Showing that BP's gusher in the ocean floor was just short of deliberate

Did they intend for the rig to explode and the hole to spew oil? Of course not. That means they lose money. But they did consistently ignore safety-related warnings that would necessitate them shutting down their operation, however shortly, in order to address the obvious problems indicating an impending explosion. They knew this was a potential, increasingly likely scenario, and they did nothing but keep drilling and pulling out oil:

The documents show that in March, after several weeks of problems on the rig, BP was struggling with a loss of “well control.” And as far back as 11 months ago, it was concerned about the well casing and the blowout preventer.

On June 22, for example, BP engineers expressed concerns that the metal casing the company wanted to use might collapse under high pressure.

“This would certainly be a worst-case scenario,” Mark E. Hafle, a senior drilling engineer at BP, warned in an internal report. “However, I have seen it happen so know it can occur.”

The company went ahead with the casing, but only after getting special permission from BP colleagues because it violated the company’s safety policies and design standards. The internal reports do not explain why the company allowed for an exception. BP documents released last week to The Times revealed that company officials knew the casing was the riskier of two options...

In April of this year, BP engineers concluded that the casing was “unlikely to be a successful cement job,” according to a document, referring to how the casing would be sealed to prevent gases from escaping up the well.

The document also says that the plan for casing the well is “unable to fulfill M.M.S. regulations,” referring to the Minerals Management Service...

On Tuesday Congress released a memorandum with preliminary findings from BP’s internal investigation, which indicated that there were warning signs immediately before the explosion on April 20, including equipment readings suggesting that gas was bubbling into the well, a potential sign of an impending blowout.

A parade of witnesses at hearings last week told about bad decisions and cut corners in the days and hours before the explosion of the rig, but BP’s internal documents provide a clearer picture of when company and federal officials saw problems emerging.

In addition to focusing on the casing, investigators are also focusing on the blowout preventer, a fail-safe device that was supposed to slice through a drill pipe in a last-ditch effort to close off the well when the disaster struck. The blowout preventer did not work, which is one of the reasons oil has continued to spill into the gulf, though the reason it failed remains unclear...

The documents show that in March, after problems on the rig that included drilling mud falling into the formation, sudden gas releases known as “kicks” and a pipe falling into the well, BP officials informed federal regulators that they were struggling with a loss of “well control.”

On at least three occasions, BP records indicate, the blowout preventer was leaking fluid, which the manufacturer of the device has said limits its ability to operate properly.

“The most important thing at a time like this is to stop everything and get the operation under control,” said Greg McCormack, director of the Petroleum Extension Service at the University of Texas, Austin, offering his assessment about the documents...

Bob Sherrill, an expert on blowout preventers and the owner of Blackwater Subsea, an engineering consulting firm, said the conditions on the rig in February and March and the language used by the operator referring to a loss of well control “sounds like they were facing a blowout scenario.”

This is an open-and-shut case of capitalist negligence. We're gonna need a lot of ropes for this one. I would pay dearly to watch these motherfuckers hung in their suits. Maybe we can dip them in oil, set them on fire, and then hang them with steel cables, as ropes would burn off very quickly. Wait, no, that's good, stick with the ropes. We will dip them in oil, set them on fire, hang them with ropes, let them hang for a second until the rope burns off, just to add agony, then watch them writhe on the ground until they die.

Oil industry threatens the president and you

They are relentless as well as remorseless. Such is the march of capital.

"An extended moratorium on safely producing our oil and natural gas resources from the Gulf of Mexico would create a moratorium on economic growth and job creation," said Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, the main U.S. trade association for the oil and natural gas industry...

The ban, Gerard said, will hurt growth "by undercutting our nation's access to affordable, reliable, domestic sources of oil and natural gas..."

Gerard said he understands the frustration many feel toward the industry, but he said lawmakers should reconsider any decisions that would limit access to domestic sources of oil.

"This issue is much larger than the oil industry since access to affordable energy impacts every sector of our economy, every state in our nation and every American family," he said...

The ban could also mean layoffs in the energy industry, particularly in the Gulf Coast region, according to API. The group said 150,000 jobs are at risk if deep water production is significantly reduced over a period of five years.

"Deepwater is where the new action is in the Gulf," said API spokesman Bill Bush. "If that's shut down, there could be serious jobs impacts."

First, the US imports around 70% of its oil. So it only produces about 30% domestically. And of that, 30% it is only 30% that comes from offshore drilling. So the US only gets 10% of its oil from domestic offshore drilling. Not very much. At all. Fuck it.

Capitalists throw around the word "jobs" like Zionists with "anti-Semite." As soon as you make a point with them, they threaten and smear you so that you fuck off real quick.

Really though, if jobs are truly lost from stopping offshore oil production, too bad. Has to happen sooner or later - that oil ain't gonna be there forever. And that's what oil companies are ultimately in the business of - running themselves out of business, although they don't tell anyone that. Or themselves, really. But anyway, sometimes you just have to find something else to do, especially when you are a cog in the most profoundly destructive industry/line of work/business the world has ever known. Slave traders had to do it, much of the German military had to do it after World War II, even people selling Yugos had to do it. It sucks for the politically-celebrated "little guy," but such is life. Hopefully, one day, slaughterhouse workers will have to do the same.

Helping BP

If you've got any thoughts on how they could do things a little differently (and who doesn't), here's how you can offer contributions, courtesy of the BP website:

Do you have ideas to help us?:
+1 281 366 5511

It only takes a minute, and there's a real person on the other end. Sure, what you say probably won't reach the top, but you can help build an atmosphere of incredibly low morale within the company among low-level employees and managers, which would eventually reach the top.

Environmental extremism

I was just reading this stupid article about how some people who fish are really pissed about their interpretations of potential new fishing regulations. One commentator refers to people who favor these regulations as "environmental extremists."

Wow.

Think about that.

I'm not talking about how fucking crazy right-wing people are, thinking that they live in their god's chosen land and shit like that, or how the country is on the verge of liberal martial law or whatever.

I'm talking about the notion that something like environmental extremism exists.

As though it's possible to take such a position.

The fact is, a concept like that only can exist in a profoundly anthropocentric, destructive culture. As though you can want to protect the environment - trees, air, water, wildlife, soil, mountains - too much. "Environmental extremist" says that the planet is fucking ours. We do what we want with it, what we see fit. It is a fundamentally individualist and arbitrary idea, one where anyone who thinks you need to rein in whatever it is that you are doing is in the extreme. And it's pervasive. I'm sure most people in America can give you some definition of environmental extremism that essentially says that no one should get in the way of human "progress." We think that we can do anything that we want, cause we're people and we are smart. We are advanced. We are the end of evolution.

People might be right about that last part, the end of evolution. Not in the way they intended, that we are perfection incarnate. No, we may be the end of evolution in that the way we've been living, the last few hundred years in particular, there won't be much left when we're done and gone. We've been partying so fucking hard that we're taking everything down with us and don't care. Too wasted on bullshit like iPods and huge televisions.

Lakes are really big toilets and sinks

If you've got anything laying around in the garage that they might give you a hard time about down at the county dump, maybe some old paint, a bit of antifreeze, tainted jet fuel, raw sewage from your factory farm or barrels of octosyllabic synthetic chemicals, just go ahead and toss it in some water that doesn't seem overly important - "navigable," if you will.

The New York Times shows that due to two Supreme Court decisions regarding the Clean Water Act over the last ten years, lots and lots of manufacturers, as well as the military, are doing just that with new found boldness. They've seen the EPA disarmed to an all-time low, unsuccessfully prosecuting cases or abandoning them with hanging heads:

Companies that have spilled oil, carcinogens and dangerous bacteria into lakes, rivers and other waters are not being prosecuted, according to Environmental Protection Agency regulators working on those cases, who estimate that more than 1,500 major pollution investigations have been discontinued or shelved in the last four years...

The Clean Water Act was intended to end dangerous water pollution by regulating every major polluter. But today, regulators may be unable to prosecute as many as half of the nation’s largest known polluters because officials lack jurisdiction or because proving jurisdiction would be overwhelmingly difficult or time consuming, according to midlevel officials.

“We are, in essence, shutting down our Clean Water programs in some states,” said Douglas F. Mundrick, an E.P.A. lawyer in Atlanta. “This is a huge step backward. When companies figure out the cops can’t operate, they start remembering how much cheaper it is to just dump stuff in a nearby creek.”...

About 117 million Americans get their drinking water from sources fed by waters that are vulnerable to exclusion from the Clean Water Act, according to E.P.A. reports...

[M]idlevel E.P.A. officials said that internal studies indicated that as many as 45 percent of major polluters might be either outside regulatory reach or in areas where proving jurisdiction is overwhelmingly difficult.

It seems that the director of that agency could issue some new regulations that address the new holes that the Supreme Court has blown in the law, but she is brilliantly passing it off to Congress, that bastion of efficiency and action. They seem to be sitting on the Clean Water Restoration Act that would help to fix this shit, but I guess it's not important or whatever.

Thankfully, there are the requisite conservative opponents of everything out there drumming up opposition to this addendum:

“If you can get Glenn Beck to say that government storm troopers are going to invade your property, farmers in the Midwest will light up their congressmen’s switchboards,” said the coalition member, who asked not to be identified because he thought his descriptions would anger other coalition participants. Mr. Beck, a conservative commentator on Fox News, spoke at length against the Clean Water Restoration Act in December.

The American Land Rights Association, another organization opposed to legislation, wrote last June that people should “Deluge your senators with calls, faxes and e-mails.” A news release the same month from the American Farm Bureau Federation warned that “even rainwater would be regulated.”

“If you erase the word ‘navigable’ from the law, it erases any limitation on the federal government’s reach,” said Mr. Parrish of the American Farm Bureau Federation. “It could be a gutter, a roadside ditch or a rain puddle. But under the new law, the government gets control over it.”

Great fucking news. When I would pee in the ocean, I used to get really worried that I was going to get arrested. But I had to go, you know? I'm sure it's the same for these people (after all, "company" is a term that tends to hide the fact that people are making all decisions) who dump lead and arsenic and whatever else they've got on hand in a lake, stream or river. They've just got to get rid of it all and the disposal center (what would be my bathroom, in the ocean situation) is so far away. What else could they do? That creek is RIGHT THERE. What the hell else is it good for? It just sits there. It's not like it grows money or produces Range Rovers.

So yes, here's to the Supreme Court for not being able to appreciate, or care, how pedantic semantics has the potential to fuck up the world just a little bit more. They're so fucking concerned with needling laws, and seem to have very little interest in the common good. Although, for a bunch of conservative assholes like they are, I'm sure things like this are the common good, as it lets their friends do whatever the fuck they want in order to maximize profits. And when stocks go up, who doesn't benefit, you know?

Trashing the planet to trash the planet

Thankfully, and with a great deal of foresight, Russia is constructing five floating and submersible nuclear power plants in the Arctic, so that they may drill for petroleum. There are no problems that could arise from this decision. Russia has an excellent history of nuclear safety and consideration for the natural world. The world needs the gas and oil deposits they may find, so that we may continue hemorraghing safe, non-toxic fumes and chemicals into the air, water and land. These deposits must be extracted at any cost, and Russia is the country for the job.

Here are some asinine things environmentalists have to say about this glorious achievement:

"It is highly risky. The risk of a nuclear accident on a floating power plant is increased. The plants' potential impact on the fragile Arctic environment through emissions of radioactivity and heat remains a major concern. If there is an accident, it would be impossible to handle," said Igor Kudrik, a spokesman.

Environmentalists also fear that if additional radioactive waste is produced, it will be dumped into the sea. Russia has a long record of polluting the Arctic with radioactive waste. Countries including Britain have had to offer Russia billions of dollars to decommission more than 160 nuclear submarines, but at least 12 nuclear reactors are known to have been dumped, along with more than 5,000 containers of solid and liquid nuclear waste, on the northern coast and on the island of Novaya Zemlya.

They are crazy people who hate progress and worship at the altar of Howard Dean.

The twentieth anniversary of the Exxon Valdez crash/spill

March 24th, 1989 - the drunk captain of the oil tanker Valdez "left the bridge" of the ship under his command. The ship hit a reef and spilled 11 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound. Eleven million. 11,000,000. From Environment News Service, today:

The Exxon Valdez spill was one of the most worst environmental disasters in history. The spill covered over 10,000 square miles of Alaska’s coastline. Oil spread along 1,300 miles of shoreline, fouling a national forest, two national parks, two national wildlife refuges, five state parks, four state critical habitat areas, one state game sanctuary, and many ancestral lands for Alaska natives.

It killed hundreds of thousands of birds, marine mammals, fish, invertebrates; and disrupted the economy, culture, and livelihoods of coastal residents.

The cleanup took four summers and cost approximately $2 billion, according to a report by the state and federal governments...

In its newly issued 20th anniversary Status Report, the state and federal Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council lists only 10 of the 31 injured resources and services they monitor as “Recovered.” Ten more, including killer whales and sea otters are listed as "Recovering." Populations of Pacific herring and pigeon guillemots are listed as “Not Recovering.”

The most important species that is still experiencing significant problems is Pacific herring, an ecologically and commercially important species in Prince William Sound. They are central to the marine food web, providing food to marine mammals, birds, invertebrates, and other fish. Herring are also commercially fished for food, bait, sac-roe, and spawn on kelp.

Due to the decreased population, the Status Report states, the herring fishery in Prince William Sound has been closed for 13 of the 19 years since the spill and remains closed today.

So that's a bit of what the crash/spill did to the environment, as well as what it's still doing today.

What did it do to people? Ruined a lot of lives. What has Exxon done about that? Fought tirelessly to ensure that they do nothing to help anyone. About four months ago, they started paying out money to some of the 33,000 people who had sued them for remorselessly fucking up their lives. From the Anchorage Daily News, December 8th, 2008:

The millions of dollars Exxon Mobil Corp. has surrendered as punishment for the Prince William Sound oil spill have started hitting the streets, nearly 20 years after the disaster.

Several commercial fishermen who joined in the lawsuit against Exxon reported receiving direct deposits in their bank accounts Monday. Paper checks are expected to go out in the mail in the next week.

The payments mark the beginning of a process to distribute $383 million among nearly 33,000 commercial fishermen and other plaintiffs.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs and Exxon continue to battle in court over whether the oil company owes interest on the punitive damages award. If so, the interest could roughly double the total payout.

$383 million to 33,000 people. Well, that sounds like a lot, yeah? No. An average of $11,600. A piss in the fucking ocean, that is. From the New York Times, June 26, 2008:

“This decision is a giant cold slap in the face,” said Garland Blanchard, 59, a third-generation fisherman who said he lost his marriage along with his two fishing boats, house, cat and dog to financial pressures caused by the spill. Mr. Blanchard expects to receive less than $100,000 from the settlement, down from the $1.2 million he had previously expected.

“Our lives and businesses have been destroyed, and we get basically nothing,” he said. “It’s pathetic.”

Local radio stations were just breaking news of the decision as Alicia Jensen opened the Killer Whale Café in Cordova, Alaska, at 6:30 Wednesday morning. Just as it has nearly every day for two decades, the spill and the legal case dominated customers’ conversations.

“This has been the primary focus of this town for most of my life,” said Ms. Jensen, 33, who owns the cafe. “I’m glad that it’s over, and everybody can get on with our lives.”

The City of Homer was prepared to place the $4 million to $5 million it was to receive in an endowment to help pay for social services, said Walt Wrede, the city manager. Now the city will receive a fraction of that amount.

Originally, Exxon was ordered to pay $5 billion, back in 1994. But their army of heartless lawyers worked very hard with corporate sympathizing judges to put off actually doing anything and have succeeded in continually reducing the payment to $383 million. I'm sure they feel like they lost, since they have to pay any amount at all. From the Anchorage Daily News, August 27th, 2008:

The Exxon case has been the source of soaring hopes and dashed dreams ever since an Anchorage jury in 1994 determined Exxon should pay $5 billion in punitive damages for the nearly 11 million-gallon oil spill.

Ever since the jury verdict, lawyers for the plaintiffs and Exxon have engaged in an marathon, ping-pong legal battle that went to the highest court in the land. Along the way, thousands of original plaintiffs have died waiting for payment.

Exxon argued all along that it paid billions of dollars to clean up the spill and compensate fishermen for their actual damages, and that billions in punitive damages weren't warranted.

Hey, Exxon already PAID money, man! Why are you trying to make them pay more, huh Karl Marx?? From the Anchorage Daily News, December 8th, 2008:

Exxon long held that it didn't owe punitive damages, arguing it already had spent $3.4 billion as a result of the spill including compensatory payments, cleanup payments, settlements and fines.

First, you cannot put a price on the destruction of the planet. You cannot put a price on ruined lives. You cannot put a price on direct responsibility for death. Those fucks should have been taken for all they had. Fuck this sham legal system. Who has been served here? Corporate capitalist interests, big fucking surprise.

Second, Exxon made $45.2 billion last year, destroying its own record for highest ever corporate profit, which it set way back in 2007, pulling in $40.6 billion.

The only reason this has happened is because we let them sleep safely.

Exxon Mobil sets record with $45.2 billion profit

The price of oil went up, the price of human life went down, the price of nature has never been lower. Let the end come.



Exxon Mobil sets record with $45.2 billion profit

By JOHN PORRETTO, AP Energy Writer John Porretto, Ap Energy Writer 1 hr 8 mins ago

HOUSTON – Exxon Mobil Corp. on Friday reported a profit of $45.2 billion for 2008, breaking its own record for a U.S. company, even as its fourth-quarter earnings fell 33 percent from a year ago.

The previous record for annual profit was $40.6 billion, which the world's largest publicly traded oil company set in 2007.

The extraordinary full-year profit wasn't a surprise given crude's triple-digit price for much of 2008, peaking near an unheard of $150 a barrel in July. Since then, however, prices have fallen roughly 70 percent amid a deepening global economic crisis.

In the fourth quarter alone crude tumbled 60 percent, prompting spending and job cuts in an industry that was reporting robust, often record, profits as recently as last summer.

With piles of cash and diversified operations, the majors like Exxon Mobil have fared better than many smaller oil and gas companies, but Friday's results show no one is completely insulated from the ongoing malaise.

Irving, Texas-based Exxon said net income slid sharply to $7.8 billion, or $1.55 a share, in the October-December period. That compared with $11.7 billion, or $2.13 a share, in the same period a year ago, when Exxon set a U.S. record for quarterly profit. It has since topped that mark twice, first in last year's second quarter and then with earnings of $14.83 billion in the third quarter.

Revenue in the most-recent quarter fell 27 percent to $84.7 billion.

Both the per-share and revenue results topped Wall Street forecasts. On average, analysts expected the company to earn $1.45 a share in the latest quarter on revenue of $69.1 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.

Shares rose $1.52, or 2 percent, to $78.52 in early trading.

The nation's second largest oil company, Chevron Corp., reported profits of $4.9 billion for the fourth quarter, though revenues slid 26 percent with oil prices in sharp decline.

It earned $2.44 per share in the three months ended Dec. 31. Like Exxon, Chevron easily beat expectations of analysts, who were looking for profits of $1.81 per share.

The industry went into retrenchment toward the end of the year with demand falling.

As expected, Exxon Mobil's bottom line took a beating from its exploration and production, or upstream, arm, where net income fell 31 percent to $5.6 billion. The culprit: lower crude prices, which the company said decreased earnings by $3.2 billion in the fourth quarter alone.

The company, which produces about 3 percent of the world's oil, said overall output fell 3 percent in the most-recent period, a troubling trend in previous quarters. Exxon, which generates more than two-thirds of its earnings from oil and gas production, said production-sharing contracts and OPEC quotas contributed to its lower output.

Results were better at its refining and marketing unit, where earnings rose 6 percent to $2.4 billion as higher margins overcame costs related to last summer's hurricanes and other factors.

The company's chemical division also took a hit, posting net income of $155 million versus $1.1 billion a year ago. Results were hurt by lower volumes and margins and hurricane-repair costs.

Exxon Mobil said it bought 119 million shares of its common stock in the quarter at a cost of $8.8 billion. Roughly $8 billion of that amount was dedicated to reducing the number of shares outstanding; the balance was used to offset shares issued as part of the company's benefit plans.

Exxon said it spent $26.1 billion on capital and exploration projects last year, up 25 percent from 2007. Its earnings release provided no information about its planned spending for 2009.

For the full year, Exxon Mobil's massive profit amounted to $8.69 a share, versus $7.28 a share a year ago.

ridiculous

the white house made explicit its refusal to open an email from the environmental protection agency containing its "conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled." if you don't acknowledge it, it must go away? this is beyond childish. this is how the fucking government works. incredible.

"Over the past five days, the officials said, the White House successfully put pressure on the E.P.A. to eliminate large sections of the original analysis that supported regulation, including a finding that tough regulation of motor vehicle emissions could produce $500 billion to $2 trillion in economic benefits over the next 32 years."

we live under an economic system with laws to keep it running profitably, not a political system.

o rly?

studies to demonstrate the obvious. guess you need them though, cause people love to forget the obvious.