BP is confident that the Gulf of Mexico will “fully recover” from its growing oil disaster, as vast oil plumes spread beneath the waves and toxic sludge chokes Louisiana’s fragile wetlands. Appearing on CBS’s Early Show Friday morning, BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles expressed his confidence that because the gulf is “a large body of water,” it will survive his company’s negligent catastrophe without any permanent damage:

It’s hard to actually know for certain because I’m not an expert, but I do know there have been larger spills and the gulf has survived. The experts tell me that there are many things going for us in this case. It’s a large body of water, it’s a warm body of water, it has natural oil seeps which the environment deals with, but we’re gonna put a lot of effort into monitoring this and do everything we can to minimize its impact. Time will tell. But I’m optimistic, very optimistic that the gulf will fully recover.

Watch it:

When asked if BP will survive this disaster, Suttles replied, “I believe we will,” noting that BP is the biggest producer of oil and gas in the United States.

Meanwhile, the approximately 60 million gallons of oil that have spewed into the gulf has already brought irreversible devastation to Louisiana’s precious coast, dragging BP’s reputation literally through the muck.

A pool of oil on a beach at the mouth of the Mississippi River on Monday (Getty)		A sign south of Belle Chasse, LA, on Thursday (AP)
Greenpeace protesters take over BP headquarters in London on Thursday (AP)		Marine scientist Paul Horsman at the mouth of the Mississippi River on Monday (Greenpeace)

If the higher flow estimates by independent scientists are correct, BP’s ongoing disaster (131 million gallons) has already surpassed the 1979 Ixtoc I blowout (126 million gallons) as the second largest spill in history, behind only the 1990 Persian Gulf war spill. Suttles expressed confidence the Deepwater Horizon gusher would be shut down by early August.

In an interview notable for his claim that government pressure on BP is “un-American,” anti-government extremist Rand Paul (R-KY) attacks the EPA for preparing to use its power to regulate greenhouse gasses if Congress does not pass a comprehensive energy plan–falsely claiming that EPA is thwarting the will of Congress:

I find it particularly galling that the EPA puts out a press release and says that if Congress doesn’t do anything about greenhouse emissions that they will. I think that’s a regulatory commission run amok and I think we need to have congressional oversight. I don’t think regulatory agencies should write regulations without approval of the people through their representatives. And I stick to that and that’s absolutely my point of view.

Watch:

Were Paul correct that Congress has not passed a law enabling EPA to regulate greenhouse gasses, then he would have a point.  But he must have forgotten about the Clean Air Act, which gives EPA broad authority to regulate “air pollutants.”  Indeed, in 2007, the Bush Administration made a similar argument to Paul’s, defending its decision not to regulate greenhouse emissions by motor vehicles by arguing that such emissions are beyond EPA’s power to regulate.  The Supreme Court smacked them down:

While the Congresses that drafted [the Clean Air Act] might not have appreciated the possibility that burning fossil fuels could lead to global warming, they did understand that without regulatory flexibility, changing circumstances and scientific developments would soon render the Clean Air Act obsolete. The broad language . . . reflects an intentional effort to confer the flexibility necessary to forestall such obsolescence.  Because greenhouse gases fit well within the Clean Air Act’s capacious definition of “air pollutant,” we hold that EPA has the statutory authority to regulate the emission of such gases from new motor vehicles.

Paul is correct that Congress has not passed comprehensive energy legislation this year, but so what?  Congress also did not pass comprehensive worker safety legislation this year, but no one suggests that OSHA lost its power to protect workers simply because Congress didn’t recently give them even broader authority.

So it turns out that the only thing that’s “run amok” is Rand Paul’s mouth.  Maybe next time he’ll actually bother to learn the facts before he pretends to be a legal expert on national TV.

Our guest blogger is Ellen-Marie Whelan, a Senior Health Policy Analyst and Associate Director of Health Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Whelan and Lesley Russell, a Visiting Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, are the co-authors of the new report “The Oil Disaster Is a Health Disaster, Too: How to Protect Public Health in the Aftermath of Major Disasters.”

All hands are on deck to stop the oil gushing out of the Gulf of Mexico and clean up the millions of gallons of oil that now pollute it. Eleven workers lost their lives in the explosion of rig. In addition to this horrible loss of life, there may an additional, emerging public health emergency from this disaster that must not be overlooked.

Many of the human health problems evolving from the BP oil disaster are insidious and unknown. The effects of the oil are the most pressing and most obvious. This is mostly a risk for those living near the coast, and workers cleaning up oil as it washes ashore. But the effects from exposure to the dispersants BP is using to “clean up” oil also pose a serious health threat. In fact, some believe the chemical toxicity of what’s in the dispersant could be more dangerous than the oil itself.

BP claims that the dispersants are safe but we don’t actually know all the chemical components in the dispersants or their long-term effects since their exact makeup is kept secret under competitive trade laws. Worse still, the New York Times reported that BP chose to use dispersants manufactured by a company with which it shares close ties, “even though other U.S. EPA-approved alternatives have been shown to be far less toxic and, in some cases, nearly twice as effective.” And with this disaster, for the first time ever, the EPA has authorized BP to use these dispersants underwater, at the source of the leak.

And who is charged with protecting the public’s health?

Well, the EPA is ramping up. In a surprising – and welcome – twist to the unfolding disaster in the Gulf Coast, the EPA just informed BP that they have 24 hours to choose a less toxic form of chemical dispersants to break up its oil spill. BP must then use the new dispersants both on the surface and underwater within 72 hours after the EPA approves of the new chemicals.

It is good sign that the EPA has mandated the use of less toxic chemicals – but this is also after 600,000 gallons have already been used in the Gulf and the leak has been going on for over 4 weeks. This is why we must take the opportunity to learn from how we have handled (or mishandled) public health emergencies in the past. In each of the following cases, there was no – and remains no – Federal entity in place at the beginning of the developing public health crisis to monitor potential health risks.

The most obvious comparison to the burgeoning BP crisis is the response that was mounted after the Exxon Valdez accident in 1989. Eleven million gallons of oil emptied from the tanker, exposing cleanup workers to oil mist that was much higher than government-approved limits. Thousand of workers came down with “the Valdez Crud,” a condition that caused respiratory problems and flu-like symptoms. Though most of these were dismissed as simple cases of colds and seasonal flu, many of the exposed workers developed much more severe complications. Unfortunately, there were not proper monitoring entities in place to track this development.

The public health response after the World Trade Center attacks was haphazard and did not adequately address health problems for the first responders and people working at Ground Zero. No one could predict the health effects from exposure to the dust and debris from the towers’ destruction. Yet there was no Federal infrastructure in place to monitor the unfolding symptoms of the first responders, clean-up crews and NYC residents experienced. What followed were numerous hearings, studies, and pieces of legislation to mount the proper federal response. And many still wonder if we’ve done enough.

We were also worried at the onset of Hurricane Katrina about potential health problems that might arise from the flood waters, yet the federal government left this public health monitoring up to the local governments that were more focused on rebuilding their communities. Despite the lessons from these very real public health emergencies, we are now facing what some are calling the worst-ever ecological disaster without an appropriate public health response in place.

President Obama plans to soon appoint an independent commission to investigate the BP oil disaster soon. In addition to determining the cause and responsibility for this calamity, the commission must also assess the health impacts posed by the oil gusher and efforts to stop it. And BP, Transocean, and Halliburton must be held morally and financially responsible for the pain and suffering of people exposed to the oil or dispersants.

Summer poised to set new record

While the anti-science crowd scours the globe desperately looking for any indication of their imaginary cooling, reality has intruded again.

Because they and the media — and even some scientists who don’t follow the subject closely — tend to take a two-dimensional view of the Arctic, they along with much of the public have been fooled into thinking the Arctic “recovered” in the past two years because sea ice extent appeared to recover.  Heck, some even claimed last month the Arctic ice was “recovering” to the 1979-2000 average.

Climate Progress readers have long understood that trends in multi-year ice “” ice volume “” are what matter most in terms of the long-term survivability of the Arctic ice in the summer (see New study supports finding that “the amount of [multi-year] sea ice in the northern hemisphere was the lowest on record in 2009″³).

CP readers have also understood that Arctic volume did not recover in the last two years.  Quite the reverse — we appear to have been breaking volume records over the past several months according to the Polar Science Center: Read more

President: “I intend to work with members of both parties to pass a [climate] bill this year.”

Today Obama signed a Presidential Memorandum directing the EPA and Department of Transportation to reduce U.S. oil use and greenhouse gas pollution by developing more efficient fuel economy standards.

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Asserts “I don’t think Washington should have anything to do with the mining” of coal: “My energy policy is let the marketplace decide through capitalism.”

Such are the joys of listening to a true libertarian unfiltered.

The Tea Party crowd may get GOP voters to go ga ga over the likes of Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul — son of Ron (but not named after Ayn).   But that’s only because the “mainstream” GOP is so extreme that they barely noticed how anarchical a pure libertarian is.

Fundamentally, libertarians think the government should be out of the civil rights and regulation business entirely.  Environmental harm should be dealt with through private lawsuits.  Safety regulations should either be nonexistent or left to local officials.  I hope we get more tough interviewers exposing his dangerous views.

Today, ABC News’ Good Morning America today, host George Stephanopoulos pushed Paul on “how far” he would “push” his anti-government views.  The answer is pretty damn far, as this video (via TP) reveals:

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On August 6, 2001, President George W. Bush famously received an intelligence briefing titled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” Thirty-six days later, al Qaeda terrorists tragically turned threat into reality.

Today, scientists tell us we have a 10-year window “” if even that “” before catastrophic climate change becomes inevitable and irreversible.

This is our intelligence briefing “” it tells us the threat is real and time is not on our side.

The national security threat posed by unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions is great (see “NYT: Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security” and “Quadrennial Defense Review Should Spark Interagency Climate Conversation“),  The threat is so clearcut that even the Bush Administration’s top intelligence experts were raising the alarm (see “The moving Fingar writes“).

And that’s why 33 generals and admirals announced support for the climate bill last month, asserting “Climate change is making the world a more dangerous place” and “threatening America’s security.”  Now, Sen. John Kerry has written a compelling op-ed explaining the grave national security threat posed by climate change and thus the urgent need to take action now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions:

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Solar Power Manufacturing Makes Good Business Sense for Governments, Study Finds

Canadian and provincial governments could spend $2.4 billion to build a large scale solar photovoltaic manufacturing plant and then give it away for free and still earn a profit in the long run, according to a financial analysis conducted by the Queen’s University Applied Sustainability Research Group in Kingston, Canada.

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This week is the 30^th anniversary of the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, by far the 48 state’s largest eruption and including the largest landslide in Earth’s recorded history.  It was “the deadliest and most economically destructive volcanic event in the history of the United States.”  Many things about Mount St. Helens relate to all the Earth sciences including climate change, with several useful metaphors as well.

Our guest blogger is long-time commenter Richard Brenne.

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