The oil corporations have done way more damage to

[malaise]

Nigeria than to the Gulf but both the USA and Britain don't give a damn

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shell
<snip>
That disaster, which claimed the lives of 11 rig workers, has made headlines round the world. By contrast, little information has emerged about the damage inflicted on the Niger delta. Yet the destruction there provides us with a far more accurate picture of the price we have to pay for drilling oil today.

On 1 May this year a ruptured ExxonMobil pipeline in the state of Akwa Ibom spilled more than a million gallons into the delta over seven days before the leak was stopped. Local people demonstrated against the company but say they were attacked by security guards. Community leaders are now demanding $1bn in compensation for the illness and loss of livelihood they suffered. Few expect they will succeed. In the meantime, thick balls of tar are being washed up along the coast.

Within days of the Ibeno spill, thousands of barrels of oil were spilled when the nearby Shell Trans Niger pipeline was attacked by rebels. A few days after that, a large oil slick was found floating on Lake Adibawa in Bayelsa state and another in Ogoniland. "We are faced with incessant oil spills from rusty pipes, some of which are 40 years old," said Bonny Otavie, a Bayelsa MP.

This point was backed by Williams Mkpa, a community leader in Ibeno: "Oil companies do not value our life; they want us to all die. In the past two years, we have experienced 10 oil spills and fishermen can no longer sustain their families. It is not tolerable."
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:cry: :cry: :cry:

[Scuba]

1. The corportocracy doesn't care about brown people, or their land....

...ergo, the media doesn't report it. 'Cause they own the media.

[suffragette]

2. When I was looking for more info on Transocean, I found the site

with transcripts of their earning meetings. Mind you, they know they are being taped (they announce it at the onset of the meetings) so pesky points looked like they're shut down quickly.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=8347642

This exchange shows they purposefully use rigs that wouldn't meet certain standards in places where they think they can get away from it. This is about deepwater rather than land rigs, but illustrates their callous valuing of money over safety:

Geoff Kieburtz – Weeden

Okay. Would it be fair for me to infer then that these Deepwater rigs are because of regulatory or safety case issues not necessarily able to compete in the U.K. North Sea market?

Steven Newman

Well, getting a rig that is not currently into the U.K. sector of the North Sea back into the U.K. sector of the North Sea does require some regulatory approvals. And there are rigs in the Transocean fleet that would be relatively straightforward to do that with. And there are some that we would prefer to keep on the international market.