Oil found 5 miles off the coast of Clearwater, FL

[Pope Pixie Pickle]

What the fuck is the British government to do about this?

Who's to blame? The company, the de-regulation (by Bush, NOT Obama) and the MMS

It's a private company. What Brittan has to do with it is beyond me.
BP itself, not Brittan, needs to be held responsible and accountable for their mismanagement of their rigs/wells/facilities and apparent inability to create a clean up response.
It's their fucking fault, not the UK, not Obama.

It's BP you want. If you want to point another finger, try the MMS. Where they should have been regulating and managing they were snorting blow off each others asses with their dicks in someone else's mouth.

The oil is headed here. There's no fucking stopping it cause nobody fucking thought of the "what if" and if they did for a split second they shrugged it off and said "fuck it, PROFITS people, PROFITS". There's nothing we can do, the beaches are fucked, fishing is fucked and I have to live with this shit. Don't tell me I'm too far inland to care, cause I fucking do weather I'm landlocked or not, I'm an hour and a half away from either coast and it's MY state no matter how much I hate this place. I'm pissed. PISSED. The beaches are one of the very VERY few things this place has to offer and they're fucked. The whole economy here will suffer, not just the coast. Trust me.
DAMN IT!

Thanks a lot BP. And FUCK YOU.

THIS.

I think it would be funny to write a massive petition to the UK government for this. Thousands of names. The "Fuck You" David Cameron would reply with would be lulzy, about as funny as all the people who started questioning his and the other Tories stance on the proposition.

There is of course precedent for Governments being held at least partly responsible for Companies registered in their domain, not entirely sure if it's ever worked that way for a Company who has pretty much the same amount of money in its coffers as its "Government" does though...

Also, you could always send a letter to the one and only Green MP in Parliament, who I'm sure would welcome any means of getting her name AND her message across the headlines.

Her name is Caroline Lucas, she is the MP for Brighton Pavillion.

The economic and environmental cost of the spill is staggeringly fucking disgusting, but as the ENTIRE WORLD ECONOMY is geared towards the consumption of fossil fuels every single one of us is over a barrel of fucking crude on this one. BP itself has more money in its coffers than the ENTIRE BRITISH GOVERNMENT!  (as Payne pointed out)

So, what is the long term correct motorcycle? We need to wean the world off of oil before it runs out, need to change the way the First World runs, and figure out how to switch us all over to a green economy before the fossil fuels run out. First we need to figure out how the fuck we can sustain our current lifestyles in the First World without oil, otherwise we are not going to do shit, our addiction to a convienient life isnt going to change easily.

Biofuels are not a good solution, seeing as it doesn't reduce carbon emissions, and actually takes up valuable space that needs to be used for food production in the third world, and they seem to be shipped by diesel run tankers as it is, so a complete waste of fucking time.  We need to be ploughing as much money as possible into sustainable energy and cold fusion generators.

The small changes are easy for some of us, but my mum still wont sort out the recycling even tho there is a proper bin out front of her house and everything so first easy step doesnt seem to be sinking in for some, so my next point seems to be asking the fucking impossible.  See, the big changes that we all need to make on a national level will not be addressed in time to stop the human race falling into a complete Mad Max-esque clusterfuck when climate change or oilfail gets the better of us.  Society is at stake here, and we sit on our collective arses and laugh at tree hugging hippies. 

With the rapidly expanding population of the planet in the Third World countries we're fighting a losing battle, as why should the developing world stop developing industrially? Everyone wants a better quality of life, right?  Population control is a massive factor, and it has been found that when women are properly educated family sizes shrink, so invest in female education, women gain economic power and ambition and don't want to have as many kids.

The main issue here is how the world economy is geared towards reliance on fossil fuels, how industry and investments work, and we simply haven't been paying enough practical attention on how to fix these issues. We need more research, more skilled labour in green technology, plus education on these fields for the future but unless the ones controlling the fiscal systems see the long term benefit over the short term buck, we aren't going to see a way of sustaining our lifestyles in a clean way in time to avert disaster. As we have seen from the economic crisis, this isn't how the system currently operates. We need change in the way banking works, in the way we invest towards the long term goal of running society off of green fuel options. I think we aren't going to make it in time.

We are a very self destructive bunch of hairless apes, and instead of slinging poop over the latest environmental disaster we should, (as well as focusing on the cleanup) be discussing the long term options and how to implement them, which is the big picture in the BP oil spill crisis that seems to have been overlooked. This makes me really fucking angry, as well as Dubya not signing the Kyoto treaty, seeing as a quarter of the world's carbon emissions come from the US, which in 2000 had 5% of the world's population. The human race seems incapable of taking responsibility for its actions and providing a solution for the future, and this makes me sad and very fucking angry.

Love, one angry eco hippy, trying to think practically into the long view.

[Payne]

Angry Hippie is Angry.

Also, for the record, I don't know exactly how much either BP or the UK government actually HAS. I only presume that BP has more immediately available capital, but I haven't looked at any figures that explicitly say so.

[Pope Pixie Pickle]

i did kinda lose my shit there.... 

[Triple Zero]

Somebody mentioned the Dutch offered their help but the US refused. I didn't know anything about that, until I came across this story:

http://www.financialpost.com/Avertible%20catastrophe/3203808/story.html#

Holy fuck what a bunch of stubborn idiots.

[Pope Pixie Pickle]

Somebody mentioned the Dutch offered their help but the US refused. I didn't know anything about that, until I came across this story:

http://www.financialpost.com/Avertible%20catastrophe/3203808/story.html#

Holy fuck what a bunch of stubborn idiots.

why refuse help?

fucking eejits.

[Nast]

I suspect it's because we don't want to appear to be in need of help, least of all from you European degenerates.

[Pope Pixie Pickle]

stubbornness doesnt wash when it could have been fixable..

[Jasper]

What can we say?  We're retards.

[Jenne]

I think it's our laws that can be retarded.  Leniency in times of deep distress seems to be a failsafe the American legislature, in all branches, seems unable to have prescience to build in.  It would make sense to have a measure in the ecological laws/guidelines that allow ships to do as the Dutch containment and water-cleaning ships do, in order to expedite the process.  But instead, they can't be called in, along with most of the other 12 countries' efforts who've offered, due to our stringent clean-up laws.  Those allow all contaminated water taken in by ships to be held and dumped elsewhere.

I knew it wasn't a "pride" thing...it's a stupid rubber-stamp thing that no one seems arsed enough to figure out how to get through Congress quick-like. 

Unlike the motherfucking PATRIOT ACTS that got passed and raped us of rights right quick.

So yeah, shit like buttfucking habeas corpus can go through clean as a whistle, but allowing a small bit of ecological leniency in cleaning the water up through superior Dutch technology--eh, not so much.

(course, there could also be a "cherchez la cause" here and someone in the cleanup effort might also be stymying any effort to allow another government to help so they hold on to a monopoly, but I haven't heard of much of that quite yet)

[Cain]

The US government has never before paid attention to its own laws when they've stood in the way of it wanting to do something, so I fail to see why they would let it do so now unless there was also another reason, like not having Europe's largest energy company being seen as coming to the rescue of America.  Ditto as for why the Saudis and Brazilians haven't been asked to help either.

[Triple Zero]

The horriblest thing about that article is that, if I'm reading it correctly, if they had allowed outside help, the cleanup would have gotten several orders of magnitude more efficient. Like, just one of those Dutch oil-cleaning ships having the cleaning capacity of the entire machinery working there right now.

And the legal problem is that water needs to be 99.9985% pure, or otherwise it's not allowed to be dumped in the Gulf. Which makes sense for regular ships not polluting stuff, but not for cleaning environmental disasters.

So now the less efficient American ships have to sail back and forth to get rid of the nearly-clean water some place else I guess. And that, as the Dutch saying goes, probably doesn't bring much sod to the dykes.

(just saying, for those who didnt click the article btw)

[Golden Applesauce]

Biofuels are not a good solution, seeing as it doesn't reduce carbon emissions, and actually takes up valuable space that needs to be used for food production in the third world, and they seem to be shipped by diesel run tankers as it is, so a complete waste of fucking time.  We need to be ploughing as much money as possible into sustainable energy and cold fusion generators.

Random points:
All the widely used fuels other than coal and inorganic rocket propellants are "biofuels" in that that they were derived from once-living organisms.  (It just bugs me when we use the bio- prefix to distinguish oil created from plants by artificial processes and oil created from plants by geological processes.  Pendantry, I know.)

Grown bio-fuels may not reduce emissions in the sense that they are carbon neutral (all the carbon in a plant comes from CO₂ extracted from the air), but they do reduce CO₂ emissions when used in place of digging sequestered carbon out of the ground.  This is assuming you don't need to clearcut any forests for the land to grow the crops, though.

With regards to fuel crops taking up space needed by food crops, yes and no.  Us Americans trying to use corn for fuel production is pretty retarded.  (Using the husks and other waste biomass might be less so.)  But there are a lot of other energy crops that can be grown in places where high-yield food crops don't grow well.  Jatropha can grow pretty much anywhere, and can even be intercropped with food crops.  It's also pretty poisonous, so we shouldn't need to soak it in pesticides to keep it growing well, and it doesn't need that much water, which is going to be very important soon.  And if/when scientists get a breed of algae that a) has a high oil content and b) doesn't get outcompeted in the wild by species that don't waste as much energy on producing oil, we'll be able to farm the ocean and deserts.

Diesel engines are more energy-efficient (and therefore require burning less fuel for the same amount of work) then engines that use gasoline.  From a global warming / greenhouse gas standpoint, using diesel in engines is actually better than gasoline.  The pollution associated with diesel engines is mainly sulphur compounds and high-weight hydrocarbons.  Nasty stuff to breath, and causes smog and acid rain, but not significant greenhouse gases.  Also, apparently diesel derived from vegetable oil or animal fat has almost nil sulphur content and allegedly burns cleaner, so "biodiesel" might work out pretty well.

[Golden Applesauce]

The horriblest thing about that article is that, if I'm reading it correctly, if they had allowed outside help, the cleanup would have gotten several orders of magnitude more efficient. Like, just one of those Dutch oil-cleaning ships having the cleaning capacity of the entire machinery working there right now.

And the legal problem is that water needs to be 99.9985% pure, or otherwise it's not allowed to be dumped in the Gulf. Which makes sense for regular ships not polluting stuff, but not for cleaning environmental disasters.

So now the less efficient American ships have to sail back and forth to get rid of the nearly-clean water some place else I guess. And that, as the Dutch saying goes, probably doesn't bring much sod to the dykes.

(just saying, for those who didnt click the article btw)

HOLY CRAP.

You guys actually prepare for disasters, like, ahead of time?  Your government has its own fleet of high tech oil skimmers?  And the government steps in if the oil company can't demonstrate that it has everything under control within 12 hours?  That's amazing.

Over here, that level of preparedness is called "government tyranny."   

(And we're physically hauling oily water away and storing it somewhere?  Really?  It's the fucking Gulf of Mexico.  Are we planning on just putting the entire Gulf in a reservoir somewhere, cleaning it up, and then carting it back?  It's a small ocean!  You can't move those around!)

[Cain]

It could always be stored where Louisiana currently exists.

[Triple Zero]

GA, I dunno, read the article! But that's what it sounds like, yeah.

BTW, the Netherlands is not the only country that offered help and was refused.