Regulate, Baby, Regulate

This article clearly demonstrates the need for more regulation of the oil industry and others.

Tankers run aground, wells blow out, pipes burst. It shouldn’t happen but it does. And when it does, thename [sic] of the game is containment. Both in Alaska, when the Exxon Valdez grounded, and in the Gulf over a week ago, when the Deepwater Horizon platform blew, it was British Petroleum that was charged with carrying out the Oil Spill Response Plans ("OSRP") which the company itself drafted and filed with the government.

What’s so insane, when I look over that sickening slick moving toward the Delta, is that containing spilled oil is really quite simple and easy. And from my investigation, BP has figured out a very low cost way to prepare for this task: BP lies. BP prevaricates, BP fabricates and BP obfuscates.

That’s because responding to a spill may be easy and simple, but not at all cheap. And BP is cheap. Deadly cheap.

To contain a spill, the main thing you need is a lot of rubber, long skirts of it called "boom." Quickly surround a spill or leak or burst, then pump it out into skimmers or disperse it, sink it or burn it. Simple.

But there’s one thing about the rubber skirts: you’ve got to have lots of it at the ready, with crews on standby in helicopters and on containment barges ready to roll. They have to be in place round the clock, all the time, just like a fire department; even when all is operating A-OK. Because rapid response is the key. In Alaska, that was BP’s job, as principal owner of the pipeline consortium Alyeska. It is, as well, BP’s job in the Gulf, as principal lessee of the deepwater oil concession.

Before the Exxon Valdez grounding, BP’s Alyeska group claimed it had these full-time oil spill response crews. Alyeska had hired Alaskan Natives, trained them to drop from helicopters into the freezing water and set boom in case of emergency. Alyeska also certified in writing that a containment barge with equipment was within five hours sailing of any point in the Prince William Sound. Alyeska also told the state and federal government it had plenty of boom and equipment cached on Bligh Island.

But it was all a lie. On that March night in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef in the Prince William Sound, the BP group had, in fact, not a lick of boom there. And Alyeska had fired the Natives who had manned the full-time response teams, replacing them with phantom crews, lists of untrained employees with no idea how to control a spill. And that containment barge at the ready was, in fact, laid up in a drydock in Cordova, locked under ice, 12 hours away.

As a result, the oil from the Exxon Valdez, which could have and should have been contained around the ship, spread out in a sludge tide that wrecked 1,200 miles of shoreline.

And here we go again. Valdez goes Cajun.

BP’s CEO Tony Hayward reportedly asked, "What the hell did we do to deserve this?"

It’s what you didn’t do, Mr. Hayward. Where was BP’s containment barge and response crew? Why was the containment boom laid so damn late, too late and too little? Why is it that the US Navy is hauling in 12 miles of rubber boom and fielding seven skimmers, instead of BP?

Last year, CEO Hayward boasted that, despite increased oil production in exotic deep waters, he had cut BP’s costs by an extra one billion dollars a year. Now we know how he did it.

As chance would have it, I was meeting last week with Louisiana lawyer Daniel Becnel Jr. when word came in of the platform explosion. Daniel represents oil workers on those platforms; now he’ll represent their bereaved families. The Coast Guard called him. They had found the emergency evacuation capsule floating in the sea and were afraid to open it and disturb the cooked bodies.

I wonder if BP painted the capsule green, like they paint their gas stations.

Becnel, yesterday by phone from his office from the town of Reserve, LA, said the spill response crews were told they weren’t needed because the company had already sealed the well. Like everything else from BP mouthpieces, it was a lie.

In the end, this is bigger than BP and its policy of cheaping-out and skiving the rules. This is about the anti-regulatory mania which has infected the American body politic. While the "tea baggers" are simply its extreme expression, US politicians of all stripes love to attack "the little bureaucrat with the fat rule book." It began with Ronald Reagan and was promoted, most vociferously, by Bill Clinton and the head of Clinton’s de-regulation committee, one Al Gore.

Americans want government off our backs … that is, until a folding crib crushes the skull of our baby; Toyota accelerators speed us to our death; banks blow our savings on gambling sprees; and crude oil smothers the Mississippi.

Then, suddenly, it’s, "where was hell was the Government!" Why didn’t the government do something to stop it?…

Inserted from <Alternet>

Let me start with my disagreement.  The author is a cleanup expert, and when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  The methods he said BP should have employed are not enough.  Capping the leaks is equally critical.  Even if BP had done everything he said they should have done, just one storm would leave the booms in a tangled mess.

Other than that, everything he said is dead-bang on target, exposing BP’s greed and lies over both incidents.  I had been unaware that BP was involved in the Exxon Valdez cleanup, so I decided to dig deeper into this companies background, knowing in part what I would find.

…Since the 1908 discovery of oil in present-day Iran, British Petroleum has been a leading player in the global energy market. The London-based multinational is the world’s third-largest energy company, behind Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell. Officially incorporated in 1909 as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, BP turned 100 years old in 2009.

History

After years of exploration, adventurer William Knox D’Arcy discovered oil in Persia (now Iran) in 1908. This was the first oil discovery in the Middle East. In April 1909, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was incorporated. This company was the predecessor of BP.

Controversy

In 1935, after Persia became Iran, the company renamed itself Anglo-Iranian Oil. After World War II, the company became the focus of discontent among Iranians, who charged that the dividends they received from oil production were too small. In 1951, under the leadership of Mohammed Mossadeq, Iran nationalized its oil industry. This led to a 1953 coup that resulted in Mossadeq’s overthrow. The British government and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency were implicated in the coup, which some critics charged was undertaken in part to protect Anglo-Iranian Oil’s profits in the region. By 1954, Anglo-Iranian Oil was renamed British Petroleum and resumed oil production in Iran. BP continued its Iranian operations until 1979, when the regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini confiscated the company’s assets in Iran… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <ehow.com>

Stop and think about this.  The Iran hostage crisis, the Iran-Iraq war (in which Rumsfeld brokered the deal in which Saddam Hussein first acquired chemical weapons), the Iran-Contra scandal, and the present day impasse between the US and Iran over nuclear weapons would never have happened, had not the US and the UK joined to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected government and install a notoriously brutal dictator in its place, all to protect the profits of one damn corporation.

Quite frankly, BP’s greed had caused us more than enough grief, especially considering that they don’t pay a dime in US taxes.

No cap for BP!  And remember…

Corporations are not people!  Money is not speech!