BP is blaming Transocean LTD (the rig owners) for the oil spill. Their testimony says the failsafe failed. This company is in turn blaming another company, Halliburton that drilled the well and sealed it with concrete, saying the hole wasn't dug right. That third company says they drilled and sealed exactly the way BP's engineers told them to, because it was designed, monitored, and seen to completion by BP.

BP has spent 350 million on cleanup so far- and I bet the majority of that was the colossal failure plug/retainer thing. At the end of all this, offshore drilling ought to be stopped and BP should be responsible for all clean up. It made me sick how Exxon got off the hook for all the fines and clean up in the Prince William Sound. Millions of volunteer hours should have been compensated by the company as part of the fine.

This entire thing is disgusting. And it just so happens that the problem occurs bordering some of the most delicate lands in north America.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100511/ap_ ... _oil_spill

So we can give countless more billions to OPEC nations?

Sorry, I've got to disagree.

The last major rig spill off US shores was back in 1979 on a rig owned by the Mexican government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixtoc_I
and the one before that was off the Santa Barbara coast in 1969
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_Santa ... _oil_spill

Every time there's an accident of these proportions, engineering steps in to fix the cause and prevent it in the future.

Do you think BP is going to get off the hook for this?
Hell no.
(nevermind how pointless and wasteful a congressional hearing is on this...but it is an election year so on with the dog and pony show!)

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Hold my beer and watch this...

I can live with offshore drilling if these companies are properly regulated, and don't do everything they can to skimp on safety in the name of profits.

What El Squanto said.

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mechaphil

you can disagree all you want, but a lot of environmental issues are at hand. what fills those craters left by the extracted oil? seawater? oh, you mean that significantly less dense liquid. nothing like leaving caverns under millions of tons of pressure.

get off oil altogether. a solar initiative would cut oil by a huge percent. i'm not even talking about cars. they can still run on gas. just businesses and residences.

Do i think BP will get off the hook? yes. they won't pay for all the problems that will occur. do you think Exxon paid for all million or so of the megafauna that was killed? let alone the loss of planktons and plants and damages to the shore ecosystem.

offshore drilling is fucking stupid. every time humans do something like this, they find out they did something else wrong. it's the experimenter's regress concept.

The plain fact is either we get it ourselves or we buy it from OPEC.
Do you think they have more environmentally friendly drilling practices in Iraq and Nigeria?

That's a completely separate argument / issue.
By all means, lets go full steam ahead and get off fossil fuels...that's doesn't change the realities of today or tomorrow or the next decade unless someone is holding back the next new breakthrough and the answer to our energy demands.
There currently exists no alternate energy source that could get us off oil.
Period.
Not solar, not wind, not geothermal, nothing.

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Hold my beer and watch this...

"It's pronounced nuke-you-lerr"

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buy it from OPEC. then we'll be more motivated to get away from it.

the point is not to have one source replace oil. it's a combined system. but like you said, completely different argument.

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"Call a cop he robbed Delmore blind!!!"
Rick Jeanerette after Marty Biron's diving save back in 2000.

"I'm going to go to the spa and have a hot tub and massage and relax," Miller said. "That's it, and it's back to work tomorrow." Ryan Miller after clinching the North East division.

You want to replace oil?

http://www.ls9.com/

Now convince the oil gods to stop drilling, and stop getting in the way of companies like this.

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Cold fusion works.
It's being developed by the Japanese, French and Indian governments.

We could each have a cold fusion reactor in our basement and only have to add water once a year or so.

But our government would like to remind you just how much campaign money they get from Exxon and that cold fusion is a sham.

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Hold my beer and watch this...

This is exactly what happens when you allow pure profit-seeking to guide almost all important decisions. Anyone who argues that businesses should be allowed to operate without "inefficient" government regulations ought to take a look at this oil spill, and at the near collapse of the financial system last year and wake the fuck up. Corporations care not one lick about anything but profit, and yet they are praised by many and even given huge legal rights by this insane government of ours.

This is what you get when you sit by and let business write the laws, and even then exempt companies from the environmental protection laws that were written largely with their interests in mind. BP, Transocean, Halliburton, and the government were all just thinking about the fast buck here. They all fucked up royally, and the blame goes from top to bottom, all the way down to all of us who use gasoline and let this shit happen.

Yeah, 1 rig disaster in 40 years we need to throw this corrupt system out the damn window amiright?

Multiple, government mandated safety devices failed.

It's called a god damn accident.

11 people DIED.

Christ...a building crane collapses and kills several people so we should stop construction buildings right?

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Hold my beer and watch this...

I don't know of many buildings that are built 5000 ft under the sea, whose sewage and gas lines extend to almost 20,000 ft below sea level. BP was given an exemption in the drilling law to drill at that depth.

And yes, 11 PEOPLE died, directly and immediately. How many forms of ocean life do you think will die? 11? Entire ecosystems will be destroyed. Also many will get sick from the fumes, especially those who work in the cleanup effort.

This isn't a multi-car accident on the highway, this is a disater.

and it's not the first nor the last.
It's an accident.

You guys are making it sound like this was caused by negligence or worse...if you have evidence of that, show me.
Otherwise, this is just a devastating accident.

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Hold my beer and watch this...

It absolutely was caused by negligence, at every level. Halliburton botched the cementing leading to a natural gas buildup, then...explosion. Transocean or BP or whoever tries to fix it with their joystick, doesn't work like it should. BP decides to put a dome over it, but the dome fills with ice and won't go to the bottom anyway. Meanwhile, 210,000 gallons of oil a day continues to pour into the Gulf of Mexico with no end in sight.

How can they do such high risk drilling without even knowing whether or not their emergency safety precausions will actually work? How does that happen? It's fucking lunacy and it's criminal.

um...the investigation into the cause is ongoing.
So that's a nice opinion you have there.

Since the big spooky "H" word has been mentioned several times I'm sure you've all been keeping score right?

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-0 ... ate1-.html

/what's a $1/2 Billion no-bid contract between friends anyway?

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Hold my beer and watch this...

you think I'm here to defend Obama in any way, you're barking up the wrong tree Cross. Man hasn't even changed his offshore drilling policy after this happens. He's just another Bush as far as I'm concerned on this issue. Get over him.

Why should he change his off-shore drilling policy?

There are hundreds of rigs off the coast from where you and I sit right now.
Making policy on a knee jerk reaction to 1 incident makes as much sense as saying Global warming does or doesn't exist because of the current weather.

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Hold my beer and watch this...

but allowing it without identifying the future risks of the sinkholes and juxtaposition to certain ecosystems and without a risk fund secured isn't as foolish.

no one knows what will happen when these caverns are filled with saltwater instead of oil. there was no clean-up plan written and ready to be used. there is no clean up mandates. there is no fund for emergency action in a case of emergency. the safety should be up and over standards. the FAIL SAFE should be failsafe. there's no reason there isn't four shut off switches for the valve.

i still want to know why they aren't cutting a hole in the pipe below the leak and pumping it into an oil tanker.

piss poor planning where everyone will pay for the governments and BP's errors.


i also want to know why engineers who make hundreds of thousands of dollars didn't predict the ice. and WHY they are considering doing the same thing again with a NARROWER dome. the 3 backup plans are so awful.