thanks, bp: oils well that ends well ... ?

until the stoppage has been independently confirmed, i'll keep my revised meter running.

BP says it has temporarily stopped oil flowing into the gulf of mexico from its leaking well. it is the first time the flow has stopped since an explosion on the deepwater horizon rig on 20 april. the well has been sealed with a cap as part of a test of its integrity that could last up to 48 hours. US president barack obama said the development was a "positive sign" but noted that BP was still in the testing phase. BP executive kent wells said the oil had been stopped at 1425 local time (1925 GMT) and he was "excited" by the progress.

bp 2050

the ongoing wake-up call ringing itself off the hook in the mexican gulf brings to mind 1980's "solar plexus", a cautionary bit of science fantasy by rick veitch, which originally appeared in the fourth issue of marvel comics' first color magazine epic illustrated:

(story and art by rick veitch)

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hate to nitpick, but veitch does make some stereotypical comic book science blunders and his most glaring one is off by an order of magnitude: the sun's radius is almost 700,000km, so a mere 50,000km tap would hardly come close to "penetrating deep into the sun's meaty guts ..." as veitch describes.

but editor archie goodwin committed a far more serious error: he ran veitch's story with pages 6 and 7 out of order — an unpardonable sin about which i'm sure goodwin thinks he's already heard enough.

thanks, bp

readers may have noticed the new bp oil spill meter perched in the right column of this blog. it will remain a fixture here until such time that the leak has been independently confirmed as sealed.

my home-made widget isn't as snazzy as pbs', but it can be resized. the spill rate is based on pbs' worst case scenario of 4,200,000 gallons per day (which amounts to 48.61 gallons per second ¹), which daily comes closer to reality as we peel away layer after layer of bp's lies and lowballing.

my widget also takes account of local time zones. according to wikipedia, the well exploded on april 20 at 9:45pm central daylight time. so anyone in chicago watching the meter will see the "day" counter advance nightly at 9:45pm. anyone watching in los angeles will see their counter advance at 7:45pm, while counters in new york will advance at 10:45pm, and so forth around the globe.

copy the code below and paste it into your own web pages to get a meter for your blog. to resize it, simply substitute your own numbers at each instance of the parameters for "height" and "width":

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0" width="220" height="156" id="bpLeakCounter01" align="middle"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" /><param name="movie" value="http://www.aarrgghh.com/gladYouAsked/bpLeak/bpLeakCounter01.swf" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#000000" /><embed src="http://www.aarrgghh.com/gladYouAsked/bpLeak/bpLeakCounter01.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#000000" width="220" height="156" name="bpLeakCounter01" align="middle" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" /></embed></object>

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1. oddly, the math programmers at pbs seem to think 4.2m gal/day amounts to just 37 gal/sec. update: d'oh! my bad — pbs' counter is also attempting to account for the "recaptured" oil, a number even harder to substantiate than the spillage. update 2: now revised to include bp's reported stoppage.

surfin' mobile bay

fun, fun, fun off the coast of alabama:

(hat tip to pharyngula)

the art of the backdown

oil producer british petroleum (BP) ceo tony hayward, forecasting the damage, or lack thereof, to the gulf of mexico from the ongoing and as-yet-uncontrolled flood of crude oil from the well damaged by the destruction of his deepsea drilling rig deepwater horizon:

i think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest. it is impossible to say — we will mount, as part of the aftermath, a very detailed environmental assessment as we go forward. we're going to do that with some of the science institutions in the u.s., but everything we can see, at the moment, suggests that the overall environmental impact of this will be very, very modest. (may 18)

ten days later ...

it is clear that we're dealing with a very significant environmental crisis and catastrophe. ... a cup of oil on the shore is failure. ... in that regard, we have failed to defend the shoreline to the degree and extent that we believed we could. (may 28)

(tip of the hat to think progress.)

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update: too true, john cole. too true ...

when the oil company that caused the mess is using this terminology, you have to wonder how horrible it is ...

and the winner is ...

it's only wednesday but i feel pretty safe in bestowing this week's "look who's oozed out from under its rock" award and "feces flinger of the week" trophy to disgraced former FEMA head michael "heckuvajob" brown for his transparently self-serving efforts to wipe the stink of katrina onto obama:

brown:	and i think the delay was this: it's pure politics. this president has never supported big oil. he's never supported offshore drilling. and now he has an excuse to shut it back down. you've already heard bill nelson, senator from florida, saying offshore drilling is DOA. they played politics with this crisis and left the coast guard out there doing what they're supposed to do.
cavuto:	so michael, you don't take him at face value when he says a temporary halt in offshore drilling is just that — a temporary halt.
brown:	no, no. look bill nelson — and you know, they don't say these things without it being coordinated — and so now you're looking at this oil slick approaching the louisiana shore, according to certain NOAA and other places, if the winds are right it'll go up the east coast. this is exactly what they want. because now he can pander to the environmentalists and say, 'i'm going to shut it down because it's too dangerous.' while mexico and china and everybody else drills in the gulf, we're going to get shut down.

brown:	hey, hey, chris, i think there's two things. i think, one, we're seeing the rahm emanuel rule number one, ah, taking effect. and that is, "let no crisis go unused". so, this is an opportunity for a president who wants to bankrupt the coal industry and basically get rid of the oil and gas industry to shut down offshore drilling in the gulf of mexico.
	[snip]
matthews:	why would somebody sabotage something that would cause this kind of damage to our planet, really?
brown:	oh well, because i think there are terrorists in the world who would like to do that sort of thing. terrorists don't give a rat's butt about the ecology or anything else. all they care about is hurting america.
	[snip]
matthews:	... but he just came out for offshore oil drilling.
brown:	oh, chris, ah, i'm glad you asked that. he came out and said, look, i'm going to approve oil and gas drilling. and all you guys went, look what a great guy he is, trying to reach out to everybody else. chris, all he did was he approved two existing leases on the northeast coast, and shut down all the other proposed leases on the west coast and the southeast coast. there was nothing new in what he did.
matthews:	but don't you know what you're saying to a third party, not somebody like myself or somebody like yourself, listening to you, thinks that you're sounding insane. you're saying that the president of the united states went into slow-mo here, somehow — or for somehow seemed to be working faster than he really was, but was really quite slow to get there, because he saw an opportunity to exploit a disaster so that he could reap discredit on to the coal industry. and by the way, a couple of weeks ago —
brown:	no, no, no, not just the coal ...
matthews:	— he came down for offshore drilling so that he could discredit it when this thing occurred. are you suggesting he somehow knew this would happen and that's why he came out for offshore drilling?
brown:	no, no ...
matthews:	it sounds like that's what you're saying —
brown:	no, no, chris, hang on ...
matthews:	— and it sounds crazy. crazy!
brown:	well, and the way you just put it, chris, the way you just put it, it sounds crazy to me, too.

deepwater hindenburg

(photos from the department of energy. see the rest at talking points memo.)