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The story of the failure of the leaders of the world energy supply is far from over, unless this is The EndSubmitted by Norm Roulet on Fri, 05/14/2010 - 15:37.
Today President Obama finally started talking straight to the world about some aspects of the environmental disaster taking place now in the Gulf of Mexico, polluting his nation and economy, putting his entire legacy and career and the global economy in jeopardy. As reported by CBS - video above:
A report on NPR this morning finds: "The amount of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico may be at least 10 times the size of official estimates" - "the amount of material spewing from the pipe could range from 56,000 barrels to 84,000 barrels a day" - "We're talking more than a factor-of-10 difference between what I calculate and the number that's being thrown around" - "I would peg it at around 20,000 to 100,000 barrels per day" - the current estimate of 5,000 barrels a day "almost certainly incorrect" - this is a spill of unprecedented proportions - "It would just take a few days, at most a week, for it to exceed the Exxon Valdez's record" - BP disputed these figures.... "We've said all along that there's no way to estimate the flow coming out of the pipe accurately" said Bill Salvin, a BP spokesman.
There is also an important article in the New York Times today - Size of Oil Spill Underestimated, Scientists Say - further highlighting deception and/or incompetency by US and global government, scientific and corporate leaders about the Gulf Oil crisis, and so everything else that matters on Earth. Just reading the words of BP oil executives, US government officials and scientists about the scope of this disaster and our still-poor global response astounds me - "the leak could “easily be four or five times” the government estimate" - “The government has a responsibility to get good numbers” Dr. MacDonald said “If it’s beyond their technical capability, the whole world is ready to help them” - “There’s just no way to measure it,” Kent Wells, a BP senior vice president, said in a recent briefing - “The government and BP are calling the shots, so I will have to respect their judgment,” Dr. Camilli said - BP says "“the estimated rate of flow would not affect either the direction or scale of our response" - small organization called SkyTruth, which uses satellite images to monitor environmental problems, published an estimate on April 27 suggesting that the flow rate had to be at least 5,000 barrels a day, and probably several times that - BP later acknowledged to Congress that the worst case, if the leak accelerated, would be 60,000 barrels a day, a flow rate that would dump a plume the size of the Exxon Valdez spill into the gulf every four days. BP’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, has estimated that the reservoir tapped by the out-of-control well holds at least 50 million barrels of oil - Scientists said that the size of the spill was directly related to the amount of damage it would do in the ocean and onshore, and that calculating it accurately was important for that reason. There are certainly more reasons for government and corporate leaders to mislead citizens about the BP disaster than to tell the truth - the truth hurts and showcases the failure of our government and industry geniuses to protect the planet and all life here, disgracing some of the richest and most powerful people on Earth, ever in history, and most citizens of the "developed" nations here. This age of disgrace is just beginning. Day 1, year 1 PD... Post Deepwater... began on 4/20/2010 AD, and that date changes everything for mankind going forward. Time to connect all our world leaders together with their polluting friends, and dismantle their entire world energy supply system, to bring social and environmental justice to all, and develop the means to save our planet - we all know know who are all failures in doing that now.... these cowards destroying Earth... starting with those burning coal, starting in the United States, Russia, China, India and Europe. When we talk about pollution in the Gulf of Mexico, all people who over-consume natural resources need to realize is it is our fault, and think more about the pollution causes in our own backyards... which our government and corporate leaders certainly don't want citizens to think about.
At least the oil spilling from the pipeline in the gulf of Mexico is "natural" - Earth's oil and gases. The pollution spewed into the air by coal burning around Cleveland and the world spills entirely man-made biohazards into the air, and that is entirely the choice of man, and so far worse than just spilling the oily blood of "god", to so many men. Nobody cares about the pollution killing my family in Cleveland - our "leaders" say that is totally sustainable - so it is hard to care about the oil spilling into the Gulf... that is just a new form of natural environmental adjustment we the people must now make, as the warm and comfortable baby-boomers play their end game to global human extinction... our old leaders who made this mess are largely toxified, dying mutants, so they don't care what they leave behind. Being over a mile beneath the sea, Gulf oil spill deceptions seem easy to hide from the world, as only a few people have access to the very specific technologies monitoring the science behind this disaster, and its impact on the world. This disaster is only being seen on mile-deep industrial closed-circuit robotic TV and mile high industrial closed-circuit satellite TV. The ecological disaster on the waters and on the beaches, where life-forms are dying, is leading to killing the economies of many parts of the world impacting 1,000,000s of people, which shall shock a fatally flawed global financial and trade system already failing. That disaster shall be front-page news soon. How most global citizens will experience this disaster shall be with widespread inflation, joblessness and more recession, and our real stories of suffering shall not be told on industry closed-circuit broadcast TV, in any form. BP can easily hide what they know, and so may the government. It is time for the citizens of the world to demand accountability from all the government leaders, executives and employees of the companies and government agencies now harming the Earth, and prosecute those responsible to the fullest extent of any global laws of any nations impacted by this disaster - where the tarballs and toxins roam - and that will be many nations on Earth. This is not just the beginning of an environmental crisis, but the acceleration of a global economic meltdown with the added fuel of man-made unnatural disaster, worse than anything Mother Nature ever threw at humans. We have pushed entirely irresponsible human activity on Earth beyond what is sustainable and must react with brutal environmental justice, sending those responsible to prison. No second strikes for polluters. Engineers, executives, manufacturers, scientists, reporters, editors, and government officials who deceive the public about pollution must go to prison for fraud, for as long as any harmed nation's laws allow. They have wonderful prisons in Cuba, surely to be harmed by the very non-Cuban BP Deepwater disaster. At issue ahead must be realignment of leadership around the proper stewardship of the existing world's energy supply, for which current government and corporate leadership like at BP has proved to be incompetent. Of course, BP is now bankrupt, as no corporate shell games and insurance policies may protect an entity from being liquidated to pay for such a failure. Same for Halliburton, Transocean and the other firms sharing responsibility for this - their executives should spend the rest of their days doing hard labor for this. Who else is proving to be incompetent, in the big general systems world energy supply scheme of things? Most leaders on Earth. I don't see global leaders now calling for environmental justice and global action, even as I believe this disaster is in International water. No global leaders want to do the hard work of fixing these real problems - they are tools for failed industry, looking for answers from the past. To solve the problems caused by our failed current leadership, now standing naked and grotesque in their receding red tide of baby-busting shame and stupidity, a young new wave of global citizens must work as one world of new leaders, rejecting all past failed leaders and their failed leadership and structures, and elect entirely new champions for global environmental justice for the world for the future. This must be a global movement not via Facebook, not seen through Microsoft Windows, not profiting Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, but rather an open information revolution rejecting our industrial past and all its leaders offer, being the rampant destruction of all good on Earth, to sate the personal greed of few. Think about the world they have created and the Earth they have destroyed, and what you as new leaders for the future must do to manage the global energy mess, now that all our global leaders have failed, and are deceiving us about the damages, rather than taking responsibility and action. The story of the failure of the leaders of the world energy supply is far from over, unless we accept that this is The End. If so, what a pathetic conclusion...
World Energy Supply ?subject=World%20Energy%20Supply%20on%20Earth:%20A%20Graphic%20Look%20at%20the%20State%20of%20the%20World&body=http://www.theglobaleducationproject.org/earth/energy-supply.php | Print version | Bookmark it
World Reserves of Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas
Coal has been used since the industrial revolution but only in the last 100 years have huge quantities of oil and gas been removed from underground reservoirs. Oil and gas are used as fuel energy in combustion engines and as "feed stock" for other industries — raw materials for the manufacture of other chemicals, such as plastics and agricultural fertilizer. There is a limited amount of fossil fuel. It is not "renewable" and there is no known way to make more. The energy stored in oil is significantly greater than in any other currently available source. There is no other equivalently cheap and powerful energy available from nuclear energy, natural gas, solar power, wind power, hydrogen, biomass or coal.
Which Regions Use How Much of Which Natural Energy Resource?For Heat, Electricity, Transportation, Agriculture, Industry
Half of all Americans live within 30 miles of a coal-burning power plant "...which, in addition to mercury, emit more than 361,000 tons of other toxins including vanadium, barium, zinc, lead, chromium, arsenic, nickel, hydrogen fluoride, hydrochloric acid, ammonia and selenium." 1 How and When Were the Limits of Oil Reserves Discovered?Even though the early oilmen worked with primitive exploration techniques, the peak year for discoveries of giant oil fields (ultimate recovery of 500 mbbl oil or more) in the U.S. was 1930—in the world, 1962. 80% of the oil produced in 1995 was found before 1973. We now find one barrel for every four we consume. In the last 20 years, only three fields (in Norway, Columbia and Brazil) have been found with more than one billion barrels each. None produce more than 200,000 barrels a day. From 1990 to 2000 a total of 42 billion barrels of new reserves were discovered. In the same period the world consumed 250 billion barrels.
"The rig count over the last 12 years has reached bottom. This is not because of low oil price. The oil companies are not going to keep rigs employed to drill dry holes. They know it but are unable ... to admit it. The great merger mania is nothing more than a scaling down of a dying industry in recognition that 90% of global conventional oil has already been found." (Goldman Sachs - August 1999) How Much Oil is the World Going to Want?According to a recent report by the the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), over the next 20 years US energy demands are predicted to increase by 62% for natural gas, 33% for oil and 45% for electricity. "America faces a major energy supply crisis over the next two decades."2 "By some estimates, there will be an average of two percent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead, along with, conservatively, a three percent natural decline in production from existing reserves"..."That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. This is equivalent to more than six Saudi Arabias of today's size." -- Dick Cheney (as CEO of the world's largest oil services company, Halliburton) in a 1999 speech to the International Petroleum Institute in London. How Much Oil is There? How Long Will it Last?Geologists and engineers illustrate the rise, peak and decline of oil. Oil companies and governments draw a rising graph, not showing peak or decline. Contemporary geological knowledge, backdated reserve figures and accurate production histories generate convincing evidence suggesting that the peak of all liquid hydrocarbons comes around 2010. Economic development and prosperity over the past century has been built on cheap and abundant oil-based energy. After the production peak, as supplies decline and prices rise, (with rising populations and continued industrial development the demand for oil will continue to increase ) the world will have to use less fossil fuel or find alternate sources of energy. Possible choices include gas, non-conventional oil and gas, nuclear power, hydro-electricity, wind, tide, solar, geothermal, biomass, hydrogen and over unity energy sources. None of the known alternatives will be as cheap, convenient or as energy rich as oil. How Important is Peak Oil?Industrial civilization, economic growth and the life styles of the developed world are dependent on inexpensive oil and gas. The energy and products from cheap oil have made possible the major changes in globalized industrial civilization in the last 100 years, including its huge impact on indigenous cultures and planetary ecosystems.
Affordable food production by industrial agriculture needs inexpensive natural gas and oil inputs for: fertilizers, pesticides, industrial machinery, planting, cultivating, harvesting, processing, packaging, transportation and marketing. Sources Energy Supply Text Sources: Chrisitan Science Monitor, "In Bid to Cut Mercury, US Lets Other Toxins Through", www.csmonitor.com/2005/0331/p13s01-sten.html; 2. Energy Information Administration, www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/index.html; References: BP Statistical Review of World Energy, www.bp.com; www.currentconcerns.ch; www.dieoff.org; www.hubbertpeak.com; Association for the Study of Peak Oil, www.peakoil.net; The 'Oil & Gas Journal, http://ogj.pennnet.com/home.cfmwww.greatchange.org
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AS HE SHOULD BE
The Political Gangster
I'm glad the President is stepping up maybe people will be more careful and concerned about their jobs and America's safety.
People care about jobs in year 1 Post Deepwater, that's for sure
People care about jobs, that's for sure... and we can't all be basketball players, and none of us may be fisherman in many areas of the gulf coast any more.
What other jobs are already lost because of this, and where?
I'll be watching the data... economic development from 01/01/00 PD onward...!
People care about jobs in year 1 Post Deepwater, that's for sure
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Thank you Norm
The fallout from this ecological disaster is beyond comprehension. Thank you for taking the time to put it in perspective. It may cause extinctions--it will definitely impact everyone of us. It's unreal. There is no realistic clean up.
most excellent, Norm
Thank you. I am glad Obama is angry.
This makes me ashamed to be lumped into the US consumption grouping. I don't see anyway out of this mess created in the Gulf in terms of a cleanup. It is so massive and devastating.
Progress on leak containment being made, federal officials say
Gulf oil spill: Progress on leak containment being made, federal officials say
Federal officials said Sunday that engineers have succeeded in vacuuming up some of the oil that has been leaking from the Deepwater Horizon's drilling well, the first progress in containing the BP spill since the Horizon exploded and sank last month.
The apparent success, announced by the Unified Area Command for spill response, came overnight. Undersea robots inserted a four-inch pipe into the Horizon well's "riser," which is leaking several thousand barrels of oil a day into the gulf.
The so-called insertion tube siphoned oil from the well up to the ocean surface 5,000 feet above and into the belly of the drill ship Discoverer Enterprise. Natural gas that flowed up with the oil was burned aboard the ship, officials said.
Efforts to insert the tube had failed on Friday and Saturday. Even Sunday's success was interrupted when the tube became dislodged, officials said, but engineers subsequently reinserted it.
Officials offered no immediate estimate of how much oil has been diverted so far, except to say "some" oil and gas had made it to the ship. BP had previously expressed hope that the tube tactic could divert up to three-fourths of the leak while engineers continue working to plug the well permanently.
"While not collecting all of the leaking oil, this tool is an important step in reducing the amount of oil being released into Gulf [of Mexico] waters," the command center said in a news release.
-- Jim Tankersley in Houston
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This is one of those things
This is one of those things that are just too awful to keep on top of, especially since the devastation has yet to be realized. So thanks for getting the latest out Norm.
I've spent lots of time in the Gulf area
I lived for years in the Gulf area and on the Florida coast and have seen the devastation caused to the ecosystem there by "safe" oil exploration - it has been a toxic mess for decades - now it is a disaster area beyond comprehension. I really care about this - it is like losing a home.
We'll see how this plays out, in coming months and years - on the bright side, they are doing some amazing things with technology to address this, a mile beneath the sea and high above, and this is raising environmental awareness worldwide, and that is promising for the world, I will say.
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