Remember BP?

jtotheizzoe:

The Secret of the Ooze: Two Years After the Spill

Al Jazeera has a frightening, damning, and infuriating report on the ongoing damage to the Gulf of Mexico ecosystems since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It’s been nearly two years since the Macondo well was ruptured, spilling almost 5 million barrels of oil and requiring almost 2 million barrels of dispersants to clean it up.

Fishermen are reporting shrimp catches full of eyeless shrimp, as well as fish and shellfish with oozing sores and black gills. The damage doesn’t seem limited to oil, either. Manganese-heavy drilling mud and dispersant lefotvers are showing up at even higher rates than petroleum.

Head over to Al Jazeera to read the full article. The Gulf has not recovered, and it will likely take most of a lifetime to do so. It’s important that scientists continue to get financial support to monitor the area and that the government keep pressure on BP to do their part. Not just this year, but until the mistake is fixed.

This is one of the most diverse and fruitful ecosystems in America, and we must repair it.

Support LA yoga teacher Brock Cahill’s efforts to rescue sea turtles in the Gulf!

The tragedy in the Gulf is a whole other kind of gusher and LA yoga teacher Brock Cahill is one of the few willing not just to come close but to actually lead a mission and make an impact.  Brock has a particular fascination with sea turtles who are suffering a hellish fate, as we speak. BP is towing collection booms behind fishing trawlers to wrangle oil on the surface, and once collected, burn the oil to get rid of it. In the process, sea turtles, pelicans, fish, and anything close to or on the surface is being burned alive. Even if the burning stops, the turtles are embalmed in oil, and dying by the minute.

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Yet another “inconvenient truth.”

On Fox & Friends, guest host Dave Briggs falsely claimed that President Obama “has not been down to the Gulf…[h]e has not had that moment to get down there in the Gulf and tell those people he cares, that he’s doing something.” In fact, Obama visited the Gulf Coast on May 2.

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Wait, are you telling me that there is a public sector, and it has a leadership role in solving industry-sponsored problems?

Obama 1-Grover Norquist 0.

Zachary Roth | May 14, 2010, 5:36PM

President Obama’s new plan to fix the Gulf oil spill is so crazy it just might work…

As BP’s high-priced industry experts flail, the president has turned to a rag-tag band of big-think scientific renegades, and sent them on a mission to somehow MacGyver a way to stop up the leak — before it’s too late.

OK, maybe that’s going a bit far. In fact, the news that Obama and his energy secretary, Steven Chu, have sent a team of leading physicists and engineers to the Gulf to work with BP offers further evidence of the administration’s essentially technocratic approach to governance, and its faith in knowledge-based expertise. That might seem like common sense, but it represents a shift from the Bushies’ faith in the problem-solving power of industry, and its willingness to let science take a backseat to the concerns of its religious base.

Still, asking one of the key inventors of the hydrogen bomb, along with an engineer who helped develop techniques for mining on Mars, counts as out-of-the-box thinking. Here’s a quick rundown on the president’s unlikely team…

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