At least one worker who was on the oil rig at the time of the explosion on April 20, and who handled company records for BP, said the rig had been drilling deeper than 22,000 feet, even though the company’s federal permit allowed it to go only 18,000 to 20,000 feet deep, the lawyers said.

That’s from a front-page story in the NY Times Tuesday with the mild headline, “On Defensive, BP Readies Dome to Contain Spill.”

The paper of record chose to publish this serious allegation of permit violation, but oddly didn’t lead with them.  And while reporting “BP strongly denied the claim that it was drilling deeper than was allowed,” the paper then drops this bombshell:

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Plus Dr. Jeff Masters on the link to warming (and USGS myopia)

Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen called it an “unprecedented rain event,” but that statement did not capture the magnitude. More than 13 inches of rain fell in Nashville over two days, nearly doubling the previous record of 6.68 inches that fell after Hurricane Frederic in 1979.

“That is an astonishing amount of rain in a 24- or 36-hour period,” Bredesen said Sunday.

Don’t worry, anti-science disinformers who try to shout down any talk of a link between climate change and extreme weather, the AP/WashPost story never mentions global warming.  Indeed, I couldn’t a single story on the superstorm that did.

Not that there were that many stories on the deluge at all given 1) the other mega-stories of the weekend and 2) the fact this didn’t occur on one of the coasts where Big Media lives.

But the fact that this superstorm blew away rainfall records set from the remnants of a hurricane three decades ago bring to mind Weather Channel expert Stu Ostro’s discussion of Georgia’s record-smashing global-warming-type deluge.  Of course, Ostro pointed out there was no way to know if global warming had “caused” the record floods, but

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Offshore Wind update

An environmental permit granted last week for the Cape Wind power project is not the last hurdle facing the most advanced offshore wind farm proposed for the United States. However, wind power technology developers and analysts express confidence that the nine-year-old offshore wind project will get built, and that more like it will dot U.S. coastal waters by 2020.

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Scientists say the Gulf oil spill could get into the what’s called the Loop Current within a day, eventually carrying oil south along the Florida coast and into the Florida Keys.

Too much bad news to keep up with.  This from the AP 3 hours ago:

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Think Progress reports on the latest right-wing conspiracy to shift blame from Big Oil.

As the scale of the disaster caused by the explosion at an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana became more apparent last week, right-wing radio talker Rush Limbaugh unleashed a conspiracy theory suggesting that someone intentionally blew up the rig in order to “head off more oil drilling“:

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Guest blogger Shirley Siluk Gregory, who lives on Florida’s Gulf coast, gives us an account of all of the economic and ecological factors that are coming together to worsen the effects of this spill on the region. Shirley holds a degree in geology, is editor of the cleantech site Greenbang.com, and writes about climate and energy issues regularly.

The phrase “perfect storm” is overused, but it seems apt for the situation now facing the Gulf Coast.

Look at all the elements that are coming together in the wake of the April 20 Deepwater Horizon drilling rig disaster:

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Rubio flip-flops on his ‘Drill Here, Drill Now’ talk: “I think it makes us rethink” drilling technologies

The Sunday morning news shows were dedicated, in large part, to the unfolding oil spill disaster in the Gulf Coast, as efforts continue to contain the 210,000 gallons of oil a day that are still leaking. The leak has reignited debate over offshore oil drilling, with the Obama administration saying that “further commitments for offshore drilling must await an investigation of the causes of the rig explosion and leak.” Even conservatives are back-pedaling, as seen this pair or reposts (with videos) from Think Progress.

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The problem with the April 20 spill is that it isn’t really a spill: It’s a gush, like an underwater oil volcano. A hot column of oil and gas is spurting into freezing, black waters nearly a mile down, where the pressure nears a ton per inch, impossible for divers to endure. Experts call it a continuous, round-the-clock calamity, unlike a leaking tanker, which might empty in hours or days.

One thing I’m noticing about the media coverage is that it’s like the blind people describing the elephant.  Different media outlets are getting different pieces of the story right — and some pieces wrong.  But unless you survey the entire coverage, you will definitely get a misimpression of what’s going on.

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The Wonk Room is blogging and tweeting live from the Gulf Coast.

With a naiveté reminiscent of the Bush administration, BP officials are claiming that the apocalyptic failure of its deepwater exploratory rig was unforeseeable, unprecedented and inconceivable. On Sunday, BP press flack Steve Rinehart — hired from the Anchorage Daily News after a mega-spill from a damaged Prudhoe Bay BP pipeline in March 2006 — even evoked the “I don’t think anybody” excuse that was the hallmark of the Bush administration’s attempts to deflect blame for their catastrophes:

“I don’t think anybody foresaw the circumstance that we’re faced with now.” — BP spokesman Steve Rinehart [AP 5/2/10]

“I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.” — Condoleezza Rice [CNN, 5/16/02]

“The sort of occurrence that we’ve seen on the Deepwater Horizon is clearly unprecedented.” — BP spokesman David Nicholas [AP 4/30/10]

“I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did anticipate a serious storm. But these levees got breached. And as a result, much of New Orleans is flooded. And now we are having to deal with it and will.” — President George W. Bush [GMA, 9/1/05]

BP did not build containment devices before disaster because it “seemed inconceivable” the blowout preventer would fail. — BP spokesman Steve Rinehart [AP 5/2/10]

“I don’t think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we’ve encountered. I guess the other area that I look at, in terms of an area where I think we were faced with difficulties we didn’t anticipate was the devastation that 30 years of Saddam’s rule had wrought, if you will, on the psychology of the Iraqi people.” — Vice President Dick Cheney, 6/19/06

Just as there were warnings about terrorists using planes as bombs, the threat of hurricanes to New Orleans, and post-invasion violence in Iraq, the BP failure was entirely conceivable and foreseeable:

Failures of blowout preventers and actual blowouts are common. Between 1992 and 1998 there were 319 failures of blowout preventers found in US offshore drilling, an average of 45 a year. [MMS, 1999] Between 1992 and 2006 there were at least 39 blowouts off the US coastline, 38 of them in the Gulf of Mexico. [MMS, 7/07] From 2007 to 2009 there were 19 blowouts, all in the Gulf of Mexico. [MMS]

The largest accidental oil spill in history was a Gulf of Mexico exploratory rig blowout. On June 3, 1979, the exploratory well IXTOC I blew out and ignited, burning down the platform. Divers later activated the blowout preventer to no avail.The well continued to spill oil at a rate of 10,000 to 30,000 barrels per day until it was finally capped on March 23, 1980. [NOAA]

A major offshore blowout followed by a two-month spill occurred in 2009. In “one of Australia’s worst oil disasters,” a PTTEP oil rig blew out in the Montara oil field on August 21, 2009. Efforts to control the leaking rig set it on fire on November 1st, two days before the leak was finally plugged. Official estimates of the leak rate were five times higher than those of the oil company. [Wikipedia]

A ‘spill of national significance’ exercise in 2002 concerned a major rig blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. Adm. Thad Allen led a “spill of national significance” exercise in 2002 that dealt with the scenario of an oil rig exploding off the coast of Louisiana, with an “uncontrollable discharge” of oil that lasted for a month. These training exercises take place every three years as mandated by the 1990 Oil Pollution Act, the most recent of which occurred in March, 2010.

On Sunday in Louisiana, President Barack Obama said that “the leak is unique and unprecedented.” (HT State of the Division)

Guest bloggers Tina Ramos and Bracken Hendricks of American Progress explain the important role of clean energy jobs in economic revitalization — and the importance of finance in creating those jobs.

Tomorrow, over four thousand union members, community activists, business leaders, and environmentalists will converge on Washington DC for the nation’s leading clean energy jobs summit.  The 2010 Good Jobs, Green Jobs National Conference will highlight the urgency of building a clean energy economy that lays a foundation of good jobs for working families and invests in strong communities.

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Op-ed with Podesta on the voluntary ‘trust us’, self-regulation pushed by BP and Big Oil — and the energy choice we now face

The unfolding ecological disaster on the Gulf Coast reveals the stark contrast in the energy choices that the Senate “” and the nation “” are due to make in coming months.

Do we embrace the Senate energy and climate bill, to be debated this summer, which puts a penalty on pollution and propels the transition to the clean, safe energy of the 21st century?

Or do we let the forces of obstruction “” led by Big Oil and special-interest polluters “” win, ensuring America’s continued addiction to the dirty, unsafe energy of the 19th century?

CAP’s CEO and I have an op-ed in today’s Politico, “The need to beat our oil addiction.”  Here’s the rest:

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“You get the sense that this country is straining against the leash, eager for a new wave of energy development.  There will be excess, stupidity and greed along the way. But  it would be simply amazing if, through some set of narrow political gamesmanship, Washington continued to stand in the way of all this.

It’s hard to find many conservative pundits willing to take on the right-wing orthodoxy that opposes any action to advance clean energy or reduce greenhouse gas emissions (see “Honey, I shrunk the GOP, Part 1: Conservatives vow to purge all members who support clean energy or science-based policy“).

David Brooks is one of the few exceptions, saying recently,  “I totally accept the scientific authorities who say that global warming is real and that it is manmade.”

So while I don’t agree with everything he wrote in his NYT piece, “American Power Act,” his overall analysis is certainly worth excerpting at length:

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