Marshall Ramsey for June 03, 2010

See? There’s plenty of oil to go round.

Don’t light a match.

Would have been better with a little winged BP symbol floating away…

‘Nuff said

Does emulsified oil light very well?

“Water water everywhere and not a drop to drink.” Coleridge

Could be worse could be raining. Oh wait thats coming up.

Given what exists NOW in North America, Socialism is the only political philosophy which can be fair to all, and fix life in North America.

“Socialism is a political philosophy that encompasses various theories of economic organization based on either public or direct worker ownership and administration of the means of production and allocation of resources.

A more comprehensive definition of socialism is an economic system that directly maximizes use-values as opposed to exchange-values and has transcended commodity production and wage labour, along with a corresponding set of social and economic relations, including the organization of economic institutions, the method of resource allocation and post-monetary calculation based on some physical magnitude;often implying a method of compensation based on individual merit, the amount of labour expended or individual contribution.”

Soon we will live in a world without land animals and we will have fish in the ocean again………….. We will be vegetarians and eat a good tasting, healthy, balanced diet by preparing vegetables and fish properly with herbs and spices. Currently, it is not the norm here in North America, however with the proper knowledge and ingredients it is possible………….

Harley, it is cumulative, you know. The Exxon Valdez wiped out a whole category of fishing that has never come back to Alaska, and there are still depleted stocks, did you know that? The ocean hasn’t had time to absorb this, and I doubt it has had time to absorb the big spill in the 1970s. I’m not saying “we’re all going to die,” but when you consider that 25% of fish eaten in the US comes from this area, and that is essentially going to be gone or reduced to a tiny percentage, you start to wonder how far you can go. I’m a capitalist (heck, I’m a consultant to executives), but I have to say the best companies don’t only chase profits. They try to create a long-term benefit for the community, because then the community is glad to have them there.

How about we nuke the Gulf Of Mexico? Burn up all that pesky oil in one shot… no more problem.

“Shoot this one is only the 2nd largest in the Gulf.”

It’s now the largest in U.S. history but don’t worry, there’s still time to be #1!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/37457330#37457330

When will come to our senses and emulate France and Japan by putting renewed effort into our nuclear development program. Our future energy sources must be nuclear and shale.

And we all know Harley doesn’t live on the Gulf, now.

hey, I say let them be and don’t let the government handle it. Then, come election time, remind everyone down there that we let them handle it the Republican way, by the gov. staying out and the business doing it itself. Then we’ll see how they vote. Oh, that’s what Obama is doing, isn’t it? You guys really have to learn that he fights like an Oriental.

Harley: You guys got in real trouble with this. Positive proof that big business can’t function any better than biog gov. Some of your buds have claimed it was cause BP was Greenies. which is incredible fraud, but then, if that’s all you have, I guess you go for it. Showing dead beaches ahead of time as a warning of what will happen if you aren’t careful is called a WARNING and a CAUTION. showing them after the fact is called a TRAGEDY.

Anti- enviros kept the killswitch requirement that Brazil has for it’s wells off our. It would have shut things down at the source before the rupture. The many back ups would have worked if someone had simply made sure the battery for them was working.

Sorry, this is the worst man-made disaster for that area ever. And, if i was member of the DNC, I’d be notebooking every one of your comments and posting them until after this election and trot them out for the next one, too.

Good idea, libertarian; It’s not like there was ever a Three Mile Island or Chernoble thing to warn us about Nuke power’s drawbacks. Or like we don’t have huge coal reserves we can tap or solar power that keeps getting better every day. Yeah, nuclear power.

I get what you’re saying, harley, but I’m not hearing most sensible people saying that capitalism or profit-making is a bad thing – just that unrestrained capitalism, with an arrogant company that refuses to follow safety regs is a bad thing. And I think we can agree on that. As I commented elsewhere, when OTHER oil companies are saying “you’re not doing enough, BP,” something is badly wrong. The problem is that, as far as I can tell, we don’t have a means to “make it right.” Apparently dispersants are only for PR value - they make it look better from orbit, but dispersants are themselves toxic. If Alaska is still dealing with the effects of a much smaller spill over two decades ago, how are we going to deal with this, apart from making sure it NEVER happens again? I have family on the Redneck Riviera, and it’s likely it will never be the same in their lifetimes. I don’t have an answer, but we sure as H3ll need to discuss what happened here, and kick BP’s @ss in a monumental way for their incredibly arrogant flouting of the law (760 “willful, egregious safety violations” in the last three years versus 8 for Sunoco and ConocoPhilips, 2 for Citgo [yes, CITGO], and 1 for Exxon) and their even more astonishing ineptitude in fixing their own messes.

Libertarian obviously doesn’t know the costs and complexity of getting oil shale converted to gas. Israel, not Iran, should also raise our concerns about nuclear power(s).

“Good idea, libertarian; It’s not like there was ever a Three Mile Island or Chernoble thing to warn us about Nuke power’s drawbacks. Or like we don’t have huge coal reserves we can tap or solar power that keeps getting better every day. Yeah, nuclear power.”

More people in the US have died in Teddy Kennedy’s auto than from nuclear power accidents. Obviously it is easy for a liberal to dismiss the thousands who have died in coal mining accidents. They just don’t matter.

Do you actually know anything about solar/wind efficiency? The only future is nuclear.

And not a moment too soon.

libertarian, quit repeating that canard about Kennedy’s car and nuclear power plants. It has NEVER been true. The first accident in a nuclear power plant took place in 1961, when the SL1 in Idaho went critical and killed three men. One was blown onto the ceiling and impaled on a control rod, and remained there for six days. All three had to be buried in lead coffins. http://www.radiationworks.com/sl1reactor.htm In 1964, a man poured what was supposed to be diluted uranium solution - it was not, it went critical, and splattered him with highly radioactive liquid. He died of radiation poisoning. http://www.bazley.net/institute/archives/UNCdeath.html There are four deaths in US nuclear power plants (not counting other deaths in nuclear research) alone before Kennedy went driving drunk and stupid. And even if it was true in 1969 (which it wasn’t), it certainly isn’t now. Ever heard of Chernobyl? 2 people died that night, and 28 within a few weeks due to radiation poisoning, and untold numbers after that due to overexposure. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/chernobyl/inf07.html I’m not defending Kennedy’s actions, but I’m REALLY tired of that nonsense. Nuclear power has its advantages, but anyone who persists in treating it as completely safe is an idiot. There is NO “safe” level of radiation. There is only improved odds of not having an effect.

MM

I apologize. I hadn’t realized Chernobyl was in the US.

You are struggling to find any American who died because of the quest for nuclear energy but continue to ignore the tens of thousands killed in coal mining. I guess their deaths are easy for you to rationalize. I will take nuclear any day. Just think you have to go back 50 years as if there have been no improvements in our technology. Somehow France and Japan don’t have your problem. What do they know that you don’t?

It has.

Libertarian, churchill– First of all, sorry about the US glitch. I’ve seen the simpler version of that bumper sticker. I am, however, still correct that that slogan has never been true. 4>1. It’s just snide and pointless. It’s also a pet peeve of mine, which I wanted to address. Please note that I am not against nuclear energy, though I think we should really be aggressively pursuing fusion power rather than fission; Carter stopped us building “breeder” plants because it put too much bomb-ready plutonium in one place, and given some of the mistakes made in the nuclear industry (let alone ordinary idiocy), that’s looking like it was a wise move. I am not ignoring the deaths from coal mining and for that matter oil drilling, either (22 people died on that platform BP is failing to fix). And as for natural gas, LNG is hugely dangerous stuff, and gets taken in big tankers right past Manhattan Island. That’s just the explosive part, rather than the deaths through gas inhalation. It’s very simple, really: if it didn’t have latent energy, it wouldn’t be a good source of power! No one will ever build a helium fuel cell. But nuclear power is more dangerous than people say, and in a way that is different. It’s not just “boom, you’re done, and it’s over.” Radioactivity is sneaky stuff, and it lasts a long time. And the amount of nuclear waste – if you include things like the handling equipment, contaminated clothing, etc., etc., in addition to the actual metal – is large and not easy to deal with. We’ve got to do something about our power needs, but clearly it is not a single-source, silver-bullet solution. I favor means to reduce consumption of all fossil fuels, spending more research money on solar and fusion and helping people use solar and wind as supplemental power sources, and building new plants carefully.

churchill, maybe, maybe not. Hard to say at this distance re: Carter. He does have a degree in nuclear physics, so I suspect he was more sensitive to that issue. It may not be government’s job to subsidize it, but in that case why do we give huge tax breaks to oil companies for exploration? Apparently some of the biggies have paid fewer taxes than a middle-class family! We are subsidizing it, because as a country we have a need (or because oil companies give lots of donations to Congresspeople) (or both). We should be consistent, either way. And we have long funded research initiatives. One of the key factors for solar is efficiency, and my sources (an MIT physicist) say we’re on the verge of some significant improvements. Shouldn’t we support that, if only with the equivalent of a small business loan?