Evil BP Chief to Star in Hollywood Blockbuster
June 9th, 2010
by Alan Hickman

BP CEO, Tony Hayward
LOUISIANA - USA - Studio executives for Warner Bros have flown down to the oil disaster area to recruit the English CEO of BP after seeing him on television news stories.


"We need another English baddie in our next movie and when I saw that English dude who is in charge of BP, I said let's get this evil S.O.B in and get him to fight against Bruce Willis or who's that other guy? Yeah, I'm thinking maybe that plank of wood Kevin Costner," Dan Malnick, senior casting executive for Warners told Hollywood Weekly magazine on Tuesday.

English actors are notoriously cast as the 'bad guys' in all Hollywood films, and the CEO of BP is no exception to the rule.

"He's pretty evil I heard, so he's perfect for the role. He's got this plummy English accent and he walks around with his brass balls banging between his legs. We're currently working on Die Hard 56 so he would be perfect for that. American film audiences love the English accent and perceive it as characteristic of someone who is a sophisticated evil genius, much like Hannibal Lector or Darth Vader." Mr Malnick added.

BP's chief executive, Tony Hayward was not available for comment today, but was said to be interested in the new job offer because his current job seems to be on slightly dodgy ground at the moment.

Can the U.S. Punish BP’s Shareholders?


Lefteris Pitarakis/Associated Press
A protester outside the BP headquarters in London in late May.
The United States Justice Department said on Wednesday that it was considering legal action to block British Petroleum from paying dividends to make sure the company covers all costs related to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has said BP would be asked to pay energy companies for losses if they had to lay off workers because of the moratorium on deepwater drilling.

BP, whose shares dropped 7 percent in London on Thursday, said it would decide next month whether keep a quarterly dividend of 14 cents a share for the second quarter, a payout of about $2.6 billion. Needless to say, investors in Britain were furious because BP dividends accounted for some 12 percent of all dividends handed out by British companies last year.

Should the U.S. stop BP from paying dividends to its shareholders? What would be the consequences of this action?

By Christopher Caldwell

Published: June 11 2010 22:45 | Last updated: June 11 2010 22:45

The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is damaging Barack Obama’s standing with voters. According to The Washington Post, 69 per cent feel the government is mishandling the crisis – higher than the level of discontent (62 per cent) provoked by the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. That no one can reasonably expect President Obama to plug a leak a mile under water is exactly his problem. It makes the philosophical foundation of his presidency – restoring the public’s faith in activist government – look hubristic and misinformed. The president and his defenders see it differently: forceful government is what Mr Obama was sent to Washington to provide. Public disapproval is evidence that he has acted with insufficient force. This is a dangerous misreading. It is a recipe for governing against the public.

The first sign that the administration had gone off-course came over a month ago, when it promised to “keep our boot on the throat of BP”. What made the phrase alarming was that it was voiced by two different aides. Ken Salazar, secretary of the interior, said it shortly after the spill. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs then went out of his way to repeat it during a press briefing. The expression of a priori contempt for BP was therefore not a slip or a gaffe – it was a policy. The administration saw political advantage in being perceived as rough, tough and even arbitrary. This week the president announced he would “ride herd” on BP and said he was trying to find out “whose ass to kick”. Perhaps not without political grounds: Americans rate BP even lower than the Obama administration, and a majority would like to see its executives prosecuted.

EDITOR’S CHOICE
More from this columnist - Dec-03

It is easy to see how this became the president’s default strategy. During the last election cycle, Democrats convinced themselves that the reason they had spent so much time in the political wilderness was not that the public distrusted them or their policies but because they had been, as a party, too nice. The key word in their vocabulary became “fight”. “What I can promise you is this,” Mr Obama said to unionised auto workers two months into his administration. “I will fight for you.” Stumping for Democratic candidates in off-year elections last fall and winter, Mr Obama gave the same speech at almost every stop. Whether he was backing Creigh Deeds in the Virginia governor’s race, John Corzine in the New Jersey governor’s race or Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts Senate race, he and his aides described them as people who would go to Washington to fight – “fight for people like you”, “fight for everything we believe in”, “fight for families when it matters most”. Fight, fight, fight!

This kind of rhetoric has always fired up the Democratic base. But all the evidence is that, now George W.?Bush is gone, it alienates majorities: Democrats have lost all of the close major elections in which Mr Obama has intervened. Yet the president’s advisers and supporters behave as if, when he fails, it is always for being insufficiently Machiavellian. Being mean is the next best thing to being effective. Eric Holder, Mr Obama’s attorney-general, punctilious when it comes to protecting the rights of terror suspects, has giddily raised the prospect of criminal charges against BP’s executives. Mr Obama’s “national incident commander” sent a bullying letter to BP this week. Congressman Anthony Weiner told an interviewer: “Whenever you hear someone with a British accent talking about this on behalf of British Petroleum they are not telling you the truth.” Fight, fight, fight!

Others urge the administration to resort to constitutional chicanery. The 1990 Oil Pollution Act, passed a year after the Exxon-Valdez spill in Alaska, limits BP’s liability in federal lawsuits to $75m. But it does not cover state lawsuits, and it leaves BP liable for all clean-up costs, which will run into billions. (Since the spill, BP has lost close to £50,000m, or 40 per cent of its value.) Democratic leaders in both Houses are working on a bill to raise the liability cap from $75m to $10bn, made retroactive to April 15, to cover the BP spill. Some Republicans, particularly those up for election this year, are falling in line. The measure would be unconstitutional in two ways: as a retroactive law and as a bill of attainder.

Mr Obama has not put his personal prestige behind this. But Thomas Perrelli, associate attorney-general, made the assertion before a Senate committee that “our view is that there is a strong chance to defeat any [challenge] if Congress were to lift the caps.” On Wednesday, Mr Salazar told a Senate committee that BP would be responsible for paying the salaries of the estimated 46,000 workers laid off because of a government moratorium on deep-sea oil-drilling, announced last week. If BP is legally liable for the Gulf spill, it will be punished. But neither its misfortune – nor even its incompetence, if that be proved – should turn it into a private source of funding for public policy.

Governments can address such disasters without recourse to all-out witch-hunts or constitutional abuses. In 1988, of course, the Piper Alpha platform, operated by Occidental Petroleum, a US company, exploded in British waters due to poor safety precautions, killing 167 people. It was the most deadly oil disaster ever. History leaves us no record of Margaret Thatcher urging her public to distrust American accents or to ignore the British constitution in the interest of vengeance against foreign corporations. This incident is virtually unknown to Americans. There has not been a single recounting of it in any US newspaper since the Gulf explosion.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard

British Petroleum Now Bayou Petroleum

With BP demonstrating continued incompetence, President Obama has nationalized the company renaming it Bayou Petroleum.

Seemingly inspired by birth control methods, British Petroleum embarked upon a series of plans to stop the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. Judging from their failed attempts, the BP community must have sufficient progeny to populate Mars.

After the erection of a giant copper and concrete (yikes) condom like containment dome called Top Hat, British Petroleum sailed it to the well site, only to have it bounced away by the gusher.

Executives at BP moved to plan B: Top Kill, a reverse vasectomy approach in which mud and cement were shot into the hole to plug it. Right. Like oil is going to take a snooze and wait for the mud and cement to harden. The mixture started leaking from below the gusher hole and project Top Kill was killed.

Junk Shot was next: shooting golf balls, tires and nylon stockings into the hole. Junk Shot didn't work. Little Top Hat followed. That little sucker was also spit away by the oil gusher.

Little Top Hat was followed by castration, or Cut And Cap: slice off the top of the bent blow out preventer at the riser pipe (ouch) and slide another kind of cap on top with a catheter attached to retrieve the oil shooting up to the surface. Oil is still gushing.

BP has not tried abstinence or the rhythm method, so far.

A blow out preventer is a safety valve. It should have stopped the oil, the explosion, the death of eleven workers and the desecration of the Gulf Coast region. A plumber won't install a hot water heater without a safety valve. Pressure cookers have safety valves. A prenuptial is a safety valve.

BP crossed their fingers.

A rig worker on CNN's Anderson Cooper, June 9, said the morning of the explosion, he witnessed a BP executive overrule a Transocean Deepwater Horizon executive, and ordered the mud in the well replaced with seawater.

The seawater did not hold back the oil. The blowout preventer wasn't working properly.

Hello Bayou Petroleum.

THE LIST

The oil giant is being widely criticized for its handling of the massive Gulf spill, both before and after the blowout. Here's why

POSTED ON JUNE 11, 2010, AT 1:55 PM

An oil-splattered water bottle on Pensacola Beach. Photo: Getty SEE ALL 34 PHOTOS
Best Opinion: AP, WSJ, New York Times...

It is now clear that the disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill was eminently preventable. And even since the April 20 rig fire, experts have cited many examples of how poor choices by BP have worsened an already dire situation. Here are eight particularly unfortunate errors that experts say contributed to the biggest oil spill in U.S. history:

1. BP never had a realistic plan to deal with a spill
The oil giant's official plan for dealing with a potential Deepwater Horizon spill, and its more general plan for any spill in the Gulf, both wildly overestimated its preparedness and seriously lowballed the potential damage, according to an AP analysis. The plan — approved by the Interior Department in 2009 — lists a dead scientist among its wildlife experts and a defunct Japanese home-shopping website among its equipment suppliers. Portions of it are written in pencil.

2. BP went with a risky type of blowout preventer — and then didn't maintain it
The blowout preventer is a giant valve that is supposed to be the last line of defense against a damaged well becoming an ecological catastrophe. But for the Deepwater Horizon project, BP chose a model — made by U.S.-based Cameron International — with well-documented design flaws. To make matters worse, according to a congressional investigation, the Deepwater's blowout preventer was in terrible shape: It had a dead battery, debilitating hydraulic-system leaks, and "shutoff shears" that weren't strong enough to seal the well. BP also opted not to install a voluntary $500,000 acoustic shutoff switch that could have sealed the well by remote control in the event the blowout preventer failed, reports the WSJ.

3. The well's critical plumbing was shoddy and poorly designed
Days before the blowout, BP decided to use a type of single-wall well casing that it knew increased the risk of gas leaks like the one that ultimately caused the deadly fire on the rig, according to The New York Times. Why? To save money. Drilling experts also say that BP's design for the casing pipe from the sea floor to the oil reservoir has a baffling design flaw that made it essentially impossible to create effective cement seals, the primary guards against natural gas leaks.

4. BP and rig workers ignored or misread clear warning signs
As Halliburton contractors were lowering the final cement plug down the well, rig workers conducted several tests for gas leaks — and in what an internal BP postmortem calls a "fundamental mistake" — they misinterpreted a "very large abnormality." When they decided, wrongly, that the test results were acceptable, they replaced the heavy drilling mud in the well with lighter seawater, allowing the pockets of natural gas below to explode upward and, ultimately, set the rig ablaze.

5. A "company man" overrode explosion concerns of well cementers
BP sent home the contractor it had hired to test the cement plug inside the well 11 hours before the explosion, without ever having him conduct the "gold standard" test on whether the seal was secure, according to the testing firm. A BP "company man" also overruled other safety concerns, including replacing the drilling mud with seawater, says another partner company.

6. BP hasn't fessed up about how much oil is really spilling
Experts tend to agree that, in order to prepare for containment and cleanup efforts, federal and state officials need to know how much oil they're dealing with. But the oil company has been slippery on that point: BP said two days after the explosion that no oil was leaking; three days later, it said 1,000 barrels per day (bpd) were leaking; three days after that, it was 5,000 bpd — even after a "confidential" company memo said that up to 14,266 bpd was gushing out. BP no longer gives estimates, but government scientists Thursday said the true leak rate is has been between 20,000 to 40,000 bpd.

7. BP's "solutions" may be making the spill much, much worse
The company's string of failed attempts to seal or contain the leak — top hat, top kill, junk shot — may, in fact, be intensifying the problem. A flow-rate expert on the government panel looking into the leak rate, Dr. Ira Leifer of the University of California at Santa Barbara, says that both the top kill and containment cap strategies have damaged the well and dramatically increased the amount of oil spurting into the ocean. He suggests that, following BP's decision to install a containment cap, the leak may now be 100,000 barrels per day.

8. BP needs a bigger boat
While the containment cap strategy may have made the overall situation worse, the company is finally collecting sizable quantities of oil from the wellhead. The problem? There's no place to store it all, reports the WSJ. The tanker now floating above the wellhead can process about 18,000 barrels per day, while BP has a stated goal of collecting 50,000 bpd. The company is scrambling to bring in more ships, and will begin burning off as much as possible.

Mr. President: Enough talk, now action!
By Ed Rollins, CNN Senior Political Contributor


June 16, 2010 8:42 a.m. EDT
President Obama spoke to the nation about the oil disaster from the Oval Office on Tuesday night.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Ed Rollins says President Obama's speech made all the key points
He says the most important thing is that Obama follow up with action
Rollins: Americans want to know if Obama is tough enough to deal with this crisis
He says key test will come when Obama meets with BP executives

Editor's note: Ed Rollins, a senior political contributor for CNN, is senior presidential fellow at the Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency at Hofstra University. He is a principal with the Dilenschneider Group, a global public relations firm. He was White House political director for President Reagan and chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

New York (CNN) -- President Obama has given a lot of speeches. He's given hundreds since he became president. He's given six in the last two days on his trip to the Gulf.

But last night's was the first speech he has given from the Oval Office. It will not be his last. But it was important, and he gave it well. It took him five paragraphs to say the serious words we have all known for weeks, but he needed to say: "This oil spill is the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced."

He went on to say what every American and every victim of this disaster wanted to hear: "We will fight this spill with everything we've got for as long it takes. We will make BP pay for the damage their company has caused. And we will do whatever's necessary to help the Gulf Coast and its people recover from this tragedy."

The rest of the speech didn't matter nearly as much. There were other things he wanted to say, and some of them were important. But the reality is that those 44 words quoted above are action items: We will fight with everything; we will make BP pay; and we will help our citizens recover. Now the president has to make it happen. As our nation's leader, he made commitments and they must be kept.
Video: Did Obama deliver to Gulf residents? Video: New Orleans evaluates Obama promise Video: Obama lays out Gulf strategy Video: Rep. Markey demands BP apology

We all know the president can give a great speech. In fact, he's president because he first got noticed giving a speech. He gave many more inspiring campaign speeches and raised the expectations of millions of Americans that things would be different.

Whether they are or not is up to each individual to judge. But why there was such a buildup to his giving his first Oval Office speech baffled me. The president sits at his own desk in the office he works in every day; he looks into the camera and reads the teleprompter. It's symbolic, but that's about it.
My old boss Ronald Reagan gave most of his big speeches from the Oval Office. He felt that the office gave gravitas to his words. He had a unique ability to look into that camera and make most Americans feel he was talking to them -- a very special skill. Who can forget his speech from the Oval Office on the night of the Challenger disaster?

The doubts people have expressed over the last several weeks about Obama were: Does he get it? And if he does, is he tough enough to do something about it? I think he gets it. I hope he's tough enough. I think the speech was a good speech. It was the public consumption speech. It was designed to make us feel better.

The next speech he gives in the Oval Office is the one that counts. It's a private speech. When he meets Wednesday with the chairman and chief executive officer of BP, he needs to express the anger and disappointment of the nation and put a fear into this company that will move them to continued action and enough contrition that they won't quit until every last legitimate claim is paid. That's what we want to hear!

The president closed his speech asking for prayers. "We pray for the people of the Gulf. And we pray that a hand may guide us through the storm towards a brighter day."

I think what the American public wants is a president who will guide us through this storm. If we pray, our prayers are for him and those victims of this disaster. The time for speeches is over. No more words; just action!

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Ed Rollins.

Crabs provide evidence oil tainting Gulf food web
AP


FILE - In this July 15, 2010 file photo, freshly sorted blue crabs sit in a box in Hopedale, La. Researchers wondering how badly the Gulf of Mexico wi AP – FILE - In this July 15, 2010 file photo, freshly sorted blue crabs sit in a box in Hopedale, La. Researchers …

* Gulf Coast Oil Spill Slideshow:Gulf Coast Oil Spill
* Is Gulf Seafood Safe to Eat? Play Video Video:Is Gulf Seafood Safe to Eat? ABC News

By JOHN FLESHER, AP Environmental Writer John Flesher, Ap Environmental Writer – Mon Aug 9, 5:33 am ET

BARATARIA, La. – To assess how heavy a blow the BP oil spill has dealt the Gulf of Mexico, researchers are closely watching a staple of the seafood industry and primary indicator of the ecosystem's health: the blue crab.

Weeks ago, before engineers pumped in mud and cement to plug the gusher, scientists began finding specks of oil in crab larvae plucked from waters across the Gulf coast.

The government said last week that three-quarters of the spilled oil has been removed or naturally dissipated from the water. But the crab larvae discovery was an ominous sign that crude had already infiltrated the Gulf's vast food web — and could affect it for years to come.

"It would suggest the oil has reached a position where it can start moving up the food chain instead of just hanging in the water," said Bob Thomas, a biologist at Loyola University in New Orleans. "Something likely will eat those oiled larvae ... and then that animal will be eaten by something bigger and so on."

Tiny creatures might take in such low amounts of oil that they could survive, Thomas said. But those at the top of the chain, such as dolphins and tuna, could get fatal "megadoses."

Marine biologists routinely gather shellfish for study. Since the spill began, many of the crab larvae collected have had the distinctive orange oil droplets, said Harriet Perry, a biologist with the University of Southern Mississippi's Gulf Coast Research Laboratory.

Click image to see photos of oil spill aftermath


AFP

"In my 42 years of studying crabs I've never seen this," Perry said.

She wouldn't estimate how much of the crab larvae are contaminated overall, but said about 40 percent of the area they are known to inhabit has been affected by oil from the spill.

Tulane University researchers are investigating whether the splotches also contain toxic chemical dispersants that were spread to break up the oil but have reached no conclusions, biologist Caz Taylor said.

If large numbers of blue crab larvae are tainted, their population is virtually certain to take a hit over the next year and perhaps longer, scientists say.

How large the die-off would be is unclear, Perry said. An estimated 207 million gallons of oil have spewed into the Gulf since an April 20 drilling rig explosion triggered the spill, and thousands of gallons of dispersant chemicals have been dumped.

Scientists will be focusing on crabs because they're a "keystone species" that play a crucial role in the food web as both predator and prey, Perry said.

Richard Condrey, a Louisiana State University oceanographer, said the crabs are "a living repository of information on the health of the environment."

Named for the light-blue tint of their claws, the crabs have thick shells and 10 legs, allowing them to swim and scuttle across bottomlands. As adults, they live in the Gulf's bays and estuaries amid marshes that offer protection and abundant food, including snails, tiny shellfish, plants and even smaller crabs. In turn, they provide sustenance for a variety of wildlife, from redfish to raccoons and whooping cranes.

Adults could be harmed by direct contact with oil and from eating polluted food. But scientists are particularly worried about the vulnerable larvae.

That's because females don't lay their eggs in sheltered places, but in areas where estuaries meet the open sea. Condrey discovered several years ago that some even deposit offspring on shoals miles offshore in the Gulf.

The larvae grow as they drift with the currents back toward the estuaries for a month or longer. Many are eaten by predators, and only a handful of the 3 million or so eggs from a single female live to adulthood.

But their survival could drop even lower if the larvae run into oil and dispersants.

"Crabs are very abundant. I don't think we're looking at extinction or anything close to it," said Taylor, one of the researchers who discovered the orange spots.

Still, crabs and other estuary-dependent species such as shrimp and red snapper could feel the effects of remnants of the spill for years, Perry said.

"There could be some mortality, but how much is impossible to say at this point," said Vince Guillory, biologist manager with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.

Perry, Taylor and Condrey will be among scientists monitoring crabs for negative effects such as population drop-offs and damage to reproductive capabilities and growth rates.

Crabs are big business in the region. In Louisiana alone, some 33 million pounds are harvested annually, generating nearly $300 million in economic activity, Guillory said.

But fishermen who can make a six-figure income off crabs in a good year now are now idled — and worried about the future.

"If they'd let us go out and fish today, we'd probably catch crabs," said Glen Despaux, 37, who sets his traps in Louisiana's Barataria Bay. "But what's going to happen next year, if this water is polluted and it's killing the eggs and the larvae? I think it's going to be a long-term problem."
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