BP Doesn’t Pay

BP isn’t repairing the damage it caused in the Gulf of Mexico. Of course, it was easy to predict that. Enbridge didn’t clean up the huge spill in Wisconsin. Yet these sorts of companies get billions of dollars in government subsidies, despite huge profits they are allowed to keep even though they cost the government billions in lost economic potential from destroyed environments.

Oil companies have become the worst neighbours imaginable. They party all night long, keep bonfires going all night, trash the neighbourhood, and if you call the police on them, the police come to your door instead. They also ran over your pet duck, and blamed you for not keeping better tabs on it.

BP Gulf Disaster Continues

I’ve been avoiding shrimp for close to two years because I expected this.

Do you remember how the EPA said it was safe for New Yorkers to return to the area around Ground Zero, despite the obvious hazard to respiration from asbestos dust? The government’s action around the BP oil geyser is equally negligent and harmful to humans. My friend Kyle noted recently that if radiation had caused these deformities, there’d be a lot more outrage. Given the media silence on radioactive seawater spreading out from Japan, I’m not so sure.

Here’s what I said in 2010:

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said in a joint release Sunday, “We will not rest until BP permanently seals the wellhead, the spill is cleaned up, and the communities and natural resources of the Gulf Coast are restored and made whole,” they said.

Good luck putting the genie back in the bottle. Making the communities and natural resources whole again could take a decade, or ten decades. It’s a little hard to go without rest that long.

Do you see Napolitano resting? I do. Are those deformed shrimp a sign of a restored Gulf Coast? How much compensation is BP paying this year to fishermen (at least fishermen if not more people from more impacted industries)? How much is going to the resort industries where if you swim on their beaches, you get skin problems from the Corexit and oil?

On April 20, 2010, BP’s Deepwater Horizon oilrig exploded, and began the release of at least 4.9 million barrels of oil. BP then used at least 1.9 million gallons of toxic Corexit dispersants to sink the oil.

Keath Ladner, a third generation seafood processor in Hancock County, Mississippi, is also disturbed by what he is seeing.

“I’ve seen the brown shrimp catch drop by two-thirds, and so far the white shrimp have been wiped out,” Ladner told Al Jazeera. “The shrimp are immune compromised. We are finding shrimp with tumors on their heads, and are seeing this everyday.”

Made whole? More like made wholly into an ongoing catastrophe. And BP and deep water drilling keeps rolling on…

“I will not be alive to see the Gulf of Mexico recover,” said Cake, who is 72 years old. “Without funding and serious commitment, these things will not come back to pre-April 2010 levels for decades.”

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Send some money to the region through Defend New Orleans if you like.

2010 in memoriam

- RIP Jon Swift

Many people were born in 2010, and I don’t know any of them (yet). Many others died in 2010, and I knew a few of them, and others I would have liked to know. My grandfather’s last living sibling passed away in her 90s. The Conservatives lost their 10%er mailbox spam propaganda. I appeared on TV dissing Brad Wall’s opposition to the world working out a means to scale back our out of control pollution, before the Copenhagen conference failed miserably.

Many famous, and not famous people died last year. Several bloggers passed away, Jon Swift among them and I learned of his passing today by reading Miss Cellania’s year end roundup. I’d spoken with Jon (Al) by email and he had me on his generous and open blogroll. Al was right when he wrote that many live fast and die young.

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My blog suffered over 12,222 spam comments in 2010, according to an email WordPress.com sent me yesterday. It was also incorrect about world food stocks collapsing in 2010, and fortunately that won’t happen in 2011 either. The most popular post was about Stephen Colbert saying, “Sarah Palin is a Fu*king retard“, and my various posts on WikiLeaks were by far the most popular search hits. It’s been more than a year now that I’ve not had my years of blog archives online, and I miss them regularly.

2010 wasn’t all bad though, even though there were significant disasters that befell the world. The BP oil spill, the arrest of Julian Assange, and the G20 mass arrests in Toronto were low points. On a more personal level, I made several wonderful trips to the US and Mexico, got engaged, and remained healthy for another year. My father recovered from life saving heart surgery, and most of my family is well too. 2011 holds a lot of promise, and this is going to be a fascinating decade!

String of Pearls

Last week, April and I went to a play at the University of Regina, String of Pearls. It was very entertaining, and told a fictional story of women who possessed a necklace, through a connected series of unlikely events. The play’s most striking feature is that only women are on stage in the ~90 minutes.

I’m in the credits of another film, with the actress doing the monologue in this scene.

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Everyone, I think, can sympathize with this description of social interaction. I often worry if I fall into some of the more catastrophic categories.

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And back to products of the sea…
Is the Gulf of Mexico safe to be around? It’s probably not the best place to be eating from, or swimming in right now.

How Do You Know Obama Is Lying?

…His lips are moving.

The Taliban are hopelessly outnumbered. So why are more American and NATO troops needed in Afghanistan?

The troops are needed in the Gulf (of MEXICO), to finish cleaning up the mess BP and TransOcean started this Spring. It will take as long as the Iraq War to get that region back to normal, if it even can be done.

[P]people like Chef Chris Sherrill feel abandoned.

“It’s amazing how quickly the American public forgot that this was one of the worst manmade disasters in U.S. history,” he said. His wedding catering and event business in Gulf Shores, Ala., is teetering because few brides are still coming to the beach for weddings.

I’m nervous about eating any shrimp, or seafood that might come from the Gulf of Mexico. I’m giving up shrimp for the next decade, unless I find a source I trust.

The slight isn’t necessarily intentional. Walking with his girlfriend in a park in Des Moines, Iowa, Michael Gauthier said he wonders about the oil’s lingering impact on the environment, and he fears for Gulf residents.

“It’s not in your face every day so you forget about it. Who doesn’t have bills to pay and work to go to? Who has time to think about what’s going on in Louisiana?” said Gauthier, 26.

What’s going on is the continued arrival of oil washing ashore, although in lesser amounts than during the summer. Dire predictions of environmental Armageddon have yet to materialize, but there’s also no consensus on how badly the ecosystem has suffered.

At first, no one could agree on how much oil was spilling into the Gulf; now there’s disagreement over how much remains. A commission this week faulted Barack Obama’s administration for multiple missteps, including an effort to block scientists from telling the public how bad the spill could be early on.

“If someone could say it will affect this, our shrimp are going to be poisoned for 10 years, people would think this is a bigger deal maybe,” said Scott Peterson, 37, also of Des Moines.

Not Toxic: Government: Toxic

Both the American and Canadian governments have problems determining when toxic contamination of the environment is toxic.

Here’s a handy reference guide to determine if an oil spill is toxic or not.

• If oil’s earning the oil industry record profits: not toxic
• If it’s in your driveway or under a gas station, home, or school: toxic
• If it’s on a ball diamond: not toxic
• If it’s under the ocean with millions of gallons of toxic detergent attached to it: not toxic
• If that oil shows up under special lighting: toxic again
• If it’s on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico: toxic
• If it’s visible on your beach: toxic
• If oil’s on your beach but you can’t see it: not toxic
• If the spill was “contained”: not toxic
• If the spill was not “contained”: not toxic (as soon as it’s off the front page news)

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Scientists should examine the chemical and political properties of this “not toxic” oil, and determine if all oil can be converted to the not toxic variety. We owe it to our oil companies to ensure they can continue to fuel our economy and governments with the money needed to make oil not toxic.

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ADDED:

“Scientists are questioning the claim by the White House that most of the massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has largely dispersed, Channel 4 News’s science correspondent Julian Rush learns.
[...]
“There clearly remain an awful lot of oil products that are unknown at the moment,” George Crozier, Director of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama, told Channel 4 News.

He worries that the low oxygen levels in the deep waters could mean toxic compounds in the oil will have time to accumulate in the gulf ecosystem – eventually working their way into the food chain.

But Crozier, like many Gulf coast scientists accepts that the Gulf is well suited to dealing with the oil: “This is not the end of the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf has the capacity to detox this exposure. But the question is, is it going to take days, weeks, months or years,” he says.”

Hitting Snooze

On the weekend I had a four hour nap. This came about because it was terribly hot outside, (and warm inside too), and I’d been getting less than ideal levels of sleep attending concerts and a family reunion.

-River south of Moose Jaw, SK

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The American government is getting ready to let BP hit the snooze alarm on the people living in the Gulf region.

For Acy Cooper, a shrimper from Venice, La., weekly checks from BP had replaced income lost when large sections of the gulf were closed. But then his 25-boat task force shrunk to 21, to 12, to nine. And he wasn’t one of the nine.

Cooper says that leaves him in a hole; shrimp-trawling season won’t start for one week. And even then, he worries that the remaining oil could turn up in somebody’s net and ruin his business all over again.

“If we get these shrimp and they get one person sick, you know how long it will take us to come back?” Cooper said at the meeting with Mabus. To prove his point that oil was still out there, he held up a Gatorade bottle filled with oil taken from a nearby marsh. “We ain’t through the cleanup. We can’t go into recovery. It is not recovery. Somebody’s lying.”

Washington’s solution to their problem is to say that if the oil is out of sight, it’s not their problem.

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Also on the weekend I had a very interesting discussion with my uncle. He’s a respected journalist for a large newspaper, and I always learn lots from him and his stories. One quibble I’ve not been able to get out of my head though, is his idea of “sustainability”. He’s in favour of nuclear energy for this province, in part because it’s “sustainable” (even though uranium is clearly a non-renewable mineral). He’s not convinced that what happened at Chernobyl could happen here (because we have different politics over here). I think the BP oil spill and Chernobyl meltdown are perfect examples that even though safety systems can be in place to prevent or limit catastrophes on a global magnitude, they will be turned off. Just hit snooze, it’s what humans do to alerts they don’t want to hear.

Celebrate Ignorance

A former candidate for the GOP bemoans his loss at his nomination meeting, and the “irresponsible” “ignorance” of Sarah Palin. This guy doesn’t appreciate Limbaugh or Beck; it sounds like he may have a soul.

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The NY Times ran with a very irresponsible headline based on lies from the US government. The BP oil and dispersants (detergent) in the Gulf of Mexico is an uncontrolled experiment which the world has never seen before. There is not enough data at this point to conclude that there is “little additional risk” from this point on. Just because all of the oil isn’t on the surface, doesn’t mean it has disappeared. Out of sight is not out of mind, especially for the millions of people who make their living off sea life, and the millions who eat it.

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Rob Ford is a mayoral candidate in Toronto. He must not win. A man so opposed to public health and safety cannot be a positive force in Canada’s largest Ontario city.

“I can’t support bike lanes,” he starts, and it gets worse from that point!
“Roads are built for buses, cars and trucks… my heart bleeds when someone gets killed, but it’s their own fault at the end of the day.” -Toronto Star, March 8, 2007

The obvious problems with his viewpoint are too numerous to go after all of them. Most people on YouTube are naturally tackling his obese frame needing more physical activity like biking, but that’s a distraction, he could be 150lbs and still be a tragically ironic hypocrite. Roads are built for vehicles, and pedestrians too. Cyclists are vehicles, and bike lanes are a good way to encourage more people to use smaller vehicles. This reduces traffic and parking congestion so windbags like Ford can get to city meetings faster to make Toronto less safe and more expensive.

(Bi-annual cycling tests, and $200 licenses? Surely you jest? There’s no limit to the potential stupidity of Toronto’s public servants apparently.)

At least there are good people doing good things for Toronto. Some even put their money where their mouths are.

American Taxpayers for Gulf Restoration

My title is an unlikely name for a cause backed by Hollywood celebrities and musicians. That’s why it has another name, and is funded by a greenwashing effort by BP and other oil companies. “Be The One” is an oil industry effort to make the US government (AKA taxpayer) responsible for funding the clean-up of oil along the Gulf and Atlantic coast.

The US Government said it “will not rest” until the people living at the Gulf are “made whole”. The actions of BP and Transocean injured the Gulf and its people, and they are 100% responsible for the out of control gusher that flowed for months and it’s cleanup. “BP The One” will be a failed greenwashing attempt.

“Be The One” may have pulled down its sponsors page to avoid further scrutiny.
As of writing it displays:
“Not Found
Apologies, but the page you requested could not be found. Perhaps searching will help.”

Facebook groups, Desmogblog, and HuffPo are all over this. Sandra Bullock has backed out of the petition campaign.

BP Stations in UK Shut Down by Greenpeace

A stunt in the UK has shut many BP stations by blocking and turning off pumps before removing the on-switch. I suppose many of the activists will end up in jail before the criminals at BP do. The moral of the story is, if you’re going to prevent thousands of people from working, you have to do it far away in the Gulf of Mexico, and poison countless animals and people while you’re at it.