News roundup, 14 Feb 2025

- The Trump regime has banned an Associated Press reporter from White House events due to the news service's failure to immediately start calling the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America". AP's style guide now calls for the internationally recognized name to be used, while acknowledging the name the regime uses; evidently this isn't enough for Trump, though.

- The White House is saying that the 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum will be in addition to the 25% across the board tariffs that they plan to impose on all Canadian and Mexican imports. And that's not even considering the fact that the regime has plenty more tariffs planned. The Bank of Canada fears that a drawn out trade war could lead to a permanent decline in the country's GDP.

- Video evidence used to convict one of the Jan. 6 rioters has been removed from government websites, to the alarm of  news organizations. Several of these organizations have taken legal action, and a judge has responded by ordering the administration to stop removing such things and to provide an explanation for their removal.

- Donald Trump discussed Ukraine in a phone conversation with Russia and has agreed to help negotiate a ceasefire. To the surprise of few, and to the alarm of much of Europe, he seems to have agreed that Russia should be able to keep most of the territory it has seized from Ukraine, and that NATO membership for that unfortunate country is not in the cards.

- The City of Toronto has issued a cease and desist order to a man who was making tiny trailer homes, designed to be towable with a bicycle. The letter said that the trailers were unlawfully occupying city property; in one sense this is kind of odd because usually in this country municipalities only have the power to regulate how something is used, not whether you can sell it or not. Maybe Toronto is an exception to that rule, or maybe nonprofits that give things to people are held to different legal standards than businesses that sell things. Apparently the trailers include smoke alarms and carbon monoxide alarms as well as fire extinguishers in an effort to make them safer. On the other hand, according to a councillor who supports the idea in principle but wants the current operation stopped for now, they also have heaters that burn diesel fuel, which could be a safety concern as well as an environmental and health concern. Whether that outweighs the health and safety concerns about people living in tents in the dead of winter is another question.

- In a campaign speech at a gala held by the London, Ontario police chief, Doug Ford was recorded saying that judges should have the power to "send 'em right to sparky". Once this became public, though, he told reporters that he was joking and that he doesn't actually support the death penalty.

- The mayor of Swift Current, Saskatchewan has asked city council to make a recommendation on whether to remove the US flag from the city's flag court. The matter has provoked some lively (but surprisingly civil) debate but has not come to a resolution.

Corexit still lingers in Gulf

While the methane seems to have been mostly burned off by bacteria, which is a good thing given its potency as a greenhouse gas, it seems that one of the dispersants used to clean up the spill is still there:

A crucial component of the chemical dispersant applied to oil gushing from BP’s blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico last year did not break down as fast as scientists initially expected and probably remains at detectable levels in the deep ocean, scientists said on Wednesday.

Traces of the dispersant compound were found in September more than 150 miles from the well site, researchers with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution said in their report.

From the New York Times. While this isn't as bad as some of the more hysterical predictions, it is most definitely not a good thing. I, for one, will be curious to see how many Common Loons, Double-Crested Cormorants, and White Pelicans there are at my parents' cottage this year. All of these birds have always been common there, and all of them migrate through the Gulf of Mexico.

More on the Gulf oil spill

First the good news -- the plug in the oil well in the Gulf seems to be working. And in some ways the area looks much better than you'd expect. The devil may be in the details, though, as Raj Patel points out in The Nation:

In addition to making sure the slick was under-recorded, the company worked hard to make sure there was less of it to be seen. Besides the prison laborers who mopped up the oil at a discount on shore, at sea, over 1.8 million gallons of Corexit dispersants were used to make the oil vanish from sight. Such dispersants are banned by the Environmental Protection Agency, but the Coast Guard issued exemptions some seventy-four times in forty-eight days. It worked: BP's principal problem has, literally, disappeared. "I don't think we'll see any more oil going into the beaches," BP's avuncular new CEO, Bob Dudley, announced upon taking over. "… And where there is no oil on the beaches, you probably don't need people walking up and down in hazmat suits." In other words: if the oil cannot be seen, the danger has passed.

Sadly, "if you can't see it, it's not there" isn't sound environmental science. Oil enters the food system far more rapidly as an invisible emulsion than as a rainbow slick. Scientists have already discovered the spill's signature inside crab larvae, though the consequences of mixing oil and dispersant with the gulf ecology is uncertain, and won't be fully known for generations. By introducing Corexit into the gulf, BP not only hid its mess, but sowed doubt over the full extent and effects of the damage. This ignorance is no accident—for BP, it's bliss. It makes it possible for BP to argue that it cannot be held accountable for those damages that were not directly related to the spill.

There's a great big experiment running in the Gulf right now. The thing about Corexit and similar dispersants is that they're emulsifying agents -- they bring insoluble stuff like oil into a sort-of solution. On the positive side, this means that it will break down faster than it otherwise would... but that positive is very double-edged, considering the biochemical oxygen demand that will result from all that oil. There are oil eating bacteria, and this will be a huge bonanza for them... but all those extra consumers need extra oxygen to do it. And they'll produce plenty of good ol' carbon dioxide, without even giving us useful energy in the process.

BP wants to drill in Gulf again

They don't have much shame, do they?

BP PLC (BP-N41.330.651.60%) said Friday it might someday drill again into the same lucrative undersea pocket of oil that spilled millions of gallons of crude, wrecked livelihoods and fouled beaches along the Gulf of Mexico.

“There's lots of oil and gas here,” chief operating officer Doug Suttles said at a news briefing. “We're going to have to think about what to do with that at some point.”

The vast oil reservoir beneath the blown well is still believed to hold nearly $4 billion worth of crude, and until Friday BP had not indicated any plans to cash in on that potential windfall. With the company and its partners facing tens of billions of dollars in liabilities, the incentive to exploit the wells and the reservoir could grow.

From the Globe. So it seems they need that oil... so they can pay for the mess they made drilling for oil in the same darn place. Does that make sense?

"Top kill" fails to stop gusher

The situation isn't getting any better:

With BP declaring failure in its latest attempt to stop the uncontrolled gusher feeding the worst oil spill in U.S. history, the company is turning to yet another mix of risky undersea robot maneuvers and longshot odds to plug the blown-out well.

Six weeks after the catastrophe began, oil giant BP PLC is still casting about for at least a temporary fix to the spewing well underneath the Gulf of Mexico that's fouling beaches, wildlife and marshland.

A relief well that's currently being drilled — which is supposed to be a better long-term solution — won't be done for at least two months. That would be in the middle of the Atlantic hurricane season, which begins Tuesday.

President Barack Obama said it is “as enraging as it is heartbreaking” that the most ambitious bid yet for a temporary solution failed.

BP said Saturday that the procedure known as the “top kill” failed after engineers tried for three days to overwhelm the crippled well with heavy drilling mud and junk 5,000 feet underwater.

From the Globe. Of course, it will stop eventually, but what will be left of the Gulf's rich biota by that time?

Did BP have advance warning of trouble?

There are reports (h/t oddlots at iTulip) to the effect that Schlumberger Ltd, a respected international consulting firm, warned BP about incorrect procedures shortly before the accident, only to have them ignored. How much of this is accurate is unclear. It is known that Schlumberger staff left the rig only a few hours before the explosion, but there are inconsistencies -- the Reuters story states that they left on a BP helicopter, while the stories making the stronger claims say that the Schlumberger folks, after their advice was allegedly ignored by BP, ordered in one of their helicopters after BP told them to wait for the next scheduled flight. Whatever the case, it's being taken seriously by some, as evidenced by the relative performance of BP's and Schlumberger's stocks:


No surprise here; the possible implications of this could be very unpleasant for BP. It's worth noting, of course, that stories aren't always true, even if you do see them on the Internet; we'll have to see where this goes.

The oil spill could be about to worsten dramatically

As bad as the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is already, US authorities are looking at the possibility that it could become far worse:

A confidential government report on the unfolding spill disaster in the Gulf makes clear the Coast Guard now fears the well could become an unchecked gusher shooting millions of gallons of oil per day into the Gulf.

"The following is not public," reads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Emergency Response document dated April 28. "Two additional release points were found today in the tangled riser. If the riser pipe deteriorates further, the flow could become unchecked resulting in a release volume an order of magnitude higher than previously thought."

****

The worst-case scenario for the broken and leaking well pouring oil into the Gulf of Mexico would be the loss of the wellhead and kinked piping currently restricting the flow to 5,000 barrels -- or 210,000 gallons -- per day.

If the wellhead is lost, oil could leave the well at a much greater rate.

Source (h/t Rajiv in this iTulip thread). If that happens, this could have effects that reach far from the source of the problem. For instance, further down in the same thread, we_are_toast posted the following:

You people across the pond better get your paper towels ready. If the riser pipe fails and it takes 90 days to drill a relief well, you're in for a big surprise.

Yikes. And for further emphasis, a couple of posts down we have this:

As others in the thread have pointed out, this could be the oil industry's Chernobyl.