Congress' Gulf Oil Spill Response Given a 'D' By Commissioners 129
ananyo writes "Many of the problems that led to the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill have not been addressed, say the members of a commission set up by U.S. President Barack Obama to study the disaster. The group released a report today (PDF) on progress towards its 2011 recommendations for preventing future disasters and improving spill response. The U.S. Congress fares worst in the new report, earning a 'D' rating for its failure to enact any meaningful legislation in response to the disaster. The Restore Act would allocate 80% of any fines that BP pays for the spill under the Clean Water Act to restoring the environment and economies of the states in the Gulf of Mexico, but the act has stalled in the House of Representatives. The Obama administration did better, with a B, thanks in part to new drilling regulations, while the oil industry's efforts to improve safety saw it awarded a C+."
Well, on the upside (Score:5, Funny)
They scored an "A" on fund-raising from oil companies.
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As well as protecting them from corporate liability(fine was absolutely trivial compared to harm done), competition from the rest of society(government not only subsidizes oil companies, but restricts harvesting to those who are given contracts), and personal accountability for executives(any of them see a dime of cost for their actions?).
The commission itself was a joke from its inception. The only criteria of which a government sanctioned investigation like this will approve is more control and involvemen
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Well, this D does translate to a Aaa* in financial terms, which is practically junk status.
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earning a 'D' rating for its failure to enact any meaningful legislation in response to the disaster.
Because anytime anything goes wrong, Congress should pass yet another law to cover it.
I seem to recall that the reason the rig sank in the first place, which jacked up the pipe at the well head, was firefighting efforts swamped it [drillingahead.com]
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Except that all the safety systems in place were turned to silent due to false alarms. That had a little something to do with how the fire began which ultimately let to it's sinking.
Regardless (Score:2)
Be that as it may, if they had just let the fire burn, the rig may not have sank, which busted the pipe and caused the massive spill. They could have worked the unit on the sea floor while most of the oil was burned off topside.
I do remember some newsbabe saying that the EPA insisted they try to douse the flames due to the "pollution" it was causing.
Ironic.
But an A by BP (Score:2, Funny)
In a related note, BP gave Congress' an A+ on their response to the oil spill.
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Mitch McConnell looks like he has a clogged OUTTAKE filter. His face looks like he has permanent constipation.
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My kingdom for a mod point.
Please post your childish off-topic comments somewhere else.
Re:But an A by BP (Score:4, Insightful)
what bp did was already illegal.
there's a problem with how the court/justice is implemented when they're not doing time for it..
Self-evaluation. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Self-evaluation. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Self-evaluation. (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, I realize I am opening up a whole new branch of Bush-as-Hitler metaphors. Resist the temptation, people. That shit is old.
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I seem to remember an awful lot of Clinton blow-job jokes during the Bush years. Sauce for the goose and all.
Cue uncomfortable silence.
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The parent specifically brought up Obama's administration.
To be precise, TFA brought up the Obama administration, I was just commenting on the silliness of the Obama Administration effectively giving itself a 'B' grade.
We need a new Godwin's Law regarding the invocation of Bush.
So in this analogy Bush is Hitler? That is, in and of itself a reverse Godwin. You're invoking Hitler to argue that there's something fallacious about referencing the Obama administration's immediate predecessor in power as a reference point for their behavior. The problem is that the reference is so incredibly ugly in the popular conscience that
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So in this analogy Bush is Hitler?
It would seem that many fervently believe this in general. And they invoke Bush in the same manner as they do Hitler.
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The comment above re: Bush is explicit and specific on a single point. "Mission Accomplished" is part of U.S. History now. It's both impractical and frankly unrealistic to expect the 75% or so of the nation that dislikes President Bush to stop me
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Now, that's a narrative I've yet to hear.
The fact is that the Left and Obama in particular have used Bush as an excuse for everything. They do so to excess, to the point of it being a Saturday Night Live parody.
As for going back 8 years, things were going as well as could be expected after 9/11 until about 2007, when the Dems got a hold of the check book again.
I, for one, do look back with fondness on the dollar something a gallon gas and the 4 something percent unemployment rate.
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Can we acknowledge the government has effectively ZERO CONTROL over oil prices? They have abundant levers that may affect oil prices but have no control over them. As it stands taxes are around 10-20% of a gallon of gas at any given time. Speculation and world demand have driven gas prices up. To compare and contrast is just obtuse. When Bush was in office I wasn't letting myself or anybody I knew actually blame him for gas prices being high, I made a point of defending him as much as I hated to. He i
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You hit the nail on the head. I think it's much like comparing Lincoln to Buchanan. It's like shooting fish in a barrel.
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How goes the life of being a shill for your employer?
-GiH
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If you're going to get upset when somebody makes a valid comparison because the valid comparison makes your personal views look bad maybe you should stop and think about it? The argument here (and it is a fairly weak one) is that Pres. Obama somehow took much more credit than he should have and is somehow claiming to be personally responsible for Bin Laden's death. Now I fail to see this as it was a Fox News talking point shortly after the reality set in that he did something that the previous president c
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I'm sure the Republicans would love your new law. Just like the stupid "Godwin!!!" posts that do nothing other than derail any conversation involving Nazi Germany, the Republicans could use this new law to derail any conversation about Bush they don't like.
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Remember how modest he was when he roped in with SEAL Team 6 and personally shot Bin Laden?
No. I do remember when he came out and calmly announced that the Obama administration had ordered SEAL Team 6 to go into Pakistan and kill them some Terrorist assholes. I think you can comfortably assume that you will see Obama taking a few more victory laps on killing Osama. You will also have to get used to seeing it in places like text books, because that shit was history in the making.
-GiH
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I remember that announcement....
"I...I...I...I...My...I...My...I....I...I..." etc.
Easy to criticize obama about... without fantasies (Score:3)
"I...I...I...I...My...I...My...I....I...I..." etc.
Pay attention now. Obama uses personal pronouns less than any modern president. Yes, there has been empirical analysis on the topic. In particular, I refer you to the work of James W. Pennebaker, a social psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, who specialises in the use of pronouns.
None of this matters, of course, because political discourse continues to devolve to "four-legs-good, obama-bad" for the right. One might reasonably think that the left is just as bad, and they are pretty bad; howe
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Poor little leftist thinks Obama is being unfairly attacked.
They fact is that your guy took credit for the raid. He made it seem as if HE put into place the mechanisms to find him, HE made some difficult decision to go ahead and then lauded himself for making it.
If you can't see that, all I can say is that the Kool Aid has blurred your vision.
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Learn the lessons of Kamp Krusty (Score:2)
"You know, a D turns into a B so easily. You just got greedy." [wikia.com]
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So I noticed. But to be fair, they did *something* and congress did *nothing*, so they're justified in giving themselves at least an C.
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Congress seems to act like a cheer-leading squad, with all those non-binding resolutions and evaluations.
Congress should get an "A" if RA is slush fund (Score:2)
Hmmm...I think Congress should get an "A" if the goal is "progress towards...preventing future disasters" and the Restore Act is basically a slush fund that delivers "80% of any fines that BP pays for the spill under the Clean Water Act to...the states".
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Drill baby drill is actually an environmental push.
Drill ALL the oil - no more spills.
Simple!
Oh really? (Score:5, Informative)
The administration ought to get an 'F', given that they've approved Shell to drill in the Arctic Ocean. You think it's tough to clean up a spill in the nice temperate Gulf of Mexico? Wait until we have a midwinter blowout up there, with no idea how to clean it up or even stop it.
You'd think they'd at least learn something. Apparently not.
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My first thought on reading the summary was "Obama's commission said that Obama did good, and his political enemies did bad - big surprise there, eh?"
Re:commission set up by Obama? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.oilspillcommission.gov/page/commission-members [oilspillcommission.gov]
are all supporters of Obama... but after reading their bios, I find no reason to believe they're more or less supportive of Obama than your average businessmen or scientists, other than they were selected while Obama was in office. If fact, there's 2 co-chairmen; one's a democrat and the other's a republican. All members seem to be experts in their various fields, specifically marine ecosystems, engineering and oil extraction/spill cleanup (a couple of Exxon Valdez veterans on that list; sounds very useful and logical to me).
Briefly perusing the meeting minutes, it seems they've been up to a lot more than grading Congress and Obama's administration, anyway. If you have a problem with what they're doing, this site's where to go to learn more, and it's surprisingly full of info.
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Thank you for not just making a kneejerk comment and for actually providing information.
I'll give them a passing grade... (Score:5, Insightful)
... for doing nothing. This was, as I understand it, more a problem of lax regulation than lack of regulation.
I don't like the "but we must do SOMEthing" philosophy. Most problems are caused by solutions.
Re:I'll give them a passing grade... (Score:4, Insightful)
BUT BUT BUT BUT the free market will take care of it! Incentives and all that shit.
The free market doesn't work when the fat cats have control over all the levers of government. This just shows it once again.
Re:I'll give them a passing grade... (Score:5, Insightful)
The free market isn't free when the laws are purchased.
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Which is why the proper solution is to remove all violent regulation that prevents us from actually determining how the industry should function. Put society back in the driver seat instead of these corrupt and inept bureaucrats and the corporate suits that bribe them. End the violent domination over us in the direction of this industry. The biggest deregulation benefit would be to do away the legal shield called 'the corporation' itself. By abolishing the government protection from accountability to the re
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The free market isn't free when the laws are purchased.
Yes it is. That's precisely the definition of a free market. The person with the most money are free to do whatever they can. In a free market, buying laws is just another business strategy. Sure, the free market doesn't remain free after that, but, however you like it, it is still permissible in a free market. The crazy thing is people I keep talking to think economics plays by the definitions of terms and never evolves out of a system.
Free markets are not self sustaining.
Truly free markets don't have copyrights. (Score:1)
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People keep saying "this and this doesn't belong in
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There also has to be consequences for you actions, like stealing from your customers. [bloomberg.com]
Re:I'll give them a passing grade... (Score:4, Interesting)
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
--Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
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Is your supposition that the best laws [wikipedia.org] arise [wikipedia.org]in response to a crisis [wikipedia.org] before cooler heads can prevail?
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The free market always works until it stops working.
And when is that, you ask?
It's when the concentration of wealth and power - the end results of any free market let run loose to long - become great enough that real competition no longer exists, and the laws can be purchased by those with said wealth and power.
And we passed that point sometime between Eisenhower and Reagan.
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If you absorb the externalities into the market, then you don't have externalities.
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That's what many environmental laws are for. Companies are forced to clean up (or prevent) their environmental damage and pass that cost onto their product consumers. If companies weren't forced to do this, rivers would be on fire.
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I agree. Those externalities should be priced or be subject to civil lawsuits. This is part of the free market idea. Property rights and contracts must be enforced to maintain a free market. After all, it isn't an anarchist market.
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That's not at all what he said; I am not sure where all of this "free market" crackdown is coming from on Slashdot recently, particularly when it's not mentioned anywhere else. His point is that the actual regulators--the government people--were just as corrupt as the people doing the drilling in this case. What legislation should be passed by the government to prevent government corruption? Anti-corruption laws? Those exist.
Besides, the entire fiasco was not even as serious of a problem for BP as it should
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His point is that the actual regulators--the government people--were just as corrupt as the people doing the drilling in this case. What legislation should be passed by the government to prevent government corruption? Anti-corruption laws? Those exist.
Oversight.
Fund the goddamn auditors instead of assuming everything will be hunky dory.
Yes, this costs money. No, it does not cost more than the accidents it will prevent.
Fuck you* for trying to defund them because if they've done their job, reduced accidents, and now they seem to be a waste of money.
*you know who you are. if you have to ask, then it's probably you.
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I would think that in this case, the proper something to do is spank the regulators that were so lax so that in future the existing regulations will be applied.
There's no point in new regulations if they will be enforced like the current ones.
Re:I'll give them a passing grade... (Score:5, Informative)
I don't like the "but we must do SOMEthing" philosophy. Most problems are caused by solutions.
I'll agree with your disagreement. Government solutions usually need more solutions.
Story time! I have an in-law who works for a certain energy company that had a pipeline leak within the past few years (it's not BP, and I honestly don't remember the name). He's a manager for a department of about a hundred people whose primary job is to produce reports to accommodate whatever silly requests the government agents want. Among the requests I've heard about:
As it was explained to me, the vast majority of those agents were contractors, who make requests simply to look like they're doing something, which then entitles them to a piece of the government's clean-up money. The energy company faces enormous fines for not complying with every request, no matter how ridiculous the request or how indirect the connection to the incident may be. The end result is that the government money goes to producing useless reports, the company's repair efforts get less funding, and my in-law has a job.
Contractors, eh? (Score:3, Insightful)
So you mean private individuals whose position comes on them creating some reason to justify their employment?
How exactly is the problem with government as a whole, as opposed to the privatization of government into the hands of those who benefit not by doing their job properly, but who have corrupted the process for their own benefit?
What does that tell you? Which party is the one who continually claims that outside individuals are somehow going to be better? Whose ideology is that?
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Most problems are caused by solutions.
Wrong. Most problems are caused by empty platitudes. Why do you hate America?
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"and you know what creates wage-slaves. wages!"
(forever waiting for the duck to fly down and give me a hundred dollars..)
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You Lucky Ducky
http://comics.dailykos.com/story/2012/04/13/1082944/-Lucky-Ducky-in-Tricklin-Down-?detail=hide [dailykos.com]
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Its all a big scam anyway. Who is really capable of writing meaningful safety regulations? Only people in the industry with the experience. So who do you pick in the industry to write the regulations? Your biggest donors of course. And when they write the regulations you can be sure they will write them in order to benefit them.
It's like the lead paint in toys. The big toy makers wrote regulations that made it near impossible for startup companies to comply even if they made the toys themselves and had full
Is responsive legislation ever a good thing? (Score:1)
Typically it's way over the top and far more harmful than good.
So I'm going to say it's a good thing they got a D there.
The government is amazing (Score:1)
Our government only managed to scrap through with a (averaged) grade of C, and it got to grade its own work.
It's good to see that democracy is working so well.
meaningful legislation? (Score:1)
failure to enact any meaningful legislation in response to the
That's one of the problems when you mix corporations and capitalism. It takes legislation to make companies behave in an appropriate manner. BP should have made sure that a complete disaster would not occur. Taking risks and ignoring social responsibilities is a moral and ethical problem within corporate cultures. BP execs should have been punished way beyond the slap on the wrist. BP should not even exist today.
Useless information (Score:4, Funny)
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In other news (Score:1)
A commission set up by Obama rates the Obama administration highest of all. And this comes as a surprise to...who exactly?
Of course, they couldn't give Obama an A. That would just be gratuitous bootlicking.
ignoring the bigger problem (Score:1)
congressional approval is the worst ever. nobody thinks they are doing a job.
Congress gets an F.
Also in other news... (Score:1)
How much money did this report cost? (Score:2)
If I wrote an essay the way this report is written I'd have got a fail.
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The real problem was crooked regulators. The regulatory agency was responsible for both collecting leasing fees from the oil companies as well as regulating them. Holy conflict of interest Batman!
With that sort of setup no wonder the regulations were laxly applied. And of course the regulatory agency was frequently taken to parties stocked with all sort of goodies by the oil companies. Including prostitutes.
http://oilprice.com/The-Environment/Oil-Spills/U.S.-To-Restructure-Offshore-Drilling-Regulatory-Agenc [oilprice.com]
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You don't want to do anything complex in a PDF. That's just a set up for failure to display, trojans and other malware.
Our government understands this sort of thing. Progress as promised!
Only the Government (Score:2)
Meanwhile in Brazil.... (Score:2, Informative)
.... it is funny that the accident in the Gulf of Mexico was in part responsible for a very harsh response to a tiny spill just south of the equator:
http://www.economist.com/node/21542179
If anything, other countries have tried to learn from this disaster and the way it was handled.
FTFY (Score:2)
Vast amounts of money... (Score:2)
...or not.
"any fines that BP pays"
I remain sceptical as to the paying part.
There ought to be a law (Score:2)
Oil spills are illegal. How about that?
Honestly, not everything can be fixed by Congress. Sometimes, the administration has to step up, enforce the laws and regulations they've got and kick some ass when they see violations.
The Restore Act would allocate 80% of any fines that BP pays for the spill under the Clean Water Act to restoring the environment and economies of the states in the Gulf of Mexico,
I see the law of unintended consequences coming into play here, big time. So now, gov't revenues in support of various economic recovery programs will be linked to oil spills?
Fuck U and Fuck S (Score:1)
Provides more Fuck US; So, nothing new and all change is bad?
This is not the commission (Score:2)
Many of the problems that led to the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill have not been addressed, say the members of a commission set up by U.S. President Barack Obama to study the disaster.
If you look at who released the report [oscaction.org] you'll see that the commission set up by the President completed its work and was disbanded. This report was issued by an environmental action group which claims some previous commission members among its founders.
I assume these people are pushing their own agenda, maybe because its an election year, maybe because they really care. But I note that they are all Obama appointees.
BS here for sure (Score:2)
Of course this is just another rant against the big machine covering everything up, but making small efforts here and there to make it look like they actually care to their people....but all in all, there should have been way more activity then there was on this issue, but as we saw, a lot of media was redirected to other things instead of reading about the spill non stop years later, being it was the biggest disaster man made or other wise ever to hit this planet since man
came into power.....when you consi