Gulf residents outraged by BP CEO's yacht outing

yep, and when the Feds cough up money, so do we as taxpayers.
 
TXgolfer said:
I just believe right is right......I don't like that we should have to pay some of it.....but technically the people who inspected the well are our employees. When your employees screw up it's time to get out the checkbook. I had to do it some myself being in business. BP and the Feds are both at fault here and both should be coughing up money to pay.
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Unless they have an agenda. Then I won't pay. Come on, a floating oil rig in hurricane alley? Something fishy about that.
 
Foxrac said:
I disagree and I'm only blame on BP.
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I will clairify my stance for you. BP is fully responsible for the oil leaking out. I'm not going to disagree with you on that. But the feds are responsible for not preparing in case BP was unsuccessful is stopping it. The feds should have had everthing in place to stop as much oil as possible from reaching our shores. They could have claimed all the oil they collected and used the money from it to pay for the cleanup.
 
AndyE9503 said:
I will clairify my stance for you. BP is fully responsible for the oil leaking out. I'm not going to disagree with you on that. But the feds are responsible for not preparing in case BP was unsuccessful is stopping it. The feds should have had everthing in place to stop as much oil as possible from reaching our shores. They could have claimed all the oil they collected and used the money from it to pay for the cleanup.
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Oh ok, I'm expect BP to use tools to stop the oil spill as soon as possible since it is their responsible to do it and I found some news that federal should kick BP out and let federal to handle the oil spill, in case if BP is unable to stop the oil spill.
 
kokonut said:
Hurricanes Destroyed 109 Oil Platforms: US Government
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Whoops. I didn't see this post the first time.
Jeez, it doesn't say much in the link, other than there was no significant oil spill. Somehow I find that hard to believe. And who paid to repair the damaged rigs, the taxpayers? It would be grossly unfair to build a floating rig in hurricane alley with assurances it will be fiscally taken care of should any accidents happen.
And btw, a few weeks ago I saw a special on tv that showed one of the most environmentally friendly oil rigs, one of the cleanest, in a sort of tour. Unfortunately the jellyfish in the area were contaminated with oil, and sea turtles in turn eat the jellyfish and die because of it. The oil conglomerates make hundreds of billions of dollars in profit, and yet they whine when asked to pay for damages. (As an example, ExxonMobile completed just 10% of claims in 20 years.) Will we have deja vu? I bet we will.
 
kokonut said:
Yeah, and Obama waited some 50+ days til skimmers were used instead of during the first week of the spill. As Obama said, "The buck stops with me." Yeah, just give him a few months to think it over first.

Fault lies with the Federal govt and oil companies for many years. But once an environmental disaster happens on a president's watch and he's slow with the response, he owns it. It'll be his albatross around his neck for years to come.
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got anything new to say?
 
kokonut said:
So, the better option is to do nothing and let most of the oil reach the shore line? Which is easier? Clean up the oil as it washes ashore or suck up much of the oil as possible while it's floating on and just below the surface of the water?
Skimming does work. What doesn't help is to delay the skimming process. Waiting 60 days isn't the answer either.
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do nothing?

what about cap? junk shot? cutting the pipe? blowout valve? deep-water drilling?
 
TXgolfer said:
And inspected under obama's.....it even won an award for safety last year.
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Obama counts on his departments to hold their responsibilities to fullest extent. Now he knows this agency is corrupted and misguided. that's why he split it in half to avoid conflict of interest.

smart move. smart man.
 
TXgolfer said:
It's going better......Too bad obama turned down the Dutch early. We might have a handle on this problem. Afterall they are experts.

Oil collection rate increasing, Allen says - UPI.com
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still clinging on Dutch solution as mother of all solution despite of fact that BP did not push for it? demanded for it? After all - BP is footing the bill. BP has heavyweight lobbyists in Congress. If they wanted Dutch skimmers, they can easily get it in just 3 days after the explosion. :hmm:
 
TXgolfer said:
I am saying that.....At least part of the bill. It's unpopular. I hate paying taxes myself. But wrong is wrong. Just like cities have to pay when building inspectors mess up (at least in TX) and home inspectors have to pay when they miss something. The Feds should have to pay for botching the inspection. Feds should also have to pay for trusting the culprit rather than taking immediate action. Now, in a perfect world, we would be able to make the inspectors and obama pay. But in the U.S. we can't sue our "leaders" for their mistakes. So yeah the taxpayers should have to pay part of this bill. It is the price we pay for electing inept "leaders". Perhaps we should vote more carefully next time.
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inept leaders? So you mean the past Presidents have been inept for not seeing this and not fixing this? We've had some nasty oil spills in the past and yet..... nothing has been done?

Obama did something - by splitting agency in half. ordering full-scale investigation. holding them accountable. passing the oil liability bills. Enough is Enough.
 
What a surprise; the topic has spiraled into another Obama discussion. :roll:
 
TXgolfer said:
But did he? :hmm:
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yes. Posted several articles about it. So you're knowingly ignoring it :)

Here's a new article for you - Epic Fail – BP, MMS, Bush, Obama

Back in April, President Obama said, "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."

I agreed with the President when he said these words. I also thought oil rigs were technologically advanced, safe, and if an accident did occur, the government and the oil companies could quickly rectify the situation. I assumed they were competent, had learned from past problems, and the risks were manageable.

Big mistake. Epic. I was wrong. It turns out nobody knows how to deal with a deep-sea oil leak. Nobody. It's incredible to me that it could be so, but we're all seeing it play out right in front of our eyes.

I should know better by now than to ever assume the government is competent at anything, but the oil companies, in this case BP, it's in their economic interest to be competent, to have contingency plans in place for potential disasters. Big oil companies make tons of money doing their jobs competently. They don't want disasters to happen. That is very bad for them. This oil spill in the Gulf may bankrupt BP, not that I really care about that. If they go bankrupt, so be it. Let's bleed them dry. They richly deserve it, but you'd think BP would care about BP going bankrupt, and they would take all necessary safety precautions to insure that would never happen.

But they didn't.

And the government watchdog, the Minerals Management Service (MMS), a division of the Department of the Interior, was completely asleep at the switch. They served as little more than a rubber stamp for the oil companies. That's how it was during the Bush years, and that's how it is in the Obama years. Obama came into office and immediately appointed Ken Salazar as the head of the Interior Department. Salazar was supposed to clean up the cozy and corrupt relationship between MMS and Big Oil.

But he didn't.

Instead, the rubber stamp MMS kept right on rubber stamping. The Deepwater Horizon oil rig, the one that exploded, sank, and caused the worst oil-related environmental disaster in American history (I think we're up to the equivalent of eight Exxon Valdez's and counting), was put into production on Salazar's watch, on Obama's watch.

A Rolling Stone expose describes the situation. I wouldn't normally use Rolling Stone as a source, because they have their own agenda and are generally a bunch of drama queens, but there is too much in this story that rings true. It illustrates how our government was saying one thing publicly, but in reality doing something entirely different:
"The oil companies were running MMS during those [Bush] years," Bobby Maxwell, a former top auditor with the agency, told Rolling Stone last year. "Whatever they wanted, they got. Nothing was being enforced across the board at MMS." .....
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The rubber stamp nature of the MMS is quite evident in BP's bogus paperwork for the Deepwater Horizon oil rig:
Nowhere was the absurdity of the policy more evident than in the application that BP submitted for its Deepwater Horizon well only two months after Obama took office. BP claims that a spill is "unlikely" and states that it anticipates "no adverse impacts" to endangered wildlife or fisheries. Should a spill occur, it says, "no significant adverse impacts are expected" for the region's beaches, wetlands and coastal nesting birds. The company, noting that such elements are "not required" as part of the application, contains no scenario for a potential blowout, and no site-specific plan to respond to a spill. Instead, it cites an Oil Spill Response Plan that it had prepared for the entire Gulf region. Among the sensitive species BP anticipates protecting in the semitropical Gulf? "Walruses" and other cold-water mammals, including sea otters and sea lions. The mistake appears to be the result of a sloppy cut-and-paste job from BP's drilling plans for the Arctic. Even worse: Among the "primary equipment providers" for "rapid deployment of spill response resources," BP inexplicably provides the Web address of a Japanese home-shopping network. Such glaring errors expose the 582-page response "plan" as nothing more than a paperwork exercise. "It was clear that nobody read it," says Ruch, who represents government scientists.

"This response plan is not worth the paper it is written on," said Rick Steiner, a retired professor of marine science at the University of Alaska who helped lead the scientific response to the Valdez disaster. "Incredibly, this voluminous document never once discusses how to stop a deepwater blowout."

Scientists like Steiner had urgently tried to alert Obama to the depth of the rot at MMS. "I talked to the transition team," Steiner says. "I told them that MMS was a disaster and needed to be seriously reformed." A top-to-bottom restructuring of MMS didn't require anything more than Ken Salazar's will: The agency only exists by order of the Interior secretary. "He had full authority to change anything he wanted," says Rep. Issa, a longtime critic of MMS. "He didn't use it." Even though Salazar knew that the environmental risks of offshore drilling had been covered up under Bush, he failed to order new assessments. "They could have said, 'We cannot conclude there won't be significant impacts from drilling until we redo those reviews,'" says Brendan Cummings, senior counsel for the Center for Biological Diversity. "But the oil industry would have cried foul. And what we've seen with Salazar is that when the oil industry squeaks, he retreats."
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MMS approved the Deepwater Horizon rig in less than a month after BP submitted the application. There are indications BP cut corners on the rig:
Even worse, the "moratorium" on drilling announced by the president does little to prevent future disasters. The ban halts exploratory drilling at only 33 deepwater operations, shutting down less than one percent of the total wells in the Gulf. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, the Cabinet-level official appointed by Obama to rein in the oil industry, boasts that "the moratorium is not a moratorium that will affect production" – which continues at 5,106 wells in the Gulf, including 591 in deep water.

Most troubling of all, the government has allowed BP to continue deep-sea production at its Atlantis rig – one of the world's largest oil platforms. Capable of drawing 200,000 barrels a day from the seafloor, Atlantis is located only 150 miles off the coast of Louisiana, in waters nearly 2,000 feet deeper than BP drilled at Deepwater Horizon. According to congressional documents, the platform lacks required engineering certification for as much as 90 percent of its subsea components – a flaw that internal BP documents reveal could lead to "catastrophic" errors. In a May 19th letter to Salazar, 26 congressmen called for the rig to be shut down immediately. "We are very concerned," they wrote, "that the tragedy at Deepwater Horizon could foreshadow an accident at BP Atlantis."
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.....and he's out there in his yacht.... wondering where he get the gas for yacht from...
 
saywhatkid said:
What a surprise; the topic has spiraled into another Obama discussion. :roll:
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Right from the beginning I asked for this not to turn into a thread about Obama..guess I failed.
 
shel90 said:
Right from the beginning I asked for this not to turn into a thread about Obama..guess I failed.
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Amen. As long as he lives, there will be efforts to bash him for every problem available. I came to this thread to get away from it, but bitching about the big "O" follows like a cloud of flies.
 
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