Lucy has moved from Japan and this blog. See lucylou.info for her latest posts.
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Hey, Now BP Is Doing Stuff In Alaska That'll Piss You Off
Via savingpaper:
BP is moving ahead with the controversial project to drill for oil three miles off the coast of Alaska in spite of the Obama administration’s moratorium on offshore drilling. The project, called Liberty, has been classified by regulators as an “onshore” project because it sits on an artificial island — a 31-acre pile of gravel in about 22 feet of water — built by BP.
And then there’s what those Bush-era regulators chose not to regulate:
Rather than conducting their own independent analysis, federal regulators, in a break from usual practice, allowed BP in 2007 to write its own environmental review for the project as well as its own consultation documents relating to the Endangered Species Act, according to two scientists from the Alaska office of the federal Mineral Management Service that oversees drilling.
The environmental assessment was taken away from the agency’s unit that typically handles such reviews, and put in the hands of a different division that was more pro-drilling, said the scientists, who discussed the process because they remained opposed to how it was handled.
“The whole process for approving Liberty was bizarre,” one of the federal scientists said.
jstn:
NOAA map showing 3,858 oil platforms along the gulf coast as of October, 2006. Katrina and other hurricanes sank or otherwise disabled over 100 of them the year before.
I was surprised to see how many there were, but I guess I shouldn’t have been. Prior to this calamity my two main sources of knowledge regarding oil production were There Will Be Blood and certain scenes from Armageddon. I’ve been trying to acquaint myself with some actual data.
We rank third in oil production in the world and that a third of our production happens off shore. We account for about a quarter of world consumption and a tenth of production (behind Saudi Arabia and Russia). Almost half our supply is used to make gasoline. BP is the fourth biggest company in the world but the third biggest oil company after Shell and Exxon.
I was horrified to read about another spill that happened earlier this month in Nigeria that seems to be amongst the worst ever and has yet to receive much media attention at all. That’s apparently par for the course there.
The Exxon Valdez is 31st in the world ranking of all time oil spills, and since it happened it’s become the “Library of Congress” to which all other spills are inevitably compared. This is quite useful because frankly there’s too many units available for talking about oil and it seems like every news source uses a different one. Wikipedia has tonnage but the American media generally prefers gallons, and the oil industry itself uses barrels. It’s difficult to compare and contrast the horror without converting to a common base. One “Exxon Valdez” is reasonable shorthand for “enough oil to fuck shit up”.
The exact quantities are always fuzzy, of course. The NY Times reports a range of anywhere from 2.25 Exxon Valdezes all the way up to 9 for the Gulf so far, and that’s under the glare of the American public. The one in Nigeria was supposedly 2.5, but who knows. The US produces 19.5 EVs every day.
Not that it’s any comfort, but we still haven’t reached the proportions of the Gulf War spill, which was an astounding 43 EVs. If the one in our own gulf keeps going through August at the most pessimistic rate we could easily see another 20, totaling three times as much as now.
CNN has a good map and USA Today has a good article illustrating the current offshore leasing situation by state. It’s easy to imagine oil executives seeing the planet’s surface as a real life Starcraft map. If we’re lucky, someone will tell them about the hundred billion dollars for every human being on Earth lying in the minerals of the asteroid belt.
Is it asking too much for underwater aliens à la The Abyss to reveal themselves to humanity and show us the error of our ways?
(via karmcity)
The ecological impact of pets.
1 medium-sized dog = 2 SUVs
2 hamsters = 1 plasma TV
1 goldfish = 2 cell phones
(From NewScientist, via Information Is Beautiful)
