Pictured here: the spill as of May 1, already to that point containing a whopping 300,000 barrels (12 million gallons) of crude oil covering 6,500 to 24,000 square kilometers - in other words, an area ranging from the Ile-de-France district to the state of New Jersey.
Despicable.
Ridiculously self-serving.
Hideously unable to man up for their own failures.
And I'm not even talking about BP, Transocean or Haliburton yet.
The Minerals Management Service, a government agency I'm sure no one had ever heard of before the Deepwater Horizon rig suddenly combusted and sank in a time period from April 20 to 22, is at fault primarily for outright neglect in their oversight of the construction and operation of that very rig. In particular, the agency made several decisions almost in defiance of their raison d'etre - regulation of energy sources in the respective outer continental shelves of the country, corresponding to an area approximately 200 nautical miles (370 km) from the coastline.
First: MMS decided in 2009 not to require the usage of acoustically controlled BOPs, blowout preventers, to guard against exactly this kind of uncontrolled spill.
Second, after a 2004 report calling into question the reliability of those exact valves when electronically controlled, regulators at MMS utterly failed to recommend any other fail-safe mechanisms, meaning that exactly those unreliable electrically-controlled BOPs were put into use in the rig.
Third, still in 2009 and prior to the appointment of the current director of the agency, and in a move more expected from the fourth Futurama film than from a federal government agency, MMS gave BP outright the ability to flout federal environmental policy in granting them a categorical exclusion waiver, ironically concluding that the spill risk was "minimal or nonexistent". What's worse about this waiver is the fact that hundreds of them have been granted for offshore drilling rigs in the Gulf! If Deepwater Horizon failed when everyone but the NOAA was pretending it wouldn't, who's to say any other rig in the Gulf is structurally sound
Speaking of which, this was reported in the New York Times yesterday:
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.
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.
In addition to all of that gross oversight, as if it wasn't enough:
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.
So we've got a government agency supposedly overseeing the "safe" regulation of offshore energy.... routinely making decisions that do not, in any way, come off as ensuring the safety of anything but the cash reserves of oil companies. (In addition to all of this, several of their employees and chairmen have either held ties with the oil/natural gas industries or have committed multiple ethics violations on the job, including what the Washington Post described in 2008 as such:
Government officials in charge of collecting billions of dollars worth of royalties from oil and gas companies accepted gifts, steered contracts to favored clients and engaged in drug use and illicit sex with employees of the energy firms, federal investigators reported yesterday.
Investigators from the Interior Department's inspector general's office said more than a dozen employees, including the former director of the oil royalty program, took meals, ski trips, sports tickets and golf outings from industry representatives. The report alleges that the former director, Gregory W. Smith, also netted more than $30,000 from improper outside work.
Now this tirade against the MMS doesn't mean I'm saying Haliburton, BP and TransOcean are free of blame, because they most assuredly are not - not in a million years. Especially disgusting in the wake of everything - the explosion, the sinking, the rage of the public, and every revelation printed by the Associated Press - is the inability of anyone in each of those three corporations to actually take any blame for the explosion.
From the Associated Press: Oil Spill Testimony: The Blame Game
And from, of all places, the Daily Show: There Will Be Blame
BP is blaming Transocean for the failure of the rig itself... Transocean, in turn, are blaming Haliburton for the failure of the underwater components of the rig, specifically cement and casing... and Haliburton and BP, in turn, failed outright to attempt any further course of action prior to the rig's explosion.
Basically, everyone's blaming each other for something where they share basically equal amounts of blame (already substantial), the MMS has routinely seen levels of corruption reminiscent of the Harding administration throughout its existence, and the President's pissed that everyone's acting like a baby.
Kill the music industry? Try killing the oil industry.
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