Checkered Lounge Pants

By Nick Spicer in Americas on May 17th, 2010 "Call me Ishmael." So begins Herman Melville epic seafaring novel, ostensibly about whaling, an American Odyssey recounting Captain Ahab's obsessive pursuit of a great oil-carrying sperm whale, Moby Dick. It ends in disaster. I write this in a sand barrier motel in Grand Isle Louisiana, in a hot room overlooking an empty beach, and just a few of the six hundred-plus oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. And it is hard not to ask: is BP another Captain Ahab? Or, worse, is the United States? Crude oil is not, of course, sperm whale oil, or "spermicetti". But they have had equally pervasive influences on their societies. In Melville's 19th century, the oil was used to burn in lamps, make candles, soften leather and even, he writes, to anoint kings: "Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar oil, nor castor oil, nor bear's oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil. What then can it possibly be, but sperm oil

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.President, Waterkeeper Alliance; Professor, Pace University Posted: May 5, 2010 10:19 AM A common spin in the right wing coverage of BP's oil spill is a gleeful suggestion that the gulf blowout is Obama's Katrina. In truth, culpability for the disaster can more accurately be laid at the Bush Administration's doorstep. For eight years, George Bush's presidency infected the oil industry's oversight agency, the Minerals Management Service, with a septic culture of corruption from which it has yet to recover. Oil patch alumnae in the White House encouraged agency personnel to engineer weakened safeguards that directly contributed to the gulf catastrophe. The absence of an acoustical regulator -- a remotely triggered dead man's switch that might have closed off BP's gushing pipe at its sea floor wellhead when the manual switch failed (the fire and explosion on the drilling platform may have prevented the dying workers from pushing the button)

You may have heard the news in the last two days about the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig which caught fire, burned for two days, then sank in 5,000 ft of water in the Gulf of Mexico. There are still 11 men missing, and they are not expected to be found. The rig belongs to Transocean, the world’s biggest offshore drilling contractor. The rig was originally contracted through the year 2013 to BP and was working on BP’s Macondo exploration well when the fire broke out. The rig costs about $500,000 per day to contract. The full drilling spread, with helicopters and support vessels and other services, will cost closer to $1,000,000 per day to operate in the course of drilling for oil and gas. The rig cost about $350,000,000 to build in 2001 and would cost at least double that to replace today. The rig represents the cutting edge of drilling technology. It is a floating rig, capable of working in up to 10,000 ft water depth. The rig is not moored; It does not use anchors because it would be

The details of this first-class environmental disaster are disturbing. The first response (putting the fire on the oil platform out) may have been a fatal error, since the fire was likely a far less damaging problem than the consequent collapse of the rig and uncontrolled gushing of the well. Failsafes at the wellhead failed. British Petroleum is widely quoted saying that a relief well might take two to three months to drill. Hopefully there will be some better news soon. Hopefully the "drill baby drill" crowd will draw the obvious lessons (but don't hold your breath). Hopefully Canada will draw the same obvious lessons about proposals from the same companies to conduct similar "development" in Canada's high arctic (but is our Conservative government capable of anything but cheerleading when it comes to the oil industry?) And hopefully this tragedy has put another nail in the worldview our current national government is a junior colony of. What British Petro