BP oil spill
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- benfal990
So they won?
- georgesIII0
I couldn't watch more than 20 sec,
makes me wanna puke,
seriously, you're letting them have a free pass like this, when they destroyed the ecosystem for the next 100years,
fuck!!
- lowimpakt0
"As much as 1 million times the normal level of methane gas has been found in some regions near the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, enough to potentially deplete oxygen and create a dead zone, U.S. scientists said on Tuesday."
- Continuity0
Seems pretty relevant.
- ewww. cheesy shit. how do some people have the balls to do this kind of crap.VectorMasked
- A hippie metal band. Interesting mix.WrappedInBooks
- TheBlueOne0
".. if we all looked to ourselves and adjusted ourselves / lives... I think we could make a dramatic change in overall consumption of our natural resources..."
-PonyBoyNo. No. No. All this is is a continuation in the magical beliefs of libertarian free market thinking. That "individual effort" is what makes us super special snowflakes. While individuals do matter, the whole premise of consumption/consumer markets (which you brought up by saying the problem is people consuming) is atomizing individuals and solving their independent little worries with mass market consumerism. The underlying basis of the entire psychology is the atomization of the individual - problems can only be solved by individual effort, reinforcing the value of the self vs. the group, while at the same re-enforcing the actual powerlessness of individuals.
For e.g. look at sports & sports marketing. It sells these figures as unique incredible athletes who succeed by massive individual effort and application of will - which is 95% bullshit. Yes, individuals do rise up, and application of will and character matter - but all these athlete have a huge million dollar support structure. Coaches, sports science, team building, administrative structures.
The average individual athlete - the guy cut from college ball but still putting in huge efforts indiviually to succeed most likely won't not because he's lacking willpower but he is lacking the access to the support structure.
But the myth is all focused on the individual effort and not on the system supporting it, which does most of the heavy lifting.
Humans are social creatures, our gifts & efforts are best realized within a group structure. We survived and bested nature NOT because their were some rare individuals who beat it, but we banded together and adapted our own social orders to make our chances in different environments more successful.
Our ability to create and adjust social orders in different hierarchies is our #1 human technology. The Spartans bested the other Greeks on the battlefield because of their social order, not technology. The US bested the Soviets because of social order, not technology. Any coach will tell you that he'll take the ordered motivated team with 2nd rate equipment over a bunch of indiviual stars with the latest endorsement deals. It's not the shoes. It's not the individual effort. It's the social structure. It's Google/Apple structure vs. Microsoft.
Everything in modern US consumer / political / industrial control culture is set up to reinforce and sell you on the idea that group effort is, if not ineffectual, is something odd and outside the norm. It sells you acceptable rebellion models that have no power anymore, symbols divorced from power (nice mohawk and rave lights there. Is that a Bukowski book under your arm. Very radical.) It's when groups form and radicalize that power structures take notice and are forced to adapt.
Sure Martin Luther King was a great man, but if he stood alone preaching without masses of individuals organizing in protest, and on the fringe some groups trying to take on the use of violence (always a right the State likes to hold for itself) in the effort of social change, then forget it, Civil Rights wouldn't have happened.
So to sit there and say "It's up to you, Joe Consumer to stop driving your humvee and filling up with gas" is just total bullshit. It's like telling individual Southerners in 1870 - "It's up to you to be nice to them balck folk". Sounds good, it happened. Didn't change jack shit. It took people marching in streets and guys dressed up in black carrying AK-47s in Harlem, Detroit, LA to wake up the power structure. It's a systemic problem that takes a group approach and a group realization and the ability of people to organize en masse to overcome. But the powers that be do not want organized masses, and use the soft power of social control & markets to make the idea of organized system criticism as taboo.
Think about it. It's what evolutionary science tells us. It's what behavioral economics is starting to tell us. It's what sociology and anthropology and even our own history tells us.
Not what people in power and the whole neo-liberal free market bullshit tells us, which is all fairy magic bullshit designed specifically to create a neo-fuedal lock-in of existing power holders. They sell you the idea that you can influence things as an individual, which you can't period. At least not on scales effecting social order.
And wake up from the Ayn Rand Special Fucking Snowflake Theory.
Aw, why bother. Go ahead, call me a commie or something.
- Anyway, just saying we need to change the system of energy use, not just change our lightbulbs.TheBlueOne
- yes! +1xcarlx
- drgsss0
*bares toothless grin
Ammeee-ri-caa
- sequoia0
^How can you clean something that gets in every crack and crevice? It doesn't even seem possible.
20 years after Exxon there is still oil on the shores in Alaska. It doesn't go away.
The dye has been cast in the gulf.
- desmo0
this whole ordeal is just infuriating.
bp needs accept the blame and clean that shit up!!
GAAAAD DAMMN MORANSSSSS!!!!!
- Ramanisky20
this sounds like a good idea
- I think they already tried that, but they [bp] called it a syphon.WrappedInBooks
- ukit0
Why are we even turning it into a nationalistic issue to begin with?
I mean, yes, it maybe will hurt the British economy a bit because BP is a part of the market over there. But what happens, happens, and it's not like the things U.S. officials are saying is going to change that one way or the other. What the market is reacting to is BP's inability to stop the spill.
- PonyBoy0
How many of the folks in this thread have turned off their natural gas to their homes... have stopped driving their cars... ... stopped taking the train or bus?
In talking w/friends locally and reading the forums online... I'm finding the majority of us are hypocrites in the end (I put myself in front of the line on this one)...
Sure... you can cover yourself in chocolate sauce and trip out at the next committee hearing or next media event... ... but in the end you're probably as much at fault as BP and anyone else for that matter... we consume: else BP and the like wouldn't be in business.
The outrage seems a touch 'trendy' more than it does 'real'... creating a silly moratorium where we ban ourselves from finding the energy we need to consume to move on w/everyday life - meanwhile the Vietnamese... the Russians etc... all continue tapping away in the gulf on their own deep water platforms...
*still confused
- BattleAxe0
ok so far
worst case
400 foot tsunami
Deadzones
150k barrels a day into gulfany good news?
- elektro0
the robot is out of the water
- and no more videoelektro
- well there's video but it's not the same robotelektro
- http://www.techfresh…elektro
- dasohr0
And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea; and it became as the blood of a dead man: and every living soul died in the sea. - Revelation 16:3
- ghandolf0
Gulf oil spill's threat to wildlife turns real
ASSOCIATED PRESS | MELISSA NELSON | Sat, Jun 5, 11:40 PM
ON BARATARIA BAY, La. — The wildlife apocalypse along the Gulf Coast that everyone has feared for weeks is fast becoming a terrible reality.
Pelicans struggle to free themselves from oil, thick as tar, that gathers in hip-deep pools, while others stretch out useless wings, feathers dripping with crude. Dead birds and dolphins wash ashore, coated in the sludge. Seashells that once glinted pearly white under the hot June sun are stained crimson.
Scenes like this played out along miles of shoreline Saturday, nearly seven weeks after a BP rig exploded and the wellhead a mile below the surface began belching millions of gallon of oil.
"These waters are my backyard, my life," said boat captain Dave Marino, a firefighter and fishing guide from Myrtle Grove. "I don't want to say heartbreaking, because that's been said. It's a nightmare. It looks like it's going to be wave after wave of it and nobody can stop it."
The oil has steadily spread east, washing up in greater quantities in recent days, even as a cap placed by BP over the blownout well began to collect some of the escaping crude. The cap, resembling an upside-down funnel, has captured about 252,000 gallons of oil, according to Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government's point man for the crisis.
If earlier estimates are correct, that means the cap is capturing from a quarter to as much as half the oil spewing from the blowout each day. But that is a small fraction of the roughly 22 million to 48 million gallons government officials estimate have leaked into the Gulf since the April 20 explosion that killed 11 workers, making it the nation's largest oil spill ever.
Allen, who said the goal is to gradually raise the amount of the oil being captured, compared the process to stopping the flow of water from a garden hose with a finger: "You don't want to put your finger down too quickly, or let it off too quickly."
BP officials are trying to capture as much oil as possible without creating too much pressure or allowing the buildup of ice-like hydrates, which form when water and natural gas combine under high pressures and low temperatures.
President Barack Obama pledged Saturday in his weekly radio and Internet address to fight the spill with the people of the Gulf Coast. His words for oil giant BP PLC were stern: "We will make sure they pay every single dime owed to the people along the Gulf coast."
But his reassurances offer limited consolation to the people who live and work along the coasts of four states -- Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida -- now confronting the oil spill firsthand.
In Gulf Shores, Ala., boardwalks leading to hotels were tattooed with oil from beachgoers' feet. A slick hundreds of yards long washed ashore at a state park, coating the white sand with a thick, red stew. Cleanup workers rushed to contain it in bags, but more washed in before they could remove the first wave of debris.
Alabama Gov. Bob Riley and Allen met for more than an hour Saturday in Mobile, Ala., agreeing to a new plan that would significantly increase protection on the state's coast with larger booms, beachfront barriers, skimmers and a new system to protect Perdido Bay near the Florida line.
Riley, who was angered by a Coast Guard decision to move boom from Alabama to Louisiana, said the barriers must be up within days for him to be satisfied. Allen said he needed to report to the president before confirming more details of the agreement.
The oil is showing up right at the beginning of the lucrative tourist season, and beachgoers taking to the region's beaches haven't been able to escape it.
"This makes me sick," said Rebecca Thomasson of Knoxville, Tenn., her legs and feet smeared with brown streaks of crude. "We were over in Florida earlier and it was bad there, but it was nothing like this."
At Pensacola Beach, Erin Tamber, who moved to the area from New Orleans after surviving Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, inspected a beach stained orange by the retreating tide.
"I feel like I've gone from owning a piece of paradise to owning a toxic waste dump," she said.
Back in Louisiana, along the beach at Queen Bess Island, oil pooled several feet deep, trapping birds against containment boom. The futility of their struggle was confirmed when Joe Sartore, a National Geographic photographer, sank thigh deep in oil on nearby East Grand Terre Island and had to be pulled from the tar.
"I would have died if I would have been out here alone," he said.
With no oil response workers on Queen Bess, Plaquemines Parish coastal zone management director P.J. Hahn decided he could wait no longer, pulling an exhausted brown pelican from the oil, the slime dripping from its wings.
"We're in the sixth week, you'd think there would be a flotilla of people out here," Hahn said. "As you can see, we're so far behind the curve in this thing."
After six weeks with one to four birds a day coming into Louisiana's rescue center for oiled birds at Fort Jackson, 53 arrived Thursday and another 13 Friday morning, with more on the way. Federal authorities say 792 dead birds, 256 dead sea turtles, 31 dead dolphins, and other wildlife have been collected from the Gulf of Mexico and its coastline.
Yet scientists say the wildlife death toll remains relatively modest, well below the tens of thousand of birds, otters and other creatures killed after the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska's Prince William Sound. The numbers have stayed comparatively low because the Deepwater Horizon rig was 50 miles off the coast and most of the oil has stayed in the open sea. The Valdez ran aground on a reef close to land, in a more enclosed setting.
Experts say the Gulf's marshes, beaches and coastal waters, which nurture a dazzling array of life, could be transformed into killing fields, though the die-off could take months or years and unfold largely out of sight. The damage could be even greater beneath the water's surface, where oil and dispersants could devastate zooplankton and tiny invertebrate communities at the base of the aquatic food chain.
"People naturally tend to focus on things that are most conspicuous, like oiled birds, but in my opinion the impacts on fisheries will be much more severe," said Rich Ambrose, director of the environmental science and engineering at program at UCLA.
The Gulf is also home to dolphins and species including the endangered sperm whale. A government report found that dolphins with prolonged exposure to oil in the 1990s experienced skin injuries and burns, reduced neurological functions and lower hemoglobin levels in their blood. It concluded, though, that the effects probably wouldn't be lethal because many creatures would avoid the oil. Yet dolphins in the Gulf have been spotted swimming through plumes of crude.
Gilly Llewellyn, oceans program leader with the World Wildlife Fund in Australia, said she observed the same behavior by dolphins following a 73-day spill last year in the Timor Sea.
"A heartbreaking sight," Llewellyn said. "And what we managed to see on the surface was undoubtedly just a fraction of what was happening."
The prospect left fishing guide Marino shaking his head, as he watched the oil washing into a marsh and over the body of a dead pelican. Species like shrimp and crab flourish here, finding protection in the grasses. Fish, birds and other creatures feed here.
"It's going to break that cycle of life," Marino said. "It's like pouring gas in your aquarium. What do you think that's going to do?"
- Authorities say 792 dead birds, 256 dead sea turtles, 31 dead dolphins, have been collected.ghandolf
- bp0
this will take care of it no worries
- utopian0
- it's amazing when you look at it you think it's a tiny thingspraycan
- why is that?spraycan
- Because there is nothing
around the BP well head to
compare anything in size to
but an ocean floor.utopian - why do those orange handles look like they're made for pulling by hand?Thelonious_Funk
- I don't think is a true scale. Those ARE handles, the pipe is about 12" across.mikotondria3
- Don't be so foolish as to to let obvious visual cues get in the way of a warmly-felt unfavourable prejudice.detritus
- THE PIPE IS NOT 12" ACROSS!utopian
- it's sure as fuck not 12 ft across either - use your noggin, utopian.detritus
- http://www.qbn.com/t…detritus
- Whatever is that thing, it fits in my hand. Human scale icin FAIL.maquito
- yeah the scale is totally fabricated. any video from top to ocean floor?74LEO
- it's 15cm acrosstopic
