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how's the knee?
The was/is Barry doing acting like a Republican in this scam?
What's Barry had to say about all this?
how's the knee?
still draining but the hole is getting smaller...been doing hyperbaric treatments every day for the last 6 weeks and the hole is definitely healing...will need another month or so to close completely. Unfortunately the staph infection is still there so I will probably have to have the knee taken out again...been loving having both legs back under me...I decided I needed a vacation before that...taking the family to New Orleans and staying down in the quarter...gonna binge eat and drink and then four of us will drive down to Venice where I chartered a 36' offshore go fast fishing boat...try to fill the freezer with ahi tuna...kind of a last hurrah if I have to have the knee removed again.
sounds like fun. pics or it don't count.
Yeah, I'll do some pictures.
Interesting bit on NPR. Short lived fish tend to show fewer symptoms, but the longer lived species have had marked increases in things like tumors, lesions, and ac ulation of nasty things in internal organs.
Overall populations have mostly recovered, but the individuals in the species are decidedly less healthy.
Most of what you catch will probably be ok, but still... the nastiness would worry me, for the potential of icky things.
http://www.npr.org/2015/04/21/401288...e-to-ecosystem"This is a large complex ecosystem that's difficult to sample," he says. "We're talking about cryptic things we're trying to get a handle on. We know that there's impacts in certain areas. And some species, sure, they're capable of rebounding and they did. But to make a blanket statement is way too premature."
Murawski says migrating fish with a shorter lifespan, such as Spanish mackerel, appear to be doing well. But ones that live longer and don't move around as much, like tilefish and red snapper, show more problems like tumors and oil in their organs.
Good to hear you are up and about. Hope you have fun, and I wasn't too much of a killjoy...
I'm actually curious. I figure the best way to get accurate info of the fish stocks and changes from before and after is to talk to the guys that catch and clean fish for a living.
The Enduring Mystery of the Missing Oil Spilled in the Gulf of Mexico
Workers uncovered a tar mat weighing some 18,000 kilograms just offshore of a natural barrier island in Louisiana in the summer of 2013. Although the tar mat turned out to bear more sand than oil, it represented another small fraction of thehydrocarbons that went missing after BP's blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The sum of all the dispersed oil located thus far, from tar mats to oily marine snow, hardly accounts for at least four million barrels of oil spewed into the cold, dark bottom of the Gulf of Mexico from the deep-sea well named Macondo five years ago.
Like any good mystery, this one may never be solved. Of that four million barrels or more spewed after April 20, 2010, more than a million remain missing, according to the best estimates of the U.S. government.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...GYSUS_20150423
Well, I can personally confirm that there are still fish in the gulf near the oil spill. Guys I talked to said they can't tell any difference from before/after. They don't look that big in the picture but came home with two 120 quart ice chests loaded to the top with tuna, amberjack, and mahi mahi. For scale, that big yellow fin is 4 1/2 feet long.
yep, your anecdote proves all the scientists' resulits, struggling or destroyed Gulf Coast businesses, and diseased, missing Gulf flora and fauna are all hippy lies.
Boo, do you really not have any sense of humor at all?
try me, say something funny
Well, I can personally confirm that there are still fish in the gulf near the oil spill. Guys I talked to said they can't tell any difference from before/after. They don't look that big in the picture but came home with two 120 quart ice chests loaded to the top with tuna, amberjack, and mahi mahi. For scale, that big yellow fin is 4 1/2 feet long.
Nice.
They should all have two heads, if you listen to boots.
My friend snagged a good sized Mako out there.
Yeah, had a 12' hammerhead cruising around us at one of the rigs.Nice.
They should all have two heads, if you listen to boots.
My friend snagged a good sized Mako out there.
People go spear fishing on those rigs. Just asking for trouble, IMO.
“The largest environmental settlement in history”: BP agrees to pay $18.7 billion in damages for Gulf Oil Spill
http://www.salon.com/2015/07/02/the_...ulf_oil_spill/
TX to get $750M, which most probably will be stolen and siphoned off to TX BigOil
taxpayers screwed again by BigCorp
BP’s $18.7 Settlement Today for Gulf Spill Appears to Be Mostly Tax Deductible
Oil Giant Will Likely Write Off $13.2 Billion as an Ordinary Business Cost
they provide a fact sheet that gives troubling indications that the true after-tax value of today’s settlement with the federal government, five states and 400 local en ies may actually be far less than the $18.7 billion trumpeted in the headline of the DOJ statement:
- Only $5.5 billion is indicated explicitly as a penalty under the Clean Water Act. The federal government could have received as much as a $13.7 billion penalty under that Act based on a recent finding by a New Orleans judge that the spill was the result of “gross negligence.” Penalties are not tax deductible by law, as opposed to ordinary business compensation or res ution. But 80 percent of this sum is also indicated as heading to states for restoration efforts, which could allow BP to treat it as deductible, unless the settlement language forbids it.
- $13.2 billion of today’s settlement is not categorized as a penalty, indicating that it will almost certainly become a tax deduction, unless the settlement explicitly forbids it. If so, this non-penalty portion of the settlement will have an after-tax value of only $8.58 billion, and the whole deal would be worth only $14.08 billion to the public.
- The Justice Department fact sheet indicates that the $8.1 billion earmarked for natural resource damages “includes $1 billion already committed for early restoration,” thus indicating a billion dollars of today’s announcement is actually just repackaging an earlier concession by the company.
- Because the payments will be made over 18 years, the real value of latter payments will have significantly eroded. Depending on inflation, the value of a billion dollars paid 18 years from now will be far less than a billion dollar payment today.
A bipartisan bill in Congress, The Truth in Settlements Act, in the House and Senate would require federal agencies to be explicit whether large out-of-court settlements are tax deductible and would require companies to disclose in their SEC filings whether they use settlements as tax deductions.
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire...tax-deductible
and we know BP will have $Bs in profits
Pascal, a career Environmental Protection Agency attorney only seven weeks into her retirement, knew as much as anyone in the federal government about BP, the company that owned the well. She understood in an instant what it would take others months to grasp: In BP’s 15-year quest to compete with the world’s biggest oil companies, its managers had become deaf to risk and systematically gambled with safety at hundreds of facilities and with thousands of employees’ lives.
“God, they just don’t learn,” she remembers thinking.
The administration considered the environmental record of drilling companies in the Gulf to be excellent. It didn’t ask questions about BP, and it didn’t consider that the company’s long record of safety violations and environmental accidents might be important, according to Carol Browner, the White House environmental adviser.
They could have asked Jeanne Pascal.
Jeanne Pascal was a senior attorney for the Environmental Protection Agency for 26 years. (Abrahm Lustgarten/ProPublica)
For 12 years, Pascal had wrestled with whether BP’s pattern of misconduct should disqualify it from receiving billions of dollars in government contracts and other benefits. Federal law empowers government officials to “debar”—ban from government business—companies that commit fraud or break the law too many times. Pascal was a senior EPA debarment attorney for the Northwest, and her job was to act as a sort of behind-the-scenes babysitter for companies facing debarment. She worked with their top management, reviewed records and made sure they were good corporate citizens en led to government contracts.
At first, Pascal thought BP would be another routine assignment. Over the years she’d persuaded hundreds of troubled energy, mining and waste-disposal companies to quickly change their behavior. But BP was in its own league. On her watch she would see BP charged with four federal crimes—more than any other oil company in her experience—and demonstrate what she described as a pattern of disregard for regulations and for the EPA. By late 2009 she was warning the government and BP executives themselves that the company’s approach to safety and environmental issues made another disaster likely.
A close look by ProPublica and PBS FRONTLINE at BP’s explosive growth corroborated and expanded on Pascal’s concerns. The investigation found that as BP transformed itself into the world’s third largest private oil company it methodically emphasized a culture of austerity in pursuit of corporate efficiency, lean budgets and shareholder profits. It acquired large companies that it could not integrate smoothly. Current and former workers and executives said the company repeatedly cut corners, let alarm and safety systems languish and skipped essential maintenance that could have prevented a number of explosions and spills. Internal BP do ents support these claims.
http://www.propublica.org/article/bp...ent=&utm_name=
DEEPWATER HORIZON SETTLEMENT COMES WITH $5.35 BILLION TAX WINDFALL
Today’s announcement by the U.S. Department of Justice of a proposed $20.8 billion out-of-court settlement with BP to resolve charges related to the Gulf Oil spill allows the corporation to write off $15.3 billion of the total payment as an ordinary cost of doing business tax deduction.
The majority of the settlement is comprised of tax deductible natural resource damages payments, restoration, and reimbursement to government, with just $5.5 billion explicitly labeled a non-tax-deductible Clean Water Act penalty.
This proposed settlement would allow BP to claim an estimated $5.35 billion as a tax windfall, significantly decreasing the public value of the agreement, and nearly offsetting the cost of the non-deductible penalty.
“BP was found to be grossly negligent in the Deepwater Horizon case, and yet the vast majority of what they are paying to make up for their gross negligence is legally considered just business as usual under the tax code unless the DOJ explicitly prohibits a write-off,” said Mic e Surka, program associate with US Public Interest Research Group. “This not only sends the wrong message, but it also hurts taxpayers by forcing us to shoulder the burden of BP’s tax windfall in the form of higher taxes, cuts to public programs, and more national debt.”
Under U.S. tax code, res ution, reimbursement, and compensatory payments made to damaged parties in a settlement can be claimed as ordinary cost of doing business tax deductions unless otherwise stated in the agreement. Penalties, by contrast, are almost always considered tax deductible. In this proposed consent decree, the 80% of the civil penalty portion of the payment is, as per the RESTORE Act, to be spent on “environmental restoration, economic recovery projects, and tourism and seafood promotion in the five Gulf states”. If the Department of Justice had not been explicit about deny deductions for this portion, BP could have interpreted that portion of the penalty as tax deductible res ution and compensation.
http://uspirg.org/news/usp/deepwater...n-tax-windfall
Reproduction of dolphins hurt by BP oil spill
Dolphins living in a Louisiana bay polluted by BP's massive 2010 offshore oil spill have had a very difficult time giving birth long after their bay was covered in slicks, a new study shows.
The government study is the latest by a team of scientists that has tracked the health of a population of common bottlenose dolphins in Barataria Bay, an estuary south of New Orleans covered in heavy slicks after BP's April 2010 oil spill off the coast of Louisiana.
The researchers tracked 10 pregnant dolphins for nearly four years and found that only two of the dolphins gave birth to calves.
The study was published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Britain.
BP PLC's blown-out well killed 11 workers aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and spewed more than 130 million gallons (492 million liters) of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
After the spill, researchers found dolphins in Barataria suffering from lung diseases and abnormalities they associated with exposure to oil contamination. Since then, the dolphins have become a focus of work to assess the effects from the oil spill.
In August 2011, about a year after oil stopped leaking from BP's blown-out well, researchers tagged 32 dolphins and followed them to see what happened.
The new study found they've suffered from a high mortality rate and chronic diseases that have hurt the animals' ability to reproduce. The study said the effects of the spill "have been long-lasting."
http://phys.org/news/2015-11-reprodu...ns-bp-oil.html
Thanks, BigOil!
Darrin is ING WORNG, AGAIN
Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Continues To Disrupt Marine Life
research, published June 28 in the journal Scientific Reports, claims
the oil residue has caused fundamental changes in those microbes,
which play an important role in carbon dioxide absorption by the oceans and are essential building blocks in the food chain for marine life.
“At the sites closest to the spill, biodiversity was flattened,”
“There were fewer types of microbes. This is a cold, dark environment and anything you put down there will be longer lasting than oil on a beach in Florida.
It’s premature to imagine that all the effects of the spill are over and remediated.”
BP, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon, is spinning. “Nothing to see here, move along. Nothing to see here, move along.”
“We rely heavily on the ocean and we could be looking at potential effects to the food supply down the road.
Deep sea microbes regulate carbon in the atmosphere and recycle nutrients.
I’m concerned there will be larger consequences from this sort of event.”
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/28...eanTechnica%29
BP Deepwater Horizon costs balloon to $65 billion
BP said on Tuesday it would take a new charge over the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill after again raising estimates for outstanding claims, lifting total costs to around $65 billion.
The post-tax, non-operating $1.7-billion charge BP will take in its fourth quarter results came after claims resolved in recent months were about seven times higher than anticipated, the London-based company said.
The claims were part of the Court Supervised Settlement Program that was set up in the wake of the disaster and included nearly 400,000 cases, BP said. A spokeswoman for the group said hundreds of outstanding claims have yet to be closed, raising the prospect of further charges.
BP shares were down 2 percent by 1117 GMT.
BP paid around $63.4 billion by the end of September to cover clean-up costs and legal fees linked to the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history where 11 rig workers were killed.
Charges over the spill have steadily grown since the company reached a landmark $19-billion settlement of federal and state claims in July 2015.
REMAINING CLAIMS
there was a risk that the final bill could rise again, Brendan Warn, analyst at BMO Capital Markets said.
“We note that
the last few remaining claims are likely to be the most complex and sizeable,
with this quarter’s provision being evidence of that,” Warn said.
“We acknowledge the possibility that there might be further provisions in the next few quarters,
as the remaining claims might prove to exceed BP’s expectations.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bp-deepwaterhorizon/bp-deepwater-horizon-costs-balloon-to-65-billion-idUSKBN1F50NL
BP is probably getting away on the cheap
Chemical that EPA allows to help clean up oil spills sickens people and fish, lawsuit claims
a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency, claiming that the agency has allowed 25 years to go by without updating the National Contingency Plan to respond to oil spills.
On Monday, the University of California at Berkeley Environmental Law Center issued the agency a 60-day intent to sue notice on behalf of several groups and individuals “for failure to perform a non-discretionary duty” under the Clean Water Act.
the EPA has continued to allow emergency responders to use a chemical mixture called Corexit to disperse oil into droplets that allow microbes to further break it down,
About 20 percent of nearly 5,000 Coast Guard personnel who responded to the BP spill and were exposed to the toxin reported persistent coughing. Others experienced wheezing and trouble breathing, according to a 2018 study commissioned by the National Ins utes of Health.
“The combination of both oil and oil dispersants presented associations that were much greater in magnitude than oil alone for coughing, shortness of breath and wheezing,” the report said.
A Louisiana State University study two years prior reported a similar finding:
that symptoms from exposure resulted in “burning in nose, throat or lungs, sore throat, dizziness and wheezing."
during the Deepwater Horizon cleanup efforts, when
“dispersants and oil combined to form droplets of chemical enhanced oil that is more deadly than oil alone to people,”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/03/26/chemical-that-epa-sanctions-help-clean-up-oil-spills-sickens-people-fish-lawsuit-claims/?utm_term=.bc1ff7b10fd4
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