I’m getting the distinct impression that this is being treated first and foremost as a political, and public policy problem, by the Obama admin. And I pretty much knew from the get-go that BP was going to treat this as an engineering problem and public relations problem.
Nobody is treating it at the level it deserves to be treated at: a potentially catastrophic environmental problem. Good on these tree hugging scientists for raising the flag.
I doubt Obama is issuing direct orders to NOAA. And I don’t think there’s ever been a deep water blow out of this magnitude, so to some extent we’re in uncharted waters. Nobody really knows what the F to do. There doesn’t appear to be any clear scientific consensus on whether dropping millions of gallons of toxic dispersants on the oil actually makes this worse – from an environmental perspective – or not. The problem is, once the oil is in the water, and there was no successful containment at the front end, there are no good choices left. Only bad choices and worse choices.
High fives to the tree-hugging, lying liberal scientists for calling this out. The primary issue- the environment – is being displaced by other, more parochial interests. As for NOAA scientists getting the shaft, this doesn’t surprise me. The US government has become, since the dawn of Reaganomics, a nearly fully-owned subsidiary of corporate interests and our Wall Street Overlords. There should have been robust requirements already in place that forced BP and others to have a viable containment plan ready-to-go at a moments notice. It’s an appalling failure of conservative ideology, and their neoliberal allies, to presume that the Captains of Industry are actually interested, and can be trusted to essentially self-regulate -- or to self-implement in any fair and equitable way, the balancing of their profit motive and the public interest. Anyway, this crap is par for the course, and I had a bad feeling about this spill within a couple days of it happening. All the signs were pointing to a clusterfuck. I’ve seen this crap routinely; how the influence, power, and legions of lawyers of powerful Robber Barons can make a regulatory agency cower in fear and submission. There is this pervasive warped sense of priorities where the public interest supposedly has to be balanced against the possibility of offending any entity that wields gi-nourmous power and wealth. Fuck that. These agencies sole purpose for existing is to serve the public interest, and the public welfare.