Paying for the Nation's Worst Oil Spill
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2010-06-07/paying-nations-worst-oil-spill
A Brown Pelican prepares to enter the water at the Egmont Key National Wildlife Refuge near St. Petersburg, Florida on May 23, 2010. The bird was rescued and cleaned by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service after being found oiled near Louisiana's coast.
U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Nick Ameen via Deepwater Horizon Response on Flickr
Cleaning up the BP oil disaster. The White House sent BP a $69 million bill for initial expenses. Total costs could reach into the billions. Who will pay for the nation's worst oil spill?
Guests
Tyson Slocum
director of Public Citizen's energy program.
Neil King, Jr.
national reporter, The Wall Street Journal.
Kevin Book
managing director of research, ClearView Energy Partners.
Darryl Willis
vice president for resources for BP.
Comments
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I've noticed that the media (CNN and network news) is not showing as many pictures of oil-soaked birds or dead fish as was done during the Exxon Valdez disaster. Please ask your panelists comment on why not.
Is the American public being spared from the gruesome photos to avoid further outrage? The media talk about the devastation that will and is occur, but they are not showing the immediate harm to the fragile ecosystem. Or is it that the wildlife has not been as affected (yet)?
I am confused as to why so many people are worried about the loss of jobs. It may sound out of touch on my part but, it seems to me if a group of people made their living off of dumping carcinogenic or toxic chemicals into a water source, or by destroying multiple other person's revenue source then the loss of jobs that would result from closing down the industry would be irrelevant when related to the many other jobs that are negatively affected.
Whenever your hear interviews with the oil industry reps, or employees of the off shore drilling you hear them talk about how the moratorium will devestate the local economy. It's almost as though I am hearing the manufactures of Zyklon B argue that elimination of concentration camps would devestate their economy. Am I that out of touch or is it perhaps the oil industry and persons who make their living from it that are out of touch?
I feel like the focus by BP since the oil disaster began has been on recovering the oil that is spewing rather than working to simply stop it. Wouldn't it be easier to stop the flow than to try to find a way to be able to continue to get the oil from the source? Isn't our environment more valuable than the liquid gold under the Gulf? Can your panelists comment on that?
- A concerned New Orleans native living in Baltimore
I'm amazed by the comments made by all the news outlets, that the discontent of the people toward the President's actions is do to his inability to connect emotionally with the people.
How stupid can the press think the people are? It has nothing to do connecting. It has everything to do with the response to the clean-up efforts, not that actual spill. We realize that BP or the Oil Companies have what expertise there is. The problem is the efforts made for the clean-up.
We can't afford to wait for BP to protect the marshes and shoreline. That's not their priority.
While BP should pay for all associated efforts, we have to protect what we can while we can, not after wholesale destruction.
I've lived by the ocean all my life and am sick at heart about the lack of response. Major issues:
All disbursement treatments should be stopped.
Berms should have already been established across marshes.
The state agencies should be allowed to coordinate all clean-up
efforts with immedaite payment be made by the federal gov't until money can be collected from BP.
Here is an apparent "natural" solution for cleaning up an oil spill. View their compelling demonstration. It is still hypothetical that this would be effective in the open sea.
http://www.wimp.com/solutionoil/
Among people I know there is much skepticism that such an idea would be attempted. BP seems very insular and government seems very distant from ideas produced by someone other than high paid "experts."
Cleveland Heights Ohio
I'd like to know more about the hard science and engineering of the challenge to solving the escape of oil, control and clean-up of escaped oil, the present and expected effect on wildlife and vegetation. What's the hard scientific and engineering supervision and follow through here? Who's in control here? Is BP the only science and engineering "decider"? Does the US have any scientific or engineering oversight? Do we, in fact, know much about how to do what needs to be done here? If not, where are the MIT/Cal Tech and other engineering talent? First of all this is an engineering problem.
I live north of the Gulf, inland Missouri, on what I would call homesteaded land. What happens to the quality of life I enjoy when we have the first hurricane that sends oily rain over my gardens, orchards, and home structures?
Additionally, once the plume rounds the Keys and heads up the East Coast, will these residents be compensated either for loss of their livelihoods or damage to the environment.
I see the damage chain as not ending for decades, and affecting far more than we have begun to recognize.
I think it is ironic that we have all feared, and rightly so, the repercussions of the leakage of nuclear waste, this fear being in part an obstacle to further development of the resource, when all along we had this sleeping bomb of offshore drilling presenting a threat equal in magnitude, albeit mechanical vs. mutational, in threat to our environment. In the end, it comes to the integrity of the CEO's of the companies in charge: sadly, greed and integrity are often at odds! BP's lack of integrity has been obvious since the early days of exploitation of oil in Iran and disregard for the wishes of the people! (Perhaps their mission statement reads "Money first, living organisms not employed by us last"!!!)
Thank you for this picture of a cleaned bird facing a new home. I have been so heartbroken watching the extremely sad pictures of birds, beautiful pelicans covered with thick oil which I understand needs to be shown but I wonder if the right people are affected by them.
I know that the MMS collects royalties from companies extracting oil from areas they are charged with overseeing, but does anyone know if MMS receives its revenue directly from those royalties? I have a theory that if the MMS would stand to gain or lose financially from the extraction of oil from its areas of control then they would have a strong incentive to ensure that companies are drilling properly in those areas. If the companies are not drilling properly or if they have a poor drilling safety record then the MMS would not allow them to drill further or at all since the MMS would stand to lose financially from incidents such as the current spill.
The drilling companies operate under this profit loss system. Apparently BP was not thinking about this, which allowed for their judgment to lapse and now they have to pay for their mistake. Transocean, the drilling company working with BP on this operation, argued against BP’s decision to use improper drilling practices because they knew the risks and how it could hurt them financially.
BP also had a poor safety record. If the MMS were to have received it’s funding directly from oil extraction then they probably would have denied BP’s request to drill based on their poor record.
Such a structure of funding may also have cleaned up the culture at the MMS since their incomes would have been dependent upon proper drilling practices instead of bribes from the oil companies.
I tend to believe that one of the reasons newspapers have declined is that they became somewhat irrelevant when they came under the control of gov't rather than the "watch dogs" we needed. I refer particularly to the "weapons of mass destruction theory" promoted during the Bush administration to support our going to war. I along with at least 1/4 of a million people participated in the protest march in NYC in 3/02, and all the papers gave it such little coverage, some reported as if a few thousand showed up. I think there was only one paper ? knight Ridder that constantly questioned whether there really were any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
I believe that if all the papers had kept to a more honest reporting that the public would have and still be clamoring for the information they presented.
Thank you.
Magpie
It would seem to me at this time that ALL pictures of destruction should be publicized. I'm sure there are dead sperm whales and with the pending whale ban being voted on with the IWC this June 21st, it would seem to me that people should know in order to connect with the president to try to stop this from happening. Whales are going to have enough to deal with in this mess ( as well as ALL marine life and sea birds) without being HUNTED.