It's been GUSHING for a month.
Experts are saying that BP is grossly underestimating the amount of oil that is gushing, and BP refuses to allow any scientists or independent experts into the area to assess the actual amount and the situation.
Obama needs to federalize this operation.
About Gulf Oil Spill
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
If someone came into your home and was destroying it, would you allow them to continue the activity and be in charge of clean-up?
No.
You would call in your own people, your own specialists, and give those who had destroyed it the bill.
The argument that BP should control the effort stop the oil from gushing (and subsequent clean-up) because the oil industry's employees are the sole/best experts is abzurd.
It is long past the time when Obama should have pushed BP aside and put the Army Corps of Engineers on this. When the Army Corps of Engineers is allowed to do the job, there is nobody better.
BP has no desire or incentive to stop this disaster. As a matter of fact, by destroying the entire region ecologically, BP and all pro-drilling interested parties (politicians included) can and will argue that offshore drilling increase, "since it's all ruined anyway". Mary Landrieu has already launched that campaign (fumes on the brain is the only explanation I can think of for Louisianans putting her back into the US Senate), and the longer that Obama drags his feet by letting BP control the situation, the more he looks in cahoots.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
There should be no cap. Period.
If liability winds up bankrupting these companies, so be it. That's the ultimate check on their never engaging in careless operations.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Apparently, before Katz was removed from the team, the whole team was "off the team":
==Jonathan Katz, a physics professor at Washington University in St. Louis, is another member of JASON. But Katz's major research focus has been astrophysics, and in an interview Friday with a St. Louis paper, he didn't seem confident that he had been much help with the mission. "I was honored to be invited and enjoyed the experience," said Katz. "Did I have anything much to contribute? I think I have some ideas for how to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future, but I don't have anything very specific to offer on the present problems. It is very much in the hands of the real pros." Asked if he'd be willing to go back, Katz said: "I'd be happy to, but someone's got to send me an email or a phone call."==
http://tpm
Nobody should be doing deep sea drilling without a plan and resources in place for accidents.
I think that's what this 5-member "crack scientific team" that Steven Chu put together has determined, and what was already known -- It's out of control, and BP's answer is to stall for time with the 'straw' while they drill another well to tap into the one that is gushing, which they say is going to take months.
About Gulf Oil Spill
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
BP continues to drill, at the Deepwater Horizon site and elsewhere, and refuses to allow scientists' observing the effects that the oil is having on the environment, the scope of the disaster so far, and denies oversight & independent inspections:
"There is new concern about another BP facility in the Gulf: a former BP insider tells us the platform Atlantis is a greater threat than the Deepwater Horizon."
http://www
About Gulf Oil Spill
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Which leads us to the real issue here: Obama's seriousness of purpose is in question.
One team of 5 men whose mission of actually stopping the out of control gusher isn't their first priority:
==Chu said he’s tasked his team to develop “plan B, C, D, E and F” in addition to finding a way to stop the oil leak.==
http://www
Like the hose that BP managed to put into place just takes a small amount of the oil gushing from the center of the leak (not 'polluted' with any seawater which makes the oil unsalable), this group appears to be tasked with coming up with a way to harvest for use/sale the oil gushing & saving offshore oil drilling.
The environmental catastrophe of this is a secondary or last concern. There are no chemical experts on this team dealing with the toxic pollutants that BP's dumping into the gulf (nor is this administration prohibiting BP's continued use of them).
Many teams are needed, including allowing outside scientists into the area to monitor what's going on & having the Army Corps of Engineers take over the operation.
How many more weeks of oil gushing before 0bamabots question Obama's not pulling out all of the stops to deal with this catastrophe? Why's Obama more concerned with protecting BP's proprietary equipment & methods than the lives & well being of the American people?
About Gulf Oil Spill
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Katz does not believe that global warming is caused by human activity. But even if it is, he doesn't support Americans cutting carbon emissions because "nobody else is doing it". He doesn't believe that warmer climate creates storms or droughts.
I don't know who declared Katz a "genius"* or recommended him for this team, but these papers he's written indicate a mundane shallow narrow mind & scattered thought processes. If you're indiscriminate about facts, your conclusions aren't valid. GIGO.
His Papers - http://wup
*If only Elena Kagan had left this kind of paper trail. Just last week Obama's surrogates were all over the cable channels trying to assuage liberals' doubts about Elena Kagan by saying, "Thurgood Marshall was her mentor", when all she did was work for him, and did not share his judicial philosophy.
About Gulf Oil Spill
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
As a purported "genius", how Katz believes what he does is bewildering. But how, as a scientist, he comes to these opinions, is troubling. He states things that aren't true, proven falsehoods, as facts. According to him, the war in Iraq was justifiable, because "Al Qaeda carried out the attacks in cooperation with, & perhaps at the behest of, Saddam Hussein and Iraq". And "The single most important fact, confirmed by the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, is that Mohammad Atta, the ringleader of the terrorist attacks of September 11, met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague a few months before". All of which has been exposed as false. Katz also claims, "Some evidence is incontrovertable; for example, that Iraq organized an unsuccessful plot to assassinate former President Bush when he visited Kuwait in April, 1993". Not true.
http://raw
http://wup
Katz seems to only consider information that validates his beliefs, & rejects what doesn't fit his pre-formed opinions. For example, he believes that discrimination against women in the field of physics (& other fields in science & the law) doesn't exist because his wife (a physicist) has never experienced it & neither of them have ever seen it at Washington University (where he teaches).
About Gulf Oil Spill
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Those who question what his beliefs about homosexuality have to do with his being put on a select team to do whatever this team has been tasked to do (we really don't know what the focus is), it's about his credentials as a scientific "genius", or having a scientific mind at all.
Katz equates homosexuality with being in the Ku Klux Klan. Not only is that a value judgment (which would have nothing to do with his appointment, true), but it ignores the best scientific theory that homosexuality is biology, not choice. Yes, the statement makes him a homophobic id-jit, but for these purposes (solving this ecological threat to our nation and world) you also have to wonder how good of a scientist he actually is.
But Katz has some startling opinions on a whole host of topics -
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
We're agreed that there should be no laws based on sexual orientation, but there are.
About Elena Kagan
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
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