US, Britain both want 'strong and stable' BP

[2pac Shakur]

TORONTO (AFP) – US President Barack Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron agreed BP should "remain a strong and stable company" after meeting ahead of the G20 summit in Toronto, Downing Street said.
In their first face-to-face talks since Cameron took power last month, the PM raised the issue of the British-based oil giant, which has faced heavy criticism in the United States over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
"The leaders agreed that BP should meet its obligations to cap the leak, clean up the damage and meet legitimate compensation claims," Downing Street said in a statement issued after the meeting.
"They also agreed that it was to both countries' advantage for BP to remain a strong and stable company."
A senior US administration official added both leaders had agreed that "BP has certain obligations and that those obligations have got to be met."
On Friday, Cameron warned against the "destruction" of the company, saying it was "important for all our interests."
BP has faced increasingly heavy criticism from the Obama administration over the country's worst ever environmental disaster, triggered when a BP-leased rig exploded in the Gulf in April. The president has vowed to hold BP accountable for the spill.
Despite desperate efforts, BP is still not capping all of the 35,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil estimated to be spilling into the sea every day, saying it is managing to contain around 25,000 barrels a day.
The firm says it has spent 2.35 billion dollars on compensation and clean-up costs, but the final costs are likely to be even higher.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/usoilenv...pstocksbritain

Hasn't been in our interest up to now.

[zeuz]

It smells like another Gummint bailout

[2pac Shakur]

Obama and Cameron "agreed that there was nothing to be gained from damaging BP as a going concern," a UK official said after the leaders met at the G8/G20 summit in Canada

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100627/..._oil_spill1_15

Nothing to be gained?
How about sending a message to other companies cutting corners on this sort of thing?
BP is just becoming a cash cow for politicians. It is not just us vs BP, it is us vs the gummint. This is absolutely effing ridiculous.

F*** BP.
F*** our gummint.
F*** Britain's gummint.
They don't give a f**** about us!

[2pac Shakur]

The news from the gulf only gets sadder and more infuriating. It's now raining oil. An amateur video has surfaced on youtube documenting a recent occurrence of the phenomenon.

In the video, the camera operators walk up and down the street during a light rain storm. The cloudy, foamy, rainbow effect of oil on a wet surface is clear as a narrator confirms the visuals. The video lasts approximately one minute and is filmed across both sides of about half a residential block. Evidence of oil in the water appears everywhere in the video.

Strictly speaking, oil does not evaporate into the sky, which would be required before it could then be rained back down to earth. However, as reported by The Huffington Post, the dispersant used by British Petroleum in its attempt to corral the oil spill seems to have aided oil-seawater emulsification, a key to the process of oil becoming part of rain.

Thus, not chocolate rain, but a far more disturbing oil rain in the Louisiana.

http://homeschoolers.gather.com/view...59174697244816

BP is dumping who knows how many millions of gallons of this dispersant into the GUlf. The dispersant is illegal in pretty much the rest of the world. Somebody other than BP needs to be in charge of this cleanup!

[2pac Shakur]

The UK's Marine Management Organization has banned Corexit so if there was a spill in the UK's North Sea, BP is banned from using Corexit. In fact Corexit products currently being used in the Gulf were removed from a list of approved treatments for oil spills in the U.K. more than a decade ago. The Environmental Advisory Service for Oil and Chemical Spills at IVL, Swedish Environmental Institute, has, upon request of the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency evaluated Corexit extensively and recommended it not be used in Swedish waters.

The Swedish study concludes: "The studies suggest that a mixture of oil and dispersant give rise to a more toxic effect on aquatic organisms than oil and dispersants do alone... The research on toxicity of oils mixed with dispersants has, however, shown high toxicity values even when the dispersant per se was not very toxic." A report for the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation Division of Spill Prevention and Response concluded that Corexit actually inhibits bacterial degradation of crude oil. It may look good on the surface but it will take longer for natural bacteria to eat up the crude oil.

Many of the region's important organisms, such as blue fin tuna and shrimp, use the wetlands at some point in their lifetime. Adult tuna breed during the late spring and early summer. Their eggs then float to shore and the larvae grow in the wetlands, protected from predators. Any decent chemist will tell you that surfactants, which are the primary ingredient in Corexit destroy cell membranes --- including larval membranes of larval tuna eggs, shrimp and any other marine life trying to develop.

BP with the EPA's approval continues to pour Corexit into the gulf with no science to estimate the harm the gusher's load of dispersed oil will cause the water column, because they lack sufficient and fundamental data on how dispersants affect the oil, what creatures live in deepwater ecosystems, how laboratory flask toxicity tests translate to actual conditions in the ocean, and how oil and Corexit affects organisms over time.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/...entry_id=65552


The EPA should just make it official and call themselves BPA. They certainly care more about BP than the Environment!