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Edited on Mon Jun-14-10 09:29 AM by flyarm
Silly me..but I was able to read a Katrina disaster report by the Florida State legislature that stated very clearly that 124 rigs were damaged or broke away ..one even broke away and traveled 800 miles in the Gulf and was subsequently hit by a ship..and did huge damage to the ship.. Now wtf would have given Obama advice to say .. "Oil rigs today generally don't cause spills," Am I the only one who remembers how the price of Gas went up nationwide after Katrina because we were told damage from Katrina to the oil rigs in the Gulf caused a shortfall of oil so our gas prices had to reflect that? Airlines were increasing prices beause of a shortfall of oil ..because of Katrina......... Do we really have that short of memories? 124 rigs were damaged or destroyed in the Gulf from Katrina..does no one else remember that?? It is all in the Florida Legislative reports..Do you think..just think, perhaps Obama's advisors could have looked that up and told him that?? Or all they simply had to do is read the White House message boards..because thousands of angry Democratic Floridians were emailing the White House with that info! In fact, the day Obama announced drill baby drill, there were hundreds of Protestors in St Pete Fla..protesting Newt Gingrich at the Vannoy Hotel where he was giving a drill baby drill speech..much to the surprise of the protestors..while they were protesting Newt and his drill baby drill, Obama did his speech of drill baby drill! The democratic and environmental Protestors were totally caught off guard..that Obama would sell them out after campaigning in Fla promising no more drilling in the Gulf.. but there are pockets to grease..and promises to keep don'tcha know..but they are not promises to we the people..they were corporate promises.. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Who Owns BP? Biggest Shareholder is JPMorgan Chase In the wake of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, BP’s stock value has plummeted, prompting news stories identifying the company’s largest investors. Oddly enough, some media outlets have failed to identify the largest BP shareholder: the U.S. investment firm JPMorgan Chase. According to the European financial database Amadeus, JPMorgan Chase is the No. 1 holder of stock in BP. That distinction also has earned the Wall Street bank the title of “Global Ultimate Owner” of the oil giant, as it owns 28.34% of BP. Next, at 7.99%, is Legal and General Group, a British-based financial services company with assets of more than $350 billion. Another U.S. investment firm, BlackRock Inc., owns 7.1% of BP. Other owners include the governments of Kuwait, Norway, Singapore and China. http://www.allgov.com/Top_Stories/ViewNews... ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph... Groups Challenge Continued Oil Operations in Gulf Excluded from New Moratorium Since spill, feds have given 27 waivers to oil companies in gulf Source: McClatchy Since spill, feds have given 27 waivers to oil companies in gulf By Marisa Taylor | McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON — Since the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig exploded April 20, the Obama administration has granted oil and gas companies at least 27 exemptions from doing in-depth environmental studies of oil exploration and production in the Gulf of Mexico.
The waivers were granted despite President Barack Obama's vow that his administration would launch a "relentless response effort" to stop the leak and prevent more damage to the gulf. One of them was dated Friday — the day after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he was temporarily halting offshore drilling.
The exemptions, known as "categorical exclusions," were granted by the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, or MMS, and included waiving detailed environmental studies for a British Petroleum exploration plan to be conducted at a depth of more than 4,000 feet and an Anadarko Petroleum Corp. exploration plan at more 9,000 feet.
"Is there a moratorium on offshore drilling or not?" asked Peter Galvin, the conservation director at the Center for Biological Diversity, the environmental group that discovered the administration's continued approval of the exemptions. "Possibly the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history has occurred, and nothing appears to have changed." Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/05/07/9376 ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx .....remember Dashle who pushed Obama during our primaries..and was one of his top advisors...........working with Whitman..the lady who lied about the air quality at Ground zero in NY?? Can i tickle your memory..she lied and people died and keep dying!! And that is just one example.. Spill, Baby, SpillBy Michael Isikoff, Ian Yarett and Matthew Philips | NEWSWEEK From the magazine issue dated May 10, 2010 BP has been trying hard to burnish its public image in recent years after being hit with a pair of environmental disasters, including a fatal refinery explosion in Texas and a pipeline leak in Alaska. One major step was to announce, in 2007, that it had hired a high-powered advisory board that included former EPA director Christine Todd Whitman, former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, and Leon Panetta, who were each paid $120,000 a year. (Panetta left when he became President Obama's CIA director.) Two years ago the oil giant's chief executive, Robert Malone, flew board members out to the Gulf of Mexico on a helicopter to demonstrate the safeguards surrounding BP's advanced drilling technology. "We got a sense they were really committed to ensuring they got it right," Whitman told NEWSWEEK.
Now BP, formerly known as British Petroleum, finds itself blamed for what could prove to be the worst oil spill in U.S. history. And only weeks after Obama announced an ambitious plan to open up more U.S. offshore waters to oil drilling, shunting aside environmental concerns from his own Democratic Party, his administration is facing a comeuppance from hell. "There was a lot of wishful thinking, I guess," says Villy Kourafalou, a scientist at the University of Miami's Rosensteil School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. "The new technologies were said to be so wonderful that we'd never have an oil spill again." Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), who had sought to block the expanded drilling, says the oil and gas industry was pushing this idea hard. "They said, 'We'll never have a repeat of Santa Barbara,'?" referring to the 1969 rig explosion off the California coast. Both the Bush and Obama administrations "were buying the line that the technology was fine," Pallone adds.
BP pressed hard to make that point in D.C. Its PR efforts included payments of $16 million last year to a battery of Washington lobbyists, among them the firm of Tony Podesta, the brother of former Obama transition chief John Podesta. Last fall, after the U.S. Interior Department proposed tighter federal regulation of oil companies' environmental programs, David Rainey, BP's vice president for Gulf of Mexico exploration, told Congress that the proposal was unnecessary. "I think we need to remember," he said, that offshore drilling "has been going on for the last 50 years, and it has been going on in a way that is both safe and protective of the environment."
Read the full article at:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/237298
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and never forget this..we Floridans won't!!!
YouTube - Barack Obama on Offshore Oil Drilling ( to Florida voters while asking for their votes)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8fkbEuCQss ...
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Obama: “Oil Rigs Today Generally Don’t Cause Spills”
Obama Repeats Katrina Oil Spill Myth To Defend Offshore Drilling
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm8gLmuTvJ4 ... ...
By: David Dayen Thursday April 29, 2010 1:42 pm
snip:
What a difference 18 days makes. Here was Barack Obama, on April 2, before the BP oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, claiming that oil rigs are safe to justify his position on offshore drilling:
I don’t agree with the notion that we shouldn’t do anything. It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn’t come from the oil rigs, they came from the refineries onshore.
Not only does this quote look ridiculous in hindsight, it wasn’t true at the time, as Brad Johnson points out:
Obama’s claim that oil rigs did not cause any spills during Hurricane Katrina is simply false, as the Wonk Room reported in June, 2008, when Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and other conservatives made the same false claim:
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita Caused 124 Offshore Spills For A Total Of 743,700 Gallons. 554,400 gallons were crude oil and condensate from platforms, rigs and pipelines, and 189,000 gallons were refined products from platforms and rigs.
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita Caused Six Offshore Spills Of 42,000 Gallons Or Greater. The largest of these was 152,250 gallons, well over the 100,000 gallon threshhold considered a “major spill.”
http://news.firedoglake.com/2010/04/29/oba ... ... ’t-cause-spills/
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Government to Oil Plume Discovery Team: Shut Up
Posted by flyarm in General Discussion
Tue May 18th 2010, 02:38 PM
Government to Oil Plume Discovery Team: Shut Up | The Seminal
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/48816 ...
Government to Oil Plume Discovery Team: Shut Up
By: Jim White Tuesday May 18, 2010 6:06 am
The research vessel Pelican. (photo: Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium)
On Saturday, the New York Times brought the world’s attention to the discovery by a team of researchers on the the vessel Pelican that there are large underwater plumes of oil emanating from the Deepwater Horizon spill. Remarkably, the response of the government to the attention focused on this discovery has been to tell the researchers to stop granting interviews with the press. At the same time, the blog on which the researchers had been providing updates has also fallen silent since Saturday.
Pensacola television station WEAR filed a report (video at the link) on the oil plume and broke the news about the scientists being muzzled by the government:
Over the weekend, a research crew from the University of Southern Mississippi found evidence that there are 3 to 5 plumes… About 5 miles wide, 10 miles long and 3 hundred feet in depth.
But after giving that information to the press, the lead researcher now says he has been asked by the federal government… Which funds his research… To quit giving interviews until further testing is done.
What an interesting change of course for the government. Even the government’s website on the Deepwater Horizon response had been touting the mission of the Pelican as recently as May 6:
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Read more: http://www.adn.com/2010/06/09/1315823/bp-c-plan.html
"Lutz is listed as a go-to wildlife specialist at the University of Miami. But Lutz, an eminent sea turtle expert, left Miami almost 20 years ago to chair the marine biology department at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. He died four years before the plan was published."
BP's Gulf spill plan outdated, error-filled
By JUSTIN PRITCHARD, TAMARA LUSH and HOLBROOK MOHR
The Associated Press
Published: June 9th, 2010 10:32 PM
Last Modified: June 12th, 2010 11:38 AM
VENICE, La. - Professor Peter Lutz is listed in BP's 2009 response plan for a Gulf of Mexico oil spill as a national wildlife expert. He died in 2005.
Under the heading "sensitive biological resources," the plan lists marine mammals including walruses, sea otters, sea lions and seals. None lives anywhere near the Gulf.
The names and phone numbers of several Texas A&M University marine life specialists are wrong. So are the numbers for marine mammal stranding network offices in Louisiana and Florida, which are no longer in service.
BP PLC's 582-page regional spill plan for the Gulf, and its 52-page, site-specific plan for the Deepwater Horizon rig are riddled with omissions and glaring errors, according to an Associated Press analysis that details how BP officials have been making it up as they go along. The lengthy plans approved by the federal government last year before BP drilled its ill-fated well vastly understate the dangers posed by an uncontrolled leak and vastly overstate the company's preparedness to deal with one.
"Look, it's obvious to everybody in south Louisiana that they didn't have a plan, they didn't have an adequate plan to deal with this spill," said Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. "They didn't anticipate the (blowout preventer) failure. They didn't anticipate this much oil hitting our coast. From the very first days, they kept telling us, ‘Don't worry, the oil's not going to make it to your coast.' "
In the spill scenarios detailed in the BP's exploration plan, fish, marine mammals and birds escape serious harm; beaches remain pristine; water quality is only a temporary problem. And those are the projections for a leak about 10 times worse than what has been calculated for the ongoing disaster.
There are other wildly false assumptions in the documents. BP's proposed method to calculate spill volume judging by the darkness of the oil sheen is way off. The internationally accepted formula would produce estimates 100 times higher.
The Gulf's loop current, which is projected to help eventually send oil hundreds of miles around Florida's southern tip and up the Atlantic coast, isn't mentioned in either plan.
Read the whole thing..your blood will boil!!
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Government Collusion with BP to Block Information Flow Means We Need an Independent Commission to Handle Spill Response
By: Jim White Thursday June 10, 2010 6:50 am
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/53862
Writing in Thursday’s New York Times, Jeremy W. Peters provides further documentation of what he titles "Efforts to Limit the Flow of Spill News". Perhaps the most damning evidence Peters provides comes from an effort by Florida Senator Bill Nelson to visit the Gulf with a group of reporters:
Last week, Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, tried to bring a small group of journalists with him on a trip he was taking through the gulf on a Coast Guard vessel. Mr. Nelson’s office said the Coast Guard agreed to accommodate the reporters and camera operators. But at about 10 p.m. on the evening before the trip, someone from the Department of Homeland Security’s legislative affairs office called the senator’s office to tell them that no journalists would be allowed.
“They said it was the Department of Homeland Security’s response-wide policy not to allow elected officials and media on the same ‘federal asset,’ ” said Bryan Gulley, a spokesman for the senator. “No further elaboration” was given, Mr. Gulley added.
Why would the Department of Homeland Security have a policy that prohibits elected officials and media being on the same ship in the Gulf? Is there any other explanation than a blatant attempt by the federal government to stifle reporting on conditions in the Gulf as they really exist, rather than as they have been presented by BP and federal "spokespeople"?
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From the Ground: BP Censoring Media, Destroying Evidence
Source: Huffington Post
...... BP is using federal agencies to shield itself from public accountability.
For example, while flying on a small plane from New Orleans to Orange Beach, the pilot suddenly exclaimed, "Look at that!" The thin red line marking the federal flight restrictions of 3,000 feet over the oiled Gulf region had just jumped to include the coastal barrier islands off Alabama.
"There's only one reason for that," the pilot said. "BP doesn't want the media taking pictures of oil on the beaches. You should see the oil that's about six miles off the coast," he said grimly. We looked down at the wavy orange boom surrounding the islands below us. The pilot shook his head. "There's no way those booms are going to stop what's offshore from hitting those beaches."
BP knows this as well -- boom can only deflect oil under the calmest of sea conditions, not barricade it -- so they have stepped up their already aggressive effort to control what the public sees.
.............
With oil undisputedly hitting the beaches and the number of dead wildlife mounting, BP is switching tactics. In Orange Beach, people told me BP wouldn't let them collect carcasses. Instead, the company was raking up carcasses of oiled seabirds. "The heads separate from the bodies," one upset resident told me. "There's no way those birds are going to be autopsied. BP is destroying evidence!"
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/riki-ott/fro... -...
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