Incredible irony here. The Jones Act is an entirely different issue than the 15ppm EPA standard. You're so ignorant of a simple technical issue that you're apparently can't understand what I wrote, and in the simplest language possible.
And your calling the 15ppm issue a "neocon talking point" is laughable if it wasn't so sad. What major politician or talking head has discussed this?
Do you even know what this issue is? Let me try to explain it to you again:
The skimmer ships take a mixture of oil and water off the surface of the ocean. Its a crude process, and this mixture is typically 30 to 70% oil. So for every gallon of oil that you pick up you might have one or two gallons of water to dispose of. The mixture then flows into the ship and into a settling tank. The oil floats to the surface of the tank and the water sinks, like a bottle of salad dressing. In reality this settling process is only 99% or so efficient at separating the oil and water. Common sense would dictate that you should them pump out this water and dump it behind the ship, because even if the water contained 1% oil, it was cleaner then before and is being dumped into a spill area, which itself is contaminated with oil, and the oil might get picked up in a second pass.
But The Obama's EPA insists that the water has to be cleaned to less than 15ppm before being dumped. That requires a land based treatment technology. So the ship has to steam all the way back to port with the mixture of oil and water, stirring up more polluted water, making it harder to skim off, through some booms, causing more oil to be released into adjacent waters. Then it has to pump the water into land based tanks for further treatment, steam back to the soil site, through more booms and then stir up more floating oil....
Its a totally retarded way to clean up an ocean, Libby. It is ineffective, wastes a tremendous amount of resources, and the end result is that very little gets cleaned up relative to what could be done should common sense prevail.
And again, the only person who can stop all this nonsense is your beloved black president,
The Obama.