Killing A Billion-Dollar Economy is Easier Than You Think

Like I said two years ago: the Gulf Coast is dead. Twenty million Americans fucked right into the ground by BP and governments wholly owned by Big Oil.

Annie-Rose Strasser at Think Progress:

The Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded nearly two years ago to the day, beginning an oil spill that lasted three months and released some two hundred million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. BP may have declared their mission accomplished, but the results of the spill are still trickling out.

The latest? Shrimp with no eyes, fish with lesions, and clawless crabs.

Scientists believe that shrimp, fish, and crabs in the gulf have been deformed by the chemical released to disperse oil during the spill. Fishers in the area say that they’ve been noticing deformities on their catches since. Al Jazeera reports:

“At the height of the last white shrimp season, in September, one of our friends caught 400 pounds of these,” [Louisiana commercial fisher Tracy] Kuhns told Al Jazeera while showing a sample of the eyeless shrimp.

According to Kuhns, at least 50 per cent of the shrimp caught in that period in Barataria Bay, a popular shrimping area that was heavily impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants, were eyeless. Kuhns added: “Disturbingly, not only do the shrimp lack eyes, they even lack eye sockets.”

“Some shrimpers are catching these out in the open Gulf [of Mexico],” she added, “They are also catching them in Alabama and Mississippi. We are also finding eyeless crabs, crabs with their shells soft instead of hard, full grown crabs that are one-fifth their normal size, clawless crabs, and crabs with shells that don’t have their usual spikes … they look like they’ve been burned off by chemicals.” [...]

The dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities. Shrimp, for example, have a life-cycle short enough that two to three generations have existed since BP’s disaster began, giving the chemicals time to enter the genome.

BP claims to be investigating any toxicity and testing fish in the gulf, but they also claimed these marshes were clean. The company is clearly trying to distance itself from the spill, which was a public relations disaster. Indeed, just today, BP came to a settlement agreement with plaintiffs suing over health and economic issues related to the spill.

At the same time, deep water drilling has started again. And though details are still only emerging on the full impact of the spill, some want the U.S. to move back into offshore drilling as aggressively as possible. Today, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) went on the Senate floor to advocate for more drilling permits in the Gulf, arguing that “mother nature has proved amazingly resilient” in the wake of the spill.

Tell that to the fish without livers and the shrimp without eyes.

The cover story in this week's Nation magazine is an investigation into BP's Toxic Legacy: Two Years After the BP Spill, A Hidden Health Crisis Festers.

Wall Street nearly brought down the global economy, and ruined enough of it to leave hundreds of millions in economic misery for years, but it took just one of the thousands of oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico to destroy for decades if not centuries one of the world's largest and most productive food ecosystems.

How Civilized and Rational Nations Handle Polluting Corporations

The Obama administration continues to allow ocean rapist BP to continue to drill for oil and suck up billions in taxpayer subsides while the millions of people along the Gulf Coast die slowly from their BP-poisoned economy.

But not every country in the Americas is that stupid.

From William K. Wolfrum:

There is something odd happening here in Brazil. There is an oil spill – courtesy of Chevron – off the coast here. That’s not the odd part. In fact, it increasingly seems like a normal occurrence. Chevron has thus far lied about the oil spill and has shown a lack of preparation in dealing with it. But there’s nothing strange about that, either.

No, the odd part is this – there are no sectors of Brazilian politics or the media that are rushing to defend Chevron on the oil companies for this spill, nor is the government working to help Chevron’s public relations team. In fact, the Brazilian government is working hard to make Chevron responsible for the spill, which is coming from a leak at more than 1,000 meters below the sea in the Frade oil field off the coast of the state of Rio de Janeiro.

(Last week), the Brazilian government banned Chevron from drilling in Brazil (all of Chevron’s drilling activities are in the Frade oil field) while the government investigates the reasons for the spill.

Isn't there a World Trade Organization rule preventing democratically-elected governments from persecuting fossil fuel giants?

"I've never seen anything like this ever"

Explain to me again how "job creators" like BP create jobs by poisoning an entire ocean watershed that used to sustain tens of millions of people?

Lots of health care jobs, I guess - but aren't those terrible unionized public employees who are killing the economy? Funeral home jobs, then - those are private sector.

Digby:

And look what's happening in the gulf today:

The fear is palpable on the docks from Galveston to Panama City. Commercial fishermen working the waters hardest hit by the BP oil spill are worried sick about their future. It keeps them up at night. Many are convinced the 200 million gallons of crude that spewed into the Gulf last year have done irreparable damage to the fragile fisheries that provide their livelihood. According to a new CBS News segment, Gulf fishermen “have started catching fish with sores, fin rot, and infections at a greater frequency than ever before.”

It would seem BP’s oil is coming home to roost in an epidemic of sick fish and devastated lives. An Aug. 15 CBS News video – that’s going viral as we speak – captures the uncertainty of tens of thousands of commercial Gulf fishermen: “I don’t think we’ll be fishing in five years,” says Lucky Russell. “My opinion. …Everybody is worried.”

Everybody includes LSU oceanography Professor Jim Cowan, who has been studying the Gulf ecosystem for years:

“When one of these things comes on deck, it’s sort of horrifying,” Cowan said. “I mean, there these large dark lesions and eroded fins and areas on the body where scales have been removed. I’d imagine I’ve seen 30 or 40,000 red snapper in my career, and I’ve never seen anything like this. At all. Ever.”

I'm sure that the new GOP "conservation" department, along with the EPAs in 50 states will ensure that doesn't happen again, right?

But then maybe it doesn't really matter who's in charge:

The State Department gave a crucial green light on Friday to a proposed 1,711-mile pipeline that would carry heavy oil from oil sands in Canada across the Great Plains to terminals in Oklahoma and the Gulf Coast.

The project, which would be the longest oil pipeline outside of Russia and China, has become a potent symbol in a growing fight that pits energy security against environmental risk, a struggle highlighted by last year’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

By concluding that the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline would have minimal effect on the environment, President Obama would risk alienating environmental activists, who gave him important support in the 2008 election and were already upset by his recent decisions to expand domestic oil drilling and delay clean air rules. Pipeline opponents have protested in front of the White House for a week, resulting in nearly 400 arrests.

At the same time, rising concerns about the weak economy and high gas prices have made it difficult for the administration to oppose a project that would greatly expand the nation’s access to oil from a friendly neighbor and create tens of thousands of jobs.

If I were a cynic, I'd be inclined to think that certain interests were happy to keep unemployment high so as to ensure that this sort of reckless project passes muster.

But, hey, nothing to worry about. We'll have a new and improved GOP "conservation" department that will factor in the fact that 10 years after the big oil pipeline is built, many of the same people will be called back to work to clean up whatever horrific environmental disaster happens as a result. That's how it worked in Alaska, anyway. It's win-win.
If I live to be 300, I will never understand why liberals' concern for people's lives and health endangered by pollution is considered such a crime.

Corporate Psychopaths : No Shame

Down with Tyranny had an excellent piece a while back about why virtually all corporate CEOs are sociopaths.

I think it's gone beyond individual executives to the entire entity, and beyond sociopathy to psychopathy.

Zoe Schlanger at TPM:

Remember the BP "top hat"? It was one in a series of desperate attempts by the company to capture the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion last year. The top hat, mocked though it was, managed to capture and remove 679,000 barrels of oil from the crippled well, pumping it to an undamaged well called Macondo.

As it turns out, this salvaged oil translated to $47.3 million in proceeds for the three oil companies who leased drilling rights on the rig. Now, the Deepwater Horizon court case underway in Texas is dredging up the unprecedented circumstances of those profits, and a fight is underway to define the regulations governing them.

Yesterday, the United States filed a claim against one of the three drilling companies who profited—to the tune of $11.8 million—from the oil retrieved from the emergency mechanism. Anadarko E&P Company (AE&P), a subsidiary of Anadarko Petroleum Corporation (APC), holds that it was no longer a lease-holder in the drilling operation at the time of the explosion, and therefore is not a responsible party in the tragedy.

If Anadarko had a grandmother, it would be too ashamed to try to profit from the worst ecological disaster in the nation's history - one that will be ruining the lives of millions of Gulf Coast residents for generations.

Giving corporations the same rights as individuals without the same civic responsibilities of individuals is like giving a child adult privileges without adult responsibilities: it's still a narcissistic little fucker but now you have no control over it.

Forget Nukes; Let's Drill for ... oops

Yeah, nobody could have predicted this. Nobody except, you know, everybody with a lick of sense.

Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars:

While the media is busy assuring their audiences that we still need nuclear energy despite catastrophic accidents potential, environmentalists would like you to remember we still have issues in the Gulf of Mexico from another one of our short-sighted energy policies.

The Coast Guard is investigating reports of a potentially large oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico not far from the Deepwater Horizon site. According to a knowledgeable source, the slick was sighted by a helicopter pilot on Friday and is about 100 miles long. A fishing boat captain said he went through the slick yesterday and it was strong enough to make his eyes burn.

According to the Times Picayune, the Coast Guard has confirmed they are investigating a potentially large 100 mile slick about 30 miles offshore. They are going to a site near the Matterhorn well site about 20 miles north of the BP Deepwater Horizon site, according to the paper. The Matterhorn field includes includes a deepwater drilling platform owned by W&T Technology. It was acquired last year from TotalFinaElf E&P.

I'm sure that the GOP will insist that this has nothing to do with the Deepwater Horizon site and is strictly a coincidence. And of course, by no means should this force us to reassess the wisdom of deep water drilling. To which, you can be sure, the administration will shrug and acquiesce.

Because why should we worry about a fragile eco-system and search for alternative fuel sources (thereby adding jobs and strengthening the economy) when we can instead live in the back pocket of Big Oil?

As Blue Girl explained so clearly, there's no energy free lunch. Everything has a cost - environmental, safety, technological, investment. The key is making sure that cost is fully disclosed, accounted for and publicly accepted.

None of which is true of oil.

Al Jazeera - Not Just for Middle East News Anymore

The great broadcast networks of our childhood aren't dead; they're just operating under another name.

Wonder whatever happened with the BP oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, the one that spread heavy oil and toxic dispersants over thousands of square miles of sea floor, water and beaches?

One global news organization covers it, in an 8-part series on the BP oil spill.

David Dayen at Firedoglake:

I’ve heard the American media described accurately at a bunch of 7 year-olds at a youth soccer game. There’s nothing strategic about the game; all the kids chase the soccer ball in a pack. I thought of that when I read a story about enduring sickness in the Gulf of Mexico. It didn’t come from ABC, or NBC, or CBS, or Fox News, or CNN, or any local outlet. It came from Al Jazeera.

“I have critically high levels of chemicals in my body,” 33-year-old Steven Aguinaga of Hazlehurst, Mississippi told Al Jazeera. “Yesterday I went to see another doctor to get my blood test results and the nurse said she didn’t know how I even got there.”

Aguinaga and his close friend Merrick Vallian went swimming at Fort Walton Beach, Florida, in July 2010.

“I swam underwater, then found I had orange slick stuff all over me,” Aguinaga said. “At that time I had no knowledge of what dispersants were, but within a few hours, we were drained of energy and not feeling good. I’ve been extremely sick ever since.”

BP’s oil disaster last summer gushed at least 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, causing the largest accidental marine oil spill in history – and the largest environmental disaster in US history. Compounding the problem, BP has admitted to using at least 1.9 million gallons toxic dispersants, including one chemical that has been banned in the UK.

According to chemist Bob Naman, these chemicals create an even more toxic substance when mixed with crude oil. Naman, who works at the Analytical Chemical Testing Lab in Mobile, Alabama, has been carrying out studies to search for the chemical markers of the dispersants BP used to both sink and break up its oil.

If you read the article, you realize that the dispersants are causing the sickness as much as the oil. And, because they are mixing around in the water, they then participate in evaporation and precipitation, with the dispersant chemicals reaching more of the population through rainfall. Merrick Vallian, the friend of Steven Aguinaga, has already died from chemical exposure.

This is why Hillary Clinton said that Al Jazeera is real news, and by implication what passes for real news in this country isn’t. Merely touching the Gulf of Mexico is causing a host of serious medical problems. That’s happening right in our country. And if it weren’t for Al Jazeera, there would be a near-total media blackout. At least in the national media; from what I can tell, the Times-Picayune has had decent coverage.

Read AJE's 8-part series on the BP oil spill here.

And demand Al Jazeera on your local cable or satellite system here.

First New Deepwater Gulf Drilling Permit Goes to ... Wait for It ... BP!

David Dayen at Firedoglake:

The Obama Administration approved the first deepwater drilling well permit for the Gulf of Mexico, 11 months after the BP oil disaster.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement announced Monday that it issued a permit to Noble Energy Inc. to continue work on its Santiago well about 70 miles southeast of Venice, La. Drilling will resume nearly one year after BP’s blowout created the worst offshore spill in U.S. history.

SNIP

“Noble Energy,” as it turns out, is not accurate. In fact, BP holds the largest stake in the well approved today.

SNIP

So to recap, BP owns twice as much a stake in this well as Noble Energy, and yet the announcement of the permit says that Noble Energy received it. Noble operates the well, but BP is the biggest stakeholder, and as such could be the biggest voice in making key decisions about cost and safety.

SNIP

But suffice to say this – the team that brought you millions of gallons of oil a day spilling into the Gulf, is back drilling in the Gulf. We’ll see if they learned anything.

I'd say both parties have learned very big lessons here: BP that it can destroy an entire ocean ecosystem and get away with it, and the Obama administration that you can never punch hippies hard enough.

Dolphin Babies Murdered by BP

Yes, murder is the word and of course BP did it.

Heather at Crooks and Liars:

Anyone else going to be shocked if this is not caused by the massive amount of oil and dispersants these poor animals have been exposed to? There has been almost a media blackout in any coverage of what's going on in the Gulf nationally.

More Dead Dolphin Babies Found along Gulf Coast:

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says the number of dead dolphins found since Jan. 1 in the area affected by last year's oil spill is now 67, with 35 of them premature or newborn calves.

NOAA regional spokeswoman Kim Amendola says five dead calves were reported Friday in Mississippi or Alabama.

Scientists are looking into whether any unusual deaths in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill area may be related to toxins from oil or dispersants. However, they're also investigating whether it could be related to the cold weather or a disease.

Watch the video here.

Dolphins. Baby dolphins. Dead baby dolphins.

Spread the word.

Rand Paul Not Letting Us Down

Yep, he's doubling down on the corporate cock-sucking.

From TPM:

Sen.-elect Rand Paul (R-KY) is not backing down from his claim that President Obama was too hard on BP back during this summer's massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. On the campaign trail in March, Paul took heat for his statement that Obama's rhetoric toward the energy giant in the wake of the disaster off the Louisiana coast was "un-American." In what appear to be his first public comments about the spill since being handily elected Kentucky's new Senator, Paul took a similar line to the one he did as a candidate.

"I didn't like the language," Paul said in an interview on CBS' Face The Nation this morning. "I didn't think the president or his people should say something like 'putting a boot heel on the throat' of a business. I didn't like that."

Paul was referring to a statement made by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar back in March, as oil was still flowing unfettered from an open hole in the ocean floor drilled by BP. As the Obama administration amped up its public response to the spill, Salazar told reporters that the government would keep its "boot on the throat" of the company to ensure that it did all it could to plug the leak.

Somebody tell Mitch McConnell that beating Paul's performance is going to require a major rim job.

Gulf Oil Catastrophe Still Bad and Getting Worse

From edger at They Gave Us A Republic ....:

BP and the Feds have fooled America and the entire world into thinking the BP Gulf Oil Spill is over, that the beaches are clean and that the seafood is safe, and everything is OK.

Titled "The Gulf Oil Spill isn’t over!" here's a little bit of mournful Louisiana blues to tell the real story.

Let's make this one viral....

Uploaded to YouTube Oct. 02, 2010 by:
Holt Webb - writer/photographer & publisher of The Vanishing America Project
"a multi-year journey I’ve undertaken to use my skill as a photographer and a writer to promote conservation and raise awareness about what we are losing – our culture, our wildlife, and our landscape – in hopes that some of it will still be around for future generations to enjoy."

Hat tip to Alexander Higgins who for months on his blog has been collecting every bit of news you can imagine about the BP's Gulf of Mexico oil catastrophe.

Read the whole thing, including captions from the video, here.

The Gulf is Completely Fucked Forever

Zandar points us to the story that's as invisible to the MSM as the billions of gallons of oil still poisoning the Gulf of Mexico are invisible to the EPA.

MoJo's Julia Whitty has a pretty sobering report on what to expect from the Gulf of Mexico now that the spill is "contained".

Consider that while we've all been fixated on the true spill rate—is it 35,000 barrels a day? 60,000 barrels? More?—those figures are only estimates, and only of the oil. Few people realize that some 40 percent of what spews from the Deepwater Horizon well is methane, the primary component of natural gas—a dangerous greenhouse gas and a toxin to most life. Indeed, methane may hold the answer to the quantity of vented oil. David Valentine, a biogeochemist at the University of California-Santa Barbara, suggested in May in an op-ed in the journal Nature that plumes of dissolved methane could be used to calculate how much oil has leaked into the Gulf of Mexico. But BP has blurred the evidence trail—intentionally or otherwise—by treating at least some of the escaping methane with methanol, another toxin, in an effort to prevent a dangerous buildup and possibly even another explosion. Nevertheless, around the spill site, Valentine and his colleagues found clouds of dissolved natural gas at 100,000 times the normal density and at depths of more than 2,500 feet. They also found that little of the gas seemed to be reaching the air. Which is good news for the atmosphere, but probably bad news for the ocean.

That's because the methane may also be powering up blooms of microbes that eat methane but use up the oxygen in the water as they do so—causing dead zones where most life cannot survive. The Gulf of Mexico is already home to the second-largest dead zone on Earth; the last thing it needs is another. On the surface above the methane clouds, Valentine and colleagues discovered a mass kill of pyrosomes—free-floating colonies of jellyfish look-alikes that straddle the vertebrate-invertebrate divide, and an important food for sea turtles. It's not yet clear which of many smoking guns killed the pyrosomes. "We'll be working up the story of the relationship between dispersant, oil, gas, and the microbial community for some time to come," says Valentine.

Then there are the drilling fluids contaminating the seafloor near the wellhead. Euphemistically called muds, these heavy fluids are pumped into wells to keep the highly pressurized oil and gas from exploding upward. BP's drilling muds have been pouring out of the wellhead, along with 30,000 barrels added in its failed "top kill" and other efforts to plug the leak. Along with oil, methane, methanol, and Corexit, drilling fluids add their own frightening recipe to the disaster: arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium, barite, fluoride, chrome lignosulfonate, vanadium, copper, aluminum, chromium, zinc, radionuclides, and other heavy metals. Relief wells require pumping thousands more barrels of drilling fluid into the reservoir, with all the same risks of explosion attending the original well. The EPA estimates these drilling fluids will pose a threat to the seafloor and surrounding waters for up to 40 years. Plus a recent study finds that oil spills create a whole new pathway for arsenic pollution in the sea. The oil prevents seafloor sediments from bonding with and burying arsenic that naturally occurs in the ocean. This shutdown of the natural filtration system allows arsenic levels to rise from the deep water to the surface, disrupting photosynthesis in phytoplankton, increasing birth defects and triggering behavioral changes in marine life, and killing animals that feed on poisoned prey.

Never before in human history has the vast food web of the ocean—rooted in the dark, and flowering at the surface—come under so many assaults from below, above, and within the water column: marine warfare masquerading as a cleanup.

Do read the whole story. The cold hard truth is that the Gulf has suffered a toxic, possibly fatal event that will rewrite the entire ecosytem of the area, like taking a crowbar to a stained glass window. What's left will not be recognizable to most of us. For the next generation or so the effects of this spill will change the Gulf for good, and it may not survive the damage. What does emerge will be something totally different.

This is far from over folks. You and your kids will still be reading about how the Gulf of Mexico is damaged for years to come.

MoJo actually has a whole ongoing section/series on the BP catastrophe, which you can keep up with here.

Susie Madrak spots the equally invisible story of the people of the Gulf, whose lives are destroyed by the "cleaned up" oil.

As a member of the Professional Left, I'm sorry to say that my attitude toward the Gulf oil spill cleanup is that the glass is not even half-full. I'm sorry to say it, because it's an implied criticism of the administration and it will make poor Bobby Gibbs cry. I think it's got to be said, loudly and often: This seafood is not safe to eat.

From the Solve Climate blog:

HOPEDALE, LA.— In the small towns of coastal Louisiana, the widespread consensus is that the oil is far from gone.Fishermen return from working on cleanup crews or from recreational angling trips with stories of crabs whose lungs are black with oil, or of oysters with shells covered in sludge. They take photos and carry tarballs home like talismans to show what they have seen. They talk about their fears with anyone who will listen, and often their voices are tinged with panic.

Yet a government report released last week by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said that 75 percent of the oil has been cleaned up, dispersed or otherwise contained. And the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reports that of all the samples of seafood that have been tested since the oil spill, none have shown evidence of contamination.

While some in the coastal seafood industry agree with these assessments, a majority seem to view the news with a sense of betrayal.

"The cleanup isn't even close to being done," said Karen Hopkins of Dean Blanchard Seafood, which accounts for about 11 percent of the U.S. shrimp supply, on the barrier island of Grand Isle.

"The last thing I want to do is scare anyone away from the seafood down here," said Dawn Nunez, standing at the counter of the shrimp wholesale business and deli she owns in the tiny fishing town of Hopedale. "But if I’m not eating it or feeding it to my children, I can’t advise anyone else to eat it either."

On their dock across the street, Dawn's husband Marty Nunez pulls a clump of oil-ridden marsh grass out of a plastic bag.

"There's people fishing where this is at – or worse than this," he said. "I can't understand how they say things are getting back to normal."

Nunez surreptitiously picked the grass while working as part of BP'sVessels of Opportunity cleanup operation on Monday. For him the oil-soaked grass is a symbol of a lurking threat. Like many other people living along the coast, Nunez is confident that vast quantities of oil remain in the environment, despite highly publicized announcements to the contrary.

"Our fishermen bring home grass and tarballs and then we watch the news and they say there is no sign of oil," said Dawn Nunez. "Where did it go? Where did millions of gallons of oil go if it's not in the Gulf?"

A widely held theory is that the 1.8 million gallons of dispersants that were sprayed during the cleanup operation caused the oil to sink to the bottom.

Make no mistake: the frantic scramble to dump millions of gallons of "dispersant" into the Gulf was a deliberate move by BP to ensure that billions of gallons of oil vanished from sight and sank far away from any attempt to collect it. That second gusher - of toxic Hide-It-All - was, in fact, BP's real "response plan" to a spill: Force the oil miles under the surface and pretend it's all gone.

For BP to properly compensate the people of the Gulf Coast, and all the people of the United States who used to eat the fish and seafood of the Gulf, who vacationed on the Gulf, BP will have to replace the entire economy of the Gulf Coast. Every household's income, every business' revenue, every state's tax collections - everything.

Because it's all gone now.

Facing the People

Via Rumproast:

A photo gallery: When the cold and detached president met the angry people.

Big Winner of Gulf Catastrophe Should Not Be Ethanol

What could make the BP oil gusher/catastrophe worse? A bailout for the boondoggle ethanol industry.

Kevin Drum:

The BP oil spill is bad enough already. But I'm here to make it even worse. Here is Robert Bryce in Slate today:

The most disgusting aspect of the blowout in the Gulf of Mexico isn't the video images of oil-soaked birds or the incessant blather from pundits about what BP or the Obama administration should be doing to stem the flow of oil. Instead, it's the ugly spectacle of the corn-ethanol scammers doing all they can to capitalize on the disaster so that they can justify an expansion of the longest-running robbery of taxpayers in U.S. history.

....Why does the ethanol business need federal help? The answer is so disheartening that after five years of reporting on the corn-ethanol scam, I find it difficult to type, but here goes: The corn-ethanol industry needs to be bailed out by taxpayers because the industry was given too much in the way of subsidies and mandates. And now the only way to solve that problem is — what else? — more subsidies and mandates. The BP mess provides the industry with the opening it needs to win those subsidies from the federal government.

....The strongest indication that an ethanol bailout is imminent came last Friday when Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack (former governor of Iowa, the nation's biggest ethanol-producing state) said, "I'm very confident that we're going to see an increase in the blend rate." The "blend rate" refers to the federal rule that limits ethanol blends to no more than 10 percent for standard automobiles. Commonly known as "E10," the fuel contains 90 percent gasoline and 10 percent alcohol. The Obama administration bailout, which would come via approval from the EPA, will likely allow gasoline retailers to blend up to 15 percent ethanol into U.S. gasoline supplies.

Three years ago, responding to an increase in corn ethanol subsidies, I wrote: "Can anyone think of any other single policy that has as many simultaneous baneful effects? Are we complete morons?" The answer, apparently, is yes. Read Bryce's whole piece to get the entire grim story.

If a fraction of the tens of billions of tax dollars that have been wasted on ethanol over the past thirty years had been spent instead on genuine renewable energy, we wouldn't be drilling for oil today.

Ethanol can't replace oil; solar, wind and geothermal can.

Boehner Has the Right Idea

"I think the people responsible in the oil spill -- BP and the federal government -- should take full responsibility for what's happening there." -- John Boehner

I agree. Wait! Hear me out.

The federal government is not a people. (Neither is BP, of course, so the same following argument applies.) If Boner is really looking for the "federal government" people responsible, he can start with these two names:

George W. Bush and Richard Cheney.

From The Nation:

Bush was never able to persuade Congress to approve drilling in ANWR. But he did succeed in expanding drilling in other areas, including the deepwater gulf. Bush's principal instrument in these endeavors was the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the branch of the Interior Department responsible for providing leases for offshore drilling as well as collecting the fees and royalties the companies paid for operating in federal waters.

Intended largely to promote offshore drilling, the MMS was also responsible for ensuring that all such operations complied with the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act and other environmental laws. Full adherence to these laws could have slowed the expansion of drilling or blocked it altogether—but the MMS provided the leases without making the companies, including BP, obtain required environmental permits. MMS officials routinely ignored warnings from the agency's own scientists and from those at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that this sort of deepwater drilling posed a risk of massive oil spills with devastating consequences for protected marine species. Such preferential treatment for industry is hardly surprising, given the cozy—in some cases criminal—relationships that developed between senior MMS officials and their corporate counterparts.

BP purchased the mineral rights to drill where the Deepwater Horizon exploded in March 2008, at the Minerals Management Service's lease sale. That's 10 months before Barack Obama took office, a year before Ken Salazar became Interior Secretary. Yes, Obama failed to uncover the offshore drilling booby trap Dick Cheney's oil industry buddies had set, and Ken Salazar failed to clean house at the MMS.

From now on, the damage caused by offshore oil drilling is on Obama's head. But the people responsible for the current Gulf oil catastrophe are at BP and in the spider holes hiding Bush and Cheney.

I am perfectly fine with the actual "people responsible in the oil spill" taking responsibility for once in their miserable fucking lives and paying for every penny of the trillions it's going to cost to put the Gulf Coast right.

Just make sure you're targeting the actual perpetrators, Boner.

Bigger Mess Than the Gulf is the Oil Industry Itself

At Jesus' General, Austin Cline makes the case for cleaning up not just the oil industry's mess in the Gulf, but the industry itself:

The understandable focus on cleaning up the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico must not distract us from the need to also clean up the oil industry itself. Indeed, we should get used to thinking that no matter how successful the efforts to clean up the Gulf of Mexico ultimately are, it won't matter much in the long term if we ignore the terrible mess of the oil industry.

It will be difficult for this to really sink in for most of us, though, because practically everything we see about the BP oil disaster tends to reinforce the perception that it's an isolated accident. When was the last time anyone in the mainstream news media did a report trying to connect aspects of this disaster to larger problems in the oil industry? How often do we instead just see a focus on the accident and BP alone? We must actively resist this narrow focus and push back against what is essentially pro-oil propaganda.

Instead, we must learn how to see the deeper connections which link individual disasters with broader problems. We must learn to see the patterns of abuse and negligence across the industry — and we must communicate this to others so that they can see the same. This is critical because no fundamental changes will occur unless there is popular demand for it. That's why industry and even government are actively depicting the problems as existing merely with one oil platform or, at most, with BP alone.

The less of the spilled oil that sticks to the industry as a whole, the more likely the oil industry will be able to preserve the status quo — and it is precisely the status quo which we need to overturn.

SNIP

But we also need to change the background culture. We currently live in a society where no one seems to find it strange that shareholders' capital investment might receive stronger legal protections than employees' health and safety, nearby residents' lives and livelihoods, or the environment upon which we all depend. We need a culture where it's inconceivable that the law would require corporations to maximize profits, but not maximize employees' well-being or minimize the costs paid by others for a corporation's activities.

Read the whole thing.

The Gulf Catastrophe in Your Back Yard

From They Gave Us A Republic:

Bring the reality of the oil gusher home Click the link and tell the site where you live and look at the spill in that context. If you weren't gobsmacked by the enormity of the largest environmental disaster in American history yet, you will be after that.

"This terrible catastrophe"

Full transcript here.

Photo gallery here.