She can eat a bag of dicks. The spill is up to 25,000 barrels a day, and it’s estimated it could hit 2 million.

It’s astounding to me that BP had concluded it was unlikely that the well could leak and therefore had prepared no Plan B for the unlikely but possible scenario that it would.  Murphy’s Law didn’t originate out of nowhere. 

Not to mention their apparent attempt to cover up how bad the situation was.  Combined with the 2006 Prudhoe Bay Alaska pipeline disaster you have to wonder what kind of operation they’re running.

You also have to wonder what kind of contingency plans are in place for the other offshore drilling rigs.

Marin, the blowout preventer they had installed (bare minimum of safety required) has a 50% failure rate in the field.

And considering they initially told the Coast Guard there was no leak and turned down assistance I hope there is a criminal investigation.

BP is already trying to shirk responsibility.

Exactly. The “Plan B” for a failed preventer at 5,000 feet is to hire James Cameron to film an underwater documentary, on which he can base a romanticized, big-budget “Irwin Allen” version of the rig explosion/collapse and Second Destruction of New Orleans.

Remember, folks, it’s all right for government to intervene in business matters AFTER the pooch is screwed.

Or to give somebody a subsidy.  Anthing else—SOCIALISM!

Strange, if it hits the Gulf Stream the entire Atlantic coast is borked.

I hate that I can’t write like you, so suck it.  Otherwise, kudos on a great post.

justlen is right, if contamination isn’t rapidy contained before it hits the gulfstream, this could well be the environmental shit/fan moment of the century.

Palin knows exactly what it’s like for the Gulf Coast. The Exxon-Valdez spill totally fucked up Alaska’s thriving Spring Break tourism industry.

It’s a tangent, but I would like to point out the disingenuousness of Palin and her Drill, Baby, Drill mantra since she claims it will lower fuel costs in the US.  What a crock O’ crap.  Oil drilled anywhere in the world enters the global marketplace, not just the country where it was extracted.  Currently the majority of North Slope oil goes to Japan and the rest of Asia, but our worthless media lets her get away with selling that “drilling here = cheaper gas for your SUV” garbage.  Just more smoke and mirrors for the rubes…

@StringonaStick—Thanks for pointing that out. ANWR crude would likely be exported as well, at least until there’s some major change in the transportation/refining/cost equation. We can’t use it right now, even if it were available, because we don’t have enough refineries. Same goes for the greatly-exaggerated Bakken field, which has only modest recoverable reserves of low-grade crude, plus a shitload of shale-trapped sludge that would probably choke even a Nazi-designed Fischer-Tropsch cracking plant, and would only become truly competitive at the Beyond Thunderdome world crude price levels we’re trying to avoid. 

If cheaper, more secure energy is really the goal, extending US loan guarantees to Brazil’s Petrobras to expand their offshore drilling operations was a wonderfully low-risk decision with a higher expectation of near-term benefits than from-scratch qualification of our own mystery offshore reserves. As you mentioned, any surplus capacity drives down the market price, Brazil’s in our hemisphere and Petobras already knows where the oil is. It’s only a small step, but Palin looks like a fool when she attacks it as a hypocritical sop to George Soros, or whoever the fuck the Villain-of-the-Day happens to be.   

Palin’s an energy amateur and a political bomb-thrower who acts as though vast reserves of easily-accessible sweet, light crude are sitting idle all across America, just waiting to be popped like a geological boil. She also either doesn’t comprehend or is intentionally ignoring the fungibility of oil, which means that the US can’t control the price or the pinch-points until it starts pumping another 10 million barrels/day of high-quality domestic crude, on top of the 5 million barrels we currently produce at full-tilt. We would also need to dramatically reduce our imports of refined petroleum products…which means compelling oil companies to build multi-billion-dollar refineries, and preventing local communities from challenging them. Oh, and we should probably promote global controls on oil price speculation, just to keep the market honest.

Since speculation is a big-time money-maker, nobody wants a refinery in their backyard and and oil companies don’t really have any financial motivation to find and produce surplus crude that drives the price down, what Sarah really means when she says “Drill, Baby, Drill” is that she wants a Federally incentivized and subsidized petroleum “Manhattan Project” which forces oil companies to engage in high-risk, profit-averse activities and requires the ruthless employment of Eminent Domain, environmental-control waivers and activist court judgments to shove new refineries down the throats of state and local governments whose voters oppose them. That, plus a heavy-handed international regime of commodities market regulation, with a multi-national oversight agency that would have supra-Federal powers over Wall Street. 

When you look at it that way, Sarah is more of a Kenyan Commie than Obama.