The humor is in the source of the accusation, not its accuracy.

we're just gearing up for those plutonium powered Civics driven by 20 year old girls texting and not paying attention and setting off mini holocausts all over I-95.

Your lack of charts is disturbing.

"I did not have sex with that oligopoly, Mr. Big Oil."

Don't disparage hot hockey moms

One dumb bitch and a proven political opportunist.

Oil isn't too expensive (per se... yet), but within the next century the world will undoubtedly undergo a massive economic and technological restructuring because of the various effects of peak oil. We're already seeing the effects of peak oil today. All you have to do is to look at those ads by BP and Exxon about them pouring money into bio-fuel. You'd think that if they weren't so concerned about peak oil and the future sustainability of their current oil-driven operations that they wouldn't care to publicize their funding as both a method to increase investor and consumer confidence and future-proof their business as an energy provider?

Nuclear power is tricky because of a variety of reasons. Environmentally (you can argue through many metrics) that nuclear power is just as dangerous and if not more so than oil. Oil spills are bad and can irreversibly change local habitats and communities for centuries. Nuclear waste accidents make areas uninhabitable for any life forms for millennia. And we can't just throw all of the nuclear waste into space. What happens when a rocket malfunctions and 20tons of nuclear waste come crashing down on Paris? If you want to dig into mountains, well those have a propensity to collapse overtime. Politically, it gets worse. As a foreign policy platform, nations around the world will use your platform to decrease our dependency on oil as a mechanism to build and develop their own nuclear technologies for other reasons than to power Tehran's lights at night.

Oh oh, but wait. There are other non-renewables that can be turned into diesel such as coal. However, the problem lies in efficiency. No one should argue (and anyone who does is just flat out wrong) that coal is a viable alternative in the future simply because it is just too inefficient to turn into diesel. If we literally ran out of oil tomorrow (e.g. oil @ 1k/barrel) then maybe you'd see some appreciable % of coal actively turned into diesel. Until then, it wont happen because easily mineable coal will eventually also run out.

aggo!

was watching episode 8 of America: the story of US
fascinating to remember the oil industry at the early 20th century had 6,000 deaths per year in the US and polluted all over, but helped end the widespread decimation of whales and raised the life of the poor by ridiculous amounts

what a load of pretentious crap. you're the one wiggling out of statements, as evidenced below. ... no, what's apparent is that even though you believe you're smarter than a guy like Michael Klare, you don't really know much of what you're talking about, as evidenced by your punt to "nuclear will save the day." .... it won't. ... but it IS funny that you believe my "error" was countered in your link's assumption that we can just keep dismantling nuclear weapons and continue "re-enrichment" to make up for the annual uranium shortfall. that was amusing.

there's a lot of "could" in your link from the NEA... no mention of grade, location... so as usual, critical analysis of the industry's own claim is always necessary.

http://canada.theoildrum.com/node/5744

The conventional world-wide uranium resources are estimated by the authors of the Red Book as 5.5 million tons. Out of these, 3.3 million tons are assigned to the reasonably assured category, and 2.2 million tons are associated with the not yet discovered but assumed to exist inferred resources. Our analysis shows that neither the 3.3 million tons of "assured" resources nor the 2.2 million tons of inferred resources are justified by the Red Book data and that the actual known exploitable resources are probably much smaller.

Dr. Michael Dittmar. Dr. Dittmar is a researcher with the Institute of Particle Physics of ETH Zurich, and he also works at CERN in Geneva.

that was conveniently sugar coated... so this is essentially a semantics argument presented, unsolicited, by you because you have a personal problem with me and my well-supported thesis regarding global energy.

i can't even remember now, you've moved the goalposts so effectively... what was your original beef again? that i said the technology was still very new, and they're growing more desperate to extract the crude? or merely that i said the word "unprecedented"? You ignored most every quote in my post as usual, so I'll assume, at this point, we can both agree that it IS still very new technology, that it IS far more expensive to extract, and that risks ARE being taken without proper safeguards in place (IMO, because of that desperation).


You're welcome. What's your point? It's still very new technology, and the link I provided (and you ignored) admitted such an accident was the result of sloppy safeguards amid new technology. I'll provide it again for you to ignore.

What can be addressed now is the larger issue that a flawed, risky well plan for the MC 252 well was approved by the MMS, and BP, Anadarko and Mitsui management. Similar or identical plans were undoubtedly approved and used by many operators on other wells drilled in the Gulf of Mexico. A plan that does not include enough cement to overlap the final and previous casing strings, and that does not require running a cement-bond log to ensure the integrity of the seal is a defective plan. The fact that there have not been blowouts on previous wells does not justify the approval and use of an unsafe plan.

Again, Klare sums this entire premise up most concisely:

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/52848

The Deepwater Horizon explosion, we assuredly will be told, was an unfortunate fluke: a confluence of improper management and faulty equipment. With tightened oversight, it will be said, such accidents can be averted -- and so it will be safe to go back into the deep waters again and drill for oil a mile or more beneath the ocean’s surface.

Don’t believe it. While poor oversight and faulty equipment may have played a critical role in BP’s catastrophe in the Gulf, the ultimate source of the disaster is big oil’s compulsive drive to compensate for the decline in its conventional oil reserves by seeking supplies in inherently hazardous areas -- risks be damned.

So long as this compulsion prevails, more such disasters will follow. Bet on it.

which is essentially what I said in post 294...

On a funny note, someone started a fake BP PR Twitter page and it's brilliant.

http://twitter.com/bpglobalpr

lol

wat

lol @ that twitter feed

o man that twitter feed is great

"Bonfire/Boat Party tonight in the gulf. No fatties, BYOB."

The idiot in the print shop spilled ink on all the "BP Cares" shirts.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?...ted;photovideo

Just finished video part one, very very very interesting. First hand account from a survivor

yeah, saw that when it aired...

"there was gonna be a push coming (from BP).. you know... to pick up production, pick up the pace"

"there was pressure on the crew?"

"there's always pressure, but yes the pressure was increased."

60 Minutes piece underlines exactly what's being said here... aggressive, even unprecedented circumstances amid desperate production goals.

FWIW, "Congressman says BP will cut live video feed when it attempts to plug leaking Gulf well"

No idea whether or not there's any truth to this but sounds like weasel words rather than a denial.

Bob Herbert NY Times columnist blasts Obama today:

Following BP’s Lead

BP got off much too easy with the fines it agreed to in 2007. And for some odd reason, it’s being treated much too deferentially now. This crisis has gone on for more than a month, and neither BP nor the Obama administration seems to know what to do.

No one has a handle on how much oil is gushing out of control into the gulf. No one understands the environmental impact of the hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemical dispersants that BP is injecting into the gulf. No one has any idea how far this awful stain on the environment will spread.

President Obama should have taken charge of the response to the oil spill — which he called a “potentially unprecedented” environmental calamity — from jump street. He should have called in the very best minds and operatives from the corporate and scientific worlds and imposed an emergency plan of action — to be carried out by BP and all others who might be required. Instead, after all this time, after more than a month of BP’s demonstrated incompetence, the administration continues to dither.

Incredibly, until The Times blew the whistle in an article on Monday, environmental waivers were still being offered for oil drilling in the gulf. What will it take for sanity to prevail? How many people have to die or face ruin, and how much of nature has to be despoiled before we rein in the cowboys of these runaway corporations?

....

Even as BP’s lawyers are consumed with the task of limiting the company’s liability, the administration continues to insist it has little choice but to follow the company’s lead in fighting the spill. That is dangerous nonsense.

President Obama has an obligation to make it unmistakably clear that BP’s interests are not the same as America’s interests. He needs to stand shoulder to shoulder with the people who are taking the brunt of this latest corporate outrage. The oil has now stained nearly 70 miles of the Louisiana Coast. No one can say what terrible toll the gusher is taking in the depths of the gulf. And spreading right along with the oil is a pervasive and dismaying sense of helplessness from our leaders in Washington.

Italics addes for emphasis. Herbert is only lib blasting Obama over this.

How is this not true? The goverment has a few areas of comparative advantage when it comes to crisis management, but fixing a busted oil well thousands of feet below water is not one of them. I imagine that the only sector of the country that has that kind of expertise is the oil sector and not in the federal bureaucracy.

I took it as more of there's always going to be pressure when you are weeks behind, running at millions of dollars per day. The guy even says it was typical.

-One- of the reasons I feel they've had a hard time regulating them well, also.

They could at least demand that independent experts and scientists are allowed to examine the site.

This is false. Olbermann has been blasting Obama for this too. I know other liberals are doing this as well, but I can't remember names off-hand.

Yeah I type bad. I meant to write Herbert isn't the only one but alas I type poorly and should do a better job of proof reading. I don't agree with Bob Herbert too much but generally speaking I like his columns.

BTW WSJ came out with this today. Don't know if a subscription is required to read:

BP Cites Crucial 'Mistake'

Oil giant BP PLC told congressional investigators that a decision to continue work on an oil well in the Gulf of Mexico after a test warned that something was wrong may have been a "fundamental mistake," according to a memo released by two lawmakers Tuesday.

The document describes a wide array of mistakes in the fateful final hours aboard the Deepwater Horizon—but the main revelation is that BP now says there was a clear warning sign of a "very large abnormality" in the well, but work proceeded anyway.

The rig exploded about two hours later.

The congressional memo outlines what the lawmakers say was a briefing for congressional staff by BP officials early Tuesday. Company representatives provided a preliminary report on their internal investigation of the April 20 disaster, which killed 11 workers and continues to spill thousands of barrels of oil daily into the Gulf of Mexico.


I posed a hypothetical to several people yesterday asking what they would do if they were the POTUS about this oil spill. Mostly people just talked about how ugly this thing is. Not a lot of conviction on what should be done was forthcoming.

I don't know what Obama has done to lead the effort to cap the source of the spill exactly so I'm not going to criticize at this point. The complaints seem to be that he's relying too much on BP but I don't know that personally. In the end Obama will suffer politically because there's bound to be a gazillion arm chair QBs after the fact stating what he should have done. He might want to answer some questions from the media in the near future. Supposedly he's going to do that Friday.

Heard reports yesterday that there was a 60-70% chance that new scheme for capping will work. Don't know how anybody arrived at that number. My understanding that this has never been tried in deep water before and they're not sure exactly on what they should do so I doubt if the numbers I heard are right. A lot of reports about lax government oversight and lax operation of these wells.