From the White House – Weekly Address
In his weekly address, President Obama discusses progress in American energy and highlights that we are now producing more oil at home than we buy from other countries for the first time in nearly two decades. We reached this milestone in part not only because we’re producing more energy, but because we’re wasting less energy, and as a result, we are also reducing our carbon emissions while growing the economy.
Well (no pun intended), BP managed to shove something up their greasy hole today (pun very specifically intended). This is something many have suggested that they should do since the burning and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon on April 20. The leak has not stopped, but at the moment some oil is being collected by a ship located above the site of the wreckage. There is no word that this effort will contain all of the leak until new wells are drilled this summer, but something is better than nothing.
The official line is that the leak had been running at 5,000 barrels (200,000 gallons) per day, though estimates by outside sources put it at up to 70,000 barrels (2,800,000 gallons) per day. To date, therefore, the accident has released between 5,200,000 gallons (half of the Exxon Valdez spill) to 72,800,000 million gallons (seven times the Exxon Valdez) into the Gulf of Mexico.
Well, the Tin Man’s Hat didn’t work, so BP is onto – as Rick Sanchez puts it – somewhere between Plan B and Plan G.
Politics has gone dormant – as attested by the slow pace of political blogs these days – and as one of those paying less attention I find myself unsubscribing from many of the political mailing lists I had been on for the past year or two (I particularly don’t care what Michael Steele and the Party Formerly Known as Republicans have to say).
What about you all? Life more interesting than politics? Got any good surfing stories to tell?
Consider this a particularly slippery open thread.
The GOP now has a VP candidate who thinks there are too many polar bears. These furry mammals have made the egregious mistake of chosing to move to the area Ms. Palin and her oil buddies would like to start landcaping.
Fortunately, she won’t have to personally go shoot all of the remaining polar bears, since her oil friends are working on drowning them all.
Nine polar bears are at risk of drowning after the ice floe where they lived melted because of global warming, scientists have said. The bears were spotted in open ocean off the northwest coast of Alaska, miles from their normal hunting area by US government oil survey scientists flying over the Chukchi sea.
Scientists who study the polar bear see this group of nine bears trying to swim 400 miles to safety as a bad sign. In an area as vast as the unprecedentedly-large open waters of the Arctic, spotting one group this large and this lost means there are likely many others.