In the end, of course, it was a question of saving time and, above all, money. Even the official report into the BP gulf oil disaster has been compelled to come to this conclusion.
On April 20, 2010, the disaster killed 11 workers, seriously injured many others, and spewed over four million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico for nearly three months, creating the largest oil spill ever in American waters.
President Obama set up a commission to investigate the causes. The first part of its report published today acknowledges: “Whether purposeful or not, many of the decisions that BP, Halliburton, and Transocean made that increased the risk of the Macondo blowout clearly saved those companies significant time (and money).”
Although this conclusion is somewhat buried amidst lots of talk about “management failure” in terms of bad communications and so on – it is inescapably the overriding cause of the disaster.
The panel found that mistakes and "failures to appreciate risk" compromised safeguards "until the blow-out was inevitable and, at the very end, uncontrollable". BP's "fundamental mistake", the panel wrote, was failing to exercise proper caution over the job of sealing the well with cement.
"Based on evidence currently available, there is nothing to suggest that BP's engineering team conducted a formal, disciplined analysis of the combined impact of these risk factors on the prospects for a successful cement job," the report reads.
The report lists a host of engineering mistakes and management failures. These include flawed procedures for securing the well and an ineffective response to the blowout once it began.
What the report also reveals is a cosy relationship between government regulators and the oil industry. The agency responsible was understaffed and didn't have the inspectors and technical analysts “who were up to the task fully."
Commission co-chair William K. Reilly said the inquiry had asked whether it was a case of a single company, BP, that “blundered with fatal consequences”, or a more “pervasive problem of a complacent industry”, adding: “I reluctantly conclude we have a system-wide problem.”
Bob Graham, former Florida governor and a co-chairman of the commission, said the findings showed the blow-out was in fact avoidable. "This disaster likely would not have happened had the companies involved been guided by an unrelenting commitment to safety first," he said.
But even he must know that the oil corporations – like any other capitalist business – are guided first and foremost by a commitment to shareholders, to the bottom line, to returns on capital invested. To profit.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
For revolutionary solutions to create a sustainable, not-for-profit economy in place of global capital alongside a real democracy based on People’s Assemblies. Visit our web site at www.aworldtowin.net
Showing posts with label oil spill. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oil spill. Show all posts
Thursday, January 06, 2011
Thursday, September 09, 2010
Well they cut everything because why not
The post of poet laureate, at least in Britain, is sometimes a source of derision, as she or he is expected to compose verses in praise of the establishment. But the latest recipient of this honour in the United States may be one to break this mould.
In the US, perhaps somewhat curiously, the laureate is officially known as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress has seen fit to appoint an outsider, W.S.Merwin, as the latest incumbent for the job.
W.S.Merwin, appointed in July, was a strong critic of the Vietnam war and is today well-known for his strong ecological stance. Along with others like beat poet Gary Snyder, he has expanded and transformed nature poetry to confront ecological devastation and, as Synder has noted, search for “wildness wherever one can find it. Not just in wilderness areas, but everywhere human beings let go of the controls.”
Despite receiving a long string of accolades over the years, he has been criticised for having a strong political agenda in his work. Merwin, who is 82, has a string of prizes going back to the age of 16 when he received a scholarship to Princeton. Following a recommendation from poet Ezra Pound, he learned to translate from Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, Japanese, Russian and Sanskrit plus and other languages.
His 2009 collection The Shadow of Sirius, published by Copper Canyon Press, has been described as “almost hypnotic, like waves washing a beach”. It draws on his deep feeling for human beings as part of nature.
He is part of a generation of truly great and highly political American poets who include Adrienne Rich, Ruth Stone, John Ashberry, Robert Bly, and the late James Wright and Frank O’Hara. On the whole, they have not shirked from open criticism and defiance of the establishment. Merwin donated his first Pulitzer Prize money to anti Vietnam war activists in 1970.
He rejected the blandishments of US academe and moved to France in the 1950s. Today he lives in on the second-largest Hawaiian island of Maui where he has created the Merwin Conservancy. With his wife Paula Schwartz, he planted some 700 species of palm trees on what was an empty stretch of pineapple plantation which they work on every day in an effort to keep rare species from extinction .
According to Los Angeles Times reporter Dean Kuipers, Merwin jots down his poetry whilst working in the streambed of his mango trees. “I’ve never believed that the imagination, the thing that made poems, is separate from the rest of life at all. It’s a part of it. But we have a tradition as a society that is saying that the rest of life is there purely for us to exploit it without any concern about the consequences of it. It’s very short-term and in my view it’s suicidal.”
Merwin’s approach to the world around us in sharp contrast to that of the corporations, like BP, who published its report into the Gulf of Mexico oil spill which took place in April.
This is all the more vital in the light of yesterday’s publication of BP’s Accident Investigation Report. It is an unedifying spectacle of recrimination between BP and the string of companies responsible for the biggest oil spill of all time. BP is desperate to defend itself against accusations that it bears the main responsibility for the loss of life and vast ecological damage caused by the explosion and leakage. The report is being criticised as a damage-limitation exercise by trying to share the blame with Halliburton for their cement work and rig-operator Transocean.
All power to those who provide a different vision of human existence than that of the current economic and political system. Let’s hope that Merwin doesn’t pull his punches in his period as Poet Laureate!
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
In the US, perhaps somewhat curiously, the laureate is officially known as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress has seen fit to appoint an outsider, W.S.Merwin, as the latest incumbent for the job.
W.S.Merwin, appointed in July, was a strong critic of the Vietnam war and is today well-known for his strong ecological stance. Along with others like beat poet Gary Snyder, he has expanded and transformed nature poetry to confront ecological devastation and, as Synder has noted, search for “wildness wherever one can find it. Not just in wilderness areas, but everywhere human beings let go of the controls.”
Despite receiving a long string of accolades over the years, he has been criticised for having a strong political agenda in his work. Merwin, who is 82, has a string of prizes going back to the age of 16 when he received a scholarship to Princeton. Following a recommendation from poet Ezra Pound, he learned to translate from Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, Japanese, Russian and Sanskrit plus and other languages.
His 2009 collection The Shadow of Sirius, published by Copper Canyon Press, has been described as “almost hypnotic, like waves washing a beach”. It draws on his deep feeling for human beings as part of nature.
He is part of a generation of truly great and highly political American poets who include Adrienne Rich, Ruth Stone, John Ashberry, Robert Bly, and the late James Wright and Frank O’Hara. On the whole, they have not shirked from open criticism and defiance of the establishment. Merwin donated his first Pulitzer Prize money to anti Vietnam war activists in 1970.
He rejected the blandishments of US academe and moved to France in the 1950s. Today he lives in on the second-largest Hawaiian island of Maui where he has created the Merwin Conservancy. With his wife Paula Schwartz, he planted some 700 species of palm trees on what was an empty stretch of pineapple plantation which they work on every day in an effort to keep rare species from extinction .
According to Los Angeles Times reporter Dean Kuipers, Merwin jots down his poetry whilst working in the streambed of his mango trees. “I’ve never believed that the imagination, the thing that made poems, is separate from the rest of life at all. It’s a part of it. But we have a tradition as a society that is saying that the rest of life is there purely for us to exploit it without any concern about the consequences of it. It’s very short-term and in my view it’s suicidal.”
Merwin’s approach to the world around us in sharp contrast to that of the corporations, like BP, who published its report into the Gulf of Mexico oil spill which took place in April.
This is all the more vital in the light of yesterday’s publication of BP’s Accident Investigation Report. It is an unedifying spectacle of recrimination between BP and the string of companies responsible for the biggest oil spill of all time. BP is desperate to defend itself against accusations that it bears the main responsibility for the loss of life and vast ecological damage caused by the explosion and leakage. The report is being criticised as a damage-limitation exercise by trying to share the blame with Halliburton for their cement work and rig-operator Transocean.
All power to those who provide a different vision of human existence than that of the current economic and political system. Let’s hope that Merwin doesn’t pull his punches in his period as Poet Laureate!
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
Wednesday, July 07, 2010
Plans to bail-out BP
Contingency plans for a possible collapse of BP are reportedly being drawn up in Whitehall as the oil corporation’s crisis continues in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe. If the Coalition had to take the company over, it would blow the governments budget-reduction plans apart.
BP accounts for £1 in every £7 paid out to British pension schemes in dividends. The value of the company is uncertain following the largest offshore oil spill in history, which has wrecked ecosystems and affected jobs in US five states. And the thinking is that the Coalition could not allow BP to be broken up or fall into entirely foreign ownership if it meant that pension schemes would suffer.
BP’s management is apparently touring the Middle East looking for governments willing to put up some defensive cash to protect the company against takeover bids from its bigger competitors Royal Dutch Shell, and Exxon Mobil. You can be sure that more than one of Cameron and Clegg’s people are in there batting for BP.
On Fortune magazine’s list of the world’s largest corporations BP ranks fourth, behind WalMart. The company reported profits of US$21.2 billion on its revenue of US$367 billion last year. So the US$20 billion it has so far been obliged to set aside for the costs of the oil spill wipes out last year’s profit.
What happens to BP affects the entire global economy, and not just in terms of its revenue and profits. BP’s product is as important to capitalist production as its profits. The entire system is fuelled and lubricated by oil. This is why proposals to cap the leak altogether fall on deaf ears. Stopping the flow of oil isn’t on the agenda.
Despite the rampant destruction, all of the oil producers are intent on drilling deeper, overcoming all obstacles. It didn’t take long for the corporations to get the US Federal court to overrule Barack Obama’s six-month moratorium on all pending, current or approved drilling plans for new deepwater wells.
BP’s shares have been on the rise again after the price dropped by more than a half since the oil began leaking into the ocean, for three reasons. Firstly, the company declared it wouldn’t be issuing shares to raise capital, which would have diluted the share value even further; secondly, the relief well drilling which, it is hoped, will at least help to stop the leak in August is ahead of schedule; and thirdly, they have just begun deploying a new “super-skimmer”, a third vessel at the leak site that is hoped to nearly double BP's capacity to 53,000 barrels of the leaked oil a day from around 25,000. But rough seas are hampering efforts to finish the job, and more hurricanes are threatening as the effect of climate change induced by the burning of that same oil bites.
Rather than cap the leak BP must scoop up as much as it can. Oil corporations are the most powerful organisations in the world. So last month’s call from General Electric and Microsoft for the US government to more than triple its spending on clean energy research and development has little impact.
If the rest of BP, already 60% per cent owned by non-UK investors were to fall into foreign hands, the British government’s emergency budget will become irrelevant. There’s every chance that Cameron and Clegg will be forced to follow New Labour’s solution to the bankruptcy of the banks and take BP into state ownership.
At this rate, the state will soon control the commanding heights of the capitalist economy! So much for the virtues of private ownership. It’s not at all indispensable. What remains is the issue of the state itself. A corporate state that functions on behalf of a bankrupt capitalist system serves only narrow interests and we should work to replace it with a network of democratic People’s Assemblies. Then we would see some progress.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Oil spill goes global
Estimates of the quantity of oil gushing into waters of the Gulf of Mexico continue to increase. BP’S own guess was originally as low as 1,000-5,000. Then the original 5,000 barrels a day grew to 60,000.
Now, more than two weeks into the capping operation, around 45,000 barrels are still poisoning the seas, destroying wildlife and wrecking livelihoods – and there is no prospect of stopping the flow. It is on track to become the worst oil spill since the first Gulf War in 1991, which spilt around six million barrels.
This worsening catastrophe does not just symbolise the intertwined ecological, economic, social and political consequences of capitalist production and distribution. It is at the centre of the universal crisis that is now changing the way of life of every person on the planet. The explosion was by no means an unforeseeable accident. The drive for growth to sustain profits produced a global economy lubricated by increasing amounts of credit and debt and fuelled by oil. As the oil became harder to extract, costs escalated, profits were hit and corners cut.
During the Congressional hearing of the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, in the US House of Representatives yesterday, Chair Ed Markey dismantled attempts by the other oil companies to isolate BP. He and other House Democrats ripped into the chiefs of oil companies for filing bogus oil-safety reports before drilling new deep-sea wells, saying they are no better prepared for an offshore disaster than BP. Congressional investigators found that all five of the nation’s major oil firms filed virtually the same safety report prior to drilling new wells - right down to citing a long-dead expert who could be called in the event of an emergency.
The economic consequences are resounding around the world. The highly lucrative local fishing industry has been closed down. Tourism is melting away. BP’s market value has declined by more than 40% since the Horizon drilling rig blew up. The value of pension funds dependent on BP’s profits is dropping like a stone. The mess on Florida’s beaches is heating up the campaign to seize BP’s assets and there are indications that the global corporation is exploring ways to protect its US operation through bankruptcy proceedings.
President Obama’s speech last night, broadcast from the Oval Office, was largely about the need to wean the US off of its addiction to oil. His attempt to divert attention from his inability to do anything effective about the spill not only failed to convince anyone but, according to many commentators, actually worsened the political crisis. As the Financial Times put it ‘And there was something in it to frustrate or antagonise virtually every stakeholder who was listening.’
In his response to BP’s testimony, Ed Markey eloquently expressed the contradiction at the heart of the crisis: “BP is more concerned about minimising its ‘liability’ for the costs of the clean-up than for the ‘livability of the Gulf’ ”.
But the US Congress is no more able to act to stop the destructive actions of global corporations like BP than it is to regulate the financial institutions that arrogantly straddle the world.
The moment has arrived for a new kind of politics and a new kind of democracy based upon collective stewardship of the planet we depend upon. Now is the time for a qualitative change in our relationship with nature. Let’s begin the job of reconstructing democracy from the bottom up through the building of an international network of People’s Assemblies.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
Now, more than two weeks into the capping operation, around 45,000 barrels are still poisoning the seas, destroying wildlife and wrecking livelihoods – and there is no prospect of stopping the flow. It is on track to become the worst oil spill since the first Gulf War in 1991, which spilt around six million barrels.
This worsening catastrophe does not just symbolise the intertwined ecological, economic, social and political consequences of capitalist production and distribution. It is at the centre of the universal crisis that is now changing the way of life of every person on the planet. The explosion was by no means an unforeseeable accident. The drive for growth to sustain profits produced a global economy lubricated by increasing amounts of credit and debt and fuelled by oil. As the oil became harder to extract, costs escalated, profits were hit and corners cut.
During the Congressional hearing of the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, in the US House of Representatives yesterday, Chair Ed Markey dismantled attempts by the other oil companies to isolate BP. He and other House Democrats ripped into the chiefs of oil companies for filing bogus oil-safety reports before drilling new deep-sea wells, saying they are no better prepared for an offshore disaster than BP. Congressional investigators found that all five of the nation’s major oil firms filed virtually the same safety report prior to drilling new wells - right down to citing a long-dead expert who could be called in the event of an emergency.
The economic consequences are resounding around the world. The highly lucrative local fishing industry has been closed down. Tourism is melting away. BP’s market value has declined by more than 40% since the Horizon drilling rig blew up. The value of pension funds dependent on BP’s profits is dropping like a stone. The mess on Florida’s beaches is heating up the campaign to seize BP’s assets and there are indications that the global corporation is exploring ways to protect its US operation through bankruptcy proceedings.
President Obama’s speech last night, broadcast from the Oval Office, was largely about the need to wean the US off of its addiction to oil. His attempt to divert attention from his inability to do anything effective about the spill not only failed to convince anyone but, according to many commentators, actually worsened the political crisis. As the Financial Times put it ‘And there was something in it to frustrate or antagonise virtually every stakeholder who was listening.’
In his response to BP’s testimony, Ed Markey eloquently expressed the contradiction at the heart of the crisis: “BP is more concerned about minimising its ‘liability’ for the costs of the clean-up than for the ‘livability of the Gulf’ ”.
But the US Congress is no more able to act to stop the destructive actions of global corporations like BP than it is to regulate the financial institutions that arrogantly straddle the world.
The moment has arrived for a new kind of politics and a new kind of democracy based upon collective stewardship of the planet we depend upon. Now is the time for a qualitative change in our relationship with nature. Let’s begin the job of reconstructing democracy from the bottom up through the building of an international network of People’s Assemblies.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
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