BP pollution corporation still not trusted

This video from the USA is called BP Oil Spill Footage Save the Birds: TruthVlog.

By Emily Swanson in the USA:

Poll Finds BP Public Image Still Tarnished 3 Years After Gulf Spill

Posted: 04/20/2013 9:44 am EDT

Three years after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Americans are still likely to have an unfavorable view of the company involved in the disaster, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll. While BP has spent millions on ads touting the company’s cleanup efforts, it’s unclear whether those ads have really helped BP’s image.

According to the new poll, 43 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of the multinational oil-and-gas company, and 31 percent have a favorable view. …

The Deepwater Horizon spill was a huge public relations debacle for BP, and the results of the poll help to show why. Even three years after the oil started gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, 65 percent of respondents said they had heard a lot about it, while 27 percent said they had heard a little and only 8 percent said they had heard nothing at all.

Given that level of public awareness, it’s not surprising that BP has spent millions of dollars on advertising in response to the spill, including almost $100 million during the four months of the spill itself. (The company has also spent $42 billion to cover costs related to the spill.)

That advertising has reached a majority of Americans, according to the survey. Sixty-seven percent said they had seen BP’s TV ads about cleaning up after the spill, compared to the 33 percent who said either that they had not seen the ads (23 percent) or that they weren’t sure (10 percent).

But the survey found mixed evidence for how well those ads are working to improve BP’s public image.

Among those who had seen the commercials, 28 percent said their opinion of the company had thereby become more favorable and 11 percent said their opinion had become less favorable. But 59 percent said that seeing the ads had not changed their view at all.

The margin between unfavorable and favorable views of BP was 51 to 34 percent among those who had seen the ads and 32 to 24 percent among those who had not seen the ads. Forty-five percent of those who had not seen the ads said they weren’t sure how to rate BP.

Toxic Threads: Polluting Paradise. A story of big brands and water pollution in Indonesia: here.

Related articles

• Mississippi joins other states suing BP over oil spill (bizjournals.com)
• Florida becomes 4th state to sue BP over oil spill (miamiherald.com)
• Houston, America’s energy capital, may sue BP over oil spill (khou.com)
• Fla. AG Files Suit Against BP Over 2010 Spill (wtvy.com)
• First phase of BP trial ends, second phase to begin in September (bizjournals.com)
• Florida sues BP, Halliburton over 2010 oil spill (cnn.com)

BP oil pollution and WikiLeaks

This video fom the USA is called BP Beyond Pollution.

By Greg Palast:

Bradley Manning and the oil rig cover-up

Thursday 04 April 2013

Three years ago this month, on April 20 2010, the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew itself to kingdom come.

Soon thereafter a message reached my office, from a person I dare not name, who was floating somewhere in the Caspian Sea along the coast of Baku, central Asia.

The source was in mortal fear he’d be identified – and with good reason.

Once we agreed on a safe method of communication, he revealed this – 17 months before BP’s Deepwater Horizon blew out and exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, another BP rig suffered an identical blow-out in the Caspian Sea.

Crucially, both the Gulf and Caspian Sea blow-outs had the same identical cause – the failure of the cement “plug.”

To prevent blow-outs, drilled wells must be capped with cement. BP insisted on lacing its cement with nitrogen gas – the same stuff used in laughing gas – because it speeds up drying.

Time is money, and mixing some nitrogen gas into the cement saves a lot of money.

However, because BP’s penny-pinching method is so damn dangerous, it is nearly alone in using it in deep, high-pressure offshore wells.

The reason? Nitrogen gas can create gaps in the cement, allow methane gas to go up the borehole, fill the drilling platform with explosive gas – and boom, you’re dead.

So when its Caspian Sea rig blew out in 2008, rather than change its ways, BP simply covered it up.

Our investigators discovered that the company had hidden the information from its own shareholders, from British regulators and from the US securities exchange commission. BP USA vice-president David Rainey withheld the information from the US Senate in a testimony he gave six months before the Gulf deaths.

Channel 4 agreed to send me to Azerbaijan, whose waters the earlier BP blow-out occurred in, to locate witnesses who would be willing to talk to me without getting “disappeared.” (They didn’t talk, but they still disappeared.)

And I was arrested. Some rat had tipped off the Security Ministry. I knew I’d get out quick because throwing a reporter of Her Majesty’s empire into a dungeon would embarrass both BP and the Azeri oil-o-crats.

The gendarmes demanded our film, but I wasn’t overly concerned because I had brought with me from London Austin Powers cameras-in-pens, on which I’d loaded all I needed. But I did fear for my witnesses left behind in Azerbaijan – and for my source in a tiger cage in the US, Private Bradley Manning.

Only after investigating Baku did I discover, while trawling through the so-called “WikiLeaks” documents, secret State Department cables released by Manning.

The information was stunning. The US State Department knew about the BP blow-out in the Caspian and joined in the cover-up.

Apparently BP refused to tell its own partners, Chevron and Exxon, why the lucrative Caspian oil flow had stopped.

Chevron bitched to the office of the US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice.

The US ambassador in Baku got Chevron the answer – a blow-out of the nitrogen-laced cement cap on a giant Caspian Sea platform.

The information was marked “SECRET.” Apparently loose lips about sinking ships would help neither Chevron nor the Azeri President Ilham Aliyev, the beneficiary of millions of dollars in payments of oil company baksheesh.

So what about Manning? He has been charged with “aiding the enemy” – a crime punishable by death.

But Manning’s sole and only purpose was to get out the truth. It wasn’t Manning who wrote the cover-up memos, he merely wanted to get them to the victims – us.

And since when did the public become “the enemy”?

Had Manning’s memos come out just a few months earlier, the truth about BP’s deadly drilling methods would have been revealed, and there’s little doubt BP would have had to change its ways. Those 11 men could well have been alive today.

Did Manning know about this particular hush-hush cable about BP’s blow-out when he decided he had to become Paul Revere and warn the planet?

That’s unlikely, in the thousands of cables he had. But he’d seen enough evidence of murder and mendacity in other cables, so, as Manning, under oath, told a court, he tried to give it all to the New York Times to have knowledgeable reporters review the cables confidentially for life-saving information.

The New York Times immediately seized on this extraordinary opportunity … to ignore Manning. The Times only ran it when the Guardian was going to scoop – and embarrass – the New York hacks.

Though there are limits. While reporter David Leigh put the story of BP’s prior blow-out on page one of the Guardian, neither the New York Times or any other major US news outlet ran the story of the blow-out and oil industry cover-up.

No surprise there, though – the most “prestigious” US news programme, PBS Newshour, was sponsored by … Chevron Corporation.

I have more than a little distaste for toffs like the New York Times‘s former executive editor, columnist Bill Keller, who used Manning documents to cash in on a book deal and land star turns on television while simultaneously smearing his source Manning as “troubled,” “emotionally fractured,” “vague,” “inchoate” and – cover the children’s ears – “gay.”

Furthermore, while preening about their revelations from the Manning documents, the New York Times had no problem with imprisoning its source.

When it was mentioned that Manning was no different from Daniel Ellsberg, the CIA operative who released the Pentagon Papers, Keller reassured us that the Times had also told Ellsberg he was “on his own” and did not object to its source being charged as a spy.

And the Times‘s much-lauded exposure of the My Lai massacre? The late great investigative reporter Ron Ridenhour, who gave the story to Seymour Hersh, told me that he and Hersh had to effectively blackmail the Times into printing it.

Keller writes that Manning, by going to “anti-American” WikiLeaks, threatened the release of “information that might get troops in the field or innocent informants killed.”

Really?

This is the same Bill Keller who admits that he knew his paper’s reports in 2003 that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction were completely false, but that he – as editor – covered up his paper’s knowledge their WMD stories were simply bogus.

Those stories validated the Bush propaganda and helped tip the political balance to invade Iraq. Four thousand US soldiers died.

I guess the idea is that releasing information that kills troops is criminal, but that disinformation that kills troops is quite acceptable.

Greg Palast (gregpalast.com) investigated the BP Deepwater Horizon deaths for Channel 4. Those dispatches are contained in his highly acclaimed book Vultures’ Picnic, named book of the year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.

Australia, the USA, and WikiLeaks: here.

Related articles

• Steve Horn: State Department’s Keystone XL Contractor ERM Green-Lighted BP’s Explosive Caspian Pipeline (huffingtonpost.com)

BP oil still polluting Gulf of Mexico

This video from the USA is called BP, Beyond Pollution.

From Nature:

Dirty blizzard buried Deepwater Horizon oil

One-third of oil from 2010 spill may be mixed with sea-floor sediments.

Mark Schrope

26 January 2013

Scientists say large amounts of oil from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill may have ended up on the sea floor.

Missing oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill may have ended up at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

The Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010 spewed more than 600 million litres of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. While microbes processed the vast majority within months, US government assessments failed to account for the fate of about one-quarter of the spilled oil.

Some scientists attending the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill and Ecosystem Science Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana this week are now saying that as much as one-third of the oil may have been mixed with deep ocean sediments through a phenomenon dubbed the dirthy bathtub, and dragged to the bottom by another process called the dirty blizzard. The oily sediments risk causing significant damage to ecosystems, they say, and might even affect commercial fisheries in the future.

Perfect storm

Rebekka Larson, a sedimentary geologist at Eckerd College in St Petersberg, Florida, presented data showing that at many sites, plankton and other surface material were raining down at least ten times faster than normal, often leaving a telltale darker layer on the sea floor. Jeff Chanton, a geochemist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, thinks that the oil acted as a catalyst for particles to clump together and fall to the bottom on a massive scale, creating a ‘dirty blizzard’. This fit with reports from researchers that during the spill, layers of water that would normally be cloudy with suspended plankton instead appeared totally transparent — except for strings of aggregated particles falling to the bottom. “There’s something about that oil that just sucks everything out of the surface,” says Chanton.

Uta Passow, a biological oceanographer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, offered hints about what that something might be. She presented lab experiments showing that weathered oil collected from the Deepwater Horizon site causes particles to clump together, whereas fresh oils do not. Passow’s lab is now exploring whether the effect is due to chemical transformation of the oil on its path to the surface or some bacterial effect.

Dark water

The dirty blizzard may have gotten dirtier as it rained down. Researchers at the University of South Florida College of Marine Science in St Petersburg, led by chemical oceanographer David Hollander, described a ‘dirty bathtub’ effect in which diffuse oil, suspended in a water layer at depths of more than 1,000 metres, contaminated sediments as deep currents moved it around the Gulf. Hollander said this week that, taken together, the dirty bathtub and dirty blizzard may have sent up to 30% of the spilled oil to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. “We can debate about how to delineate it, but the material is there,” he says.

Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science in Cambridge and a member of a commission assembled by the US government to investigate the spill, is not convinced by this figure. “I find it hard to believe,” he says, noting that oil concentrations measured in most sediments have been small. But Hollander says that the spill affected such a wide area that small concentrations might add up to huge amounts of oil.

Sediment contamination could be troublesome for commercially fished species such as tilefish, which live in deep waters and not only eat worms and other animals found in the sediment, but also burrow into the sediment, mixing it up, says Steve Murowski, a University of South Florida fisheries biologist who collaborates with Hollander. Tracey Sutton, an ichthyologist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester Point, says that the ecological effects could get worse with time. ”The long-term effects, we’re not going to see yet.”

Nature
doi:10.1038/nature.2013.12304

Minor oil spills are often bigger than reported. Remote imaging finds official number of Gulf of Mexico slicks is correct, but size not always is: here.

Britain: BP drivers stage strike to save their pensions: here.

Related articles

• BP oil’s toxic ‘clean-up’ (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• The Science of the BP Oil Spill (wkrg.com)
• Gulf of Mexico clean-up makes 2010 spill 52-times more toxic (sciencedaily.com)
• Disperant Made BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill 52 Times More Toxic (treehugger.com)
• Environment: New study shows dispersant makes oil up to 52 times more toxic to Gulf of Mexico microorganisms (summitcountyvoice.com)
• BP Suspended By EPA From New Contracts With Federal Government (huffingtonpost.com)
• BP Oil Spill Class-action Claims – Filing a Claim and Making Presentment (prweb.com)

Al Qaeda’s British weapons

This video from the USA is called CIA Documents Show 9/11 Bin Laden Warnings Ignored.

British weapons go not only to dictators in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia …

By Rory MacKinnon in Britain:

Terrorists ‘may have carried’ British arms

Tuesday 22 January 2013

Terrorists “squarely” responsible for the deaths of Britons in Algeria could have been carrying British weapons from neighbouring Libya, William Hague admitted yesterday.

The Foreign Secretary was on the defensive following a firefight between Algerian soldiers and the Khaled Abu al-Abbas Brigade, which had taken staff hostage at the BP gas plant. Three Britons and one Colombian-born British resident were among 81 people killed in the battle.

Anti-war activists poured scorn on Mr Hague following speculation the group had bought its weapons from Libya’s missing stockpiles of arms supplied by Western nations to rebels two years ago in a bid to overthrow the Gaddafi regime.

Mr Hague admitted to reporters yesterday that terrorists in the region had “taken advantage” of the glut of arms in Libya.

But he insisted violence in the region could have been even worse had Britain and other nations had let the civil war continue without them.

“If the Libyan conflict had gone on for longer, there would have been an even greater flow of weapons and an even greater opportunity for extremists to take hold in Libya,” he said.

But Campaign Against the Arms Trade‘s Kaye Stearman said Mr Hague was “coming up with a counterfactual.”

“It’s speculative. William Hague is trying to evade responsibility for Britain and the EU selling arms to Libya.”

As recently as 2011 Britain’s trade officials considered Libya a “priority market” for arms sales, while EU figures showed Britain alone approved £238,608 in small arms to the Gaddafi regime between 2005 and 2009.

France, now embroiled in terrorist conflicts in both Algeria and neighbouring Mali, also signed off on €2.3m (£1.9m) worth of ammunition and fuses in the same period.

Even after Britain imposed a temporary embargo, EU members still approved another €34m (£28.5m) in arms export licences.

Meanwhile the group behind last week’s kidnappings threatened further plots against French and other Western nations’ Algerian holdings.

The Algerian government said yesterday that the death toll from the four-day siege at the Ain Amenas natural gas plant had risen to 38: here.

The war in Libya was seen as a success, now here we are engaging with the blowback in Mali: here.

Why Afghan ghosts haunt France’s Mali intervention: here.

West’s greed in new scramble for Africa: here.

Related articles

• David Cameron has created a new war on terror (blogs.telegraph.co.uk)
• Most weapons used in attack came from Libya… (telegraph.co.uk)
• Algeria hostage-takers aided by Libyan Islamists: source (dailystar.com.lb)
• News & World Events – War against al-Qaeda in Africa could last decades (disclose.tv)

Transocean’s small fine for BP oil disaster

This video from the USA is called BP Oil Disaster: Fallout Making People And Wildlife Sick – Dean Blanchard Seafood, Inc. Closed.

By Bryan Dyne in the USA:

Transocean settles for $1.4 billion in criminal and civil charges

8 January 2013

Transocean Deepwater Inc. has settled for only $1.4 billion towards all criminal and civil claims relating to the company’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in 2010, which leaked 4.9 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico and killed eleven workers. The settlement was announced by the Department of Justice on Thursday.

The settlement, which must still be approved by US District Judge Carl Barbier, precludes other criminal fines that would have arisen if Transocean went to trial in New Orleans over the spill, which was set to begin February 25. Furthermore, the settlement will not require Transocean to plead guilty to any crime relating to the deaths of the eleven workers killed on the oil rig, in contrast to BP, which pleaded guilty to eleven counts of manslaughter.

The deal consists of criminal penalties and fines of $400 million. $150 million of the criminal settlement goes towards restoring the habitats in the Gulf of Mexico that were affected by the spill and a further $150 million will go towards oil spill prevention and response research in the Gulf. The criminal penalties are from a charge of “negligence” against Transocean by the Justice Department. The more serious charge of “gross negligence,” defined as “wanton and reckless conduct,” was not levied.

The civil settlement is $1 billion in civil penalties for violations of the Clean Water Act. $800 million of that will be directed by the RESTORE Act of 2012 and will be used to fund environmental and economic projects for Gulf states. The civil resolution also reserves the claims for natural resource damages and clean-up costs.

Much has been said about the record amount of civil penalties that Transocean is required to pay, more than BP settled for last November. Attorney General Eric Holder called the settlement “significant” and claimed that it is “justice for the human, environmental, and economic devastation wrought by the Deepwater Horizon disaster.”

However, as with the $4.5 billion BP settlement, Transocean is being required to pay a paltry amount, over the course of five years, for its part in the 2010 explosion. It compares to the estimated worth of the Gulf region of more than $1 trillion, ignoring long-term environmental and economic effects. Transocean’s fund for claims from individuals and business for damages relating to the spill is only $2 billion.

The “justice” that is being meted out is merely a further signal by the Obama administration to oil drilling companies that the fines imposed for an oil spill, no matter how damaging, are not punitive but merely the cost of doing business.

The response of the market to Transocean’s settlement was favorable. The shares of Transocean Ltd. rose 6.4 percent Thursday and rose again Friday, by 5.3 percent, closing at $51.82.

The current settlement by Transocean does not include charges against any Transocean officials. In fact, the settlement places the blame on the crew of the Deepwater Horizon. The settlement states that Transocean’s crew “were negligent in failing fully to investigate clear indications that the Macondo well was not secure and that oil and gas were flowing into the well.”

This statement is designed to shield and absolve Transocean and BP of any responsibility for the explosion. It ignores the mass of reports that surfaced in the weeks and months after the explosion that the actions of Transocean and BP were directed towards making up cost overruns caused by delays in drilling, which drove the companies to ignore safety concerns around the backlog of necessary maintenance for the oil rig and to attempt to cap the Macondo well with substandard materials.

There were also reports that revealed that BP had advance warning of the explosion, but chose to continue operations to avoid another $500,000 per day rental fee on the rig. Another report indicated that the Deepwater Horizon was drilling for oil at 25,000 feet below the seabed, 5,000 feet deeper than allowed by its permit.

Placing the responsibility for the explosion on the Transocean crew also allows the US government, particularly the Minerals Management Service (since renamed the Bureau of Ocean Energy), to avoid any responsibility. From January 2005 to April 2010, there were sixteen fewer inspections of the Deepwater Horizon than there should have been. Inspections from 2010 had data “whited out” without explanation.

Such actions coincide with the policy of the Bush and Obama administrations, which have both done their utmost to protect the oil industry from civil and criminal suits. BP’s fund for compensation for the entire Gulf coast was only $20 billion. BP has been doing its best to avoid paying even that amount.

In addition, the Obama administration has allowed oil drilling to expand. BP has seven operational oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and plans to bring two more operational this year. Shell Oil’s Arctic drilling efforts are ongoing despite a series of accidents over the last year, including the most recent, in which one of its oil rigs ran aground in the Gulf of Alaska.

The next significant settlement dealing with the 2010 spill will most likely involve the full scope of the civil penalties facing BP. A trial is set for February 25. The company faces civil suits for a maximum of $90 billion for the estimated 4.9 million barrels of crude oil that spilled into the gulf. A settlement is possible before this date.

The author also recommends:

BP settles for $4.5 billion in criminal charges
[17 November 2012]

Related articles

• Transocean agrees oil spill fine (bbc.co.uk)
• Transocean to pay $1.4B for Deepwater disaster (cbc.ca)
• BP tells Halliburton to come clean (upi.com)
• Judge sets Feb. 14 hearing on Transocean plea deal (miamiherald.com)

Bahrain dictatorship and British BP oil

This video says about itself:

Nov 10, 2012

I had the privilege to meet Bahraini human rights defender, Maryam al-Khawaja, for the third time; but this time she was in Stockholm to receive the Stieg Larsson Prize 2012 for her struggle against oppression in Bahrain and her continuous work in highlighting the ongoing violations against human rights in Bahrain.

The Stieg Larsson Prize foundation had a conversation with Maryam al-Khawaja yesterday right after she received the award. This is my recording of the talk.

Here is part 2 of that conversation.

Earlier, this blog reported about one MP in Britain who did not accept a Christmas bribe from the Bahraini absolute monarchy.

However, now it seems that not all politicians in Britain are so incorruptible and anti-dictatorial.

From the Financial Times in Britain:

January 7, 2013 8:54 pm

MPs criticised over Gulf states inquiry

By Simeon Kerr in Dubai

MPs have come under fire for their handling of an inquiry into the UK’s approach to its Gulf allies after it emerged that evidence from the opposition in the troubled state of Bahrain had been excluded.

Lord Avebury, vice-chairman of the parliamentary human rights committee, said he was “very disturbed” about the omission of dissident voices from a Commons probe into the UK’s relations with Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

In a letter to the foreign affairs committee, which is conducting the inquiry, he said the list of approved submissions published last week excluded “all the pro-democracy and human rights submissions on Bahrain”, while including pro-government contributions.

The committee had requested evidence on how Britain should balance its defence and commercial interests in the Gulf with human rights issues.

The sensitive inquiry comes as the predominantly Sunni-run Gulf states are flexing their economic muscle to influence western opinion over the unrest in Bahrain, which they blame on Shia Iran.

Almost two years since protests broke out in the strategically vital Gulf state, Bahrain remains gripped by political unrest as youths from the majority Shia population protest against the minority Sunni-led government.

Manama says it is reforming after an independent commission last year lambasted its security forces for excessive use of force and the systematic use of torture after Saudi Arabia led Gulf forces into Bahrain to back the brutal quelling of dissent.

But the opposition says pledges of change are window-dressing and bloody repression continues.

Bahrain’s highest court on Monday reaffirmed sentences of up to life in jail for 13 political leaders for attempting to overthrow the monarchy, in another blow to UK-aided attempts to forge a dialogue within the island state’s polarised society.

Richard Ottaway, foreign affairs committee chairman, declined to comment. But one official said the publication of 36 submissions was not intended to indicate “the total sum of accepted evidence”.

An official said: “A further publication of evidence is expected in due course,” adding that oral testimony would be heard before the committee issued its report – expected before the summer.

Nine groups and individuals critical of the government have written to the committee, raising objections against the “disproportionate number” of submissions from those linked to the government “but who do not make these affiliations clear”.

Of the 36 approved submissions, most provide testimony in line with the government’s position, including Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, the Gulf state’s foreign minister.

Evidence has also been provided by lobbyists including Sir Graeme Lamb, a senior retired British army officer, who works for a consultancy that has been advising the [Bahraini] government.

Critical voices have been included, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and a UK-based satellite television station associated with the opposition movement.

But the main Shia opposition group, al-Wefaq was surprised to find that its submission had not been included.

Abduljalil Khalil, a senior al-Wefaq member, said the group’s exclusion was “unexpected.” He expressed concerns that the committee was failing to take a broad spectrum of opinion on the political crisis.

The UK is treading a delicate balance between fostering democratic development while maintaining its commercial relations in the Gulf, an export market worth £15bn a year.

The oil-rich Gulf states have become increasingly sensitive to criticism in the wake of the Arab uprising as the youth-driven wave of dissent spread to Bahrain, exacerbating decades of festering sectarian grievances.

Blaming the Bahrain protest movement on interference from Shia Iran, the Sunni Gulf states want western allies to show stronger support for their increasingly security-conscious policies.

In July, BP was excluded from a pre-qualification process for the extension of Bahrain’s 75-year-old oil concession.

When the foreign affairs committee inquiry was launched in September, Saudi officials threatened to reassess relations with the UK, rejecting “any foreign interference in the workings” of the Gulf states. David Cameron visited the Gulf in November .

After strenuous diplomacy, BP was later readmitted to the oil-concession bidding process.

‘Forsaken by the West’: Obama and the Betrayal of Democracy in Bahrain: here.

Bahrain arrests photographer who documented dissent: here.

Related articles

• European Union supports Bahrain dictatorship (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Bahrain dictatorship jails photographer (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Bahrain dictatorship arrests another human rights activist (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Bahrain dictatorship’s European allies (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Bahrain under pressure over refusal to reconsider activists’ sentences (guardian.co.uk)
• Bahrain protester sentences slammed (independent.ie)
• Bahrain regime detains United States journalist (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Arab dictators ‘for democracy’ in Syria (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)

BP oil’s toxic ‘clean-up’

This video is called Inside Story Americas: Environment still engulfed by BP’s oil spill.

From Wildlife Extra:

Oil spill treatment may make the pollution much worse

Gulf of Mexico clean-up makes 2010 spill 52-times more toxic

December 2012. If the 4.9 million barrels of oil that spilled into the Gulf of Mexico during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill was an ecological disaster, the two million gallons of dispersant used to clean it up apparently made it even worse – 52-times more toxic.

That’s according to new research from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Universidad Autonoma de Aguascalientes (UAA), Mexico.

The study found that mixing the dispersant with oil increased toxicity of the mixture up to 52-fold over the oil alone. In toxicity tests in the lab, the mixture’s effects increased mortality of rotifers, a microscopic grazing animal at the base of the Gulf’s food web.

Rotifers

Using oil from the Deep Water Horizon spill and Corexit, the dispersant required by the Environmental Protection Agency for clean up, the researchers tested toxicity of oil, dispersant and mixtures on five strains of rotifers. Rotifers have long been used by ecotoxicologists to assess toxicity in marine waters because of their fast response time, ease of use in tests and sensitivity to toxicants. In addition to causing mortality in adult rotifers, as little as 2.6 percent of the oil-dispersant mixture inhibited rotifer egg hatching by 50 percent. Inhibition of rotifer egg hatching from the sediments is important because these eggs hatch into rotifers each spring, reproduce in the water column, and provide food for baby fish, shrimp and crabs in estuaries.

Dispersants are poorly understood

“Dispersants are preapproved to help clean up oil spills and are widely used during disasters,” said UAA’s Roberto-Rico Martinez, who led the study. “But we have a poor understanding of their toxicity. Our study indicates the increase in toxicity may have been greatly underestimated following the Macondo well explosion.”

Martinez performed the research while he was a Fulbright Fellow at Georgia Tech in the lab of School of Biology Professor Terry Snell. They hope that the study will encourage more scientists to investigate how oil and dispersants impact marine food webs and lead to improved management of future oil spills.

Crude oil may be less harmful than the dispersants

“What remains to be determined is whether the benefits of dispersing the oil by using Corexit are outweighed by the substantial increase in toxicity of the mixture,” said Snell, chair of the School of Biology. “Perhaps we should allow the oil to naturally disperse. It might take longer, but it would have less toxic impact on marine ecosystems.”

The findings are published online by the journal Environmental Pollution and will appear in the February 2013 print edition.

See also here.

Related articles

• Study: Dispersant Made Oil 50 Times More Toxic To Gulf Of Mexico Microorganisms (thinkprogress.org)
• Disperant Made BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill 52 Times More Toxic (treehugger.com)
• BP Clean-Up Made Oil Spill 52 Times Worse (medicaldaily.com)
• Gulf of Mexico clean-up makes 2010 spill 52-times more toxic (eurekalert.org)
• For tiny critters, Gulf spill clean-up kills (futurity.org)
• Gulf of Mexico clean-up makes 2010 spill 52-times more toxic (esciencenews.com)

Again Gulf of Mexico oil disaster

This video from the USA is called Crude Awakening: BP Oil Spill/NWF PSA.

From Rocky Kistner’s blog in the USA:

Oil Platform Fire Sends Shockwaves Through Gulf On Heels of Record BP Fines

Posted: 11/16/2012 9:46 pm

An oil platform explosion and fire today near the site of the nation’s greatest offshore oil spill in history — BP’s Deepwater Horizon — sent shivers up the spines of many Gulf residents as the U.S. Coast Guard reported that 11 crewmembers were flown to area hospitals and two crewmembers were still missing as of Friday evening. News reports said four workers were critically injured with burns.

A Coast Guard spokesman said the oil and gas platform was 20 miles southeast of Grand Isle, La., and was owned by Black Elk Energy, a fast-growing oil and gas drilling operation based in Houston. News reports stated the oil platform was not actively producing oil and that a welder involved in a maintenance operation may have caused the accident. Although there were reports of an oil sheen near the platform, there were no reports of a major oil leak.

NRDC President Frances Beinecke, a member of the presidential national oil commission that investigated the BP oil disaster, issued this statement:

“Though the BP criminal case is settled, today’s accident makes clear that the hazards of oil and gas drilling are not in America’s rear view.  It is a sad reminder that offshore drilling is an inherently dangerous business. Workers and communities are put in harm’s way every day and will continue to be as long as we prioritize this risky energy development. Our leaders must keep that squarely in mind when considering where and how to allow further drilling along our coasts and in our communities.”

The Black Elk Energy accident came the day after the U.S. Justice Department announced a criminal settlement with BP involving a record-setting $4.5 billion in fines, indicting three company officials on criminal charges. Civil penalties against BP are still pending.

Many people in the Gulf are still recovering from the BP oil disaster that residents say continues to impact their fisheries and beaches more than two years later. Grand Isle mayor David Camardelle, whose community has been one of the hardest hit by the oil disaster, said he was saddened to learn of the latest offshore oil rig fire and injuries to workers. “It’s a tragic accident and my sympathies go out to the families of the workers who were impacted. But thankfully it appears this is not another BP disaster.”

Camardelle said his community still has oil and tar balls on its beaches after storms, especially after Hurricane Isaac hit their area last August. And he said many fishermen are suffering from reduced catches and have not been adequately compensated by BP for their losses. “We feel like we’re forgotten sometimes,” he said. “We can put robots on Mars, but we can’t tell how much BP oil is still out in the Gulf. Something’s wrong with that.”

Kindra Arnesen, wife of a fisherman in Buras, La., said she too was saddened by the accident, which she says hits close to home since so many of her friends and neighbors work in the oil industry. “My heart goes out to those families,” she said. “This may have been a fluke accident, but it makes me wonder, what really has changed in the oil industry since the BP explosion? We’re still using the same blowout preventers, so it seems like we should be doing something better.”

That point was made in a blog this summer by NRDC’s David Pettit, part of a coalition of conservation groups that filed a lawsuit to push for greater drilling safety in the Gulf. He reminded people that many questions raised by the presidential commission still remain unanswered:

Their investigation uncovered serious flaws in oil industry and regulatory practices.  These accidents-waiting-to-happen remain unaddressed, with the Gulf’s battered ecosystems and vital billion-dollar tourism and fisheries hanging in the balance. If drilling is to continue, more must be done to improve drilling safety and safeguard our natural resources.  The largest oil spill in America’s history should have been a wake-up call.  If we refuse to learn from that mistake, it will become a recurring nightmare instead.

That’s a nightmare no one wants to live through again.

An explosion on board an oil rig owned by Black Elk Energy in the Gulf of Mexico has killed at least one worker, with another missing, presumed dead. The Coast Guard halted their 32-hour search on Saturday night. This accident occurred less than 24 hours after BP settled for $4.5 billion on all criminal charges related to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill: here.

Related articles

• 2 missing after blast on Gulf oil platform (cnn.com)
• BP agrees to pay largest penalty in US history in $4.5bn Gulf oil spill deal (guardian.co.uk)
• US Oil Rig Ablaze in Gulf of Mexico, 9 Injured and 2 Dead (voicerussia.com)
• BP in ‘Advanced Talks’ on Settlement With U.S. Over Gulf Disaster (nytimes.com)
• Did BP Settle or Skate on Future Gulf Oil Spill Prosecution? (replugamerica.org)
• Breaking News: Platform Explosion on Oil Rig in Gulf of Mexico-AGAIN (replugamerica.org)
• Oil rig explodes in Gulf of Mexico; 2 missing, others hospitalized (usnews.nbcnews.com)
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• Deadly oil platform fire in Gulf of Mexico (aljazeera.com)

BP’s criminal pollution fine

This video from the USA is called BP Oil Spill Effect on Wildlife.

From the BBC:

15 November 2012 Last updated at 14:45 GMT

BP to get record US criminal fine over Deepwater disaster

BP is set to receive a record fine of between $3bn and $5bn (£1.9bn-£3.2bn) to settle criminal charges related to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, the BBC has learnt.

It will be the biggest criminal penalty in US history, BBC business editor Robert Peston says.

The settlement with the Department of Justice involves BP pleading guilty to criminal charges.

It is thought that up to four BP staff may be arrested, Robert Peston says.

Details of the settlement are expected to be confirmed by the Washington-based Department of Justice later.

Earlier, BP said it was in “advanced discussions” with US agencies about settling criminal and other claims.

BP said that any deal would not include a range of other claims including individual and federal claims for damages under the Clean Water Act, and state claims for economic loss.

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster killed 11 workers and released millions of barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico over 87 days.

The settlement is much bigger than the largest previous corporate criminal penalty assessed by the Department of Justice, the $1.2bn fine imposed on drug maker Pfizer in 2009.

The oil giant has been selling assets worth billions of pounds to raise money to settle all claims. The company is expected to make a final payment of $860m into the $20bn Gulf of Mexico compensation fund by the end of the year.

…

Other companies involved included Transocean, the owner of the rig and responsible for the safety valve known as the blowout preventer, and Halliburton, who provided cementing services.

BP is yet to reach a settlement with these firms. A civil trial that will determine negligence is due to begin in New Orleans in February 2013.

Related articles

• Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Blog BP Criminal Charges Largest Fine In History (gulfofmexicooilspillblog.com)
• Breaking: Up to 4 BP staff face arrest as Deepwater settlement nears (crooksandliars.com)
• BP enters plea in Gulf of Mexico oil spill case (al.com)
• BP to pay $4.5bn penalty over Deepwater Horizon disaster (guardian.co.uk)
• BP Slithers away with Light Penalty for Gulf Explosion and Oil Spill Disaster (blacklistednews.com)
• BP under ban on new govt contracts in US (radionz.co.nz)
• BP in ‘advanced’ oil spill talks (bbc.co.uk)
• Up to 4 BP staff face arrest as Deepwater settlement nears (crooksandliars.com)

US Senator Inhofe wins Rubber Dodo Award

From Wildlife Extra:

Climate-change denying Senator James Inhofe Wins 2012 Rubber Dodo Award

Sponsored by Big Oil……….

October 2012. Senator James Inhofe, one of Congress’ staunchest deniers of climate change and stalwart human obstacle to federal action on this unprecedented global crisis, is the lucky recipient of the Center for Biological Diversity’s 2012 Rubber Dodo Award, which is given annually to those who have done the most to drive endangered species extinct.

Alumni

Previous winners include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (2011), former BP CEO Tony Hayward (2010), massive land speculator Michael Winer (2009), Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (2008) and Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne (2007).

When it comes to denying the climate crisis – the single-greatest threat now facing life on Earth – James Inhofe has few peers. The Oklahoma Republican is the ringleader of anti-science climate-deniers in Congress and a driving force behind the tragic lack of U.S. action to tackle this complex problem. 2012 saw the publication, to resoundingly little critical acclaim, of Sen. Inhofe’s book, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, by WND Press, an entity also known for its “birther” campaign against President Barack Obama.

“As climate change ravages the world, Senator Inhofe insists that we deny the reality unfolding in front of us and choose instead to blunder headlong into chaos,” said Kierán Suckling, the Center’s executive director. “Senator Inhofe gets the 2012 Rubber Dodo Award for being at the vanguard of the retrograde climate-denier movement.”

Funding

According to Wikipedia, for his election funding Inhofe gets most of his largest donations from Big Oil, Big Electric, The Aircraft Owners & Pilots Association, and the good old National Rifle Association. Read more on Wikipedia.

40,000 temperature records broken in the United States in 2012

This year is on track to become the warmest on record; some 40,000 temperature records have been broken in the United States in 2012 alone, while Arctic sea ice has melted to a record low. The year has also seen record droughts, crop failures, massive wildfires, floods and other unmistakable signals that manmade global warming is tightening its grip, threatening people and wildlife around the globe.

“Senator Inhofe’s pet theory that climate change is an elaborate hoax would be hilarious, if only he weren’t an elected representative of the American people,” Suckling said. “If he were, say, a performance artist, it’d be really funny. But sadly he has the power to affect U.S. climate policy. The United States has a chance – and a duty – to take significant steps to slow the climate crisis, and a brief window of time before it’s too late for us to do so. Deniers like Inhofe, in positions of leadership, are dooming future generations of people to a far more difficult world.”

Other nominees

More than 15,000 people cast their votes in this year’s Rubber Dodo contest. Other official nominees were Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, who put a rider on a must-pass bill that stripped Endangered Species Act protection from wolves, and Shell Oil, a company bound and determined to pursue dangerous oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean.

Background on the Dodo

In 1598, Dutch sailors landing on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius discovered a flightless, three-foot-tall, extraordinarily friendly bird. Its original scientific name was Didus ineptus. (Contemporary scientists use the less defamatory Raphus cucullatus.) To the rest of the world, it’s the dodo – the most famous extinct species on Earth. It evolved over millions of years with no natural predators and eventually lost the ability to fly, becoming a land-based consumer of fruits, nuts and berries. Having never known predators, it showed no fear of humans or the menagerie of animals accompanying them to Mauritius.

Its trusting nature led to its rapid extinction. By 1681 the dodo was extinct, having been hunted and outcompeted by humans, dogs, cats, rats, macaques and pigs. Humans logged its forest cover while pigs uprooted and ate much of the understory vegetation.

The origin of the name dodo is unclear. It probably came from the Dutch word dodoor, meaning “sluggard,” the Portuguese word doudo, meaning “fool” or “crazy,” or the Dutch word dodaars meaning “plump-arse” (that nation’s name for the little grebe).

The dodo’s reputation as a foolish, ungainly bird derives in part from its friendly naiveté and the very plump captives that were taken on tour across Europe. The animal’s reputation was cemented with the 1865 publication of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Based on skeleton reconstructions and the discovery of early drawings, scientists now believe that the dodo was a much sleeker animal than commonly portrayed. The rotund European exhibitions were accidentally produced by overfeeding captive birds.

The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 450,000 members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.

Related articles

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