The BP spill and the White House Response

by: Mike Lux

Fri Oct 08, 2010 at 11:23


Even though I worry a lot about climate change, and was as horrified by the BP spill as any incident in recent years, I have not written much at all about environmental issues. I don't like to write about things that I don't know a fair amount about, and my focus in my work has always been politics and economics, so that is mostly what I write about. However, I feel compelled to drop a note about the controversy that has flared up the last couple of days, in part because it does relate directly to something I do have experience in, which is how White Houses operate.

I'm not going to spend time on the technical details of the working paper from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. That paper suggests that the administration vastly underestimated the amount of oil going into the gulf in spite of contrary information from scientists using other methodologies. The traditional media, which loves to assume the worst, has written stories implying the reasons for this was that the White House wanted to cover this data up. Robert Gibbs gave this response yesterday:

MR. GIBBS:  Look, I think it is important to understand that our response attacked the oil spill in an unprecedented way.  It was the largest environmental disaster that we have ever faced and we attacked it with the largest federal response.  We did all that was humanly possible in the most challenging of environments.

The report that NOAA sent over did not include in its modeling -- it's not a flow-rate document -- in its modeling did not include any activity that was being done, as I just mentioned a minute ago, to mechanically recover, skim, to burn, to disperse, to boom oil from spreading along the coast and up the Eastern seaboard, which we now know it didn't do.  

No information was altered.  No information was withheld.  And nothing in the report had anything to do with the robust response.

OMB is a regular part of a process that reviews government documents before they're released.  NOAA, as we put out in a statement yesterday, understood that the analysis did not include that, went back and included that, and that report was released and is on the Internet for anyone to read today.

Q  Okay, but -- so OMB did deny a request from NOAA, just not that request?

MR. GIBBS:  OMB sent the report back to NOAA to include that in the 500 different modeling analysis that were done on shoreline impact.  That report is on the Internet now for people to look at.  The worst-case scenario -- and if you look at those maps, the worst-case scenario was oil off the coast of what looks like probably the Hilton Head/Charleston area in South Carolina, which is, as you know, several hundred miles, maybe a thousand or so miles from where the oil actually did get to because the response prevented it from spreading.

Q One of the fundamental points that the working documents make is that the optimistic expression of information from the administration showed the government was either not fully competent to handle the spill or not fully candid.  Was it either of those?

MR. GIBBS:  This was an unprecedented environmental disaster met with an unprecedented federal response, which prevented any of the worst-case scenarios to coming to fruition.  It prevented the spread of oil along the East Coast.

When we had information, we gave it to the public.  That was -- that has always been our charge.  We were -- throughout this process, we got better information.  When the rig exploded and the blowout preventer failed 5,000 feet below the ocean, nobody could see what was happening.  Through the course of several months, we got better information.  We got cameras 5,000 feet below the surface.  We enhanced the video that we saw.  We were able to do more three-dimensional modeling.  And then we directed, at Secretary Chu's insistence, BP to install pressure monitors at the site to get the best available data on the flow rate.  And that's what we did.  We always sought to provide the best information as we were engaged in the most robust federal response that we've ever seen to an accident of this magnitude ever.

I am quite inclined to believe Gibbs on this one, because I look at it from the perspective of what would benefit the White House short and long term. At the time all this was going down, there was a confusing swirl of facts and a high urgency crisis going on. There was no benefit to the White House to downplay the problem, and it would have been silly for them to try: everybody understood that this was a huge deal- environmentally, politically, and in every other way. If anything, it seems to me like the White House would be trying to underscore how monumental the challenge was. Look at it this way: if the spill got solved fast, even if it was a huge disaster, they get all the more credit. If the problem dragged on, which is what ended up happening, they get less blame if the public understands just how big a blowout this was.

Here's the other thing: everyone who has served at a White House knows that on something with this level of media and political scrutiny, it does not pay over the long term to gloss over or minimize problems, because if you do it will be found out.

The Obama White House had no political incentive at the point in the crisis being discussed. What was happening was a thousand different scientists from dozens of agencies were desperately and urgently trying to figure this out, and estimates were all over the place. As Gibbs indicated, even the reports being sent over from agencies like NOAA did not include certain kinds of things in its modeling that were being included in other models. It is not surprising that one set of scientists might get their nose out of joint because their numbers weren't the ones being used at that particular point, but there certainly doesn't seem to be any ill intent on the part of the White House on this one.

Now was the White House response to the BP spill overall perfect? Of course not. I wish they had been more aggressive with BP from the beginning. But this draft report from the commission strikes me as a tempest in a teapot. I'd love to hear from those of you who know more about the science here than I do if you think I'm wrong, because like I said I am always uncomfortable venturing into an area I don't know much about. But on the political motivations of the White House, I feel pretty confident I'm right.    

Mike Lux :: The BP spill and the White House Response

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The BP spill and the White House Response | 39 comments
"I am quite inclined to believe Gibbs on this one" (4.00 / 4)
Stop the presses!
This is a remarkable post (4.00 / 7)
I'll leave aside the particulars of this issue (except to point out that it wasn't, as Lux claims, the press that critcized Obama for this but Obama's own hand-picked commission) and focus on this frighteningly stupid comment:


There was no benefit to the White House to downplay the problem, and it would have been silly for them to try: everybody understood that this was a huge deal- environmentally, politically, and in every other way.

Yeah, just like it would been no benefit to try to limit media coverage of the catastrophe -- except they, um, did. Of course it was in their interest to downplay the problem. The greater the problem seemed, the more the White House suffered. And they had the power to shape perception of it.

If you're arguing that the full scope of the crisis would eventually become known so efforts to downplay it were short-sighted and self-defeating -- well, maybe -- but then, being the super-savvy insider, you surely know that presidents are often short-sighted and self-defeating....

I trust they didn't lie because lying woulda been dumb!

I mean, duh, I believe President Clinton when he said he didn't have sex with that woman cause it would have not been in his benefit to lie. And I believe President Bush when he said that Saddam has recently sought large quantities of uranium from Niger, because the truth was going to come out and he would be exposed as a liar!

Lies and cover-ups usually work quite well for presidents, and even when it seems quite clear that lying and covering-up will backfire, they do it anyway.


[ Parent ]
"I trust they didn't lie because lying woulda been dumb! " (4.00 / 1)
No. What Lux actually says is quite a bit stupider and more repulsive than your rephrase. He says "lying woulda been dumb in the LONG TERM". The white washing of the Obama White House by self-styled progressives seems to be in full swing, possibly based on that Great Progressive Moment  of Obama's refusal to sign the fast track foreclosure fraud bill. It is hard to know whether progressives should drop to our knees now or wait for his pants to fall first.
[ Parent ]
Yeah, well (4.00 / 1)
Obama didn't sigm a bad smallish bill (for now) and appointed Warren to a position with vague and perhaps non-existent power. It's practically the New Deal and the Great Society combined.  
[ Parent ]
I generally like Lux's diaries (4.00 / 2)
For one reason or another, though often enough I disagree.

You isolate the crucial portion of this diary that is ridiculous in the extreme. Living in an alternate fantasy world extreme.

But the next sentence, in my judgment shows this even more clearly:

If anything, it seems to me like the White House would be trying to underscore how monumental the challenge was.

Yeah, except we know that is not what they did and we knew this even before the revelations. How one could have avoided Allen and the others talking up the recovery effort or ratifying the dispersal = no problem BS is a mystery.

Maybe the WH should have tried to demonstrate the size of the problem and the inadequacy of the response (their's or at least BPs) but we know what happened and it was not playing up the catastrophe. As I say, we knew that all along.

So, in what alternate world does one imagine that they would have been inclined to play up the catastrophe?

Did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts? Hot ashes for trees? Hot air for a cool breeze? And cold comfort for change?

[ Parent ]
being somwhat new here, (4.00 / 2)
I'm getting the impression that you are the great apologist for the administration.  
And of course (4.00 / 1)
we all know that the administration can never be right. It is always totally self-serving and entirely venal.

You've watched too many conservative Republican administrations. Remember that the American "conservative movement" is a conscious creation of ultra-wealthy individuals and families who consider the government to be an opposing power center to be destroyed so that they can take over.

That's why they have created the CATO foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and so on and why they fund conservative politicians both running for office and in between offices with "wing-nut" welfare.

John Boehner is their current bought-and-paid-for politician. Rupert Murdoch's FOX is their wholly-owned media subsidiary, keeping potential conservative Republican candidates for President on the payroll until they run for office.  

[ Parent ]
The other administrations are simply not relevant here. (4.00 / 4)
This current one and their specific behaviors are what's relevant. And in this particular case, this administration's behaviors are no different from the other ones. Lies, obfuscations, intimidation of scientists and journalists... and so on.

I would suggest that Barack Obama and his advisors have learned all the wrong lessons of GOP governance. Instead of learning "how not to govern," they've learned "how to get away with it."

"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." -Woody Allen, My Speech to the Graduates

[ Parent ]
Really? (4.00 / 1)
Lies, obfuscations, intimidation of scientists and journalists

Where's the evidence for the evil intent these all require?

Don't get me wrong. Any organization when it acts does exactly what it did previously. Change occurs one or two percent at a time and the rest is 99% routine. That's why personal secretaries and administrative assistants have jobs. So down in the trenches of government we can expect the workers at all the lower levels to perform in exactly the routine ways they did two years ago.

The behavior of a civil servant sitting in the job of undersecretary of the Dept of Interior is not evidence of the intent of the CEO. The conservatives hate that and blame it on civil servant obstructionism, but it's frankly the nature of modern organizations. I suspect that Erik Holder is pulling out his hair because of the behavior of the civil service lawyers left over from the Bush administration. But those guys were selected, trained and promoted for effectiveness during the previous administration. And the Republicans don't want the new administration to make changes. This is one major reason for not approving Obama's political appointees. That's a process that is going on right now like never before since the Andrew Jackson period. You want change and the Republicans want to delay and prevent change. Delay and prevention is much easier to succeed at.

I suspect that Obama and his entire team of close advisers are quite surprised at how hard it is to change the federal bureaucracy, but that's the nature of its very size. It's not evil intent on the part of Obama and his minions. Expecting major changes in how the federal government works when Obama has only been in office a year-and-a-half is a fool's game. It's not possible. It's an ignorant fantasy to imagine that a new CEO has the power to instantly make sweeping changes in a large organization. That's true even for very important changes.

Never mind reason and reality, though. You have your mind made up and Obama is 'BAD!'

[ Parent ]
The facts speak for themselves. Rationalizations, not so much. (4.00 / 5)
The evidence is all over the place. Journalists were threatened with jail  time and had their photo and viddy equipment confiscated, not just by local police, but by the Coast Guard. Who runs the Coast Guard?

Muzzling NOAA and EPA was not an accident or simply a recalcitrant bureaucrat stiffing the White House. That was a WH decision.

They flat out lied about flow rates, as has been confirmed by more than a few experts in the field. Who's decision was that? Once DOE and USGS were on-site, it was their prerogative as to how to manage the data. Instead of allowing access, they kept independent scientists at bay for months. Again, who's running the show here?

In a federal disaster site, the federal government has control, not some corporation.... unless the feds opt to cede said control. The President himself said, "It's BP's oil." Oh really? When it's killing the eastern half of the Gulf of Mexico? Since when? That's just crass abdication to avoid taking responsibility.

NOAA is still lying about the spill, the toxins and their effects on human beings. You know, the little people who actually live, work and eat in the Gulf. Please explain how the public interest, health and welfare is served by this.

Seriously, I could go on for hours about this. Rationalizations simply don't cut it in the face of a growing and already overwhelming body of evidence.


"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." -Woody Allen, My Speech to the Graduates

[ Parent ]
Oh come off it. (4.00 / 1)
Who does run the Coast Guard? And did they actually give any Coast Guardsmen instructions to threaten journalists? Even if Coast Guard men were assigned to provide security on beaches, what instructions were they given by the White House. Every mistake made in government is not immediately the direct responsibility of the current White House.

I still don't buy your characterization that the WH muzzled NOAA or EPA. Should they have allowed those organizations to release questionable conclusions in the name of the WH? I wouldn't allow it. I'd delay and check the reports. so would any competent manager.

Same question on flow rates. Release best reliable conservative information to the public, not the wildest speculations even if those speculations are by a few random experts. A competent manager would delay the report unless it made an immediate difference in how everyone should react to an immediate danger. It's called management by exception. It's used because normally managers don't know shit about what is going on. (Auditors and inspectors even less so.)

What would have changed if the WH had released the speculative reports you think they should have released? The White House is responsible for long term efforts. If immediate reactions for safety were required then someone closer to the problem than the WH should handle that. I notice that the Parish governments closest to the spill are generally opposed to the drilling moratorium in spite of more recent and more accurate information. Are you going to blame the WH for their decisions?

The DOE and USGS were observers watching what was happening and doing what the experts on site told them to do. Their job was to collect and report information and provide it to the government. They did not and do not have the expertise to do otherwise. They were not actually the operators performing the jobs, and only those operators had any clue what was really happening. The direct chain of command was up through BP. The government was only responsible for directing BP and monitoring their behavior. If BP failed to act then they could be taken to court - maybe. Or exposed in the media, but that would be a blunt instrument that screwed up the job being done on the ground. The government had no effective control not ceded to them by BP. That has not changed, either.

I find your fantasy that the federal government had control rather than BP to be quite charming. Neither the data nor the theoretical models that would allow effective control to be taken from BP existed. Probably they still don't. Certainly the government did not have the individuals with the necessary expertise to step into the situation. It will take a while for the government to get those resources.

Show me the proven reliable data that NOAA is sitting on and I'll believe they are lying about the toxins. Remember tobacco? The tobacco companies had all the data. It took years for the government to get enough data and reliable models to act. Of course some executive could have arbitrarily imposed limitations on sale of tobacco products, but that would have been Locke's arbitrary rule by man instead of rule of law. History shows we cannot trust government with arbitrary power.

You have a very loose standard for defining what you consider "evidence." Gathering real evidence is time-consuming and expensive. It's not widely practiced, either.

You are correct that this could go on for a long time. But the result would be no different from what I have already written. You are upset and overwrought.

I'm just angry at the true villains - BP, Transocean and Halliburton to start with. Then there are the wealthy oligarchs who are working and deploying their money to destroy and take over the American government ...

[ Parent ]
oligarchs, eh? (0.00 / 0)
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.c...

Rich Richman

[ Parent ]
I"m not even sure what you are accusing me of (4.00 / 4)
"You've watched too many conservative Republican administrations"

I watched the disaster unfold, after this administration proclaimed that offshore drilling was safe enough to open up to new waters, and then stifle scientists, the press, and the truth. In the end they proclaimed the oil disappeared!  

[ Parent ]
BINGO!!!! (0.00 / 0)
nt
[ Parent ]
Mike, you are correct. (4.00 / 2)
When the underwater gusher occurred it was quite unprecedented. The only collected information that might apply to the problem existed in the archives of BP and perhaps a few other oil companies. The only organizations who had a clue regarding what might be happening were private companies who knew it was not in their interests to let that information get to the media or the government. It's also important that there was no information anywhere that was specifically organized and categorized so that it could be quickly retrieved to answer the problems created by the surprise gusher.

Since those oil producer organizations were going to be blamed for the gusher, they were going to be quite sparing with the facts and the details. And it's not like the White House had an on-going office of oil producer disasters or anything. So they were scrambling to find out what the media and the oil companies knew just like everyone else.

I'll certainly defer to your description of how the various governmental organizations handled the information gathering and analysis. You describe what any bureaucracy would have to do. And no other organization structure could have done it as well.

A bureaucracy is designed to deal with complex problems by gathering information, categorizing it, breaking it down and handing parts to specialists to quickly analyze and recommend responses to. The recommendations have to then be handed over to executives to coordinate. Remember, the military designed to first real bureaucracies to fight and win wars because that organization structure was the most successful. But the whole process is more an adaptive one than it is an intentional one. Intent really doesn't matter much until after the problem is understood and the implications become clear.

The media wants to create heroes and villains to populate their simplistic narratives, so they infer intent where intent is an impossibility. But in this case it's clear that the White House had to be a consumer from the process. It wasn't going to especially shape its outcomes.

The White House was under the constraint that anything they said or did could inflame the public further. The public was already mad and scared of the Gulf disaster and the media was happy to contribute to that process. It's their job, after all. So the White House had to be very limited in what it released under its own imprimatur. The White House was also going to want the process to thoroughly deal with the issues involved, so making sure that premature and incomplete information was not released would have been very important. Those pressures would put big limitations on what was officially released. Prematurely released incomplete information would not be in their long term interest. This is very counter to the media's "scoop" mentality.

The media wants to read the Administration's very appropriate hesitancy to release premature information as intent to cover up the severity of the problem. That "read" gives the media a good villain for their hero/villain narratives. Another of the media narratives is that both Republicans and Democrats misuse government equally, so it would feed into that narrative also.

That's roughly what I see having happened. I, too, am quite inclined to believe Gibbs on this one. So I appreciate your post, Mike. I'm glad you obtained and published the information.  

No, not EVERYTHING in the five-year plan was a lie...so what? (4.00 / 5)
Mike, I'm perfectly willing to believe that the White House wasn't lying to the public to the degree that the Soviet Union lied in its handling the Chernobyl disaster. That they did lie, though, is in my opinion beyond dispute, and the lies they told were driven by the same perceived needs which always drive administrative lies in response to failures like this. In order:

1. Protect our power.

2. Protect our reputations.

(Otherwise, we'll lose control of the situation.)

3. Don't threaten the people who made the mess.

(Otherwise, they'll hide the information from us that we need to fix it, and unleash their lobbyisys on us before we're ready to deal with them.)

4. Discount any information which doesn't come from our guys.

(Only our guys are sensitive to to the need for 1. and 2.)

5. Publish only reports which minimize the medical and other risks to victims, responders and the public at large.

(Don't destroy any more of the economy, or create any more political opposition to what we'll need to do in the future than is absolutely necessary.)

6. Tell the people what we think they want to hear.

(Just until we get a handle on things, of course. Then, after the potential for counterproductive hysteria has passed, we can tell the truth, and comfortably discount it, if necessary to assure 1. and 2.)

The net result of these lies -- BP goons accompanied by cops threatening legitimate journalists, flow rate estimates which increased by an order of magnitude from day 1 to the day the spill dropped out of the news, BP weaseling out of its responsibilities to make victims whole, and using obscure tax laws to stick the taxpayers with the bill, the destruction of half of the Gulf Coast economy -- is not just the cost of getting through a mess with a whole administrative skin. It's also another brick in the wall of mistrust which separates government from the people.

Anyone familiar with the cynical and criminal culture of the old Soviet Union can see the unmistakeable signs of the same culture here. We'll all go out in the streets and wave our little flags at the passing parade, but we won't trust a word of what anyone tells us. The administration may always be successful in hiding the truth from us, but what it can't hide is the fact that it lies. In the end, this is the kind of success which leads to disaster -- a cumulative, and perhaps permanent one. The clock is ticking....

My response (4.00 / 1)
William, You generally make a lot of sense so I try to make sure I read your material, but I don't think you have thought this one through.  

If the Obama guys ignore 1 & 2 on your list they will end up with a mostly failed administration along the line of the Carter administration. They are not that stupid.

As for 3, what counter strategy would you suggest. Keep in mind how many things the White House is being forced to deal with and keep in mind that resources cannot be withdrawn from most of these other things without them going to shit also. The most important resource is CEO time. America lucked out with Bush. He believed in delegating, so Cheney and Rumsfeld ran the show. But they dealt only with their own bailiwicks so damned little that Bush would have liked to accomplish actually happened. And since Rumsfeld did not coordinate with State and the Intelligence Community much of what he attempted was similarly a total failure.

4. Name someone who can be trusted outside the White House. Trust is built on long-term relationships for which a price has to be paid. No one in the opposition can be trusted, as they repeatedly prove. No one in the Oil industry can be trusted since their culture is all about dominating governments rather than working with them. Certainly no one in the media can be trusted. At best they have different agendas, and the agenda with the Gulf Gusher has been to frighten readers/viewers to increase revenue. They have had an anti government culture since Nixon was brought down. It takes a lot of time and failures to know who to trust, and the Obama administration has not been in office to build up very many trustworthy people on their Rolodexes.

5. How about NOT publishing speculative reports. I've lived around and with the oil industry on the Gulf since the early 40's and much of what you are demanding right now simply is not known by any reliable sources. [Among other things the oil production industry has actively prevented it from being discussed generally.]

6. How about limiting public information to what the audiences will listen to? Preferably without unnecessarily alarming an already frightened audience? Otherwise you are likely to get a lot of very crazy behavior. That's crazy behavior of the type doing stuff like nominating the whack-job Christine O'Connell and the other tea partiers has demonstrated.

BP is used to acting as a government power themselves worldwide. It's their culture and they are good at it. They own enough governments, including in the U.S. parts of state governments and all of certain American local governments. They are not used to reacting favorably to instructions or even guidance from the federal government, any more than the Wall Street Banks are. But they are also the only organization on site with the equipment and experienced individuals to actually do something about the Gulf Gusher. And BP themselves are operating in unknown and uncharted information. Every action they take is a basic research experiment. People working under that kind of pressure with the time pressure added cannot also spend their time looking over their shoulder to appease their audience(s). The rules I previously described about bureaucracies always doing 99% the same thing the same way they did the day before apply to them also.

I agree that BP has what we should consider a criminal culture or at least one we can't trust, but you don't change an organization's culture overnight. And you especially don't expect them to perform rapidly in a high priority time sensitive task such as the immediate emergency of capping the gusher while you change their culture. Yes, the clock is ticking. That's one of the many problems complicating the issue of getting better results.

Obama and co are not going to get any credit for their behavior in this crisis because Obama approved off-shore drilling just before it happened. But that was a political decision made after looking at the common wisdom regarding the dangers of oil spills and off-shore drilling. The only prior event that was relevant was the Mexican drilling disaster three decades earlier. Since it was not immediate and so many other things were, why should the administration question the common wisdom? They are not prescient. It was a question of getting the issue off the table, nothing else. Presidents have to minimize the number of enemies and maximize the number of friends long before they have to do the "right" thing. But overall when BP, Transocean and Haliburton created this disaster they stepped up promptly (unlike Bush in Katrina.) Since then there  is very little they could have done that they did not do and do generally right about this Gulf disaster. At least so far. Unless of course they have magic powers they failed to deploy when they had the attention of the appropriate spirits.  

[ Parent ]
The it -could-not-be-otherwise-or-we're-doomed defense (4.00 / 1)
Your response makes it very clear -- to me, at least -- that you and I have a completely different understanding of what's really at stake here. You seem to want to save what can be saved in an awful situation. I think that there is no such thing -- the status quo is not only toxic, it's entirely beyond salvation. All you can save by refusing to admit that anything could happen except what did happen without risking the Apocalypse simply makes the Apocalypse all that more inevitable.

Go ahead and claim that anything which doesn't maintain the administration's prerogatives -- which you seem to misconstrue as something like options and flexibility -- will result in chaos.

You'll (we'll) get chaos anyway. We're already getting it, but perhaps it's moving too slowly for you to see it. Be patient. The pace will be picking up shortly, and when it does, the sharp creases in the Presidential trousers won't save him from looking like those fat old men in ushankas who used to stand on top of Lenin's corpse and survey their glorious Soviet future.

[ Parent ]
Not so (0.00 / 0)
But they are also the only organization on site with the equipment and experienced individuals to actually do something about the Gulf Gusher

Some advised that the Administration bring in another oil company to tackle the spill at BP's expense.

[ Parent ]
Meanwhile the dispersants that were poured into the Gulf against the advice of all environmental scientists..... (4.00 / 8)
....have had their effect....the oil has sunk out of sight.

Out of sight, out of mind.

Forming a thick sludge at the bottom of the Gulf for decades or centuries to come.

In one respect at least, BP and the White House were in complete sync: Get this off the headlines ASAP, damn the consequences for marine life.

Mission accomplished.

Did I mention that off-shore drilling is actually very safe these days?

Yes and that sludge will be poisoning "safe" Gulf seafood for decades. (4.00 / 2)
Where do the shrimp live? On the bottom! How many thousands of pounds of Gulf Shrimp are being consumed as we speak? If I can find Gulf shrimp in markets here in SoCal, then it's everywhere, because we don't even need to get shrimp from the Gulf.

Obama's legacy will long outlive him, even though he'll probably live to a ripe old age.

"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." -Woody Allen, My Speech to the Graduates

[ Parent ]
Looks like someone refuses to pay attention to this issue... still. (4.00 / 12)
A stunning bit of ignorant apologia here, Mike. I'll agree with you on your one point though: you don't care about environmental issues, nor do you understand the economic, cultural and public health issues at stake here. Perhaps it would be best if you let others handle this one, since you show no interest in the truth.

Here's the other thing: everyone who has served at a White House knows that on something with this level of media and political scrutiny, it does not pay over the long term to gloss over or minimize problems, because if you do it will be found out.

This, of course, is simply not supported by the facts. The WH has made and continues to make, every effort at keeping this out of the media. They muzzled NOAA and EPA outright. They made sure the gusher rates were low-balled to save BP money and to take pressure off the WH to actually do something besides pretend it's not really that big of a deal. This was all to benefit both BP (by saving them money) and the WH, by making it look like it's smaller than it is.

Over the past few months, I've encouraged anyone with any interest at all in the amount of oil that gushed forth from the Deepwater Horizon well into the Gulf of Mexico to check in regularly with Sarabeth Guthberg who, at 1115.org, has been keeping a close eye on a lot of fast-moving numbers -- the estimates from the Flow Rate Technical Group, competing numbers from other scientific authorities -- and the many ways in which BP worked to undermine the measurement effort. Well, the well is now capped, so what's Guthberg's verdict?

This is an unmitigated success for BP. Not so much because they have apparently managed to seal the well for good (though additional cement may also be poured in from the bottom, through the relief well that is nearing completion), but because they managed to do so without ever letting the flow of oil from the blown well be metered.

This is, indeed, great news for BP, because it's the oil flow estimate that will be used to determine the fines that will be levied against BP for destroying the Gulf Coast region. An accurate measurement is "the last thing BP wants".

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

They also put the criminals responsible for this disaster in charge of collecting the evidence to be used against them:

N

EW ORLEANS (AP) -- Now that BP appears to have vanquished its ruptured well, authorities are turning their attention to gathering evidence from what could amount to a crime scene at the bottom of the sea.

The wreckage -- including the failed blowout preventer and the blackened, twisted remnants of the drilling platform -- may be Exhibit A in the effort to establish who is responsible for the biggest peacetime oil spill in history. And the very companies under investigation will be in charge of recovering the evidence.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

They also have and continue to harrass and intimidate scientists not under their direct control:

A month after the Deepwater Horizon disaster began, scientists from the University of South Florida made a startling announcement. They had found signs that the oil spewing from the well had formed a 6-mile-wide plume snaking along in the deepest recesses of the gulf.

The reaction that USF announcement received from the Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agencies that sponsored their research:

Shut up.

"I got lambasted by the Coast Guard and NOAA when we said there was undersea oil," USF marine sciences dean William Hogarth said. Some officials even told him to retract USF's public announcement, he said, comparing it to being "beat up" by federal officials.

http://www.tampabay.com/news/e...

They also made the $20 Billion fund contingent on more drilling... by BP in the Gulf. That $20 Billion, by the way, is a small fraction of the real damage and people will be really upset when they realize that's all there is to come.

WASHINGTON-The Obama administration and BP PLC are close to a deal to use future revenues from the oil giant's Gulf of Mexico operations to guarantee its $20 billion cleanup and compensation fund, a move that would give both sides an incentive to continue production in the Gulf, scene of the U.S.'s worst-ever offshore oil spill.

http://online.wsj.com/article/...

Carol Browner even had to audacity to claim 75% of the oil spilled had simply "disappeared." You can't tell me that wasn't in both BP's and the WH's interests, even though it's the most ridiculous bullshit anyone has heard, since, "I'm not a crook!"

WASHINGTON - About three-quarters of the oil spilled from the ruptured BP well in the Gulf of Mexico has disappeared, a top US official said Wednesday.

"The scientists are telling us about 25 percent was not captured or evaporated or taken care of by mother nature," said Carol Browner, a top energy adviser to President Barack Obama, on the ABC network's "Good Morning America" programme.

http://www.google.com/hostedne...

That's just a small taste of the horrific mismanagement, obfuscation and out right lying this administration has foisted on the American people, all just to get this thing out of the headlines. BP is still using Corexit, the Coast Guard was being used to threaten journalists with jail time, the oil washing up was mostly just covered up leaving a thick layer underneath (and yes, that oil will come back up at some point). I could go on and on and on.

I found the working papers refreshing for their honesty. I thusly found Gibbs' responses wholly lacking in any integrity whatsoever. Indeed, there is one other thing you might want to share with your friends at the WH, which is the horribly inadequate testing of sea-food from the Gulf--seafood which I am finding in markets and lecturing the store managers about: the testing is designed to ignore the toxins in the food. Of course, most of the poisoning won't become apparent for a while, so they can skate on that one as well.

Today, NOAA reopened 5,130 square miles of Gulf waters to shrimping and fishing. I took a look at the data on which NOAA based their decision and was surprised to find that their data included only 12 samples of shrimp, consisting of a grand total of 73 individual shrimp, caught from an area about the size of the State of Connecticut.

http://switchboard.nrdc.org/bl...

MIke, this problem will be with us long after Barack Obama has gone off to spend more time with his BP contributions. So let's remember that it was Obama's MMS that issued the permit to this well. It was this government that ignored the warnings and refused to do it's job. It was this government that still refuses to do it's job and has bent over backwards to make sure BP's shareholders don't have to bear the burden of this disaster. Barack Obama owns this puppy and always will, pithy presser remarks or not.

Disasters like these take years to process. It takes years to get to the whole truth. So the WH's priority was to think short-term and get this out of the headlines as fast as possible. Damn the public interest.

So you think Gibbs' case is sound, eh?


"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." -Woody Allen, My Speech to the Graduates

Now I'm feeling almost bad for Lux (0.00 / 0)
You crushed him.
[ Parent ]
And I almost feel bad for doing it (4.00 / 2)
But this is one case where ignorant, phony rhetoric coming from a progressive member of the apparat just doesn't fly. I just can't tolerate it.

In a sense, though, Mike has illustrated rather perfectly just how awful "progressive" leadership is in DC. We're somehow supposed to simply jettison facts, logic and basic human decency in defense of an indefensible administration?

How's that progressive at all?

"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." -Woody Allen, My Speech to the Graduates

[ Parent ]
Thanks for the work (0.00 / 0)
~
[ Parent ]
You wrote (4.00 / 1)
The WH has made and continues to make, every effort at keeping this out of the media. They muzzled NOAA and EPA outright.

Where is the evidence the White House actively muzzled NOAA and EPA? Comparing proposed news releases with other information and giving the people time to make those comparisons is not in fact muzzling. It is prudent handling of the reports. That's what OMB does. No one speaks "for" the federal government on an overnight whim. Except, of course, the President and maybe Joe Biden.

Is there any indication that the reports were improperly delayed?

Show me some real evidence or I just have to chalk your opinion up to a strongly held inference based on a lack of actual information.

What you wrote is, in fact, more of an indication of your anger that things are not changing more rapidly. If I am right in inferring that from what you wrote, then I agree with you. But that's still just demanding immediate action by magic instead of looking at reality.

I don't read fantasy much because I don't like solutions that are based on unexplainable magic. That's my bias.  

[ Parent ]
Whistleblowers from NOAA and EPA (4.00 / 6)
Your bias is simply denial. Where have you been these last six months?

So let's start with Democracy Now's interview with Hugh Kaufman, who was also interviewed by Keith Olbermann:

http://www.democracynow.org/20...

In this case, these dispersants were used in massive quantities, almost two million gallons so far, to hide the magnitude of the spill and save BP money. And the government-both EPA, NOAA, etc.-have been sock puppets for BP in this cover-up. Now, by hiding the amount of spill, BP is saving hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in fines, and so, from day one, there was tremendous economic incentive to use these dispersants to hide the magnitude of the gusher that's been going on for almost three months.

Here's a report by GLG group, a consultancy:
he EPA Lies Under Oath

It might come as some big shock but there is increasing evidence to show that the EPA has lied ... yet again.  Without mincing words, Federal Government agencies have literally allowed tens of thousands of Americans to be poisoned during the Exxon Valdez disaster, during 9/11, and now, history is once again repeating itself in the Gulf of Mexico, except for one change:  we now have a top EPA official warning us that the Government is allowing us to be poisoned.  

http://www.glgroup.com/News/BP...

From Dan Froomkin at Huffo:

What led Obama administration officials to wildly understate the size of the BP oil spill until it was all over? Was it just a series of honest mistakes? Or was science being manipulated for political purposes?

An environmental whistleblower group suspects the latter, and its distrust has only grown as the U.S. Geological Survey, one of several agencies involved in assessing the flow rate, has refused to turn over relevant documents including directives from political appointees

So the group, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, filed suit in federal district court on Thursday, claiming that hundreds of pages of reports and communications are being withheld in violation of the Freedom of Information Act.

"Our concern is that the administration took, and is still taking, steps to falsely minimize public perception about the extent and severity of the BP spill -- a concern that the administration could start to dispel by releasing these documents," PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch said in a statement.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

Are you telling me you don't know about any of this?

Here's this from that lefty rag the NYT:

WASHINGTON - The federal Minerals Management Service gave permission to BP and dozens of other oil companies to drill in the Gulf of Mexico without first getting required permits from another agency that assesses threats to endangered species - and despite strong warnings from that agency about the impact the drilling was likely to have on the gulf.

Those approvals, federal records show, include one for the well drilled by the Deepwater Horizon rig, which exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers and resulting in thousands of barrels of oil spilling into the gulf each day.

The Minerals Management Service, or M.M.S., also routinely overruled its staff biologists and engineers who raised concerns about the safety and the environmental impact of certain drilling proposals in the gulf and in Alaska, according to a half-dozen current and former agency scientists.

Those scientists said they were also regularly pressured by agency officials to change the findings of their internal studies if they predicted that an accident was likely to occur or if wildlife might be harmed.

Under the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Minerals Management Service is required to get permits to allow drilling where it might harm endangered species or marine mammals.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, is partly responsible for protecting endangered species and marine mammals. It has said on repeated occasions that drilling in the gulf affects these animals, but the minerals agency since January 2009 has approved at least three huge lease sales, 103 seismic blasting projects and 346 drilling plans. Agency records also show that permission for those projects and plans was granted without getting the permits required under federal law.

"M.M.S. has given up any pretense of regulating the offshore oil industry," said Kierán Suckling, director of the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy group in Tucson, which filed notice of intent to sue the agency over its noncompliance with federal law concerning endangered species. "The agency seems to think its mission is to help the oil industry evade environmental laws."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05...

More from the Times:

Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials.

To some critics of the response effort by BP and the government, instances of news media being kept at bay are just another example of a broader problem of officials' filtering what images of the spill the public sees.

Scientists, too, have complained about the trickle of information that has emerged from BP and government sources. Three weeks passed, for instance, from the time the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20 and the first images of oil gushing from an underwater pipe were released by BP.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06...

From the Guardian:

White House claims that the worst of the BP oil spill was over were undermined yesterday when a senior government scientist said three-quarters of the oil was still in the Gulf environment and a research study detected a 22-mile plume of oil in the ocean depths.

Bill Lehr, a senior scientist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) departed from an official report from two weeks ago which suggested the majority of the oil had been captured or broken down.

"I would say most of that is still in the environment," Lehr, the lead author of the report, told the house energy and commerce committee.

The growing evidence that the White House painted an overly optimistic picture when officials claimed two weeks ago the remaining oil in the Gulf was rapidly breaking down fuelled a sense of outrage in the scientific community that government agencies are hiding data and spinning the science of the oil spill. No new oil has entered the Gulf since 15 July, but officials said yesterday the well is unlikely to be sealed for good until mid-September.

Under questioning from the committee chair, Ed Markey, Lehr revised down the amount of oil that went into the Gulf to 4.1m barrels, from an earlier estimate of 4.9m, noting that 800,000 barrels were siphoned off directly from the well.

By some estimates, as much as 90% of the oil was unaccounted for. Lehr said 6% was burned and 4% was skimmed but he could not be confident of numbers for the amount collected from beaches.

The NOAA has been under fire from independent scientists and Congress for its conclusions and for failing to explain how it arrived at its calculations. The agency has failed to respond to repeated requests from Congress to reveal its raw data and methodology.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/envi...

If you do some Googling, you can find a lot more. So I'd appreciate it if you'd  refrain from referring to my remarks as fantasy. Given that there's a mountain of evidence that says otherwise, your remarks come off as denialist BS.

"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." -Woody Allen, My Speech to the Graduates

[ Parent ]
OK. You provided a lot of evidence. (4.00 / 2)
But did you really, REAlly, REALLY prove it? Show me some MORE real evidence or I just have to chalk your opinion up to a strongly held inference based on a lack of actual information.  
[ Parent ]
Mongo no like proof. (0.00 / 0)
Mongo like unsubstantiated rationalization based on desire to deny, er, something, so that Mongo can sleep nights. Mongo understandably sensitive.

Oh, and Mongo like beans......

"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." -Woody Allen, My Speech to the Graduates

[ Parent ]
I always found Bush apologists telling me to PROVE Bush (4.00 / 4)
knew the reports of Iraqi WMD's were too cute by a half. I must say you are even cuter still. Why don't you and Lux just PROVE that the Obama administration was entirely aboveboard and PROVE that you are really being objective. Otherwise I will have to chalk up your comments to  a strongly held inference that departs radically from reality and from the aggregate of evidence we see in front of us by which most (not the cutesy set) judge reality.
[ Parent ]
Oh, here's a couple more. (4.00 / 3)
Scientists investigating oil spill unsettled by calls from federal commission

NEW ORLEANS-- Some independent scientists, who have been looking into oil spill contamination in the Gulf of Mexico, said they have received some unsettling phone calls from the federal government.

The calls came from attorneys, on behalf of the National Oil Spill Commission. The scientists said their questions seemed designed to cast doubts on their findings.

As the oil spill unfolded, scientists from research institutions around the country descended on the Gulf to witness what ended up becoming an unprecedented environmental event. Two of those scientists included Dr. William Sawyer, a Florida-based toxicologist, and Marco Kaltofen, a scientist and head of Boston Chemical Data in Massachusetts.

"Right now, the Gulf is basically a big experimental laboratory," Sawyer said.
Both were hired by a New Orleans-based law firm to collect and analyze samples of water, sand and sea life that had been affected by the oil spill.

"What has been most important to us is to make sure that we have independent data, that is gathered from along the coast, where our clients reside," said attorney Stuart Smith, of the Smith Stag Law Firm, which hired Sawyer and Kaltofen.

The scientists looked at samples from off the coast of several Gulf states, including Louisiana. They said, so far, their findings are troubling.

"We've found an alarming pattern of hydrocarbons maintained in the water column, at levels that are hazardous to the marine environment," Sawyer said.
"If we're finding so much more of the toxic part of oil in the water column, the obvious question is what's happening to the seafood?" Kaltofen said.

In the seafood, they found the presence of potentially toxic hydrocarbons, at levels above the norm. Even though they had yet to issue a report drawing any conclusions, they began posting their data online.

Then, they received phone calls.

"We were contacted by the national commission on the BP oil spill," Kaltofen said.

President Barack Obama created the commission to look into the oil spill, hold hearings and eventually make recommendations based on their findings. Yet, the two scientists said the phones calls were unsettling.

"I explained the work, but there seemed to be a grave concern as to why we were finding contamination," Sawyer said. "It was sort of a loaded question -- and then the questions were geared towards sampling permits."

The question: did they have the proper permits to do their sampling? The scientists said they did.

"The second thing we were asked is, 'Do we believe that our data shows that the federal data is wrong?'" Kaltofen said. "The last thing, of course, is the National Commission impugned my reputation and said that they were trying to determine if we were sampling illegally."

http://www.wwltv.com/news/gulf...

NOAA Claims Scientists Reviewed Report; Scientists Say Otherwise:

Why did administration officials mislead the public about those findings -- and then claim that independent scientists had reviewed them, when the evidence suggests that they did not?

NOAA public affairs officials did not respond to requests for comment before my deadline.

Ian R. MacDonald, an oceanographer at Florida State University who was not one of the scientists on NOAA's list, sees this latest incident as part of an ongoing problem.

Lubchenco had previously been a key figure in the patently low-ball estimates for the oil flow, and fervently resisted acknowledging the existence of underwater oil plumes, he said.

"I've worked with NOAA essentially all my career and I have many good friends there, and people I respect in the agency, scientists who are really solid," MacDonald said.

"Throughout this process, it's been troubling to me to see the efforts of people like that passed through a filter where the objective seems to be much more political and public relations than making comments to inform the public.

"The consistent theme," MacDonald said, "seems to be to minimize the impact of the oil -- and to act as a bottleneck for information."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

Is that enough?

"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." -Woody Allen, My Speech to the Graduates

[ Parent ]
wrong (4.00 / 4)
At best the administration is guilty of a criminal level of incompetence regarding the rate of oil gushing. At worst they are guilty of a criminal conspiracy to protect BP's image.

The administration may not have had good numbers on the oil spill from the start, but they had the data that could have been used by any number of marine scientists (and that was eventually used by scientists commissioned by NPR) to refute the ridiculously low official BP numbers. A competent administration should have released that data for scientific analysis; it should not have helped BP keep that information from the public.

I think the basic problem here was the same basic problem of the Obama administration so far: a fundamental belief that good policy requires partnership with big business, and therefore that everything else must bend to the necessity of avoiding an adversarial stance toward big business.

This was every bit as big a screw-up as pre-negotiating the health care overhaul with the insurance industry. Actually probably a bigger screw-up.

Oh Mike, here's one item I would like you to comment on directly: (4.00 / 4)
In School Outreach, BP and NOAA 'Dispel Myths' About Dispersants, Subsurface Oil

Even as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calls for more research into the long-term effects of the chemical dispersants BP used in the Gulf, representatives of BP and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have reached out to local schools to "dispel myths" about dispersants and subsurface oil, according to recent reports in the Houma Courier and the Tri-Parish Times. (We first noticed the Tri-Parish Times piece via TreeHugger.)

BP and NOAA appear to be doing demonstrations for local schools using a 10-gallon fish tank full of water, some cooking oil, and some dishwashing detergent to simulate the properties of oil and the effects of dispersants.
The Houma Courier quoted NOAA science support coordinator Gary Ott as telling the children, "Oil floats. See, we've tested it." (The oil-floats argument is also what then-BP CEO Tony Hayward said when first confronted with evidence of underwater oil plumes this summer.)

According to the two reports, Ott had the children try to use eyedroppers to suck up the oil, simulating the inefficiency of skimmers. He had them use paper towels to simulate absorbent booms.

And then he applied dishwashing detergent to the floating oil to break it down - simulating dispersants. Though he acknowledged the dispersed oil doesn't disappear and could hurt some fish species, Ott told the children that the chemicals were broken down within weeks by microbes, the Courier reported. He also assured the children that Gulf seafood was safe to eat.

There's so very much more.....

http://www.propublica.org/blog...

Wait, I thought the oil had simply disappeared!

It doesn't take much effort to see that this federally supported propaganda operation is dangerously misguided. The fact that federal scientists are being used in this way is horrifying to me.

Given that BP & NOAA have teamed up to encourage children to poison themselves with tainted seafood, how is this any other than criminal negligence (or worse) just to suit the interests of a criminally operated oil company? How is the public interest being served here? How do you excuse this kind of morally bankrupt behavior?

"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." -Woody Allen, My Speech to the Graduates

"Now was the White House response to the BP spill overall perfect?" (4.00 / 3)
Somehow I always get the impression that the "perfect" question and the "Of, course, not." answer is a less than totally honest debating tactic. Since nothing is perfect, most critics are not expecting "perfection" so why use that measure as a tool to distract from the original subject matter.

Basically did the administration vastly underestimated the amount of oil going into the gulf in spite of contrary information from scientists using other methodologies as suggested by National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling?

From everything I've read, the answer would be "yes." A simple yet not perfect answer.

still, Lux has perfected the use of such dishonest rhetorical devices (4.00 / 1)
In his previous post he hoped progressives "would be willing to meet Obama (and his strenuous outreach efforts) halfway. Not only dishonest but a true crock of shit.
[ Parent ]
Can't go along with this one, Mike (4.00 / 2)
The administration had just put itself on record as endorsing deep water drilling off the east coast. If there was a chance in hell the BP blowout could be minimized, they had every incentive in the world to cover up, since it interfered with their game plan.

I'd be an idiot if I didn't think they would try. That's elementary politics.

Can it happen here?

So, the admittedly inaccurate and extremely BP friendly estimates . . . (4.00 / 1)
. . . were just a coincidence?

This administration really does think we're all a bunch of idiots.

No, just a minority. (0.00 / 0)
That's apparently all that counts.
[ Parent ]
Can't Agree (4.00 / 4)
Here's the other thing: everyone who has served at a White House knows that on something with this level of media and political scrutiny, it does not pay over the long term to gloss over or minimize problems, because if you do it will be found out.

I think this is wrong on two counts.  First, it is clear from watching Washington that people there do not think this way.  People gloss over problems all the time.  Just like people in business and their every day lives gloss over problems.  It is human nature.

Second, I think this is factually incorrect on the effectiveness.  Glossing over problems, unfortunately, does actually work.  The oil spill was a huge problem for Obama while it was happening, but now it has been largely forgotten.  Worse news at the time would have made it worse for Obama, far worse than any small story like this after the fact.

Now, I do think there is both top-down level problems with Obama's response to the oil spill and random issues that happen whenever large organizations deal with complex problems.  I have no idea if this particular item is a real top-down cover up or just some random bureaucratic confusion that looks bad after the fact.  Like most things, I suspect a little from both category A and B were involved.  Most likely some people were being extra careful because they knew accurate bad news was not appreciated and inaccurate bad news was not tolerated.

The BP spill and the White House Response | 39 comments
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