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» Hatrack River Forum » Active Forums » Books, Films, Food and Culture » Gulf of Mexico Oil Slick - Things are getting really bad (Page 5)

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Author Topic: Gulf of Mexico Oil Slick - Things are getting really bad
BlackBlade
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quote:
Originally posted by malanthrop:
Yeah,

Bobby Gindhall loves sand barriers...he's been lobbying for them for a very long time.

Even if that were the case, you're accusing Gindhal of following Emanuel's motto. "Never let a crises go to waste".

Bobby Gindhall cares about his state but the federal government is slow to react. The best and most reactionary government is local government. We live in an upside down nation. Our founders intended a nation in which a town can trump the feds. The feds are only suppose to trump a town when it comes to individual rights. Federal law trumps state law. If the state law is constitutional, the feds have no position.

No, that is incorrect. You might as well pretend Shay's Rebellion never happened.

You need to realize something. Lets say you are exactly right about what the founders intended, (assuming we can homogenize them like that at all.) Let us also say that they created a government born out of that intention. The people had that government, so what did they do with it? Well first they tried things the Federalist way, and they didn't like it, so Thomas Jefferson got voted in. Political parties disappeared for a time and everybody was a Jeffersonian Democrat. That didn't work out too well so we see Whigs getting voted in, followed by Jacksonian Democrats. Then Lincoln Republicans. I could take the time to expand this all the way to the present but it's not very relevant to my point.

What is relevant is that originally if America had this State Government > Federal Government system, they surrendered it, because it wasn't working the way they wanted. We had a bloody civil war precisely because of this issue.

You can argue that we've gone too far in the federal direction, and I'd say the fact our entire history has been an almost unrelenting push towards giving the Federal government more power at the expense of the States gives you quite a fertile ground for that belief. But to argue that we need to just take everything back to the way things were when the constitution was formed is just foolish. It's essentially arguing that not one single improvement to our government was ever formulated since it was instituted. If that were true, that makes Americans the single worst group of people to ever try their hands at politics.

[ June 06, 2010, 03:06 PM: Message edited by: BlackBlade ]

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Shanna
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quote:
Originally posted by malanthrop:
Thanks for the correction on the spelling. Care to comment on content?

As I am a Louisiana resident, I cannot begin to tell you how much this state needs more federal involvement. Jindal's is absolutely an opportunist whose "interest" in sand barriers is simply a game that will be quickly abandoned once it is no longer politically useful. Local politics here are incredibly corrupt and Jindal has already showed that he's keeping this time honored tradition alive,
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Ron Lambert
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There are hundreds of oil platforms in the Gulf, and maybe thousands all around the world. This is the first time I have ever heard of a major problem with any of them, in the several decades of their existence. Seems like a remarkably good track record, over all. We still need the oil, so we still need to "drill, baby, drill." Just make sure that the oil companies that manage them do not have hundreds of safety violations like BP has had over the past few years (the next highest was, I think, Exxon, with eight). Something clearly is wrong with the attitude of BP toward safety standards--they seem to regard paying millions of dollars in fines for cutting corners (as they have) as being part of the cost of doing business.

Three Mile Island did not lead us to shut down all the nuclear power plants in the country. It was, in fact, a demonstration of the effectiveness of backup safety designs. The sterling safety record of the nuclear power industry has pretty much discredited all the fanatics who opposed it, and more and more mainline politicians are calling for more nuclear power plants to be built. One would only hope they would not be built upon known fault lines.

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BlackBlade
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quote:
Originally posted by Ron Lambert:
There are hundreds of oil platforms in the Gulf, and maybe thousands all around the world. This is the first time I have ever heard of a major problem with any of them, in the several decades of their existence. Seems like a remarkably good track record, over all. We still need the oil, so we still need to "drill, baby, drill." Just make sure that the oil companies that manage them do not have hundreds of safety violations like BP has had over the past few years (the next highest was, I think, Exxon, with eight). Something clearly is wrong with the attitude of BP toward safety standards--they seem to regard paying millions of dollars in fines for cutting corners (as they have) as being part of the cost of doing business.

Three Mile Island did not lead us to shut down all the nuclear power plants in the country. It was, in fact, a demonstration of the effectiveness of backup safety designs. The sterling safety record of the nuclear power industry has pretty much discredited all the fanatics who opposed it, and more and more mainline politicians are calling for more nuclear power plants to be built. One would only hope they would not be built upon known fault lines.

You might be right. But one also has to consider just what is the total damage done by an accident of this magnitude, and is it an acceptable cost for the benefit of drilling for oil off shore.

Maybe we shouldn't be saying, "drill, baby, drill," but, "drill, baby, drill, after we setup proper safety standards and protocols, as well as a system for enforcing them."

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The White Whale
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quote:
Originally posted by Ron Lambert:
The sterling safety record of the nuclear power industry has pretty much discredited all the fanatics who opposed it

This still does not address the problem many have with the hundred-to-thousand year lifetime of the waste products. Safety in industry is expected. That's why BP's failure is so awful. Planning to keep the waste safe for a thousand years is impossible, or at least hasn't been adequately addressed by anyone.
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Mucus
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quote:
Originally posted by Ron Lambert:
This is the first time I have ever heard of a major problem with any of them, in the several decades of their existence.

Well.
Category:Oil_platform_disasters

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Parkour
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quote:
Originally posted by Ron Lambert:
There are hundreds of oil platforms in the Gulf, and maybe thousands all around the world. This is the first time I have ever heard of a major problem with any of them, in the several decades of their existence.

There have been plenty. There have been bigger issues than this and they have been handled. This one is different and has many issues with failures of oversight. It is so embarrassing because the company undercut our own environmental safety by claiming disaster readiness they did not have.
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Mucus
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Oh, timely article
quote:
John Vidal of The Observer reports on the effect of oil drilling in the Nigerian delta, where activists claim that oil leaks are common and cleanup and compensation are rare. “There are more than 300 spills, major and minor, a year,” said Nnimo Bassey, the Nigerian head of Friends of Earth International. “It happens all the year round. The whole environment is devastated. The latest revelations highlight the massive difference in the response to oil spills. In Nigeria, both companies and government have come to treat an extraordinary level of oil spills as the norm.”
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/where-oil-spills-happen-all-the-time/
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Ron Lambert
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The last major oil spill that caused vast environmental damage was when the Exxon Valdez tanker ran aground and split open. This latest one in the Gulf is still the one producing the worst environmental damage since then. I see by your link, Mucus, that there have been a few other spills. Probably the worst one was the Montara spill off the coast of Australia. The deliberate sabotage of the Kuwait oil wells by Iraq in Desert Storm produced a spill. But it looks like in every case the disasters were handled. Sometimes it took a couple of months, but they were handled, even by relatively small oil companies. There does not seem to be any massive environmental damage associated with these spills, certainly not on the scale we are looking at with the BP Gulf disaster.

Before anyone cavalierly suggest that we do without oil from off-shore drilling platforms, they need to ask themselves if they can afford to pay $10 a gallon for gasoline, and how long they think they will have jobs when the entire economy suffers the enormous hits of higher and higher energy costs. Not to mention the political vulnerability we will have if we have to rely on ever larger amounts of foreign imported oil from countries that profess to hate us and our culture and our entire civilization. The Arabs did try an oil embargo against us in 1972. It did not work well, because we were not totally dependent upon their oil. Even so, we did have to observe gas rationing on alternate days for a time. Now our consumption of petroleum products has multiplied many times. We get a large part of it from Venezuela--whose leader is a diehard holdover communist, and hates us--and not so much from Saudi Arabia. But it would not take much to put us in a precarious position once again. Our economy is already barely beginning to recover from a Depression. One of the things that has helped us begin to recover is the relatively low price per barrel of oil. But let a few fanatics succeeded in stampeding people to demand that off-shore pumping cease, or even that there just be no more new drilling, and our whole economy could collapse completely. We are still that close to it. A feather's touch could destroy us.

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AvidReader
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quote:
Originally posted by Ron Lambert:
Before anyone cavalierly suggest that we do without oil from off-shore drilling platforms, they need to ask themselves if they can afford to pay $10 a gallon for gasoline...

Actually, if we took the bulk of the cars off the road, it would be safe for me to bike the six miles I live from work without a scrap of sidewalk or much shoulder. But I live in Florida where pedestrians and bicyclists are twice as likely to be injured as the average in the country.

quote:
...and how long they think they will have jobs when the entire economy suffers the enormous hits of higher and higher energy costs.
Ok, that's a pretty good one. I'm originally from a semi-rural county where everyone lives in subdivisions dotted around the woods and two big towns at either end of the county. Everyone in the middle would suffer with no good options but trying to work from home or paying through the nose for the gas.

It would probably take a massive construction campaign to put grocery stores, clothing boutiques, hardware stores, etc in the subdivisions so people could reach them without a car.

Even here in Tally, most people live outside town and drive in every day. Moving some of the government offices out to Killearn and Lake Jackson would probably make that workable without cars, but we're not as diversely employed as most cities. [Smile]

As something of a hippie, I have to wonder if announcing that we're going to raise gas prices to unsustainable levels and planning for it over the next decade wouldn't actually produce healthier, more connected communities.

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fugu13
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Either a gasoline tax or a carbon permit system with appropriate numbers of permits would be plenty effective. Note: it should really be accompanied by repeal of the zoning laws that make it illegal to put grocery stores, et cetera, in subdivisions. But that would probably start to come naturally if gas prices were higher by $3 a gallon or more.
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The White Whale
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quote:
Originally posted by AvidReader:
As something of a hippie, I have to wonder if announcing that we're going to raise gas prices to unsustainable levels and planning for it over the next decade wouldn't actually produce healthier, more connected communities.

Do you mean sustainable levels?

If you do, then absolutely. By paying the actual price of gas/oil and not some bizarre government subsidized bastardized price, the economic system (which everyone seems to trust so much) would kick in and make alternative transportation more appealing. Communities would be build and modified to mixed zoning. No more suburbs with no grocery stores. No more needing to drive an hour to drop of the kids, pick up your prescriptions, and to get to work. Shipping would change, movement will change. The entire country would slowly (and for the most part, unwillingly) shift into a reduced-consumption, more efficient, and more stable state.

Some say that this would cause undue hardship on some. And yeah, it would. But if you implement the fee-and-dividend system, the people would still shift away from these oil-intense processes, while still getting their money back. In the long run, these changes would make everyone less dependent and less tied to the fluctuations of gas/oil prices without destroying the country. A spike in oil prices? Alright. I'll take the bus/subway/walk to work today.

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Godric
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Um... What about electric cars?
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The White Whale
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What about them?
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Godric
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Well, isn't the idea to continue to have vehicle transportation without the need to fuel them with oil?
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Lyrhawn
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Purely electric cars that don't rely at all on gas are still a ways away from mass production and mass consumption. Quick charge station infrastructure still needs to be installed across the nation before people will turn their lives over to them, regardless of how close things are your house.

I still think a car like the Chevy Volt is the perfect compromise, but we won't know how popular it us until it goes on sale later this year.

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The White Whale
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If oil is being taxed, coal should be as well. In fact, a carbon tax is really what I'm talking about here. So electricity from coal or oil will all be more expensive.

And these zoning changes have little downsides, even with electric cars. They way things are laid out now (at least wherever I've lived) all of the stores are in one strip, away from the houses. It's to the point where there are Lowes and Home Depots across the street from one another. Walmarts and Kmars within eyeshot of one another. Tops and Wegmans within a 5 minute walk. It's silly.

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Samprimary
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quote:
The sailor, who Buzbee refuses to name for fear of costing him his job, was on the ship's bridge when Deepwater Horizon installation manager Jimmy Harrell, a top employee of rig owner Transocean, was speaking with someone in Houston via satellite phone. Buzbee told Mother Jones that, according to this witness account, Harrell was screaming, "Are you ****ing happy? Are you ****ing happy? The rig's on fire! I told you this was gonna happen."

Whoever was on the other end of the line was apparently trying to calm Harrell down. "I am ****ing calm," he went on, according to Buzbee. "You realize the rig is burning?"

i stillllllll like this.
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Lyrhawn
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quote:
Originally posted by The White Whale:
If oil is being taxed, coal should be as well. In fact, a carbon tax is really what I'm talking about here. So electricity from coal or oil will all be more expensive.

And these zoning changes have little downsides, even with electric cars. They way things are laid out now (at least wherever I've lived) all of the stores are in one strip, away from the houses. It's to the point where there are Lowes and Home Depots across the street from one another. Walmarts and Kmars within eyeshot of one another. Tops and Wegmans within a 5 minute walk. It's silly.

Hopefully, Democrats will start pushing EPA rule changes in their PR campaign to get climate change legislation passed. The EPA is going to bottleneck power plants that use fossil fuels in the near future with new limitations on emissions. It should be the perfect reason to push a new plan to grease the skids for alternative energy and a taxing scheme that incentivizes change, but stonewalling Republicans might make things a lot worse in the near term and the long term if they don't come up with a comprehensive plan soon.
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AvidReader
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quote:
Originally posted by The White Whale:
By paying the actual price of gas/oil and not some bizarre government subsidized bastardized price, the economic system (which everyone seems to trust so much) would kick in and make alternative transportation more appealing.

So...the government makes gas cheap, then slaps a bunch of taxes on it? Gee, that doesn't sound shady at all. O_o

quote:
No more needing to drive an hour to drop of the kids, pick up your prescriptions, and to get to work.
That sounds awesome. I'm only six miles from work, but the drive is 20-30 minutes with traffic. I can't get anywhere in Tally without a half hour drive.

quote:
Some say that this would cause undue hardship on some.
I'd be most worried about food access for the poor. Out in the country, most folks could probably put in a vegetable patch and get a cow, but here on the south side of town, I'm not sure how we'd keep food affordable.
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Black Fox
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Ingrained cultural and social traditions are rarely changed by anything other than near collapse or revolution. The issues isn't that we need a clean burning car, its that we need to change our transportation dynamic etc. Drill baby Drill is a finite solution to an infinite problem.
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Rakeesh
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Wow, long time no see, Black Fox. Howdy! [Smile]

Personally, I think the only thing that would work is what you describe: changing our transportation dynamic. And I think the only thing that really has a shot at that is economic pressure. Make it too expensive not to, as unpleasant as that is, because the alternatives if we don't are worse.

But that's not the way governments work, outside of near-total collapse and crisis. So hopefully if/when that comes along, we'll have some good technology to deal with it.

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Black Fox
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I feel you there Rakeesh, I support a carbon tax for that very reason. That and it has been a longtime. I am not longer a grunt, but a college student. Not only that, but if things continue to go well in the next 2 years I should be studying law at a fairly respectable institution. I will have to put up a post giving an update on my life, but my ego is generally pretty small.
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The White Whale
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quote:
Originally posted by Rakeesh:
But that's not the way governments work, outside of near-total collapse and crisis. So hopefully if/when that comes along, we'll have some good technology to deal with it.

That's horrendously pessimistic. Is there no chance that we (as a nation, or species) can see this coming and try to avoid it? We're very smart.
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Nighthawk
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I just checked the oil spill live feed, and I'm wondering why nobody has mentioned that there is FIRE coming out of the pipe.

http://www.ustream.tv/channel-popup/pbs-newshour-streaming

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The White Whale
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Look at that. Fire...um...wow?
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Samprimary
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what fire.
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Samprimary
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yeah not seeing any fire. who knows if it even was really fire. I honestly don't know what's going to ignite the cap in an environment at that O2-lacking, ambiently cold depth.
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The White Whale
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No, I was looking at around 11 EST last night, and there were definitely glowing orange flames surrounded by oil. It could have been some orange fluid...or something, but it looked like fire to me. [Dont Know]
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Stray
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quote:
Originally posted by Black Fox:
Ingrained cultural and social traditions are rarely changed by anything other than near collapse or revolution. The issues isn't that we need a clean burning car, its that we need to change our transportation dynamic etc. Drill baby Drill is a finite solution to an infinite problem.

Amen, brother! [Wink]
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Lyrhawn
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BP's spill policy

Hopefully that link works. Let me know if it doesn't.

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BlackBlade
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Not exactly new news, but what how do you guys feel about the moratorium on offshore drilling pending a 6 month safety inspection on all rigs?

On the one hand it kinda sucks to have to screw with so many oil workers lives like this, but on the other the oil industry apparently has wide spread failure to maintain basic safety standards, and those failures as demonstrated by the gulf coast spill have a huge impact on the lives of other people.

Sadly I imagine there will be alot of checking now, and down the road people will just be lax about it again until the next disaster.

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Mucus
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I'm ok with it.

Personally, I think that gas prices are too low anyways and when oil prices are too low as they are now then the government should be taxing it to make up the difference.

I'm not all anti-development, quite the opposite, but I do feel that we need an extended period of higher gas prices to really knock down the number of large cars on the road, encourage the development of alternative energy, and cut down on urban sprawl.

That said, I'm not entirely sure what effect if any this moratorium (or offshore drilling in the gulf of Mexico) has on gas prices. The wiki article on the subject links to a couple of studies that seem to indicate that allowing drilling would only affect oil prices by 1.6% and a few cents between 2012 and 2030. So I would have thought that banning it would only affect it upward by a similar amount. However, I'm not sure if they're talking about only additional exploration or existing production in addition to that.

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The White Whale
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Trust Me. What could possible go wrong?
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The White Whale
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Many more pictures of the oil, the creatures, the workers, the efforts...
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Shanna
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I met with my mother tonight to see a movie and she filled me in on a friend of hers who has been volunteering down on the beaches as part of the wildlife rescue. She's a vet and is furious with how the situation is being handled. BP officials have been refusing to let in volunteers who are carrying cameras or cell phones. My mom's friend and some of her staff having been fighting for access to a particular island that is home to the pelican and sea bird breeding grounds. They've been wanting to get in and rescue eggs from their nests, but BP officals won't give them access.

BP is also being incredibly particular about who is allowed to volunteer, refusing anyone who is interested in wildlife rescue unless they have the right credentials (vets, animal specialists, etc.) According to my mom's friend, there are people all over the place who show up everyday wanting to help but they can't get past the barricades. While I understand that letting random people handle the birds may not be the wisest thing, there's plenty of jobs these volunteers could be doing to help the specialists so that they can concentrate on doing the bird handling. For every 40 birds they've been rescuing, they're lucky if 5 survive and that doesn't even begin to count all the dead birds, fish, crabs, etc, that have been washing up on the beaches.

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Lyrhawn
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BP is in charge of security that is cordoning off public lands from being accessed by the volunteering public?
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Shanna
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Its either BP officials or independents on BP's payroll. They've got quite a few of their people on the ground being generally useless. From what I've been hearing, its gotten worse since people started reporting oil-related illnesses. BP has stepped up the security to prevent anyone from physically handling the oil or oil-contaminated wildlife (all while claiming that volunteers and fishermen are suffering from nothing more than dehydration or food poisoning. Because, you know, people who work on boats day in and day out don't know how to stay hydrated. *facepalm*)

As for movement on public grounds, I really do understand the concern that "spectators" might be getting in the way of the clean-up effort. However, alot of the concerns from vessels which have been stopped by the Coast Guard or BP boats is that some of the first questions they are asked include 1) are you media? and 2) are you recording? So its pretty easy to discern what is BP's primary worry.

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AvidReader
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CNN was complaining about lack of access yesterday. They were saying after getting permission to film at the site where wildlife was being cleaned, security told them they couldn't go in. And I thought the gal said the FAA wouldn't let Sen. Bill Nelson fly over the spill with some reporters.

It's been very weird. Like conspiracy theory weird.

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Destineer
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quote:
Originally posted by Black Fox:
I feel you there Rakeesh, I support a carbon tax for that very reason. That and it has been a longtime. I am not longer a grunt, but a college student. Not only that, but if things continue to go well in the next 2 years I should be studying law at a fairly respectable institution. I will have to put up a post giving an update on my life, but my ego is generally pretty small.

Hey man, good to see you!
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The White Whale
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BP Spills Coffee
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Mucus
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quote:
Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
BP is in charge of security that is cordoning off public lands from being accessed by the volunteering public?

Seriously, WTF?
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FoolishTook
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quote:
Either a gasoline tax or a carbon permit system with appropriate numbers of permits would be plenty effective. Note: it should really be accompanied by repeal of the zoning laws that make it illegal to put grocery stores, et cetera, in subdivisions. But that would probably start to come naturally if gas prices were higher by $3 a gallon or more.
Potentially collapsing the U.S. economy is one helluva means to an end.

Do changes have to be forced? I'm all in favor of public transportation, getting rid of zoning laws, bike routes, less cars on the road, more people walking, cycling, carpooling. I love all these ideas.

But in a collapsed economy, there is very little opportunity for innovation. I want these changes to come via pressure from consumers/citizens, not because we can't heat our homes in the dead of winter.

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The White Whale
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quote:
Originally posted by FoolishTook:
I want these changes to come via pressure from consumers/citizens, not because we can't heat our homes in the dead of winter.

Do you really think consumers/citizens will care enough to force these changes? I think back to the recalcitrance of seat-belt use. Clearly wearing seat-belts is wise, but it wasn't until a law was passed that people started doing it.

From a 'selfish' consumer point of view, these changes are probably not going to happen. They may if these selfish consumers are intelligent, organized, and concerned. But this is usually not the case. The market will not have a solution to these problems. Therefore, non-market intervention needs to step up. I like the idea of starting small (say $0.01 per gallon the first year), then raising it every year ($0.10, $0.25, $0.50, $1.00, $2.00) until we reach a price which internalizes all of the externalities. It may take us several years to determine what this price is, but this system would give us time to figure that out. It will also give everyone time to get used to it, and plan for the new realities of oil use.

You say that a carbon tax will collapse the U.S. economy. I say that the U.S. economy is doomed to collapse unless we remove its ridiculous sensitivity and dependence upon cheap oil.

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fugu13
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quote:
The market will not have a solution to these problems. Therefore, non-market intervention needs to step up.
While I understand the sentiment, a gasoline tax or cap and trade system is getting the market to find a solution. All markets only exist in the context of their formal and informal structures, and a system that neglects to account for an externality is a bad market system. Fixing that isn't working against the market -- the particular arrangement of formal and informal rules that existed before the adjustment are not somehow "more pure" than the ones after, inherently. How market-oriented a set of rules are is determined by whether markets can operate under them with minimal externalities, not by whether or not they involve taxes.
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BlackBlade
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quote:
Originally posted by fugu13:
quote:
The market will not have a solution to these problems. Therefore, non-market intervention needs to step up.
While I understand the sentiment, a gasoline tax or cap and trade system is getting the market to find a solution. All markets only exist in the context of their formal and informal structures, and a system that neglects to account for an externality is a bad market system. Fixing that isn't working against the market -- the particular arrangement of formal and informal rules that existed before the adjustment are not somehow "more pure" than the ones after, inherently. How market-oriented a set of rules are is determined by whether markets can operate under them with minimal externalities, not by whether or not they involve taxes.
I liked this post fugu, it was a very efficient summation of my feelings on the matter.
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Lyrhawn
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Agreed, to the extent that I understood it. [Smile]
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malanthrop
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quote:
Originally posted by BlackBlade:
quote:
Originally posted by malanthrop:
Yeah,

Bobby Gindhall loves sand barriers...he's been lobbying for them for a very long time.

Even if that were the case, you're accusing Gindhal of following Emanuel's motto. "Never let a crises go to waste".

Bobby Gindhall cares about his state but the federal government is slow to react. The best and most reactionary government is local government. We live in an upside down nation. Our founders intended a nation in which a town can trump the feds. The feds are only suppose to trump a town when it comes to individual rights. Federal law trumps state law. If the state law is constitutional, the feds have no position.

No, that is incorrect. You might as well pretend Shay's Rebellion never happened.

You need to realize something. Lets say you are exactly right about what the founders intended, (assuming we can homogenize them like that at all.) Let us also say that they created a government born out of that intention. The people had that government, so what did they do with it? Well first they tried things the Federalist way, and they didn't like it, so Thomas Jefferson got voted in. Political parties disappeared for a time and everybody was a Jeffersonian Democrat. That didn't work out too well so we see Whigs getting voted in, followed by Jacksonian Democrats. Then Lincoln Republicans. I could take the time to expand this all the way to the present but it's not very relevant to my point.

What is relevant is that originally if America had this State Government > Federal Government system, they surrendered it, because it wasn't working the way they wanted. We had a bloody civil war precisely because of this issue.

You can argue that we've gone too far in the federal direction, and I'd say the fact our entire history has been an almost unrelenting push towards giving the Federal government more power at the expense of the States gives you quite a fertile ground for that belief. But to argue that we need to just take everything back to the way things were when the constitution was formed is just foolish. It's essentially arguing that not one single improvement to our government was ever formulated since it was instituted. If that were true, that makes Americans the single worst group of people to ever try their hands at politics.

We had a civil war because some states ignored the constitution and the feds had to intervene. Slavery wasn't a "state's rights issue", just as the 2nd amendment isn't a state's rights issue. I have a right to bear arms and all men are created equal. The founders had it right. I doubt the feds would go to war with Illinois to protect gun rights but a president from Illinois went to war to protect individual rights. There is no "state's rights" that violate the constitution. States are the ultimate authority for things not spelled out in the constitution.
The feds should intervene when a state is violating federal constitutional law. I don't believe in local anarchy. We do have federal protections and the federal government has an obligation to uphold federal law.

"Sanctuary Cities" like San Fransisco should be flooded by federal agents. Immigration is a federal issue. How can you have a "sanctuary city" without the feds coming down? I doubt you'd tolerate a slavery accepted sanctuary city. San Fran accepting illegal immigration is no different than another place accepting slavery. The feds should intervene in either case. The federal government should raid sanctuary cities for harboring illegal immigrants. They would do so for a city tolerating slavery. Both are under the pervue of the federal government.

[ June 13, 2010, 01:41 AM: Message edited by: malanthrop ]

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Samprimary
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There's got to be some sort of a game at play here, like, you could call it Six Degrees of Malanthrop

Like secretly he's sitting at his computer thinking "Okay, how do I go from the BP oil spill to earnestly claiming that San Fransisco should be flooded by the feds for harboring the immigrants, in only six jumps ..."

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malanthrop
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Federal law should be enforced everywhere.

A city banning guns is no different than one tolerating slavery. African Americans have a right to be free and all Americans have a right to bear arms.

Even though we have a constitutional right to bear arms, the feds defer that right to the city. They won't do the same for slaves and they choose what laws they will enforce. A "sanctuary city" is a place to hide from federal law. The "sanctuary" is from the feds, only because the feds wont intervene. A city with slaves wouldn't be tolerated. A city that trumped the first amendment wouldn't be tolerated. They'll tolerate a city that ignores the second amendment. Why is there such an inconsistency?

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