Spill baby spill, slippery politics

Of course. There's an addiction. In Libya, while you lot are paralysed with the oystermen and the bed and breakfasts neither of which would exist without cheap oil.

Youve hit the nail on the head!

I think BP has played this opne pretty smart. They look incompetent but will now have three more production wells for their plate. You watch, the relief wells wont have a bit of trouble lining up . This area of the innre Gulf is riddled with oil seeps along certain linear features.
Pulling oil at a rate much faster than originally determined by their reservoir guys wont be a bad thing.

I saw a news item on one of those moving strips at the bottom of the screen to the effect that BP would make $ or £ 10 billion from the accident. I didn't see any discussion on it.

One discussion started about BP's role in getting the alleged Lockerbie mastermind released early on the grounds he had only weeks to live. That discussion was shut down with a digression which, as we all know, is the crafty use of Ignore. It is now being said that Mr al-Megrahi will live at least ten more years.

Sea turned chocolate is a sick kind of magic so catastrophic when greed is symbiotic like when police and thieves they are cross pollinating suffocating life like the sticky seagull dying - check out this youtube video Sea Turned Chocolate for the full song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnHNYcuyWKA

That'll be $200 dollars please.

It's a bit old fashioned mate--"The pellets of poison are flooding your waters" is 50 years ago. Some good that did eh?

It seems that Tony will be getting his life back pretty soon.

He actually lasted longer than I predicted.

In an interview today Alex Salmond, Scotland's Chief Minister, said that after the Piper Alpha disaster in the North Sea the British Government made the regulation of oil drilling platforms independent. He remarked that the US government failed to follow suit despite this warning. Where were the present grandstanders then?

I suppose Mr Hayward, who had next to nothing to do with DH, it being American run, is a convenient scapegoat to distract idle thinkers.

Had someone else been CEO of BP the outcome is likely to have been the same. The CEO of one of the largest companies in the world employing 83,000 people, mostly experts, is not expected to supervise a drilling operation.

I suspect that Mr Hayward's ouster is less about his management of the spill itself than about BP's investors' unhappiness about the share value being cut in half.

It might be that he wants out. I would in his position.

Very true, but if you'll pardon the buzzword, the company seems to have a problem with what they call 'corporate culture', and that does trace to the CEO in most cases. Company reps, drillers and rig hands, and the captain of the vessel were all aware of problems involving safety and rig design. Seems likely they would have known the career effects of making issues of them.

That's as maybe. I was making the point that scapegoating is the easy way out.

If the disaster can be explained in simple short sentences what's the point to all the official enquiries which will take place?

Doesn't what you say also apply to the police and security at the Love Festival disaster in Duisburg. According to Mr Salmond there was a warning in Piper Alpha which went unheeded by the US government.

I don't know myself. He said it on national TV.

After the event wisdom is a piece of cake. What's next is what people should be concentrating on rather than gloating over a scapegoat. But does that paralyse exploration? The oil fuelled party is not Christmas morning for the kiddies.

The latest news is that a Yank is replacing Mr Hayward. It is claimed he is better at PR. Which some call "spin". Others use different expressions.

Maybe he will be able to prevent CBS amazingly finding a turtle egg buried in the thousands of miles of dunes.

Is this Senator Menendez nuts or what? Calling on the British public to put pressure on our ministers to jet over to Washington to answer questions about BP is to display a knowledge of the British public not unlike the knowledge Einstein's cat had of the theories its master was working out on the papers it slept on while he was out on his day job in the Patent Office.

I must say that I find the idea that any of this is due to 'anti-British sentiment' here in America to be totally without merit.

Cycloptichorn

In view of the announcement just now on the News don't you think some of you got rather carried away.

Mr Hayward had said at the beginning that the ocean would disperse the oil just as the atmosphere does the 20, ooo,ooo barrels a day being used in the ordinary course of events and which cannot be stopped up with heavy mud.

... and that was an idiotic thing to say, and it's idiotic for you to repeat it.

Cycloptichorn

And those are two assertions which you are obviously not concerned to put yourself to the trouble of justifying.

Mr Hayward was possibly a trifle idiotic, or innocent, in his underestimation of the hysteria being whipped up by a media desperate to provide doom scenarios so that anxiety quotients are stretched to the point of necessitating the palliatives its sponsers and paymasters manufacture, or, if manufactured in China, retail.

But essentially he was correct and the White House has not announced its refusal to apologise to him without someone suggesting that it should. Mr Obama's sudden conversion from British Petroleum to BP tells anybody with the slightest acumen that he regretted his panicky first reaction.

In fact, georgebob had correctly predicted that Nature would take care of most of the oil and he is something of an expert in these matters.

"Where is the oil?" is a question many have been asking recently and it is not in the least idiotic of me to mention these matters and wonder what has been going on in the backrooms.

Your truly idiotic statement could equally apply to anyone who said there was an oil spill in the Gulf at all and then justified it by a claim that the movies were made in underwater tanks and on deserted beaches by a conspiracy of short sellers of BP stock. Much as some claim that the moonwalks took place in a hangar out in the Mohave Desert or that our enemies had weapons of mass destruction ready to drop on us at 30 minutes notice.

By your statement you serve notice that anything you say should be taken with a pinch of salt because only idiots make such statements in front of intelligent audiences.

No, he wasn't correct. The ocean doesn't 'self-clean.' The oil spreads out and either kills or harms tremendous amounts of life within it.



WTF are you talking about? The oil is dispersed into the Gulf. It didn't disappear; it's spread throughout the ecosystem. Nobody who knows one thing about how this works is asking 'where is the oil.' We know where it is. It is doing exactly what the scientists thought it would do - when you put toxic dispersant in the oil, it disperses. Not a surprise.

I must say, seeing as you have consistently displayed both your ignorance on the physics of this topic and the politics of it - nobody here in America gives two shits that BP is based in Britain, we'd be equally pissed no matter where they were based - your claim that anyone else's opinion should be taken with a pinch of salt is a total joke.

It has been purely clear from the beginning that your only interest in this event is financial. You don't give a **** what happens in the Gulf of Mexico, because it doesn't affect your life one bit - other than in the forms of dividend checks, that is. For others of us, it's more personal.

I will go with the scientists on this one - this is the biggest environmental disaster in US history. The oil doesn't just vanish and the ocean doesn't just clean itself up magically. And the last people who should be listened to, in terms of the impact this has on the Gulf, are the head of BP and a greedy drunk from Britain.

Cycloptichorn