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To: ggersh who wrote (248687)	5/18/2010 5:05:10 PM
From: Broken_Clock	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

Government to Oil Plume Discovery Team: Shut Up By: Jim White Tuesday May 18, 2010 6:06 am seminal.firedoglake.com The research vessel Pelican. (photo: Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium) On Saturday, the New York Times brought the world’s attention to the discovery by a team of researchers on the the vessel Pelican that there are large underwater plumes of oil emanating from the Deepwater Horizon spill. Remarkably, the response of the government to the attention focused on this discovery has been to tell the researchers to stop granting interviews with the press. At the same time, the blog on which the researchers had been providing updates has also fallen silent since Saturday. Pensacola television station WEAR filed a report (video at the link) on the oil plume and broke the news about the scientists being muzzled by the government: Over the weekend, a research crew from the University of Southern Mississippi found evidence that there are 3 to 5 plumes… About 5 miles wide, 10 miles long and 3 hundred feet in depth. But after giving that information to the press, the lead researcher now says he has been asked by the federal government… Which funds his research… To quit giving interviews until further testing is done. What an interesting change of course for the government. Even the government’s website on the Deepwater Horizon response had been touting the mission of the Pelican as recently as May 6: The university fleet research vessel Pelican, operated by the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, departed Cocodrie, La., late Tuesday and arrived at the spill source on Wednesday. They will return on Sunday for more supplies, and go back to the site later that week. The ship had been outfitted and ready to support a different NOAA-funded mission, but it was scrubbed in favor of gathering timely and much-needed data close to the oil spill source. “This sampling mission is one of many NOAA responses to the oil spill,” acting NOAA assistant administrator for NOAA Research Craig McLean said. “It fills an important gap in researching the interaction of spilled oil and the ocean environment. The samples will help us better understand affected ocean resources.” “We plan to sample as close to the well head as is safe, reasonable and allowable,” said Ray Highsmith, executive director for NIUST and principal investigator for both the original and revised mission. “We then plan to travel northwestward toward our long-term study site.” The question now becomes whether the government, in the form of NOAA (which sponsored the research) is merely asking for a pause in order to process data more fully, or if it is putting the lid on a story that shows the oil spill to be far worse than the surface slick would suggest. One way to judge the answer to that question will be to see how quickly the research team is able to find ship time for gathering more data. Here is one of the researchers, Dr. Vernon Asper, speaking with NPR on May 16 with interviewer Guy Raz (in the only post-May 15 interview I’ve been able to find for any of the researchers): RAZ: Vernon Asper, what will you and the scientists aboard the Pelican be looking at in the coming days and weeks? Dr. ASPER: The first thing we’re going to do is analyze our data and analyze the samples. And, of course, we’re planning our next cruises. We’re already making inquiries into finding ship time. It turns out that the limiting factor for studying this plume is the availability of research vessels. The research fleet in the United States for academic purposes has been dwindling over the last few decades, and there just aren’t ships available. So we’re having a hard time getting access to vessels that can take us out there. If the US government, acting through NOAA, is truly interested in understanding the extent of underwater oil plumes emanating from the Deepwater Horizon spill, then they will be able to arrange access for this team to gather more data aboard the Pelican or another research vessel very soon. On the other hand, if the desire of the government is to divert attention from what could be very disturbing results, then somehow this team just won’t be able to find ship time in the next few months. In the meantime, we have the first report of tar balls washing ashore in Key West. The material will be analyzed, and if the profile matches the material from the spill, then we will have confirmation that the oil has entered the loop current. Since we don’t see surface oil that far south, how could that oil reach Key West? Perhaps traveling as a plume under the surface?

To: ggersh who wrote (248687)	5/18/2010 5:31:35 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 306849

Slippery Talk: Obama Has Learned Nothing from the BP Blowout thiscantbehappening.net by Dave LIndorff Created 05/17/2010 - 10:58 President Obama claims to have learned a lesson from the disastrous blowout of British Petroleum drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico: a “cozy relationship” between the agency that regulates oil drilling, the Minerals Management Service, and the oil industry, he charges, allowed companies to drill in vulnerable offshore areas without properly assessing the risks to the ocean and its ecology. He’s only just figuring this out? Hell, we already had an example of the problem of “cozy relations” between regulators and industry. The bank crisis that produced the current recession was the financial equivalent of a much bigger oil-well blowout than the Deepwater Horizon rig. It was a catastrophic blowout of the entire global financial system--and it was precipitated by an identical “cozy relationship” between US bank regulators and the banking industry that they were supposed to be regulating. That financial blowout has left almost one in five US workers without jobs now for two years, with no end in sight. And like the giant hidden plumes of oil spreading out in deep layers of the Gulf and heading for the Gulf Stream, it also spread to Europe and beyond, hobbling economies around the world. But that’s only the beginning. If a “cozy relationship” between regulators and the industries they are supposed to be regulating is a bad thing when it comes to the oil industry, is this because the oil industry is particularly evil and corrupt or is it the principle of the thing? Of course not. As corrupt as the oil industry is, no one could say that industry is unique in its efforts to skirt rules, buy legislators, manipulate prices or poison the public. Corruption permeates US regulatory apparatus So why is the president only talking about this one “cozy relationship”? What about the drug industry and the Food and Drug Administration? What about hedgefunds and other off-exchange trading platforms and the SEC? What about the airline industry and the Federal Aviation Administration? What about the media and telecom industries and the Federal Communications Commission? What about agribusiness and the Agriculture Department? What about the National Transportation Safety Administration and Environmental Protection Industry and the auto industry? What about the chemical industry (and the oil companies!) and the EPA? What about the medical-industrial complex and the Department of Health and Human Services or the FDA or the Medicare administration? What about the nuclear industry and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission? What about military contractors and the Department of Defense? (sic) The list of federal regulators that have “cozy relationships” with the industries they are supposed to be riding herd on goes on and on. Clearly this president isn’t serious in condemning the “cozy relationship” between this one industry, the oil companies, and its regulator, the MMS, which he now says he wants to have broken up into two parts--a regulatory arm and a revenue-collection arm. If he were, he’d be breaking up most of the federal agencies and departments into two parts--one a hard-nosed regulator to protect the public, the environment and the economy, and one, if needed, that might promote the activities and development of a particular industry. He’s not even suggesting doing that, and in fact, has not suggested that there is any problem at all with the regulation of the rest of the nation’s industries, although all the available evidence is dramatically to the contrary: that the whole regulatory apparatus of the United States government has been hijacked by corporate interests. We’ve had the equivalent of huge wild-well gushers in most industries just in the past two years, including: massive outbreaks of contamination in the nation’s food supply, the bailiwick of the USDA; a wholesale failure of the auto industry to produce fuel-efficient vehicles, not to mention a deluge of safety problems (EPA and NTSA); monopoly practices and price gouging in the media/telecom industry (FCC); continuing concentration in the banking industry and a continuing refusal to address the bankruptcy crisis (Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Comptroller’s Office, Treasury Dept.); ongoing destruction of croplands and old-growth forests (Interior Department and Bureau of Land Management), and corrupt bidding processes for military weapons. And that’s hardly the complete list. If the president were honest and not just a charlatan, and if he were half the scholar he is portrayed as, he would be saying that this thoroughly predictable (and predicted) disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was the last straw, and that he would begin a wholesale assault on the subversion of the nation’s industry regulation regime. Instead, he stands exposed as just another political charlatan. His call for “reform” of the Minerals Management Service is simply an attempt by yet another slick politician, when faced by popular anger over one industry’s appalling behavior, to pretend to be doing something. We can predict that it will all be for show, and that once the BP well is finally shut down and the national attention has shifted to the next sports or movie star scandal, the oil industry will be allowed to go back to business as usual, putting coastal wetlands and the Arctic Ocean further at risk of even greater despoliation, all so that American car companies can continue to crank out gas-guzzling SUVs and power plants can continue to pour massive quantities of carbon into the atmosphere unimpeded.