permaculture

[Cory Brennan <cory8570@yahoo.com>]

This is from another list, I have not done a formal verification of this 
myself but it does have some documentation to it.

***

I've been doing a little reading today. I want to share what I found a few 
miles down into the nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico on this Cinco de Mayo, 
and Marx's 192nd B-day... I'm about to go to sleep, and I wonder.... I just 
wonder ...what I will dream about... Here's a hint: Kill the industrial 
machine!

WA Post on potential ways to stop "leak": 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2010/04/30/GR2010043003064.html

Amount of oil could soar if "cap" doesn't work: WASHINGTON — In a closed-door 
briefing for members of Congress, a senior BP executive conceded Tuesday that 
the ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico could conceivably spill as much 
as 60,000 barrels a day of oil, more than 10 times the estimate of the 
current flow. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/us/05spill.html?hp

Published on Sunday, May 2, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
Was the Gulf Oil Spill an Act of War? You Betcha
by Randall Amster
"The cruel joke is that our willingness to continually flout nature's laws 
leaves us in a perpetual state of scarcity and requires a regular 
doubling-down on the very same logic that made things scarce in the first 
place."
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/05/02-0

Obama biggest recipient of BP cash 
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64420A20100505

BP Flouted US Safety Rules...By Jason Leopold...May 5, 2010 "OSHA has found 
that BP often ignored or severely delayed fixing known hazards in its 
refineries," Solis said. "There is no excuse for taking chances with people's 
lives. BP must fix the hazards now."...Also notable about the nearly two 
dozen alleged violations at Husky was that one matches allegations leveled 
against BP a year ago by a whistleblower who said the company had been 
operating its Gulf Coast drilling platform Atlantis without a majority of the 
necessary engineering and design documents, a violation of federal 
law...Atlantis is the world's largest and deepest semi-submersible oil and 
natural gas platform, located about 200 miles south of New Orleans. The 
whistleblower said BP was risking a catastrophic oil spill even worse than 
the disaster now unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon 
platform exploded and sank two weeks ago.
 http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/050510a.html

The Bush/Obama Administration is just as complicit as BP. U.S. exempted BP's 
Gulf of Mexico drilling from environmental impact study
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 5, 2010 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/04/AR2010050404118.html?hpid=topnews

Oil Companies Pay a Pittance in Penalties to Offshore Drilling Regulator
by Marian Wang, ProPublica - May 4, 2010 9:22 am EDT 
http://www.propublica.org/ion/blog/item/oil-companies-pay-a-pittance-in-penalties-to-offshore-drilling-regulator

Gulf Oil Spill Puts Spotlight on Regulator With Mixed Record
by Marian Wang, ProPublica - April 29, 2010 2:09 pm EDT As The Wall Street 
Journal reported this morning, the oil rig lacked a device—known as an 
acoustic control—that would’ve served as a safeguard of last resort [3]....So 
which regulator oversees rigs and made that decision? It was the Department 
of Interior’s Minerals Management Service, an agency that has had a spotty 
record over the past few years...“It was an agency that was very strapped in 
its human resources, and essentially the priority for the agency was on 
production rather than on regulation and oversight,” 
http://www.propublica.org/ion/blog/item/Gulf-Oil-Spill-Puts-Spotlight-on-Regulator-With-Mixed-Record-

Gulf Oil Spill Pictures: Aerial Views Show Leak's Size
news.nationalgeographic.com — The spread of oil on the water&surface is a 
main clue being used to determine the size of the leak from the Gulf of 
Mexico rig disaster. National Geographic ... 
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/04/photogalleries/100429-gulf-oil-rig-spill-worse-pictures/#gulf-oil-rig-spill-colors-show-depth_19688_600x450.jpg

Gulf Oil Spill a "Dead Zone in the Making"?
"We're wiping out critical elements of the base of the food chain of the 
Gulf," Texas Tech's Kendall said. "This is an ecotoxological experiment 
underway in one of the world’s most productive and fragile ecosystems."...As 
oil droplets spread through the water column, the crude can be fatal to 
plankton, the tiny, open-ocean creatures that many larger animals depend on, 
according to marine biologist Earle....Rescue workers can clean and treat 
oiled birds and other relatively large animals that come ashore. But "how do 
you deal with deoiling plankton?" Earle said. 
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/05/100504-science-environment-gulf-oil-spill-dead-zone/

BP Oil Spill Highlights Poor Safety Record, the Worst of Any Oil Company in 
America
Deepwaterhorizon-fire...“BP is a London-based oil company with one of the 
worst safety records of any oil company operating in America,” says Tyson 
Slocum of Public Citizen. “In just the last few years, BP has paid $485 
million in fines and settlements to the US government for environmental 
crimes, willful neglect of worker safety rules, and penalties for 
manipulating energy markets.” We speak with Slocum and with an attorney 
representing several workers who survived the blast that sank BP’s Deepwater 
Horizon rig. He’s also representing the wife of one of the 11 workers now 
presumed dead who is filing a lawsuit accusing BP of negligence. [Includes 
rush transcript] http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/5/group_bp_has_one_of_the

There Will Be Blood...Sen. Bill Nelson wants the government office infamous 
for its "sex orgies and pot parties" probed for its lax oversight of offshore 
drilling....— By Kate Sheppard...Wed May. 5, 2010 3:00 AM PDT"In the Bush 
administration, these were the guys that were having sex orgies and pot 
parties and weren't showing up for work," Nelson told reporters, referring to 
the 2008 scandal in a Colorado regional MMS office in which it came to light 
that agency employees had been partying with industry execs rather than 
collecting millions of dollars in royalties for lease deals. Nelson has asked 
the agency's inspector general to investigate, among other things, the extent 
to which the oil industry has influenced the agency’s rulemaking 
process....The disaster in the Gulf has once again cast a spotlight on MMS, a 
troubled division with a long history of regulatory negligence. Conservatives 
have dubbed the spill "Obama's Katrina." But the roots of
 the disaster, which could potentially have been prevented by enhanced safety 
measures, stretch back to the George W. Bush years. During that era, Interior 
became a revolving door haven for industry lobbyists.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/05/bp-bill-nelson-oil-spill

WEDNESDAY 5 MAY 2010...Whistleblower: BP Risks More Massive Catastrophes in 
Gulf...Friday 30 April 2010...by: Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | Report: 95 
percent of Atlantis' subsea welding records did not receive final approval, 
calling into question the integrity of thousands of crucial welds on subsea 
components that, if they were to rupture, could result in an oil spill 30 
times worse than the one that occurred after the explosion on Deepwater 
Horizon last week. 
http://www.truthout.org/whistlelower-bps-other-offshore-drilling-project-gulf-vulnerable-catastrophe59027

What If BP Were A Human Being?...Wed, 05/05/2010 - 14:00 — Bruce A. Dixon... 
Among flesh and blood humans, there are no precise analogs to what 
corporations do when they buy and sell each other. The acts of matrimony and 
cannibalism perhaps comes closest, with consenting or non-consenting spouses 
and/or victims, along with assumption of the spouse and/or victim's assets. 
Among humans, marriage is a reason to change one's name, too. Another reason 
to change one's name is simply to escape one's old record and reputation. 
Among humans, that's called assuming an alias. So our immortal, immensely 
wealthy human BP may have been married several times, perhaps several times 
at once, could be a cannibal, albeit with sometimes willing victims, and 
operates under several aliases....You don't have to look too long and hard to 
understand why a flesh and blood BP would need aliases. The objective of the 
Anglo-Persian Oil Company was to monopolize the rich oil
 resources of what is now Iran. 
http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/what-if-bp-were-human-being

Slick Operator: The BP I've known too well...Wednesday, May 5, 2010...by Greg 
Palast for Truthout.org
May 5, 2010And 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? 
http://www.gregpalast.com/slick-operator-the-bp-ive-known-too-well/#more-3650

Things Fall Apart...Tuesday 04 May 2010...by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h 
o u t Op-Ed..."..."Things fall apart," William Butler Yeats wrote. "The 
center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed 
tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned." He 
could have been talking about us, about this past week in America, about what 
happens when madness, greed and fear combine and conspire to show us what it 
looks like when the gates of Hell crack open.Asked Friday to comment on the 
document, NOAA spokesman Scott Smullen said that the additional leaks 
described were reported to the public late Wednesday night. Regarding the 
possibility of the spill becoming an order of magnitude larger, Smullen said, 
"I'm letting the document you have speak for itself."...In scientific 
circles, an order of magnitude means something is 10 times larger. In this 
case, an order of magnitude higher would mean the volume of oil coming
 from the well could be 10 times higher than the 5,000 barrels a day coming 
out now. That would mean 50,000 barrels a day, or 2.1 million gallons a 
day..." http://www.truthout.org/things-fall-apart59152