Comment: The BP executive in charge of a newly-created unit to deal with the clean up of the Gulf Coast following the Deepwater Horizon blowout was killed in the crash of a small plane.
As is always the case with the death of a strategically-placed individual at a time of controversy, one must ask: was this tragedy as it seems on the surface–an unfortunate accident?
Given that the sabotaging of small aircraft is child’s play for a skilled assassination organization, it is important to consider what the late, unfortunate Mr. Black might have learned or known that may have placed him in danger. Had he learned something inconvenient for the political far right?
In this context, one should remember BP is a major center of power politics, in both the United States and the United Kingdom, with close connections to the Bush political milieu.
Excerpt: An executive helping to guide BP’s recovery from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, a top Texas lawyer and his mother-in-law were killed in a small plane crash in waters off northern Florida, officials said Wednesday.
James Patrick Black, 58, died about a mile from the Destin airport in the Florida Panhandle on Tuesday night, said BP spokeswoman Hejdi Feick. Those who knew them said the three were bound for a Thanksgiving holiday gathering in Florida.
Black was director of operations for BP’s Gulf Coast Restoration Organization and had a key role guiding the business unit created after April’s Deepwater Horizon rig fire and explosion and monthslong spill that spewed at least 200 millions of crude oil from a blown-out BP well. . . .
It seems pretty obvious to me that the rig was sabotaged. All the clues are there while the official story, like it is often the case, doesn’t make sense. Accidents happen but not on that scale. But the best clue remains the fact that the “accident” happened on April 20th...which is Hitler’s birthday! Many motivations could have been at play in this scheme. Suffice it to say that the far right can’t stand the fact of having a “socialist” and a black man, on top of that, as president! They will do anything to embarrass him while trying to make it profitable at the same time.
@Claude: Hey there, Claude. I absolutely agree with you here; not only does it look like the rig was indeed sabotaged, but I also now suspect that a very deep conspiracy was also involved.
I wonder if Tepco’s chief of disaster response should be “avoiding planes too:
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20111025p2a00m0na007000c.html
Unedited Fukushima accident manual released, loss of power sources not envisioned
The government’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) released part of an unedited severe accident manual for the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant on Oct. 24, revealing that Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) had not envisioned the possibility of all power sources at the nuclear complex being lost.
TEPCO, the operator of the crippled nuclear power plant, had earlier submitted to a special House of Representatives committee largely blacked-out emergency operation manuals for the Fukushima nuclear facility. The manuals were in fact used when the Great East Japan Earthquake and ensuing tsunami struck the nuclear complex. On Oct. 24, NISA released part of an unedited manual after submitting it to the same lower house panel. The manual revealed the fact that there was no operational manual that envisioned a loss of all power sources needed to activate emergency condensers and back-up water injection devices to cool down nuclear reactors. The revelation highlights flaws in TEPCO’s contingency plan in the event of a loss of power sources.
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Just FYI, if you happen to spot any oil washing up on the coast down there or in your seafood, it didn’t come from BP:
And they seemed like such a nice couple:
Here’s another fellow that might want to avoid small planes:
BP just had a nice day in court:
Let’s just hope Judge Shushan didn’t ban any of these emails because they sound “highly relevant”:
And BP scores again:
And with two year anniversary of the Gulf disaster approaching, we learn that the worst-case scenario (of an unstoppable leak on the sea floor) might be reality:
Double Whoops! That was the wrong link! Here’s the CORRECT link to the above article.
The latest innovation in humanity’s endless quest to create hell on earth: Scottland’s “Well From Hell”, an oil AND gas offshore well. And it’s more like a gateway to hell, with hydrogen sulphide and methane now bubbling up from the sea floor so agressively that workers can on longer safely work at the rig. Fortunately, Total has some options ready for their wayward rig. My favorite is the “do nothing and hope it fixes itself” option or, as Total calls it, the “Dream Option”:
@Pterrafractyl: If that gas well explodes, there could be a Fukushima tsunami situation all over again......
I not sure the shrimp are the only blind species talked about in this article.
Get your new and improved shrimp: Now with natural lubricants!
More “justice” for the Big Fish:
This ruling against Halliburton raises some important questions: Since Halliburton was apparently covering up the fact that the simulation models used for anti-blow-out work was faulty, was that a model used across the industry? And are they still using the simulation model? Because that should be a problem:
What’s more heartwarming than BP’s public displays of affection for the ‘small people’ of the Gulf coast? BP’s treatment of its own:
So much forgiveness. So much grace.
Here’s an example of just how scary nuclear power plants are when you factor in the worst case scenarios:
Uh oh, a nuclear plant sitting on Lake Michigan has been leaking for the past two months. Oh phew, it’s only leaking oil and not radiation. Good news:
And, of course, here’s a reminder how just how scary the oil industry is:
Although note that the pinhole sized leak wasn’t leaking oil. It was liquid natural gas, although Enbridge uses the pipeline to transport natural gas and crude oil. Also, according to Enbridge’s spokesman, it wasn’t a leak. It was a
“pinhole-sized defect, observed in the weld of the pipe,” that was releasing stuff. But it totally was not a leak so don’t worry:
Yep, spills are indeed inevitable. It’s just a matter of time. We should probably plan for that.
When a major disaster strikes your area, the repercussions can be felt for years...unless you close your eyes, cover ears, and yell “blah, blah blah, nothing bad happened before, everything is fine, and nothing bad will happen in the future”. That should do the trick:
And here’s a bit more on West Virginia bold legislative push to make the state safe for mass poisonings and lethal negligence:
If it seems like West Virginia’s legislature is trying to kill its constituents, keep in mind that, thanks to West Virginia’s Democratic governor, the state actually accepted the Medicaid expansion, so at least there should be some healthcare available to the casually poisoned. Could be worse!
Given all the renewed speculation about President Trump’s mental health following the release of Michael Wolff’s book that makes it sounds like everyone in the White House thinks Trump is mentally ‘losing it’, it’s important to keep in mind that the GOP and its corporate backers have been ‘losing it’ on a broad array of policy fronts for quite some time. Sometimes the party has be ‘losing it’ from an ethical standpoint, sometimes from a practical standpoint, and often times from both at the same time.
For example, shouldn’t policies that threaten virtually all of the coastal waters of the US with the kind of ecological devastation we saw in the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil catastrophe be considered a form of ‘losing it’ morally and practically? It seems like it. It’s not like that disaster was good for the BP or the industry in general. Encouraging a repeat is both greedy and insane. And yet here we are, with the Trump administration opening up almost ALL coastal US waters to drilling involves simultaneously rolling back the new safety regulations that were put in place following the 2010 spill. And this isn’t a Trump-only policy. This is something the GOP has wanted all along. That’s a form of collectively ‘losing it’, right?:
“The agency said it will hold 47 lease sales in every region of the outer continental shelf but one between 2019 and 2024. The updated five-year plan, required by President Trump in an executive order in April, puts regions that were long off-limits to oil and gas development back in play.”
Every single region of the outer continental shelf is going to be open for drilling but one. That’s the plan for “energy dominance”. And yet, as the article notes, with relatively low oil prices it’s not clear that the industry is actually going to be making big investments in offshore infrastructure any time soon. What the industry will be interested in, however, is buying up the long-term rights to drilling in these regions so, say 15–20 years from now, if prices are higher, those drilling rights will already be in industry hands:
“The demand is going to be there, for sure — maybe 15 to 20 years down the road; it’s hard to say. It will be interesting to see how that all plays out given the long timelines you need for these projects.”
And that’s one of the key elements of this proposal: while there’s little immediate economic incentive to drill in these areas today, this is the kind of industry with multi-decade timelines so there’s still going to be plenty of demand for buying the long-term drilling rights that might be put to use decades from now. And don’t forget that if you’re buying the drilling rights, it probably helps to buy those rights when oil prices are relatively cheap. In other words, it’s not just a future ecological disaster in the making, it’s also another round of fleecing the public.
So while it’s unclear how much of the newly available regions will actually be developed any time soon given the relatively low price of oil, raising questions about the feasibility of the “energy dominance” strategy the GOP and and energy industry is touting, the fact that this sweeping new rule passed in the first place and the rights to drill in all these regions are about to get sold off for cheap does point towards a very real form of “energy dominance” that exists today: the political dominance of the energy sector in US policy-making.
And as the article noted, this sweeping new change followed another round of sweeping changes to the offshore drilling industry last month: rescinding the key safety regulations put in place to avoid another Deepwater Horizon disaster:
But as one industry analyst noted, even with these regulations lifted, it’s still unclear why offshore drilling would be deemed profitable at this point compared to other forms of available oil production
And while that might sound somewhat relieving to hear that, even with regulations lifted, it’s still probably not going to be profitable to invest in these kinds of offshore operations until prices climb higher, it’s actually horrific news. Why? Because if lifting these regulations still doesn’t make offshore drilling profitable enough, that just means flouting precautions and engaging in every cost-cutting measure imaginable is probably going to be one of the paths to profitability. It’s a plan for profit-induced dementia:
“Our panel concluded that the immediate cause of the blowout was a series of identifiable mistakes by BP, the company drilling the well; Halliburton, which cemented the well; and Transocean, the drill ship operator. We wrote that these mistakes revealed “such systematic failures in risk management that they place in doubt the safety culture of the entire industry.” The root causes for these mistakes included regulatory failures.”
That’s what the investigators of the Deepwater disaster found: systematic failures in risk management that place in doubt the safety culture of the entire industry.
But it wasn’t just the industry culture. It was also the culture of the Minerals Management Service government agency, which contained an inherent conflict of interest in simultaneously promoting maximum revenues via government leases while also promoting safety and environmental protection. And this conflict appear to be resolved by ceded control of most aspects of the drilling operations to the the industry:
So, in response to this conflict of interest, the government investigators recommended separating the agency tasked with enforcing safety and environmental protection from the Minerals Management Service.
And that happens, with the separation of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) in 2011. And in 2016 that newly independent bureau finally issues new rules intended to prevent the Deepwater disaster. Rules that the industry had been protesting for years. But flash forward to April of 2017, and the head of the BSEE is a guy who protested all these new regulations even after the Deepwater disaster:
“Even now, Angelle asserts there was no evidence of systemic problems in offshore drilling regulation at the time of the spill. This view contradicts not only our commission’s findings, but also reviews by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board and a joint investigation by the U.S. Coast Guard and the Interior Department.”
That’s the guy currently running the BSEE: a guy who, even now, asserts there was no evidence of systemic problems in offshore drilling regulations at the time of the Deepwater catastrophe. And now the regulations he was tasked with enforcing have been severely gutted and basically replaced with regulations designed by the American Petroleum Institute.
So, to summarize, the Trump administration is about to unleash a massive fire sale of offshore drilling rights at the same time it guts the very same regulations designed to prevent the Deepwater mega-disaster. And the guy overseeing the enforcement of these newly weakened regulations basically thinks the industry should be regulating itself. It’s still unclear how much new drilling will take place anytime soon given the relatively high costs of offshore drilling. But that relatively high costs also doubles as an incentive for the industry to cut every cost possible in order to make those purchased drilling rights economically profitable. And those costs to be cut are obviously going to include safety regulations because that’s what the industry keeps calling for even after the Deepwater nightmare.
In other words, the Trump administration just massively incentivized gambling on ecological catastrophe along almost all US coastal waters in order to maximize the energy industry’s profits. And while demented people might take such risks, there are plenty of other malignant personality disorders that could encourage that kind of risk taking too. It’s all a reminder that dementia isn’t the only mental illness we need to be worried about impacting people with great power. Although dementia is obviously a significant concern in special cases.