likely second plume spotted by Miss. scientists is getting some ink now, so there may be even more work to be done. Early warning was that the cap that’s sucking up some of the oil may cause back-up leaks. Hopefully this is just the gossip column press of daily reports we often get.

Universal agreement: BP should have been more careful. they should clean it up; they should pay complete reparations. Anyone in disagreement?

Good luck on that sane response thing, JR. Sounds kind of like a crazy idea to me. :-)

“Kicking BP while it’s down doesn’t help anyone”

But it’s fun.

Bush has not been Prez for over 1-1/2 years, get over it! How has this Admin responded to the oil spill other than threatening BP and holding news conferences? When Louisiana tried to build temporary sand dikes to keep the oil out of the marsh and off the coast, the EPA shut them down and ordered an environmental impact study. Now the marsh is coated with oil. What do you think the environmental impact of that is going to be? There is nothing the government can do other than get out of the way. The government does not have the know-how or the equipment to deal with this.

Here is a link to story about another BP spill. Really makes you wonder. When I was checking to see if the story was still there, it took a long time to load for some reason.

As much as I’d LOVE to blame Bush, in this case that is simply not right. He may not have done anything to improve the situation, and may have allowed the situation to deteriorate during his tenure, but the problem has been simmering since way before he became president.

We can all point fingers at BP or Obama, but don’t forget to look in the mirror, gas guzzlers.

I read somewhere recently that there are cracks and such in the sea bed of the Gulf and some oil is always leaking out. There are microbes that eat this oil. Now comes a huge new food source for them. Of course they will then multiply and try to consume the new food. If they multiply too much they could deplete the oxygen in whole areas of the Gulf creating dead zones. One more possible disaster from this madness!

@jeffiekins; “a liberal tells the unenlightened what they should think”??!! Seems to me a lot of words changed their meanings ‘when I wasn’t looking’. I should be careful about using them. Shriek - in fact I used the word “feminist” just today! People will think I meant something completely different from what I had in mind!

When I was growing up, to call someone a “liberal” was a compliment. And it certainly did not mean to tell anyone else what to think.

They are planning to do offshore drilling off the Canadian Arctic coast, where the ecology is much more fragile than off Florida-Texas. And they are telling our politicians that of course it’s safe, it won’t happen here!

HHHHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLPPPPPPPPP!!!!!!!!!!

@puddleglum1066; you relieve my mind a bit. I hadn’t known that our (Canadian) oil-drilling regulations were stronger than the American ones. But even so I don’t want to see drilling in the Arctic. So it can’t happen here? Fine - if we don’t drill, we can be sure that it can’t happen here!

@babka; don’t worry that we’ll seal our borders against American illegal immigrants. They won’t be that many, and they’ll be the cream of the crop.

Oops - I just remembered that the Conservative party is in power. So there might be a few problems. They are talking about getting tough on crime. Meaning: more people in jail, building more and bigger jails, less emphasis on rehabilitation (rehabilitation is known to make recidivism (oh, look it up) less likely). If anyone seals the border, it’s more likely to be the US admin., to keep Americans from getting out.

What an ironic twist! Sorry, nope, can’t envision it. Should we build another underground railway?

@notinksanymore; all that worrying is not good for your health.

But, but, but, – we can’t have renewable energy because those windmills are “too ugly” and besides, they kill birds. Of course planes never kill birds and boy, those oil rigs are gorgeous!!

This is mostly a result of lax regulation (as is the economic crisis and the loss of jobs) which all started with PATCO and continues to this day – with everyone quaking in their boots about doing anything to “interfere with free enterprise.”

It ain’t “free enterprise” when the taxpayers are subsidizing it with tax breaks, etc.

@lindz.coop; I have heard that if they run the windmills at a little slower speed, the birds would be able to see them and avoid them. As to why the windmills should be considered ugly - that’s beyond me.

i drove along Rte 20 from south of Rochester to the outskirts of Buffalo last fall. there are windmills for miles along the highway but you don’t notice them until you are on top of them. i’ve seen more of them in southern Alberta, where they parallel the Trans Canada for miles just east of the rockies and they are invisible from just a few miles north of the highway. i, too find it hard to understand the esthetic objections.

We saw 2 windmills next to the Mackinac Bridge last weekend, and they are NOT ugly and they are sure a far sight prettier than the Fermi 2 plant in SW Detroit and any oil rigs I have ever seen. Also, as far as I know there has never been a wind spill and even if there were, chances are it wouldn’t kill anyone.

The mills move much too slowly to zap any birds that have their eyes even remotely open.