PrintMay 24, 2010
BP protecting its backside
The mainstream media astonishingly set out to investigate a news story that could negatively impact the White House. The U.S. Coast Guard under orders from BP threatened to arrest CBS news reporters if they got any closer to affected waters in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill zone. The scoundrels in charge are attempting to suppress the details of the disaster as long as possible.
While BP estimates that the rate of oil gushing out of the blowout preventer is "above" 5,000 barrels per day, many outsider scientists are claiming the actual amount to be far greater.
Also, Robert Cavnar writing for Huffington Post questioned the lack of concern coming from BP, the U.S. Coast Guard, and Minerals Management Service.
There doesn't seem to be a sense of urgency in BP's management as was evident by Tony Hayward's tone deaf assessment yesterday when he said, "...the overall environmental impact of this will be very, very modest," even as oil came ashore in Louisiana marshes killing wildlife. I'm also hearing that the response center, fully staffed Monday through Friday, has only a fraction of the people working on weekends. [snip]
The government, and the public, are also waking up to the facts that many of us have known since the first day...this disaster is much larger than BP has admitted. The MMS and Coast Guard have not publicly demanded more information be disseminated to the public.
The panicking organizations have had over a month to determine which of their top managers will be up for going to jail. In the meantime, their continual stonewalling on the disaster's real impact makes us believe that results will be catastrophic for the victims of this mess-the local fisherman, the economy, and all related enterprises, not the least of which includes future offshore drilling.
Suppression of the details doesn't change the ongoing crisis, but it does forestall the president's popularity rating from taking a nosedive. After all, if this had happened on Dubya's watch, the media would have completely emasculated him by now.
In a post on the University of South Florida's website, USF News, Economics Professor Christopher Thomas claimed that the U.S. needs to drill, baby, drill more than ever if we are to avert an extreme price hike at the gas pump.
But Thomas sees the impact at the gas pump as the one that will affect everyone in the country and believes there's no way to avoid further drilling.
"You just can't get energy risk-free," he said. "The search for energy is risky either way, risky if we do drill here, and risky if we don't drill here. The risk if we don't is that we will pay a huge price to import even more petroleum. Oil prices could rise sharply and balance of payments problems will certainly grow even worse."
[snip]
"I strongly support conservation and development of alternative energy sources, so long as these decisions are made by individual households and businesses in response to rising energy prices, rather than by central planners at the Department of Energy."
[snip]
"By shutting down Gulf drilling, remember ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) is also dead, we will have no choice but to import huge amounts of oil. This is a simple fact that cannot be changed by Congress or the President for 15 to 20 years at a minimum."
In the same USF post, two other scientists weighed in with opposing views on what should be done in the future, but none of them can deny the long-term destructive results of oil spewing out into Gulf waters.
