NASA satellite image of the oil slick from May 1st:
The slick is now the size of Puerto Rico and still growing.
Meanwhile the Washington Post sheds a tear for poor BP and its CEO:
On the day he got news that the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig caught fire in the Gulf of Mexico, BP chief executive Tony Hayward received a series of crisis updates in his London offices. The rig belonged to Transocean, but BP had leased it to drill an exploration well and BP bore legal responsibility for any consequences.
The grim updates were interspersed with long silences. One person there said that on several occasions, Hayward asked, “What did we do to deserve this?” {…]
But Hayward hasn’t tried to deny BP’s obligations. In his video, he vowed “steely determination” to control the well, clean up and “do everything we can to understand how this has occured and to ensure that it never occurs again.”
Yes, what did poor BP do to deserve this? It’s not like they had a history of oil rig failures and safety issues — oops, sorry. I have to take that last part back:
[Hayward’s] predecessor [as BP CEO], Lord John Browne, had been a brilliant deal maker and a friend of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s, but BP was often accused of neglecting safety precautions and adding to risks through deep cost cutting. Under Browne, who resigned after revelations about his personal life in Britain’s tabloid news media, a fatal explosion took place at BP’s Texas City refinery, leaks sprang onto the tundra from a company pipeline in northern Alaska, and a BP production platform in the Gulf of Mexico suffered structural problems that delayed its start date.
But in truth, who really matters the most in this crisis? Gulf Coast residents and native species of plants and animals, or the shareholders and senior executives of a major multinational oil company that worked the refs regulators to avoid the cost of the most up to date safety equipment at their well site?
In a letter sent last year to the Department of the Interior, BP objected to what it called “extensive, prescriptive regulations” proposed in new rules to toughen safety standards. “We believe industry’s current safety and environmental statistics demonstrate that the voluntary programs…continue to be very successful.” […]
But according to aides to Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat who has followed offshore drilling issues for years, the industry aggressively lobbied against an additional layer of protection known as an “acoustic system,” saying it was too costly. In a March 2003 report, the agency reversed course, and said that layer of protection was no longer needed.
“There was a big debate under the Bush administration whether or not to require additional oil drilling safeguards but [federal regulators] decided not to require any additional mandatory safeguards, believing the industry would be motivated to do it themselves,” Carl Pope, Chairman of the Sierra Club told ABC News.
Yes, because business that isn’t subject to governmental regulation will always be voluntarily motivated to take the least risks possible. Just ask all those extinct Wall Street firms that used to bestride the Global Finacial Industry, like Lehman Bros. and Bear Stearns, about how risk taking is a non-starter when Federal Regulators just get out of their way.
I’m sure, this is all good news for Republicans and their policies of de-regulation and lower corporate taxation.
And I’m not kidding about that. Watch in the weeks ahead as the GOP used this oil spill to blame Obama, the Democrats and Big Guvmint rather than where the fault really lies: on the politicians, mostly Republican but also many conservative Democrats, who allowed massive de-regulation of industries from finance to Big Oil to Big Pharma to Food manufacturers to occur.
Republican policies have made us less safe in every way imaginable. But that’s not how our fair and balanced news organizations will report it (and I don’t mean just Fox News). They’ll all get in line, with a few exceptions, to blame President Obama and the Democrats for these catastrophic failures caused by Republican control of our Government for most of the past decade. Just watch and see.
