Crude Possibilities - Thursday May 13 Gulf Oil Leak Update

1. 3-Day Coastal Oil Slick Projection.

Wind and water current will continue to be favorable for Pensacola Beach over the next three days, according to the latest projections by L.S.U.'s Coastal Studies Institute. Not so much for coastal points west of here, though. CLICK HERE or on the map, above, for a closeup.

Scientists at LSU and other research facilities that study the Gulf Coast are telling us that southeast-to-northwest winds and water currents are the norm for Pensacola Beach throughout Spring and Summer. While there will be exceptions on occasion, they generally are brief. So, if BP's Deepwater Horizion well gusher can be capped soon -- a possibility that still seems remote -- there is a rational basis in fact for hoping that we will escape the worst of the oily sludge.

2. Crude possibilities.

One scientist, who asked for anonymity because he does not want to be misunderstood as speaking for a well-known Gulf Coast employer, told us this week that much of the leaking oil appears to be "very buoyant" and "very light" in weight. It shows signs of "fragmenting," he says, into smaller pools and slicks.

"For a sandy beach like yours," he said, "this would not present much of a clean-up problem. It's worse for marshes with fine grained soils and cohesive particles that have the ability to retain that kind of oil for a long time."

"Over time, you probably will get occasional tarballs -- the flat, hard kind of heavy tar -- washing up on the beach," he forecast. "But that's nothing new."

He pointed out that over the decades occasional tarballs have washed up on Pensacola Beach before. Most of them are thought to be from long-forgotten tanker spills or small leaks from in-shore drilling rigs elsewhere in the Gulf. "Winter storms and of course hurricanes over time can transport the heavier crude patties almost anywhere."

When we asked about Escambia County's proposed plan to scrape the beach and build a landward berm in advance of any oil arriving, this expert said he considered it "unconscionable." He thought is was a waste of money and potentially harmful to the beach ecology. Scrape the beach afterwards if the worst should happen, he advises, but don't go throwing away money now on a worse-than-useless defense.

3. Eye Candy.

Today's New York Times has a report straight from Dauphin Island, Alabama. Reporter Shaila Dewan is there, bemused at the contrast between barefoot bathers enjoying the sun and surf and "National Guard troops and scores of laborers in hazmat gear and gloves" patrolling the beach and fortifying the island. They're there "for the coming war on oil," armed with what one resident calls "eye candy" -- hopelessly inadequate booms, hay bales, and skimmers.

Although 35 pounds of tarballs have been collected this week on Dauphin Island, the slick itself is still well offshore and out of sight:

At this time, it is perfectly possible to enjoy the beach, which is being kept unbelievably clean by the Tyvek battalions, so numerous that there was not enough trash to go around and their nearly empty garbage bags streamed behind them in the wind. But no one knows how long the oil will stay away, nor at what moment the Tyveks will suddenly drive past in four-wheelers towing trailers of hay, or wade into the water with strings of what look like pompoms and affix them to metal posts to catch incoming oil.

Even the normal beach trash is so sparse, Dewan writes, that "nearly empty garbage bags" stream behind the hazmat battalions.

Dauphin Island residents seem as divided as Pensacola Beach islanders. Some are grateful for the flurry of preparatory activity, others deeply skeptical.

David Probst... approached a television satellite truck Tuesday evening in hopes of showing off a small paper bag full of tarballs he had collected.

Mr. Probst opined that the floating booms, hay bales, and skimmer booms — strings of pompom-like material that trail through the water and are supposed to collect oil — were nothing more than “eye candy” whose weaknesses would be exposed as soon as a sustained south wind came along, pushing the disaster right onto Dauphin Island’s doorstep.

4. "Red Flag" Drilling Days.

On the beach everybody knows what a red flag day is: stop playing in the water for your own safety and that of others. Turns out, based on yesterday's congressional committee hearings, there were plenty of red flags waving in BP's face before the April 20 Deepwater well blowout -- but it proceeded with drilling activities, anyway.

WaPo summarizes:

A House energy panel investigation has found that the blowout preventer that failed to stop a huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico had a dead battery in its control pod, leaks in its hydraulic system, a "useless" test version of a key component and a cutting tool that wasn't strong enough to shear through steel joints in the well pipe and stop the flow of oil.

In a devastating review of the blowout preventer, which BP said was supposed to be "fail-safe," Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on oversight, said Wednesday that documents and interviews show that the device was anything but.
* * *
In Washington, Stupak said the committee investigators had uncovered a document prepared in 2001 by Transocean, the drilling rig operator, that said there were 260 "failure modes" that could require removal of the blowout preventer.

"How can a device that has 260 failure modes be considered fail-safe?" Stupak asked.
* * *
Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), who said the committee has collected more than 100,000 pages of documents, focused on the cementing job by Halliburton. He said statements and documents indicated that a test performed on the work about five or six hours before the explosion showed other dangerous flaws.

Waxman said James Dupree, BP's senior vice president for the Gulf of Mexico, told committee staffers Monday that the test result was "not satisfactory" and "inconclusive." Waxman said the test showed wide discrepancies in pressure between the drill pipe and the kill and choke lines in the blowout preventer. Dupree told committee staffers that the pressure readings should have been the same.

At the hearing, Halliburton's chief health, safety and environmental officer, Tim Probert, conceded in questioning that the pressure readings "would be a significant red flag."

5. The Color of Research Money.

Yesterday, we mentioned the inevitably ugly stampede of hungry academic researchers trying to belly-up to the money trough they hope will soon be spilling out of the BP oil disaster. Today, the PNJ editorial board does its best to clear a place at the table for Florida universities by calling on Governor Charlie Crist to "knock some heads in Tallahassee and raise some cane with BP to get Florida's universities fully engaged."

By "fully engaged" the newspaper means Crist "could make some of the $25 million BP fronted to the state available for the effort, and then he should politely ask BP for more cash."

It's a very old joke that the most exciting words in science are not, "Eureka, I have found it" but "Your research grant has been approved.'" Scholars follow the money, as Phillip Mauser once said.

We have no doubt that some, possibly even many, of the Florida academics the PNJ wants to receive BP money have only the best of intentions. But where were they when Congress and the Florida state legislature were busy passing drill-baby-drill bills?

Where was the scientific curiosity in the Florida university system then? Some professors, surely, must have been researching questions like, "What would an oil well blowout do to the cycle of life a mile below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico?;" or "What innovations in drilling safety have been overlooked by the oil industry in the past three decades?;" or "How can a deep sea oil well blowout be rapidly shut off?"

As far as we're concerned, if anyone was seriously examining these or related questions, they're the ones who deserve to go to the head of the grant-money breadline. It shouldn't matter where they live or work -- in or out of "Florida's universities" or, for that matter, the state as a whole.

The issues are too important to the public at large to be treated like so much pork in the Florida educational funding barrel.

What we should be aiming for is superior, independent, and courageous research that won't disappear from public view behind some corporate claim to copyright or trade secrets, or be watered down to the taste of this year's partisan political fashion or to hike corporate profits.

6. White House Oil Slick Plan.

Speaking of money and research, the White House yesterday publicly released a $118 million supplemental budget request to take account of the BP oil spill. As Reuters reports, "the bulk" of the money is expected to be paid by BP Corp. and a one percent hike in oil drilling fees paid by the oil industry.

In addition to substantial funds to pay for U.S. Coast Guard services, fishermen and other coastal workers' unemployment, and Gulf Coast economic recovery monies, the budget request includes --

• $29 million additional appropriation request "for the Secretary of the Interior for additional inspections, enforcement, studies and other activities that may not qualify as recoverable from the responsible parties or the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund;"
• $5 million for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for activities that support the response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, but may not qualify as recoverable from the responsible parties or the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund; and
  
• $2 million to the FDA to monitor and respond to the environmental impact of the oil on seafood.

The full text of the detailed supplementary request is here. A Fact Sheet summary is here.
Details of the plan.

Oops! Title change 5-14 am

Electrifying Sight to See

While we've been out and about visiting saner parts of America, we found ourselves a few nights ago driving through central Illinois. It was a balmy night, the long-sought promise of Spring finally arrived. The warm, sweet smell of freshly-turned earth filled the air.

Suddenly, off to our left in the pitch dark of a moonless night we spotted an impossibly high rhythmically blinking red light. Before we could say "Close Encounter" the vista expanded. It seemed as if an entire army of red-eyed creatures a couple of hundred feet high was staring menacingly at us.

As daylight broke, we regained consciousness. Painfully, we slid out from underneath the rental car, rose to our feet unsteadily, and took a cautious look around. No aliens, anywhere.

What we did see, though, was no less astonishing: the new "Rail Splitter Wind Farm" between Springfield and Peoria.

Here is an aerial view. Here are the numbers. Here are the folks operating it.

And below is the answer to a good friend's first question when we called in our report. He asked, "Do they make any noise?"

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4-02am

Al Gore's Nobel Speech (Video and Text)

(22 min.)

(prepared text)

SPEECH BY AL GORE ON THE ACCEPTANCE
OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
DECEMBER 10, 2007
OSLO, NORWAY

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Honorable members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Excellencies, Ladies and gentlemen.

I have a purpose here today. It is a purpose I have tried to serve for many years. I have prayed that God would show me a way to accomplish it.

Sometimes, without warning, the future knocks on our door with a precious and painful vision of what might be. One hundred and nineteen years ago, a wealthy inventor read his own obituary, mistakenly published years before his death. Wrongly believing the inventor had just died, a newspaper printed a harsh judgment of his life's work, unfairly labeling him "The Merchant of Death" because of his invention -- dynamite. Shaken by this condemnation, the inventor made a fateful choice to serve the cause of peace.

Seven years later, Alfred Nobel created this prize and the others that bear his name.

Seven years ago tomorrow, I read my own political obituary in a judgment that seemed to me harsh and mistaken -- if not premature. But that unwelcome verdict also brought a precious if painful gift: an opportunity to search for fresh new ways to serve my purpose.

Unexpectedly, that quest has brought me here. Even though I fear my words cannot match this moment, I pray what I am feeling in my heart will be communicated clearly enough that those who hear me will say, "We must act."

The distinguished scientists with whom it is the greatest honor of my life to share this award have laid before us a choice between two different futures -- a choice that to my ears echoes the words of an ancient prophet: "Life or death, blessings or curses. Therefore, choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live."

We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency -- a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here. But there is hopeful news as well: we have the ability to solve this crisis and avoid the worst -- though not all -- of its consequences, if we act boldly, decisively and quickly.

However, despite a growing number of honorable exceptions, too many of the world's leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler's threat: "They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent."

So today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun.

As a result, the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising. The experts have told us it is not a passing affliction that will heal by itself. We asked for a second opinion. And a third. And a fourth. And the consistent conclusion, restated with increasing alarm, is that something basic is wrong.

We are what is wrong, and we must make it right.

Last September 21, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the North Polar ice cap is "falling off a cliff." One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as 7 years.

Seven years from now.

In the last few months, it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter. Major cities in North and South America, Asia and Australia are nearly out of water due to massive droughts and melting glaciers. Desperate farmers are losing their livelihoods. Peoples in the frozen Arctic and on low-lying Pacific islands are planning evacuations of places they have long called home. Unprecedented wildfires have forced a half million people from their homes in one country and caused a national emergency that almost brought down the government in another. Climate refugees have migrated into areas already inhabited by people with different cultures, religions, and traditions, increasing the potential for conflict. Stronger storms in the Pacific and Atlantic have threatened whole cities. Millions have been displaced by massive flooding in South Asia, Mexico, and 18 countries in Africa. As temperature extremes have increased, tens of thousands have lost their lives. We are recklessly burning and clearing our forests and driving more and more species into extinction. The very web of life on which we depend is being ripped and frayed.

We never intended to cause all this destruction, just as Alfred Nobel never intended that dynamite be used for waging war. He had hoped his invention would promote human progress. We shared that same worthy goal when we began burning massive quantities of coal, then oil and methane.

Even in Nobel's time, there were a few warnings of the likely consequences. One of the very first winners of the Prize in chemistry worried that, "We are evaporating our coal mines into the air." After performing 10,000 equations by hand, Svante Arrhenius calculated that the earth's average temperature would increase by many degrees if we doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Seventy years later, my teacher, Roger Revelle, and his colleague, Dave Keeling, began to precisely document the increasing CO2 levels day by day.

But unlike most other forms of pollution, CO2 is invisible, tasteless, and odorless -- which has helped keep the truth about what it is doing to our climate out of sight and out of mind. Moreover, the catastrophe now threatening us is unprecedented -- and we often confuse the unprecedented with the improbable.

We also find it hard to imagine making the massive changes that are now necessary to solve the crisis. And when large truths are genuinely inconvenient, whole societies can, at least for a time, ignore them. Yet as George Orwell reminds us: "Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."

In the years since this prize was first awarded, the entire relationship between humankind and the earth has been radically transformed. And still, we have remained largely oblivious to the impact of our cumulative actions.

Indeed, without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on the earth itself. Now, we and the earth's climate are locked in a relationship familiar to war planners: "Mutually assured destruction."

More than two decades ago, scientists calculated that nuclear war could throw so much debris and smoke into the air that it would block life-giving sunlight from our atmosphere, causing a "nuclear winter." Their eloquent warnings here in Oslo helped galvanize the world's resolve to halt the nuclear arms race.

Now science is warning us that if we do not quickly reduce the global warming pollution that is trapping so much of the heat our planet normally radiates back out of the atmosphere, we are in danger of creating a permanent "carbon summer."

As the American poet Robert Frost wrote, "Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice."
Either, he notes, "would suffice."

But neither need be our fate. It is time to make peace with the planet.

We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war. These prior struggles for survival were won when leaders found words at the 11th hour that released a mighty surge of courage, hope and readiness to sacrifice for a protracted and mortal challenge.

These were not comforting and misleading assurances that the threat was not real or imminent; that it would affect others but not ourselves; that ordinary life might be lived even in the presence of extraordinary threat; that Providence could be trusted to do for us what we would not do for ourselves.

No, these were calls to come to the defense of the common future. They were calls upon the courage, generosity and strength of entire peoples, citizens of every class and condition who were ready to stand against the threat once asked to do so. Our enemies in those times calculated that free people would not rise to the challenge; they were, of course, catastrophically wrong.

Now comes the threat of climate crisis -- a threat that is real, rising, imminent, and universal. Once again, it is the 11th hour. The penalties for ignoring this challenge are immense and growing, and at some near point would be unsustainable and unrecoverable. For now we still have the power to choose our fate, and the remaining question is only this: Have we the will to act vigorously and in time, or will we remain imprisoned by a dangerous illusion?

Mahatma Gandhi awakened the largest democracy on earth and forged a shared resolve with what he called "Satyagraha" -- or "truth force."

In every land, the truth -- once known -- has the power to set us free.

Truth also has the power to unite us and bridge the distance between "me" and "we," creating the basis for common effort and shared responsibility.

There is an African proverb that says, "If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." We need to go far, quickly.

We must abandon the conceit that individual, isolated, private actions are the answer. They can and do help. But they will not take us far enough without collective action. At the same time, we must ensure that in mobilizing globally, we do not invite the establishment of ideological conformity and a new lock-step 'ism.'

That means adopting principles, values, laws, and treaties that release creativity and initiative at every level of society in multifold responses originating concurrently and spontaneously.

This new consciousness requires expanding the possibilities inherent in all humanity. The innovators who will devise a new way to harness the sun's energy for pennies or invent an engine that's carbon negative may live in Lagos or Mumbai or Montevideo. We must ensure that entrepreneurs and inventors everywhere on the globe have the chance to change the world.

When we unite for a moral purpose that is manifestly good and true, the spiritual energy unleashed can transform us. The generation that defeated fascism throughout the world in the 1940s found, in rising to meet their awesome challenge, that they had gained the moral authority and long-term vision to launch the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, and a new level of global cooperation and foresight that unified Europe and facilitated the emergence of democracy and prosperity in Germany, Japan, Italy and much of the world. One of their visionary leaders said, "It is time we steered by the stars and not by the lights of every passing ship."

In the last year of that war, you gave the Peace Prize to a man from my hometown of 2000 people, Carthage, Tennessee. Cordell Hull was described by Franklin Roosevelt as the "Father of the United Nations." He was an inspiration and hero to my own father, who followed Hull in the Congress and the U.S. Senate and in his commitment to world peace and global cooperation.

My parents spoke often of Hull, always in tones of reverence and admiration. Eight weeks ago, when you announced this prize, the deepest emotion I felt was when I saw the headline in my hometown paper that simply noted I had won the same prize that Cordell Hull had won. In that moment, I knew what my father and mother would have felt were they alive.

Just as Hull's generation found moral authority in rising to solve the world crisis caused by fascism, so too can we find our greatest opportunity in rising to solve the climate crisis. In the Kanji characters used in both Chinese and Japanese, "crisis" is written with two symbols, the first meaning "danger," the second "opportunity." By facing and removing the danger of the climate crisis, we have the opportunity to gain the moral authority and vision to vastly increase our own capacity to solve other crises that have been too long ignored.

We must understand the connections between the climate crisis and the afflictions of poverty, hunger, HIV-Aids and other pandemics. As these problems are linked, so too must be their solutions. We must begin by making the common rescue of the global environment the central organizing principle of the world community.

Fifteen years ago, I made that case at the "Earth Summit" in Rio de Janeiro. Ten years ago, I presented it in Kyoto. This week, I will urge the delegates in Bali to adopt a bold mandate for a treaty that establishes a universal global cap on emissions and uses the market in emissions trading to efficiently allocate resources to the most effective opportunities for speedy reductions.

This treaty should be ratified and brought into effect everywhere in the world by the beginning of 2010 -- two years sooner than presently contemplated. The pace of our response must be accelerated to match the accelerating pace of the crisis itself.

Heads of state should meet early next year to review what was accomplished in Bali and take personal responsibility for addressing this crisis. It is not unreasonable to ask, given the gravity of our circumstances, that these heads of state meet every three months until the treaty is completed.

We also need a moratorium on the construction of any new generating facility that burns coal without the capacity to safely trap and store carbon dioxide.

And most important of all, we need to put a price on carbon -- with a CO2 tax that is then rebated back to the people, progressively, according to the laws of each nation, in ways that shift the burden of taxation from employment to pollution. This is by far the most effective and simplest way to accelerate solutions to this crisis.

The world needs an alliance -- especially of those nations that weigh heaviest in the scales where earth is in the balance. I salute Europe and Japan for the steps they've taken in recent years to meet the challenge, and the new government in Australia, which has made solving the climate crisis its first priority.

But the outcome will be decisively influenced by two nations that are now failing to do enough: the United States and China. While India is also growing fast in importance, it should be absolutely clear that it is the two largest CO2 emitters -- most of all, my own country -- that will need to make the boldest moves, or stand accountable before history for their failure to act.

Both countries should stop using the other's behavior as an excuse for stalemate and instead develop an agenda for mutual survival in a shared global environment.

These are the last few years of decision, but they can be the first years of a bright and hopeful future if we do what we must. No one should believe a solution will be found without effort, without cost, without change. Let us acknowledge that if we wish to redeem squandered time and speak again with moral authority, then these are the hard truths:

The way ahead is difficult. The outer boundary of what we currently believe is feasible is still far short of what we actually must do. Moreover, between here and there, across the unknown, falls the shadow.

That is just another way of saying that we have to expand the boundaries of what is possible. In the words of the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, "Pathwalker, there is no path. You must make the path as you walk."

We are standing at the most fateful fork in that path. So I want to end as I began, with a vision of two futures -- each a palpable possibility -- and with a prayer that we will see with vivid clarity the necessity of choosing between those two futures, and the urgency of making the right choice now.

The great Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, wrote, "One of these days, the younger generation will come knocking at my door."

The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask: "What were you thinking; why didn't you act?"

Or they will ask instead: "How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?"

We have everything we need to get started, save perhaps political will, but political will is a renewable resource.

So let us renew it, and say together: "We have a purpose. We are many. For this purpose we will rise, and we will act."