Energy

Apocalypse in the Gulf Now (Oil) & Next (Nukes)
By Harvey Wasserman

As BP's ghastly gusher assaults the Gulf of Mexico and so much more, a tornado has forced shut the Fermi2 atomic reactor at the site of a 1966 melt-down that nearly irradiated the entire Great Lakes region.

If the White House has a reliable plan for deploying and funding a credible response to a disaster at a reactor that's superior to the one we've seen at the Deepwater Horizon, we’d sure like to see it.

Meanwhile it wants us to fund two more reactors on the Gulf and another one 40 miles from Washington DC. And that’s just for starters.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has warned that at least one new design proposed for federal funding cannot withstand tornadoes, earthquakes or hurricanes.

But the administration has slipped $9 billion for nuclear loan guarantees into an emergency military funding bill, in addition to the $8.33 it’s already approved for two new nukes in Georgia.

From TomDispatch this Sunday: A major environmental writer asks the biggest question of all: Can the president act to change our world in the midst of a historic eco-disaster? -- Bill McKibben, "If There Was Ever A Moment to Seize, Will Obama Stand Up to Big Energy in Deeds as Well as Words?"

The President's words on BP's disaster in the Gulf of Mexico are ever so slowly growing stronger. Environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, now asks the tough question. Will deeds follow? Can this president step up to the moment or will he more typically nibble at the edges of our energy crisis, letting the American system fiddle while the Gulf burns?

In his latest TomDispatch post, McKibben brilliantly compares Barack Obama's BP moment to the moment when John F. Kennedy committed the U.S. to land a man on the moon -- to point out how deeds can truly follow words. He adds: "The challenge [Obama] faces is so much tougher. The Apollo mission was technically complex, but in a sense the very opposite of our energy challenge: a moon shot meant focusing all our energy on three guys and a rocket, while an energy revolution would mean, in essence, landing all of us on a different planet, one where we no longer need the fossil fuels that are currently the engine for our economy."

Still, as we lose our Heat War on a globally warming planet, he suggests just how Barack Obama could begin "turning history" in a new direction: "Obama’s barely broken a sweat on climate change: a few paragraphs in a few speeches. Now, the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf offers him the best chance he’s ever going to get to go to work. The president could stand on the Louisiana shore and say: 'Bad as this is, it’s only a small and visible symbol of the greater damage we do each day simply by burning coal and gas and oil. If that black gunk now washing up here had ended up safely in the gas tanks of our cars, it would nonetheless have done great damage. It’s all dirty, every last drop and lump.'”

This piece is a stirring call for an American president to rise to a moment that must not be missed. McKibben ends this way: "To have a chance we need a leader. We need someone to stand up and tell it the way it is, and in language so compelling and dramatic it sets us on a new path. On this planet of nearly seven billion, at this moment in history, there’s exactly one person who could play that role. And so far he hasn't decided."

Don't miss this one. It's McKibben at his best!

Government Impotence and Corporate Rule
By Jim Hightower | Common Dreams

Many news reports about the Gulf oil catastrophe refer to it as a "spill." Wrong. A spill is a minor "oops" — one accidentally spills milks, for example, and from childhood, we're taught the old aphorism: "Don't cry over spilt milk." What's in the Gulf isn't milk and it wasn't spilt. The explosion of BP's Deepwater Horizon well was the inevitable result of deliberate decisions made by avaricious corporate executives, laissez faire politicians and obsequious regulators.

As the ruinous gulf oil blowout spreads onto land, over wildlife, across the ocean floor and into people's lives, it raises a fundamental question for all of us Americans: Who the hell's in charge here? What we're witnessing is not merely a human and environmental horror, but also an appalling deterioration in our nation's governance. Just as we saw in Wall Street's devastating economic disaster and in Massey Energy's murderous explosion inside its Upper Big Branch coal mine, the nastiness in the gulf is baring an ugly truth that We the People must finally face: We are living under de facto corporate rule that has rendered our government impotent.

Thirty years of laissez-faire, ideological nonsense (pushed upon us with a vengeance in the past decade) has transformed government into a subsidiary of corporate power. Wall Street, Massey, BP and its partners — all were allowed to become their own "regulators" and officially encouraged to put their short-term profit interests over the public interest.

Let's not forget that on April 2, barely two weeks before Deepwater Horizon blew and 11 people perished on the spot, the public's No. 1 official, Barack Obama, trumpeted his support for more deepwater oil drilling, blithely regurgitating Big Oil's big lie: "Oil rigs today generally don't cause spills." He and his advisors had not bothered to check the truth of that — they simply took the industry's word. That's not governing, it's aiding and abetting profiteers, and it's a pathetic performance. Read more.

BP Buys 'Oil' Search Terms to Redirect Users to Official Company Website
BP Spokesman Acknowledges Purchase 'To Make It Easier for People to Find Out More About Our Efforts in the Gulf' and Other Ways to Help
By Emily Friedman | ABC News

Be careful where you click, especially if you're looking for news on the BP oil spill.

BP, the very company responsible for the oil spill that is already the worst in U.S. history, has purchased several phrases on search engines such as Google and Yahoo so that the first result that shows up directs information seekers to the company's official website.

A simple Google search of "oil spill" turns up several thousand news results, but the first link, highlighted at the very top of the page, is from BP. "Learn more about how BP is helping," the link's tagline reads.

A spokesman for the company confirmed to ABC News that it had, in fact, bought these search terms to make information on the spill more accessible to the public.

"We have bought search terms on search engines like Google to make it easier for people to find out more about our efforts in the Gulf and make it easier for people to find key links to information on filing claims, reporting oil on the beach and signing up to volunteer," BP spokesman Toby Odone told ABC News. Read more.

BP to Pay a Second Month of Loss of Income Claims | Deepwater Horizon Response Official Site

BP said today it will be sending a second advance payment during June to individuals and businesses along the Gulf Coast to compensate for the loss of income or net profit due to the cleanup of the Deepwater Horizon Incident in the Gulf of Mexico.

With the second advance payments, BP estimates it will have spent about $84 million for loss of income or net profit through June, based on the claims it has received to date. This number will grow as additional claims are filed.

“We deeply regret the impact the oil spill has had on individuals and businesses, and understand the need for quick and reasonable compensation,” said Doug Suttles, chief operating officer, BP Exploration and Production. “We hope these payments will assist individuals, businesses and the communities impacted.”

About 14,000 individuals and businesses in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida have received an initial advance payment for loss of income or net profit to date. Read more.

Halliburton Profited by BP's Destruction of the Gulf Coast and Cheney's Company Made a Profit
By Brian Connors | Associated Content

This proves that Cheney was willing to make the bottom 99% unwitting pawns to his desire of increasing profits for the top 1%! Also that he deserves to be put in jail for his crimes.

The article "As 'top kill' effort fails, BP must fall back on oil spill containment strategy" relating to Cheney's Energy Task Force Ruined the Gulf states "BP's three-day effort to throttle the leaking gulf oil well with multiple blasts of heavy mud has failed. The attempted "top kill" of the well was abandoned late Saturday afternoon, leaving the huge Macondo field deep beneath the sea floor once again free to pump at least half a million gallons of crude a day into the gulf...

"There's no silver bullet to stop this leak," Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said.

We are being held captive to this catastrophe as a mediocre containment strategy is all that will be currently utilized as the article states "After that, the company could place another blowout preventer on top of the existing one. Meanwhile two drilling rigs at the surface continue to drill relief wells. That's a long-term strategy that requires engineers to hit a seven-inch target, the bottom of the leaking well, 3 1/2 miles below the surface of the gulf. The first of the two relief wells to hit the target will send a massive dose of cement to seal the leaking well. Read more.

Lawsuit Seeks Full Disclosure of Dispersant Impacts on Gulf’s Endangered Wildlife
By Center for Biological Diversity | Common Dreams

The Center for Biological Diversity today filed an official notice of its intent to sue the Environmental Protection Agency for authorizing the use of toxic dispersants without ensuring that these chemicals would not harm endangered species and their habitats. The letter requests that the agency, along with the U.S. Coast Guard, immediately study the effects of dispersants on species such as sea turtles, sperm whales, piping plovers, and corals and incorporate this knowledge into oil-spill response efforts.

"The Gulf of Mexico has become Frankenstein's laboratory for BP's enormous, uncontrolled experiment in flooding the ocean with toxic chemicals," said Andrea Treece, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. "The fact that no one in the federal government ever required that these chemicals be proven safe for this sort of use before they were set loose on the environment is inexcusable."

Dispersants are chemicals used to break oil spills into tiny droplets. In theory, this allows the oil to be eaten by microorganisms and become diluted faster than it would otherwise. However, the effects of using large quantities of dispersants and injecting them into very deep water, as BP has done in the Gulf of Mexico, have never been studied. Researchers suspect that underwater oil plumes, measuring as much as 20 miles long and extending dozens of miles from the leaking rig, are the result of dispersants keeping the oil below the surface.

On May 24, EPA Administrator Jackson expressed concern over the environmental unknowns of dispersants, which include the long-term effects on aquatic life. Nonetheless, the federal government has allowed BP to pump nearly 1 million gallons of dispersants into the Gulf of Mexico. Read more.

Feds Move to Block Transocean's Bid To Cap Damages For Gulf Oil Spill
'This It Cannot Do,' Says Justice Department, And Compares Transocean To Titanic's Owners
By Jason Ryan | ABC News

"Suffice it to say, eleven crewmembers lost their lives in the immediate disaster stemming from the explosion and fire aboard the vessel. As for the oil spill, we shall forego a cascade of words like 'catastrophic' and 'cataclysmic' as they simply do not do justice to the magnitude of economic, health, and environmental devastation wrought upon the nation's waters, across a swath of States, and upon entire communities."

Hours after Attorney General Eric Holder disclosed ongoing criminal and civil probes related to the Gulf oil spill , the Justice Department has filed motions to block Transocean from seeking to limit their liability in the unfolding disaster. The documents were filed late Tuesday night in federal court in Houston, Texas.

The motion filed by the Justice Department follows Transocean's May 13 motion to seek limited liability of just $26.7 million. The Justice Department initially signaled to Transocean that it would oppose this in a May 24 letter to Transocean's counsel. Transocean has asked for limited liability under the Limitation of Liability Act of 1851, the same act invoked by the owners of the RMS Titanic when they awarded a paltry $95,000 to the survivors of the Titanic tragedy.

The May 24 letter said, "It is simply unconscionable, in the circumstances of this case, that Transocean is attempting to use this same shield of liability potentially leaving thousands of people who have been damaged by your clients' actions with no remedy."

Transocean owned the Deepwater Horizon, the mobile offshore drilling platform that exploded April 20, killing 11 workers. The explosion triggered the ongoing oil spill that has become the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.

In the Tuesday filing, the Justice Department said, "Transocean seeks to absolve ('exonerate') itself from liability concerning the Deepwater Horizon explosion, fire, and oil spill, or, alternatively, limit its liability to approximately $27 million. This it cannot do." Read more.

By Nikolas Kozloff

From Buzzflash

Judging from the oily history of the last ten years, reining in BP could prove politically daunting. A company with incredible economic might, BP has enjoyed privileged access to the inner rungs of Washington power. Only by ridding the political system of insider money can we hope to avert future oil disasters like the devastating spill which hit the Gulf of Mexico last week.

The perversion of U.S. democracy to serve oil interests like BP went into high gear under former Vice President Dick Cheney. Dallas-based Halliburton, where Cheney worked prior to the 2000 election, made equipment and chemicals used in oil drilling, and sold to producers including BP.

BP Hires Cheney's Press Flack
By Kate Sheppard | Mother Jones

BP has hired Dick Cheney's former press flack, Anne Womack Kolton, to serve as the new "head of U.S. media relations" as the company deals with the PR disaster of the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf. Kolton was Cheney's press secretary during the 2004 campaign, and then moved to a job in public affairs at the Department of Energy.

One of her tasks in her previous job was defending the administration's secret meetings with energy officials, even as courts were telling the White House to turn over documents about the task force: "We are ready to defend our principles in court. This goes to the heart of the presidency and to the ability of the president and vice president to receive candid, discreet advice."

Not a lot is known about the task force, since the administration succeeded in shielding it from the public. But it is known that BP officials were among the oil chiefs involved in the secret meetings. Read more.

The BP oil gusher is just the latest in a long line of assaults on the Gulf of Mexico
By Diane Wilson | Grist

I'm a fourth-generation fisherwoman from the Texas Gulf Coast, on a boat since I was eight. Over the last two decades, I've become a self-appointed watchdog of the chemical, oil, and gas corporations that are decimating the Gulf.

I hate to say it, but what I'm seeing now in the Gulf ain't nothing new. The toxic releases, the lies, the cover-ups, the skimping on safety, the nonexistent documents, the "swinging door" with regulators, the deaths. Same ole same ole.

What is new is the massive nature of the oil gusher and the fact that it can't be covered up because it's ongoing and being videoed. This elephant can't be swept under the carpet, but I'm sure if BP could, BP would.

There are politicians out there -- we've all heard them -- who say this oil spill is just one accident and one accident does not a case make. Heck, one plane crashes and you don't stop flying, do ya? Well, this isn't just one accident. This is the biggest flame among the thousands of fires set by Corporate America on its Sherman-like march across the Gulf. Read more.

5 million charging stations for electric vehicles by 2015
By Weston Sedgwick, Chicago Green Technology Examiner

A total of 4.7 million electric vehicle charging stations will be installed worldwide over the next five years to support the transition to plug-in vehicles, says Pike's "Electric Vehicle Charging Equipment" report. The United States alone is likely to be home to almost 1 million charging points by 2015.

Pike Research forecasts that annual revenue from EV charging equipment will reach $1.8 billion (US) in 2015.

That need will be fueled by the more than 3.1 million electric vehicles (EVs), including both hybrids and all-electric cars, expected to be sold worldwide during the next five years, according to Pike.

"The success of hybrid vehicles in the 2000s gave drivers a taste for propulsion by electric power, and governments around the world are now highly focused on creating the charging infrastructure to support the arrival of EVs in significant numbers," Pike senior analyst John Gartner said in a statement.

Pike anticipates that the Asia Pacific region will be the world’s largest market for EVs and charging equipment. Read more.

PROTEST BP IN CVILLE ON MEMORIAL DAY


Blow-Out Polluters, Bull Promoters, Bellowing Pigs, Beyond Prosecution?

What ever you call BP, it's destroying the Gulf of Mexico, utterly destroying it. 

Think I'm kidding?  See these images.

And people in Charlottesville, in addition to through their taxes, are giving money directly to BP every day at gas stations.

This has got to end!


Memorial Day- Protest BP

From TomDispatch today: a unique first-person account by an Arctic photographer of the next deep-water oil drilling danger, Shell Oil's venture into America's Arctic seas -- Subhankar Banerjee, "BPing the Arctic?, Will the Obama Administration Allow Shell Oil to Do to Arctic Waters What BP Did to the Gulf?" (Note as well that there is a TomCast audio interview with Banerjee on the impact of drilling in Arctic waters which can be found here, and that three of Banerjee's remarkable Alaskan Arctic photos accompany the piece and can be reproduced with credit.)

Writes photographer Subhankar Banerjee, "I've come to know Arctic Alaska about as intimately as a photographer can. I’ve been there many times... crisscrossing the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge -- 4,000 miles in all seasons by foot, raft, kayak, and snowmobile." He's spent almost a month in a near-continual blizzard camped out before a polar bear den. He's counted almost 1,000 Beluga whales in a mile stretch of the Chukchi Sea coast and has been on native whale hunting expeditions. He's been unable to go to sleep at night because of the cacophony of calls from 180 nesting species of birds.

This is what it has meant for Banerjee to photograph the Alaskan Arctic for the last decade -- and he offers it up in all its vivid detail in his first TomDispatch post. (His highly regarded photographs of the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge were infamously censored in the Bush years by the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History - because pressure to drill for oil in the refuge was so high.)

Now, as Shell Oil prepares to send a drilling ship into Alaska's Arctic seas this July, he describes in vivid prose the world he's explored. It's one of the richest ecologies on the planet that, sooner or later, will -- as events in the Gulf of Mexico make clear -- be despoiled if the Obama administration doesn't at the last moment deny access to Arctic waters to that oil company.

This is the rarest of accounts of a world in danger, as vivid as any set of photos. It's news; it's a passionate hymn to an ecology that should be preserved; and it's a plea to the president and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar not to grant the last permits that will lead to the tragic BPing of America's Alaskan waters.

Banerjee concludes: "If the remaining permits are approved for Shell in the coming weeks, [the drilling ship] the Frontier Discoverer will be in the Chukchi Sea less than six weeks later. President Obama and Secretary Salazar should stop this folly now. It’s important for them to listen to those who really know what’s at stake, the environmental groups and human rights organizations of the indigenous Inupiat communities. It’s time to put a stop to Shell’s drilling plan in America’s Arctic Ocean for this summer -- and all the summers to come."

This is a unique piece for TomDispatch to publish. I hope you'll give it special attention by reading it now.

• AP Exclusive: Witness says BP took 'shortcuts' | Yahoo News
• Multiple warning signs preceded BP blast: inquiry | Raw Story
• How Big Is The Deep Horizon Spill? | Paul Rademacher Using Google Earth
• BP Cites Crucial 'Mistake' | WSJ
• BP says it has paid $29M in oil spill claims | Google
• Washington and BP -- 'Like a Junkie Controlling His Dealer' | Der Spiegel
• Spill 39 million gallons of oil in the sea: no charges. Peacefully protest oil drilling: charged for felony | Greenpeace
• FL DEP update: No oil on Florida beaches – contains FL emergency resources
• Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Response/Official Site of Deepwater Horizon Unified Command
• Fishermen hired by BP for oil clean up weren’t provided protective equipment, have now fallen ill | Think Progress
• **Hearing Thursday** Landrieu to Chair Hearing On Deep Water Horizon Oil Spill Impact On Small Businesses | Market Watch

• AP Impact: Bad cement jobs plague offshore rigs | Google News
• Oil Spill's Economic Toll Estimated in the Billions | ABC News
• Jean-Michel Cousteau Dispatches Team To Gulf Oil Spill | Ocean Futures
• Research Shows Federal Oil Leasing and Royalty Income a Raw Deal for Taxpayers | Solve Climate
• Investigator Warned MMS in 2009 About Deepwater Gas Blowouts in Gulf of Mexico | Solve Climate
• Regulators Conducted Lax Oversight of Oil Industry, Report Uncovers | Truthout
• Louisiana Fishermen Helping in Spill Cleanup Report Getting Sick | Fox News
• Read the Govt’s Report Blasting Drilling Regulators on Ethics, Drugs and Porn | ProPublica
• Fears Grow of Continued Oil Spill Through August | Democracy Now!
• Gulf oil plume darker; not good news, expert says | Desdemona Despair
• EPA Officials Weigh Sanctions Against BP’s U.S. Operations | Pro Publica
• Louisiana Fishermen Helping in Spill Cleanup Report Getting Sick | Fox News

Kucinich: We Must Look to the Consequences of our own Demand and Consumption

WASHINGTON, D.C. (May 25, 2010) -- Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today made the following statement on the Floor of the House of Representatives about the ongoing ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico:

“We are now in the 36th day of a man-made environmental disaster which is fast becoming an ecological apocalypse for countless species of marine life. The ecosystems of the Gulf of Mexico cannot survive wave after wave of toxic substances hitting the beaches.

“The ultimate surprise is not that it happened. Oil companies, and Democratic and Republican administrations, refuse responsibility and rejected alternatives. In this privatization of the natural world, damage to sea life is the cost of doing business. The ultimate horror is that we can’t stop the oil flood, won’t stop consumption of oil products and fail to admit the limits of technology.

Protesters pose nearly naked at BP HQ | ABC 13 KTRK

Activists staged a nearly naked protest to bring attention to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Dozens of Codepink activisits, in a women-led, women-initiated action, took their message to the public in front of the BP headquarters on Westlake Park Boulevard just before noon Monday. The women posed nearly naked, dripping with 'oil' and dragging nets of fish.

The protesters mourned the deaths of the 11 workers and devastation of wildlife and livelihoods all along the Gulf Coast. Read more.

BP Houston: The Naked Truth--Rallying the Troops!

BP Houston: The Naked Truth--Singing in Action!

Enviros Go Veal Pen 2.0 With BP’s Money
By Jane Hamsher | FireDogLake

“Some purists believe environmental groups should keep a healthy distance from certain kinds of corporations, particularly those whose core mission poses risks to the environment.” No, what the “purists” actually believe is that these groups should not be raising money from the public to act as watchdogs of the oil companies, and then take money from the oil companies to rubber stamp their green washing efforts and shield them from criticism when they richly deserve it. It’s known in common parlance as a “scam.”

Ten days after the BP oil rig collapsed into a flaming ball of oil on April 20, I wrote a post about how most of the environmental groups still had nothing about it on their landing pages. [At left] Here was the Sierra Club’s landing page on the morning of April 30.

I chalked it up to an unwillingness to buck the White House, as President Obama had a press conference in the Rose Garden to announce the expansion of offshore drilling on March 31:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: So today we’re announcing the expansion of offshore oil and gas exploration, but in ways that balance the need to harness domestic energy resources and the need to protect America’s natural resources. Under the leadership of Secretary Salazar, we’ll employ new technologies that reduce the impact of oil exploration. We’ll protect areas that are vital to tourism, the environment, and our national security. And we’ll be guided not by political ideology, but by scientific evidence.

That’s why my administration will consider potential areas for development in the mid and south Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, while studying and protecting sensitive areas in the Arctic. That’s why we’ll continue to support development of leased areas off the North Slope of Alaska, while protecting Alaska’s Bristol Bay.

But the Washington Post is reporting that money from BP itself was also complicating matters for the enviros: Read more.

BP Oil Spill Day 35: Is It Time to Push BP Aside?
Government Threatens to Take Over if BP Does Not Make Progress
By Sam Champion and Kate McCarthy | ABC News

Frustration along the Gulf Coast is mounting and the government has threatened to take over the cleanup process in the Gulf of Mexico if BP does not make progress soon as the oil spill enters its fifth week.

"If we find that they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing, we'll push them out of the way appropriately and we'll move forward to make sure that everything is being done to protect the people of the Gulf Coast," Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said Sunday.

BP acknowledged that the government is not happy with the progress in capping the underwater gusher so far, but said the government's position "is no different from our own view."

"We are putting everything we know how to do at this. We've got the best people, the best scientists with us from our own company or across the industry or from government," BP COO Doug Suttles said on "GMA." "I think everyone is frustrated, we're frustrated, clearly the secretary [Salazar] is and they want us to get this done as quickly as we can." Read more.

• BP May Be Barred From U.S. Contracts Under Plan Weighed by EPA | Business Week
• James Carville Takes On Obama On Oil Spill: He's 'Risking Everything' With 'Go Along With BP Strategy' | Huffington Post
• Experts testify on grim ecological fallout from Gulf oil spill | CNN
• Hurricane, Oil Spill Could Be Troubling Mix | NPR
• It's Bush's Oil Spill | Daily Beast
• Crime on the High Seas – the “Deepwater Horizon” Oil Rig Disaster | Daily Censored
• White House Covers Up Menacing Oil "Blob" | Oil Price
• BP refuses EPA order to switch to less-toxic oil dispersant | LA Times
• U.S. government slams BP for missed deadlines on spill | Reuters

Trucking Toward Climate Change
By Dahr Jamail | Truthout

The tar sands mining project in Alberta, Canada, is possibly the largest industrial project in human history and critics claim it could also be the most destructive. The mining procedure for extracting oil from a region referred to as the "tar sands," located north of Edmonton, releases at least three times the CO2 emissions as regular oil production procedures and will likely become North America's single largest industrial contributor to climate change.

Most of the oil produced by the project will likely be consumed by the United States, a country that, along with Canada, is already heavily invested, on many levels, in the project.

The project is operated by Imperial Oil, whose parent company, ExxonMobil Canada, has a long-term production goal of more than 300,000 barrels of bitumen (extra heavy oil) per day. To do this, they will require new equipment to be shipped through the United States.

Trucks and trailers moving specialized, nontoxic mining equipment from where it is manufactured in Korea to the Kearl oil sands project, located in the Athabasca oil sands in northeastern Alberta, are slated to use highways in Idaho and Montana to transport the gear. This would happen after it has been shipped across the Pacific Ocean to Portland, Oregon, where it would then be barged up the Hood and Snake Rivers to Lewiston, Idaho, from which it would be hauled over land into Canada. Read more.

Obama’s BP Disaster Commission: Looking Forward with No Subpoenas
By emptywheel | FireDogLake

As promised Obama signed an executive order forming a presidential commission to study the BP disaster today. I thought it’d be instructive to compare what he just formed with what Edward Markey and Lois Capps proposed. Starting with this detail:

Sec. 4. Administration. (a) The Commission shall hold public hearings and shall request information including relevant documents from Federal, State, and local officials, nongovernmental organizations, private entities, scientific institutions, industry and workforce representatives, communities, and others affected by the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, as necessary to carry out its mission. [my emphasis]

Obama’s envisioning this Commission “requesting” information from entities like BP and Halliburton. Capps and Markey, however, envision subpoenas: Read more.

Lessons from the Gulf
By Stephen Lendman

On April 22, AP reported the news - an initial April 20 explosion, then a larger one igniting Deepwater Horizon's oil drilling platform that burned for more than a day before sinking and releasing thousands of barrels of oil daily into surrounding waters, enough potentially to cause the greatest ever environmental disaster if not sealed in time to prevent.

Transocean Ltd. owned and operated the Deepwater Horizon platform under contract to BP Exploration and Production Inc., a division of BP - 4th on Fortune Global 500 with $239 billion in 2009 operating revenue and $14 billion in profits. It ranked fourth behind Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil and Wal-Mart. Of the world's 10 largest companies, six are oil giants. Transocean, an offshore drilling contractor, owns operates about 140 drilling rigs. More on its culpability below.

On April 29, the Institute for Southern Studies published "Facts and Figures" about the Gulf explosion and emerging disaster saying: