Five months and one day before its Deepwater Horizon rig exploded while exploring the Macondo Prospect off the coast of Louisiana, BP’s top Gulf of Mexico official testified its practices were “both safe and protective of the environment.” In June, the U.S. Minerals Management Service proposed stricter safety and environmental rules, opposed by BP and the rest of the offshore drilling industry as unnecessary. In a Senate hearing on offshore drilling “environmental stewardship policies” on November 19, 2009, BP America’s vice president of Gulf of Mexico exploration, David Rainey, opposed the proposed MMS rules and defended the existing regulatory system. Rainey claimed that drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) has been shown to be “both safe and protective of the environment”:

I think we should remember that scientific knowledge is always moving forward. And actually using the best available and the most up-to-date scientific information is part of the current regulatory system. And it supports the OCS leasing, exploration, and development program. And I think we need to remember that OCS has been going on for the last 50 years, and it has been going on in a way that is both safe and protective of the environment.

Watch it:

Rainey’s testimony followed a September 14, 2009, letter from his predecessor Richard Morrison, which said “we are not supportive of the extensive and prescriptive regulations” in the proposed rule, because “[w]e believe industry’s current safety and environmental statistics demonstrate that the voluntary programs” since the American Petroleum Institute codified those programs in 2004 “have been and continue to be very successful.”

It appears that the MMS was correct when they argued in their proposed rule that existing safety rules were not sufficient. “The MMS believes that if OCS oil and gas operations are better planned and organized, then the likelihood of injury to workers and the risk of environmental pollution will be further reduced,” they wrote in 2009.

After waiting a week to respond to the growing oil apocalypse off the coast of Louisiana, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) exploited the disaster to call for new offshore drilling subsidies. The Deepwater Horizon rig deployed by BP to explore the Macondo Prospect exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers and beginning a flood of oil from a mile below the ocean surface that now threatens the entire Gulf Coast. Vitter failed to officially respond for an entire week, until he expressed condolences for the victims but then turned directly to a demand for American taxpayers to push oil subsidies to Louisiana:

As we move forward with the recovery process, I hope that the rest of the country will realize that our state needs to be fairly compensated for this burden through increased revenue sharing from offshore production.

Because of the 1990 Oil Pollution Act passed following the Exxon Valdez spill, BP will have to reimburse taxpayers for the cost of the government’s contribution to the response effort. Vitter is simply trying to exploit this tragedy to tie his state even more tightly to the fortunes of the deadly and destructive oil industry. Vitter is a long-time promoter of expanding offshore drilling, which is a central plank of his so-called “No-Cost Stimulus Act.”

Big oil rakes in the cash

I was out driving/just a taking it slow
Looked at my tank/ it was reading low
Pulled in a Exxon station/out on Highway One
Held up without a gun
Held up without a gun

“” Bruce Springsteen

Springsteen’s song could not be more true today. Big Oil is once again riding high oil prices to large profits (see below) while American consumers get stuck with a $2.7 billion gasoline bill in the first quarter of 2010 due to higher oil prices. But the problems with oil go beyond these companies’ profits. Rising oil prices also add more filthy lucre to the coffers of hostile regimes, including Iran. CAP’s Daniel J. Weiss and Susan Lyon have the story in this repost.

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Carbon, Nitrogen Link May Provide New Ways to Mitigate Pollution Problems

A new study exploring the growing worldwide problem of nitrogen pollution from soils to the sea shows that global ratios of nitrogen and carbon in the environment are inexorably linked, a finding that may lead to new strategies to help mitigate regional problems ranging from contaminated waterways to human health.

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I don’t think it’s a big coincidence that we’re seeing all of these fossil fuel accidents after 8 years of lax oversight by Bush-Cheney (see The deadly toll of the ‘safe’ and ‘clean’ coal and oil industries).  The fox was guarding the henhouse.  And in this case, the henhouse itself was not actually run by the hens.

An investment group with ties to labor pension funds called for the resignation of Massey Energy directors who are “ultimately responsible for Massey’s alarming safety compliance record.”  Brad Johnson has the story in this Wonk Room repost.

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The catastrophic gusher of oil unleashed by the explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig last week is on track to quickly exceed the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, an independent expert warns. An explosive burst of oil destroyed the exploratory rig 41 miles off the Louisiana coast on the eve of Earth Day, killing 11 workers. After the shattered hulk of the rig sank to the ocean floor a mile down, the pipeline continues to spew oil that has now reached shore, with an end weeks or months away. John Amos, the president and founder of the nonprofit firm SkyTruth, “which specializes in gathering and analyzing satellite and aerial data to promote environmental conservation,” estimated from satellite photos that the calamity is increasing at a rate of 850,000 gallons (20,000 barrels) a day:

That’s right: more than 6 million gallons spilled into the Gulf of Mexico so far. This, and other radar images that SkyTruth is getting, confirm what we’ve seen on the NASA/MODIS images so far, and support our conservative calculations showing that in the first week of this spill at least 6 million gallons have entered the Gulf. That’s a spill rate of at least 850,000 gallons (20,000 barrels) per day, 20 times larger than the official Goast Guard estimate of 42,000 gallons per day.

By today, about 7 million gallons will have been spilled, taking the Deepwater Horizon disaster more than halfway to the 1989 wreck of the Exxon Valdez, which dumped 11 million gallons into Alaska’s Prince William Sound — one of the nation’s worst environmental disasters. This catastrophe — which occured as Halliburton was cementing the well — will exceed the scale of the Exxon Valdez within a week.

The sea of oil spewing from the mangled pipeline is already larger than 31 nations. After the Montara oil platform blew up in Australia’s Timor Sea last August, it took 10 weeks to stop the flow of oil. If recent history is any guide, it may be months before the sea of oil stops growing.

On April 22, the U.S. Coast Guard estimated the flow rate to be 336,000 gallons of crude a day, but BP officials claimed on Sunday that the rate was only 42,000 gallons a day. By Thursday, officials admitted that the disaster is increasing at least 210,000 gallons a day, much closer to the Coast Guard’s original estimate. Amos called that estimate a “bare-bones limit.”