According to Bloomberg News, energy investor and oil industry commentator Matt Simmons has died of an accidental drowning at his home.

Simmons had been frequently mentioned in news reports about the blowout of the Deepwater Horizon. He appeared as a commentator on MSNBC to discuss issues around offshore drilling, and was a proponent of using small nuclear devices to stop the oil flow from the well.

Bloomberg:

Matthew R. Simmons, an energy investment banker and a leading proponent of the “peak oil” theory that claims the Earth is running out of crude, died yesterday.

Simmons, 67, died in an accidental drowning at his home in Maine, local officials said.

Heart disease may have been a contributing factor, according to reports.

Emergency medical workers responded to Simmons’s home a little before 10 p.m. local time yesterday, said John Dietter, a crew chief in North Haven, Maine. The official cause of death is drowning, and he was found in a hot tub, said Tara Harrington, medical associate at Maine’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner.

“It was an accident,” Harrington said today in a telephone interview. She said “heart disease” was listed for the category of “other significant conditions” on the death certificate.

This is not a huge surprise, but the oil-soaked 5th circuit Court of Appeals has denied the Obama administration's appeal of the decision to lift the moratorium on deepwater offshore drilling.

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana — The Obama administration lost its bid Thursday to maintain a six-month moratorium on offshore deepwater drilling which a federal judge ordered to be lifted last month.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the government's request to stay that judge's order pending appeal.

The motion was denied because the government failed to show "a likelihood of irreparable injury if the stay is not granted," the court wrote in a 2-1 ruling.

The government also "made no showing that there is any likelihood that drilling activities will be resumed pending appeal."

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has said he will soon issue a new order to block deepwater drilling regardless of how the court ruled.

The court noted that the Salazar "has the right to apply for emergency relief if he can show that drilling activity by deepwater rigs has commenced or is about to commence."

It also ordered that the appeal be expedited so the case can be argued on its merits during the week of August 30.

Given the depth of cronyism between this court panel and the oil industry, their ruling was to be expected. I'm wondering what steps Salazar will take to block drilling despite the court's order. Perhaps he will revoke permits?

Alicublog: Right-wing bloggers versus gay pride.

Distributorcap NY: Packing them in at the Supreme Court.

Poor Man Institute: Toilet trained and dumb.

His Vorpal Sword: North to Alaska – Moose of Darkness.

The Reaction: Thoughts on the G20 summit in Toronto.

The Existential Cowboy: The oil industry lobbied against blow-out preventers.

Also, Music of the World Cup.

Guest post by Batocchio. Temporarily e-mail tips to batocchio9 AT yahoo DOT com.

Back during the age of Reagan, I was working on a story about the popular meme of "running government like a business." I interviewed one management consultant who explained to me an important difference between government and the private sector. He said that business was focused on getting something out to market that was "good enough" quickly, something they could improve later. He said that government's priority wasn't speed or cost, but compliance with federal regulations, and everything else came second - not a bad thing when dealing with safety issues.

That's why he confidently told me that "no one in their right mind" would ever apply "just get it done" business mentality to safety regulation:

An examination by The New York Times highlights the chasm between the oil industry’s assertions about the reliability of its blowout preventers and a more complex reality. It reveals that the federal agency charged with regulating offshore drilling, the Minerals Management Service, repeatedly declined to act on advice from its own experts on how it could minimize the risk of a blind shear ram failure.

It also shows that the Obama administration failed to grapple with either the well-known weaknesses of blowout preventers or the sufficiency of the nation’s drilling regulations even as it made plans this spring to expand offshore oil exploration.

“What happened to all the stakeholders — Congress, environmental groups, industry, the government — all stakeholders involved were lulled into a sense of what has turned out to be false security,” David J. Hayes, the deputy interior secretary, said in an interview.

Even in one significant instance where the Minerals Management Service did act, it appears to have neglected to enforce a rule that required oil companies to submit proof that their blind shear rams would in fact work.

As it turns out, records and interviews show, blind shear rams can be surprisingly vulnerable. There are many ways for them to fail, some unavoidable, some exacerbated by the stunning water depths at which oil companies have begun to explore.

But they also can be rendered powerless by the failure of a single part, a point underscored in a confidential report that scrutinized the reliability of the Deepwater Horizon’s blowout preventer. The report, from 2000, concluded that the greatest vulnerability by far on the entire blowout preventer was one of the small shuttle valves leading to the blind shear ram. If this valve jammed or leaked, the report warned, the ram’s blades would not budge.

This sort of “single-point failure” figures prominently in an emerging theory of what went wrong with the Deepwater Horizon’s blind shear ram, according to interviews and documents. Some evidence suggests that when the crew activated the blind shear ram, its blades tried to cut the drill pipe, but then failed to finish the job because one or more of its shuttle valves leaked hydraulic fluid.

These kinds of weaknesses were understood inside the oil industry, documents and interviews show. And given the critical importance of the blind shear ram, offshore drillers began adding a layer of redundancy by equipping their blowout preventers with two blind shear rams.

Shorter version: For eight years, we had conservatives doing what conservatives do -- namely, ignoring regulations, taking businesses at their word and doing everything possible to help them maximize profits at the expense of the public good. But appointing Ken Salazar was highly unlikely to reverse that trend.

They have good reason to worry. Even though BP claims otherwise, we just don't know for sure and you shouldn't just dump it anywhere (although I suspect they will, anyway):

About 35,000 bags — or 250 tons — of oily trash have been carted away from this beach, said Lt. Patrick Hanley of the Coast Guard, who is stationed at Port Fourchon. And as of Monday, more than 175,000 gallons of liquid waste — a combination of oil and water — had been sent to landfills, as had 11,276 cubic yards of solid waste, said Petty Officer Gail Dale, also of the Coast Guard, who works with at the command center in Houma.

Michael Condon, BP’s environmental unit leader, said that tests have shown that the material is not hazardous, and can safely be stored in landfills around the region that accept oil industry debris. The checklist and procedures involved, Mr. Condon said, are part of a process “we do very well and have done for a long time.”

But some local officials, environmental lawyers and residents who live near landfill sites are not convinced.

“There’s no way that isn’t toxic,” said Gladstone Jones III, a New Orleans lawyer who has spent much of his career trying to get compensation for plaintiffs he says have been harmed by exposure to toxic waste.

In fact, waste from oil exploration and production falls into a regulatory no man’s land, neither exactly benign nor toxic on its face. The compounds in oil most dangerous to human health — like benzene, a carcinogen — are volatile and tend to dissipate when crude oil reaches the ocean surface, or soon thereafter. But some toxicologists say it is impossible to know whether the toxic chemicals are entirely gone.

Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson has written a stunner of an article called "The Spill, The Scandal and The President." It's damned heartbreaking to learn that yes, at least in Interior, this really is the third Bush term:

Even worse, the "moratorium" on drilling announced by the president does little to prevent future disasters. The ban halts exploratory drilling at only 33 deepwater operations, shutting down less than one percent of the total wells in the Gulf. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, the Cabinet-level official appointed by Obama to rein in the oil industry, boasts that "the moratorium is not a moratorium that will affect production" – which continues at 5,106 wells in the Gulf, including 591 in deep water.

Most troubling of all, the government has allowed BP to continue deep-sea production at its Atlantis rig – one of the world's largest oil platforms. Capable of drawing 200,000 barrels a day from the seafloor, Atlantis is located only 150 miles off the coast of Louisiana, in waters nearly 2,000 feet deeper than BP drilled at Deepwater Horizon. According to congressional documents, the platform lacks required engineering certification for as much as 90 percent of its subsea components – a flaw that internal BP documents reveal could lead to "catastrophic" errors. In a May 19th letter to Salazar, 26 congressmen called for the rig to be shut down immediately. "We are very concerned," they wrote, "that the tragedy at Deepwater Horizon could foreshadow an accident at BP Atlantis."

The administration's response to the looming threat? According to an e-mail to a congressional aide from a staff member at MMS, the agency has had "zero contact" with Atlantis about its safety risks since the Deepwater rig went down.

Excuse me, I think I have to go scream now...

[...] Salazar did little to tamp down on the lawlessness at MMS, beyond referring a few employees for criminal prosecution and ending a Bush-era program that allowed oil companies to make their "royalty" payments – the amount they owe taxpayers for extracting a scarce public resource – not in cash but in crude. And instead of putting the brakes on new offshore drilling, Salazar immediately throttled it up to record levels. Even though he had scrapped the Bush plan, Salazar put 53 million offshore acres up for lease in the Gulf in his first year alone – an all-time high. The aggressive leasing came as no surprise, given Salazar's track record. "This guy has a long, long history of promoting offshore oil drilling – that's his thing," says Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. "He's got a highly specific soft spot for offshore oil drilling." As a senator, Salazar not only steered passage of the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act, which opened 8 million acres in the Gulf to drilling, he even criticized President Bush for not forcing oil companies to develop existing leases faster.

Salazar was far less aggressive, however, when it came to making good on his promise to fix MMS. Though he criticized the actions of "a few rotten apples" at the agency, he left long-serving lackeys of the oil industry in charge. "The people that are ethically challenged are the career managers, the people who come up through the ranks," says a marine biologist who left the agency over the way science was tampered with by top officials. "In order to get promoted at MMS, you better get invested in this pro-development oil culture." One of the Bush-era managers whom Salazar left in place was John Goll, the agency's director for Alaska. Shortly after the Interior secretary announced a reorganization of MMS in the wake of the Gulf disaster, Goll called a staff meeting and served cake decorated with the words "Drill, baby, drill."

Salazar also failed to remove Chris Oynes, a top MMS official who had been a central figure in a multibillion-dollar scandal that Interior's inspector general called "a jaw-dropping example of bureaucratic bungling." In the 1990s, industry lobbyists secured a sweetheart subsidy from Congress: Drillers would pay no royalties on oil extracted in deep water until prices rose above $28 a barrel. But this tripwire was conveniently omitted in Gulf leases overseen by Oynes – a mistake that will let the oil giants pocket as much as $53 billion. Instead of being fired for this f*ckup, however, Oynes was promoted by Bush to become associate director for offshore drilling – a position he kept under Salazar until the Gulf disaster hit.

"Employees describe being in Interior – not just MMS, but the other agencies – as the third Bush term," says Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which represents federal whistle-blowers. "They're working for the same managers who are implementing the same policies. Why would you expect a different result?"

[...]"People are being really circumspect, not pointing the finger at Salazar and Obama," says Rep. Raul Grijalva, who oversees the Interior Department as chair of the House subcommittee on public lands. "But the troublesome point is, the administration knew that it had this rot in the middle of the process on offshore drilling – yet it empowered an already discredited, disgraced agency to essentially be in charge."

Via Robert Reich, something that, if true, confirms most of what I already thought -- namely, that BP's priority is still their bottom line:

A petroleum engineer who's worked in the oil industry tells me BP is doing the minimum to clean up the oil and everything it can to protect its bottom line. According to the engineer, here’s what BP should be doing right now to mitigate the damage. If the president were to put BP into temporary receivership, he’d have the power to get BP to:

1. Stop releasing dispersants. So-called dispersants are toxic, and it's crazy to add more poison to the Gulf. Dispersants do nothing to assist the environment in naturally cleaning the oil; their main use is PR. They reduce the number of ugly pictures of birds covered in pure black crude. Dispersants break the thick layer of crude into smaller globs, but that doesn’t help the Gulf and its wildlife. Most of the crude just mixes with the water to produce a goop that looks like chocolate ice cream but is highly poisonous.

2. Mobilize every possible tanker to siphon up crude from as close to the leak points as possible. Oil industry leaders as John Hofmeister (president of Shell Oil from 2005 until 2008) have recommended this, but inexplicably neither BP nor the federal government are talking about even trying this idea. BP currently has only one spot where they have inserted a tube into a riser, or pipe, that is leaking oil from the sea floor. The company is gathering the crude oil and siphoning it up to a drill ship for storage.

They should have at least a dozen collectors. BP has 24 tankers that are being used to make money for BP, not for clean-up duty. (President Obama should also use all necessary federal power -- or money, and send BP the bill -- to put as many tankers and refineries from other companies on the task.)

Continue reading »

Jason Leopold has the story over at Truthout. Another day, another story of a huge corporate behemoth running amok and roughshod over the most basic safety regulations and protocols.

In 2008, an employee of BP hired to oversee and maintain required document databases relating to regulatory safety requirements raised concerns about a related BP Gulf project, Atlantis.

The whistleblower, whose name has been withheld at the person's request because the whistleblower still works in the oil industry and fears retaliation, first raised concerns about safety issues related to BP Atlantis, the world's largest and deepest semi-submersible oil and natural gas platform, located about 200 miles south of New Orleans, in November 2008. Atlantis, which began production in October 2007, has the capacity to produce about 8.4 million gallons of oil and 180 million cubic feet of natural gas per day.

It was then that the whistleblower, who was hired to oversee the company's databases housing documents related to its Atlantis project, discovered that the drilling platform had been operating without a majority of the engineer-approved documents it needed to run safely, leaving the platform vulnerable to a catastrophic disaster that would far surpass the massive oil spill that began last week following a deadly explosion on a BP-operated drilling rig.

The specifics are pretty chilling. Regulations require extensive preparation and analysis of potential hazards with signoffs by qualified engineers at each step. Part of the analysis is a detailed drawing of the project's piping and process flows. BP's were incomplete, which prompted a member of the BP team to alert BP officials to the risk that they could be assumed to be complete, leading to a complete failure of the system. According to the Truthout article, 85 percent of the drawings did not receive engineer approval.

Eighty-five percent. Stunning. And there's more.

Even worse, 95 percent of Atlantis' subsea welding records did not receive final approval, calling into question the integrity of thousands of crucial welds on subsea components that, if they were to rupture, could result in an oil spill 30 times worse than the one that occurred after the explosion on Deepwater Horizon last week.

The rest of the story is at Truthout. Go read it. It's chilling all on its own, but when read in the larger context of the Massey Energy Upper Big Branch disaster, Goldman Sachs revelations, Wall Street meltdowns and SEC shenanigans, the abject failure of conservative "small government, no regulation" philosophy is truly on parade for everyone to see.

Late-night editorial comment:

The Masseys, Halliburtons, BPs, and Wall Streeters do it because they expect to do it and get away with it. They do it because for 30 years we've listened to the drumbeat of a cadence: Profits over all. As the cadence quickened, the media joined the parade, morphing from objective observer to drum major. The beat grew louder. With each decibel increase, their arrogance and power grew stronger. In 30 years, the John Birch society has transformed from pariah to mainstream. How far will we let them go before we get out in the streets and "take our country back"?

Continue reading »

The American Prospect: Ted Kennedy: Keeper of the Liberal Flame

Grist: Majority of 'Energy Citizens' rallies organized by oil-industry lobbyists

Attytood: New president, same old war against press freedom in Iraq

Truthdig: Only one U.S. official has taken an honorable stand on torture

We are respectable negroes: Double Down on Diabetes - We are indeed a society too sick to survive: KFC has a sandwich where the bread is replaced by fried chicken

RealClearPolitics: Opinion, news, analysis, vdeo and polls. Simply indespensible

Come on, you didn't really think this cheap gas lull was going to last, did you? Better tune up those bicycles!

Sharp reductions in investments and low oil prices could curb future supplies by almost eight million barrels a day within the next five years, according to a study scheduled for release Friday, the latest warning that the world could face a new energy shock when the economy picks up.

The report by Cambridge Energy Research Associates, an oil consulting firm, said that the potential drop in production capacity is a “powerful and long-lasting aftershock following the oil price collapse.”

The global slowdown has forced oil companies to slash their investments, postpone or cancel expansion plans, or delay drilling in many corners of the world. While some of the biggest companies, like Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell, say they will keep their investments unchanged this year, many other producers are curbing investments because of the crisis.

The report says about 7.6 million barrels a day of future supplies are “at risk” of being deferred or canceled, like heavy oil or deepwater projects, and which could bring total supplies to 101.4 million barrels a day by 2014. Last year, the group projected that capacity would rise to 109 million barrels a day by then.

“Seven consecutive years of rising oil prices — unprecedented in the history of the oil industry — have come crashing down, thus burying the notion that the commodity price cycle was a historical relic,” said the report, a field-by-field study of production trends.

Many experts have voiced even darker concerns in recent months. Christophe de Margerie, the chief executive of French oil company Total, recently said that producers would find it challenging to bolster supplies even to 90 million barrels a day by the middle of the next decade as projects get canceled.

Oil prices have fallen by 63 percent from their peak of $147 a barrel last summer. They are now trading around $54 a barrel after OPEC producers curbed supplies to prevent a price collapse.

But even at this level, many producers warn that oil prices remain too low to sustain increased investments.