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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (76992)	6/1/2010 11:03:00 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

Scientist Optimistic About Marine Life In Gulf GUY RAZ, host: Now to the potential environmental consequences. Teams of scientists have been testing the waters around the source of the spill for the past month. Vernon Asper is one of them. He's a professor of marine science at the University of Southern Mississippi. And he joins me on the line from Biloxi. Welcome. Dr. VERNON ASPER (Professor of Marine Sciences, University of Southern Mississippi): Thank you. RAZ: The last time we spoke, your team had found three massive oil plumes 10 miles by 3 miles wide. Now the plumes, are they moving or are they sort of staying in place? Dr. ASPER: Well, they're doing some of both. They're staying in place in that it appears that they're still emanating from the well. And if that's the case, then it's sort of like a river. It's staying in the same place that every time you look at it, it's slightly (unintelligible) material what you're looking at. RAZ: And if you were to describe the plumes, if you were to swim through them, would it be, you know, millions of droplets of oil or would it sort of be one thick kind of mass of oil? Dr. ASPER: Well, that's what we haven't actually done yet. We have a camera system on board and we're hoping to put that in the water, either tonight or maybe tomorrow night. The hypothesis is that as this material is being ejected from the well, it's coming out under high pressure and it's coming out sort of in a mist of very, very small droplets. And we expect that the images that we get will sort of look like an underwater cloud. RAZ: What kind of impact could it have on marine life? I mean, what kind of oxygen levels are you finding in those areas, for example? Dr. ASPER: The oxygen levels are crazy low, they're reduced. But in these depths, which is fairly deep, the shallowest layers that we're seeing now around 700 meters, maybe a little bit deeper than that. If you go a little higher in the water column, down around 200 meters, the oxygen levels are considerably lower. But that's totally natural. That's caused by the decomposition of organic matter that falls out of the surface. So were these layers of presumably oil, where they are is not particularly low oxygen. RAZ: You sound somewhat optimistic, am I reading that correctly? Dr. ASPER: Well, you know, people tell me that. I guess so. The thing that I see in this is that when you look at the damage the oil does on the surface when it gets into the marshes and into the sensitive nursery areas and the estuaries, the damage is pretty obvious. And it can be fairly severe. But out on the open ocean, especially down at these steps, there are microbes down there that are basically designed to handle this. That's what they eat for a normal meal. So, they are actually getting a lot more probably than they're used to eating. But on the other hand, it's normal food for them. It's not a foreign substance. The dispersants, of course, that's a different story. The drilling mud, that's a different story as well. But in terms of the raw hydrocarbons coming out of the ocean, it's not that foreign to them. RAZ: Can we assume that marine life continues to swim through these plumes? Dr. ASPER: In the deep sea, yes. I think you can pretty safely assume that it's swimming through it. And actually up on the surface, one of the things that's kind of remarkable is that we see lots of fish when we stop at night to put our sampling package into the water, we see quite a few rather large fish and they seem to be oblivious to it. We've seen dolphins, of course. We've seen all kinds of things. We saw (unintelligible) out there and some of them are kind of oiled up. But we've seen crabs around there, very few dead things on the surface, which is kind of surprising. We have seen dead jellyfish and a few things like that. But all in all, the impact out there seems to be less conspicuous. RAZ: You're getting ready to ship off again. What are you going to be looking at on your next trip? Dr. ASPER: Well, we've been looking more or less on the western side of the spill, because that's where we saw our plume the last time. And on this cruise that is coming up these next few days, we'll probably look in other directions, especially to the northeast, which is where the scientists from the University of South Florida saw a plume. We're also going to make a complete circumnavigation of the well at fairly close range, maybe three miles in radius, and make a circle just to see what we can find in terms of connections to other plumes. RAZ: That's Vernon Asper. He is a professor of marine science at the University of Southern Mississippi. We reached him in Biloxi, Mississippi. Vernon Asper, thank you. Dr. ASPER: Okay. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. npr.org

To: koan who wrote (76992)	6/1/2010 11:42:54 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 149317

The Oil Plume _______________________________________________________________ By DAVID BROOKS Op-Ed Columnist The New York Times May 31, 2010 The failure of the top-kill technique in the Gulf of Mexico represents an interesting turning point on the Obama presidency. It symbolizes the end of the period of lightning advance and the beginning of the period of nasty stasis. President Obama swept into office having aroused the messianic hopes of his supporters. For the past 16 months he has been on nearly permanent offense, instigating action with the stimulus bill, Afghan policy, health care reform and the nearly complete financial reform. Whether you approve or not, this has been an era of bold movement. But now the troops are exhausted, the country is anxious, the money is spent and the Democratic majorities are teetering. The remaining pieces of legislation, on immigration and energy, are going nowhere. (The decision to do health care before energy is now looking extremely unfortunate.) Meanwhile, the biggest problems are intractable. There’s no sign we will be successful in preventing a nuclear Iran. Especially after Monday’s events, there’s no chance of creating a breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli dispute. Unemployment will not be coming down soon. The long-term fiscal crisis won’t be addressed soon either. In other words, if the theme of the past 16 months was large change, the theme of the next period will be gridlock and government’s apparent impotence in the face of growing problems. And, at this particular moment, we are confronted by the picture of an uncontrolled gusher of oil spewing destruction into the gulf. This image could be with us for another few months, searing into the national consciousness and becoming the defining image of 2010. Everybody is comparing the oil spill to Hurricane Katrina, but the real parallel could be the Iranian hostage crisis. In the late 1970s, the hostage crisis became a symbol of America’s inability to take decisive action in the face of pervasive problems. In the same way, the uncontrolled oil plume could become the objective correlative of the country’s inability to govern itself. The plume taps into a series of deep anxieties. First, it taps into the anxiety that the people running our major institutions are just not that competent. Second, it feeds into the anxiety that there has been an unhappy marriage between corporations and government officials, which has had the effect of corrupting both. Most important, the plume exposes the country’s core confusion about the role of government. When this country was born, the founders laid down strict roles for the federal government and the president. But over the years, the roles of government and the presidency have expanded. As a matter of conviction, the country is deeply uncomfortable with these expansions. Operationally, on the other hand, the country has become accustomed to the new programs and to the new presidential role. In times of crisis, you get a public reaction that is incoherence on stilts. On the one hand, most people know that the government is not in the oil business. They don’t want it in the oil business. They know there is nothing a man in Washington can do to plug a hole a mile down in the gulf. On the other hand, they demand that the president “take control.” They demand that he hold press conferences, show leadership, announce that the buck stops here and do something. They want him to emote and perform the proper theatrical gestures so they can see their emotions enacted on the public stage. They want to hold him responsible for things they know he doesn’t control. Their reaction is a mixture of disgust, anger, longing and need. It may not make sense. But it doesn’t make sense that the country wants spending cuts and doesn’t want cuts, wants change and doesn’t want change. At some point somebody’s going to have to reach a national consensus on the role of government. If this disaster teaches anything, it is that we are a venturesome, entrepreneurial society. We rely on corporations like BP to bring us energy. At the same time, it is clear that even well-meaning corporations sometimes take shortcuts when it comes to controlling pollution and protecting worker safety. So we want government to regulate business. We want regulation to be strong enough to reduce risk but not so strong as to stifle innovation. We want regulators to work cooperatively but not be captured by those they monitor. We have known, for a long time, that regulation is about balance. The proper regulatory regime has to be set case by case and year by year. We should be able to build from cases like this one and establish a set of concrete understandings about what government should and shouldn’t do. We should be able to have a grounded conversation based on principles 95 percent of Americans support. Yet that isn’t happening. So the period of stagnations begins.

To: koan who wrote (76992)	6/2/2010 10:51:16 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 149317

BP Spill Cost May Hit $37 Billion, Credit Suisse Says (Update1) By Brian Swint June 2 (Bloomberg) -- BP Plc’s cost to deal with the well leaking into the Gulf of Mexico may reach $37 billion, Credit Suisse Group AG said. Cleanup costs may be $15 billion to $23 billion if the well leaks until relief drilling is completed in August, analysts led by Kim Fustier in London said. Claims may rise to $14 billion, the Swiss bank said. “By early August when the relief wells are drilled, Macondo could have spilled 45 to 75 million gallons of oil into the Gulf, four to seven times Exxon Valdez,” the analysts said. “Dividend risks are clearly rising.” BP is trying to seal a new pipe to the damaged well to direct the oil and gas to a drillship after an attempt to plug the well failed. The company has lost more than a third of its market value since the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20 that triggered the leak. The costs to BP would be equivalent to three years of the company’s cash flow after dividends and capital expenditure, assuming oil prices at $80 a barrel. It would need a 10 percent increase in borrowing to equity, according to Credit Suisse. BP paid a dividend of 56 U.S. cents a share last year. The company will promise to keep the dividend this week, the Times of London reported today without citing anyone. To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Swint in London at bswint@bloomberg.net Last Updated: June 2, 2010 10:14 EDT