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[Gulf Coast Oil Spill]It Ain't Over Yet
Drake
Blow it all upForeverRegistered User regular
Blow it all upForeverRegistered User regular
Original Op is in the spoiler. It contains useful links for volunteer info and the like.
So here we are, it's been a month. BP is currently trying their Top Kill, a process that involves sealing the leaks with Drilling Mud pumped into the wellhead at high pressure, then capping this seal with cement and fillers (in this case rubbery garbage). We should know one way or another how effective this process is soon enough. At this moment, every thing looks oily and icy on the BP DisasterBot Spillcam.
Another big concern is the health of the people working this industrial catastrophe. Reports have been coming out that people haven't been equipped with the proper respiration gear, which is pretty unbelievable. The toxicity of this kind of accident is pretty high, the air around the spill is basically saturated with hydrocarbon solvents and gases. Stuff like benzene, which is very not good for you. The health fall out we will see from just this fact alone is going to be pretty bad.
Now for some numbers. BP has claimed that the leak has been putting around 5,000 bbl/day into the Gulf. No one has really believed this number but BP has clung to it through thick and thin. According to this article on Bloomberg.com, it's more likely 12,000 to 19,000 bbl/day. If that is accurate then we roughly have twice the oil of the Exxon-Valdez now in the Gulf of Mexico. That's pretty bad news. These estimates are changing all the time (mainly growing), so I wouldn't be surprised to hear that for whatever reason there is even more oil than that in the Gulf.
Finally, I'll wrap this up with a link to the NOAA's website dedicated to the response. Get your factsheets and spill projections here.
Spoiler:
So here we are, it's been a month. BP is currently trying their Top Kill, a process that involves sealing the leaks with Drilling Mud pumped into the wellhead at high pressure, then capping this seal with cement and fillers (in this case rubbery garbage). We should know one way or another how effective this process is soon enough. At this moment, every thing looks oily and icy on the BP DisasterBot Spillcam.
Another big concern is the health of the people working this industrial catastrophe. Reports have been coming out that people haven't been equipped with the proper respiration gear, which is pretty unbelievable. The toxicity of this kind of accident is pretty high, the air around the spill is basically saturated with hydrocarbon solvents and gases. Stuff like benzene, which is very not good for you. The health fall out we will see from just this fact alone is going to be pretty bad.
Now for some numbers. BP has claimed that the leak has been putting around 5,000 bbl/day into the Gulf. No one has really believed this number but BP has clung to it through thick and thin. According to this article on Bloomberg.com, it's more likely 12,000 to 19,000 bbl/day. If that is accurate then we roughly have twice the oil of the Exxon-Valdez now in the Gulf of Mexico. That's pretty bad news. These estimates are changing all the time (mainly growing), so I wouldn't be surprised to hear that for whatever reason there is even more oil than that in the Gulf.
Finally, I'll wrap this up with a link to the NOAA's website dedicated to the response. Get your factsheets and spill projections here.
Drake on
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I mostly consider this a failure of the media.
And on a serious note, I really don't think this top kill is going to work. Something about pumping in that mud at a lower PSI than the oil just seems... outside of science to me. Here's hoping they figure out how to fix it sometime and actually get started cleaning up their gigantic mess.
I don't necessarily think this is a problem with Obama, though (not saying you are, but just that one can easily conflate government = the administration currently in chargE), unless there's evidence that during his administration up to the start of the spill that he let it get worse by somehow undermining the MMS, etc (I doubt this is the case). Rather, I think there's just a general systemic government failure (MMS is a prime component of this) here that's part of the departmental bureaucratic organization level which is outside any administrative control.
Well...
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
Well, no. The Bush Interior's utter corruption and subserviance to the oil industry is the primary fault there. That said, Salazar was not the best pick to clean it up and he didn't do a great job doing so.
That's actually pretty neat. Need more Hondas.
Also, the live feed of the mess is very... brown today. They need to learn how to park their little underwater cameras better... or everything is just horribly messy today.
BMW was running commercials a year or two back about their hydrogen cell car that was "ready for when the world is ready for it" or something.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
What the fuck? The media has been running nonstop since he got elected about how we need less meddlesome government, less inept government trying to run our lives, less government getting into people's private businesses. Private business fucks up and suddenly it's Obama's fault?
I'm not even that hardcore pro-Obama but it's just obnoxious to me that we can suddenly be criticizing the government for not becoming sufficiently involved cleaning up someone else's mess, especially when the someone else is doing their best to be unhelpful throughout all this.
Really? BP fucks up and then BP pulls shit like this when the government comes in to help and somehow this results in Obama apologizing?
Lone Gunmen did it. Or rather, discovered it.
/Obscure?
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Well, this spill was never going to get plugged and cleaned up quickly. The GOP knows this and the problem is that if Obama had tried to step in and do too much the GOP could point and scream about government interference and how things would have gotten fixed so much faster if the government just stepped back and let the business handle it.
Besides the currently insane expense of actually produce the cars(clarity is estimated at 300k a pop). Where does the hydrogen come from?
Fracturing light hydrocarbons(Generally heating methane with steam)
edit: you have to drill to get methane, normally in the same spots you drill for oil.
Wait, is this real?
It's the same reason he doesn't call half of Congress fucking idiots for pulling the shit they do, even though it's very obvious to most of us.
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It certainly is, BP admits it is in the Daily Beast article. It's not really surprising, this sort of purposefully fanciful and "funny" example is ubiquitous in neoclassical economics, MBA programs, and internal corporate communications like this. It distances the example from reality and trivializes the actual human cost, which I suppose is the point.
I wouldn't be upset if he had certain members of congress flayed alive for the shit they do, but I'd really really like at least the acknowledgment of how bad they are
It really is just an endless amount of crap floating around.
The issue is that most likely in real life, the "best" option in this scenario would be the straw option because it would probably be cheap enough to justify it, but it ignores externalities like the value of a life that make brick the option you should choose.
Just like "we can save money and statistically the cost-benefit analysis says it is worth it to half ass the concrete around the BOP". Which ignores the giant disaster that affects the entire gulf region if an accident occurs.
It's mostly, as I've mentioned in the old thread, we suck as a species at evaluating risk and probability. Especially when lots of money is involved.
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The assumptions in this are strawmen to the point of absurdity. What kind of ridiculous equipment costs as much as the *potential* damage it could prevent, especially when we're talking about damage potential up to and including the corruption of an ocean, the poisoning of states worth of people, destruction of economies, tsunamis, and extinction of species (if you could even put prices on those things)?
...Also, what enlightenedbum said.
Which is why the Straw house, which is the cheapest to make is not the best option in the example because of its high vulnerability of blowing down. Instead, it's the Brick house that comes out as the option to pick.
It's an entirely economic approach to illustrating how to quantify uncertainty for the purposes of things like insurance. It's neither wrong nor right if you're using it for that purpose, and if your sole operating value is profit maximization. If it's worker safety, then you wouldn't strictly use this.
Well, the problem is that somehow the pig evaluates its own life as being worth only $1000. Which is also the price of the Blast Resistant House... So... um....
Edit: I mean, according to this, it'd be a good deal for one of the pigs to sell one of his brothers for a house.
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It's a shorthand figure for the purposes of providing a simple number for an example. The purpose of the example is to demonstrate the cost-benefit calculation process, not to examine the separate valuation process of individual elements.
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He made Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves though!
Isn't the vast majority of oil below the surface anyway? Wouldn't it require a shitload of these machines due to the vast amount of miles the oil covers even if you only include water near the coast?
Look, I don't dispute the value of the concept being taught here. I mean, in the last thread, I was doing calculations to demonstrate that pretty much anything BP could have done to hedge against such an event would have been a statistically supported action due to the ridiculously large, negative expectation from such an event.
But there are many examples with which you can teach the concept of expectation vis a vis cost benefit analysis without having to value a life. In terms of teaching, it's generally advisable to avoid examples that will have obvious problems that will distract from the concept being taught; in terms of PR, an oil company probably doesn't want to be caught showing its employees how lives can be valuated in cost benefit analyses, never mind with such low valuations; in terms of morality, what is a company doing assigning monetary values to lives, even if it's imaginary money to a fake life. It's just....
I mean, look, I can try to teach someone about supply and demand and proper pricing using the example of gangs demanding protection money from slum residents, but there are just so many reasons not to.
The counterpoint she provided is that the machines are privately owned and it wouldn't cost anyone anything for them to go to use, aside from the actor. Who already gave his okay, I guess. I mean he bought the company that makes that stuff when the Exxon Valdez thing happened.
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Well yeah, the math is right. My point is the situation they've set up to do the math on is completely absurd. MJS=how much they will have to spend in case of disaster. In this example MJS is exactly equal to the cost of the best readily available protection, which never happens in real life, and if it did happen it would never result in choosing that option if *any* cheaper option were available. That's why it's an absurd.
In the kinds of situations BP operates in, MJS >>>>>>>>>>>> that cost, if MJS can even be quantified in terms of $. If this is just a silly training sheet, fine. If it's an attempt at indoctrination towards risky safety practices (unlikely but possible), that's awful. In either case the example they set up to do the math on is purely ridiculous.
As to optics, it has terrible optics. That was the entire thrust of the link that accompanied the letter: it was found during the course of an actual situation where people died and there was litigation and served to otherwise tar BP's image. I don't necessarily think it was connected to widespread non-consideration of actual human life (the link doesn't provide evidence of such beyond the posted example), but brought up in a political situation (namely, its associated court case) it can be easily connected with such a theory. But this is a political negative associated with how the tool is used and not an inherent flaw with the tool itself.
You're right. I'm just ranting because the example itself is so stupid (IMO).
It would be fitting for a 101 type class, but if the company needs a situation this basic to help them understand risk I am concerned.
Costner has a number of these machines that can do low volumes of water and in and of themselves would have virtually no effect.
Significantly larger versions could be built, but good luck getting someone to pay for that.
Any source on how much water they can clean? Because the bullshit number of "200,000 gallons" (per machine) came from my mother's Glenn Beck ass-kissing mouth.
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