At least one man has drowned in crude during the clean-up operation, which has expanded as the area of the slick has doubled in size despite earlier government assurances that it was being contained and posed no risk to ecologically sensitive areas.

Five days after a pipeline explosion at the north-east port of Dalian, oil had reportedly spread over an area of 430 square kilometres, prompting a dispersal mission along the coast.

Hundreds of local volunteers are spreading absorbent matting along the Yellow Sea shoreline in an attempt to stop the slick from damaging beaches.

Out at sea, authorities have started to use oil-consuming bacteria to try to disperse the slick, along with chemical agents and lengthy floating barrages.

Even though maritime officials have mobilised 800 fishing boats to assist the 40 specialist vessels in the operation, the winds and tides are spreading the slick wider and thinner.

The difficult conditions have proved fatal for at least one man. A 25-year-old firefighter, Zhang Liang, drowned on Tuesday when a wave threw him from a vessel, according to the state news agency Xinhua.

In some areas, volunteers equipped only with rubber gloves, rubber boots and rudimentary tools have struggled to cope with the waves washing up on the beaches.

“I’ve been to a few bays today and discovered they were almost entirely covered with dark oil,” Zhong Yu of the environmental group Greenpeace China, told the Associated Press. “The oil is half-solid and half-liquid and is as sticky as asphalt.”

Fishing in the waters around Dalian has been banned until the end of August.

“The oil spill will pose a severe threat to marine animals and water quality, and sea birds,” Huang Yong, deputy bureau chief for the city’s Maritime Safety Administration, told a regional TV station.

The authorities say the leak was staunched within 24 hours of last Friday’s accident, but they have yet to reveal how much oil was discharged before then. The state-run China Central television channel estimates the spill at 1,500 tons, less than 0.5% of the amount released into the ocean by the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Local officials have been upbeat about the prospects of a quick clean-up and a resumption of normal services at the port, which has had to redirect 420 vessels from the area of the slick.

“Our priority is to collect the spilled oil within five days to reduce the possibility of contaminating international waters,” Dalian’s vice mayor, Dai Yulin, told reporters earlier this week. Other officials expect the operation to last twice as long and even then it is far from clear that the ecological damage will end.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/21/china-oil-spill-disaster-wildlife

They distributed 17 million fuel smart cards to Iranian auto drivers, with a ration plan of 180 liters of fuel for the summer season (60 litres for private vehicles in each month of summer), the allocation of 25 liters of gasoline for motorcycles and the same amount for the public sector vehicles, including pick-up trucks, taxis and cabs, each month of summer.

They suggest that had fuel rationing not been implemented, fuel consumption nationwide would have reached as much as 98 million litres per day.

The thing is, in Australia we extract about 580,000 litres yet consume 953,000 litres, we are exporting part of our economy, so should we consider a similiar system here?

The Dwarves dug too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dum… shadow and flame.- Saruman, The Lord of the Rings and there is something primordial about BP’s quest for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s an Icarus-like story of super-ambition; of reaching too far, delving too deep.

I don’t know if you’ve stopped to contemplate what BP was trying to do…

The well itself started 5,000 feet below the surface. That’s the depth of the Grand Canyon from the rim. And then the company attempted to drill more than 30,000 feet below that ’Äî Mt. Everest would give 972 feet to spare. Furthermore, the company sought oil in a dangerous area of the seabed. It was unstable and many think BP sought it out because seismic data showed huge pools of methane gas – the very gas that blew the top off Deepwater Horizon and killed 11 people.

More than a year ago, geologists criticized Transocean for putting their exploratory rig directly over a massive underground reservoir of methane. According to the New York Times, BP’s internal “documents show that in March, after several weeks of problems on the rig, BP was struggling with a loss of ‘well control.’ And as far back as 11 months ago, it was concerned about the well casing and the blowout preventer”.

The problem is that this methane, located deep in the bowels of the earth, is under tremendous pressure… Some speculate as much as 100,000 psi – far too much for current technology to contain. The shutoff vales and safety measures were built for only 1,000 psi. It was an accident waiting to happen… And there are many that say it could get worse – much worse. Geologists are pointing to other fissures and cracks that are appearing on the ocean floor around the damaged wellhead.

According to CNN:

The University of South Florida recently discovered a second oil plume in the northeastern Gulf. The first plume was found by Mississippi universities in early May. And there have been other plumes discovered by submersibles…

Some geologists say that BP’s arrogance has set off a series of events that may be irreversible. There are some that think that BP has drilled into an deep-core oil volcano that cannot be stopped, regardless of the horizontal drills the company claims will stop the oil plume in August.

Need the mudlogs

Geologist, Chris Landau, for instance, has called for a showing of the mudlogs. A mudlog is a schematic cross sectional drawing of the lithology (rock type) of the well that has been bored. So far, no one has seen them… BP keeps them hidden.

Mr. Landau claims it is a dangerous game drilling into high pressure oil and gas zones because you risk having a blowout if your mud weight is not heavy enough. If you weight up your mud with barium sulfate to a very high level, you risk BLOWING OUT THE FORMATION.

What does that mean? It means you crack the rock deep underground; as the mudweight is now denser than the rock, it escapes into the rock in the pore spaces and the fractures. The well empties of mud. If you have not hit high pressure oil or gas at this stage, you are lucky. But if you have, the oil and gas come flying up the well and you have a blowout, because you have no mud in the well to suppress the oil and gas. You shut down the well with the blowout preventer. If you do not have a blowout preventer, you are in trouble as we have all seen and you can only hope that the oil and gas pressure will naturally fall off with time, otherwise you have to try and put a new blowout preventer in place with oil and gas coming out as you work.

Obviously, the oil and gas pressure hasn’t fallen off; in fact… it’s increased. The problem is that BP may not only have hit the mother of high-pressure wells, but there is also a vast amount of methane down there that could come exploding out like an underwater volcano. I recently heard a recording of Richard Hoagland who was interviewed on Coast to Coast AM.

Mr. Hoagland has suggested that there are cracks in the ocean floor, and that pressure at the base of the wellhead is approximately 100,000 psi. Furthermore, geologists believe there are another 4-5 cracks or fissions in the well. Upon using a GPS and Depth finder system, experts have discovered a large gas bubble, 15-20 miles across and tens of feet high, under the ocean floor.

These bubbles are common. Many believe they have caused the sinking of ships and planes in the Bermuda Triangle. That said, a bubble this large – if able to escape from under the ocean floor through a crack – would cause a gas explosion that Mr. Hoagland likens to Mt. St. Helens… only under water. The BP well is 50 miles from Louisiana. Its release would send a toxic cloud over populated areas. The explosion would also sink any ships and oil structures in the vicinity and create a tsunami which would head toward Florida at 600 mph.

Now, many people have called Hoagland a fringe thinker and a conspiracy theorist. And they may be right… But that doesn’t mean he isn’t on to something.

EPA finds high concentrations of gases in the area

The escape of other poison gases associated with an underground methane bubble (such as hydrogen sulfide, benzene, and methylene chloride) have been found. Last Thursday, the EPA measured hydrogen sulfide at 1,000 parts per billion – well above the normal 5 to 10 ppb. Some benzene levels were measured near the Gulf of Mexico in the range of 3,000 – 4,000 ppb – up from the normal 0-4 ppb.

The Oil Drum (an industry sheet), recently ran an article about the sequence of events that tried to stop the oil spill. The upshot of industry insiders was that after trying a number of ways to close off the leak, the well was compromised, creating other leaks due to the high pressure. BP then cut the well open and tried to capture the oil. In other words: BP shifted from stopping the gusher to opening it up and catching what oil it could. The only reason sane oil men would do this is if they wanted to relieve pressure at the leak hidden down below the seabed… And that sort of leak – known as a “down hole” leak – is one of the most dangerous kind.

It means that BP can’t stop if from above; it can only relieve the pressure. So, more oil is leaking out while BP hopes it can drill new wells before the current one completely erodes. BP is in a race against time… It just won’t admit this fact.

There are abrasives still present, a swirling flow will create hot spots of wear and this erosion is relentless and will always be present until eventually it wears away enough material to break it’s way out. It will slowly eat the bop away especially at the now pinched off riser head and it will flow more and more. Perhaps BP can outrun or keep up with that out flow with various suckage methods for a period of time, but eventually the well will win that race, just how long that race will be?

No one really knows…

Which leads us back to Mr. Landau’s point about the mudlogs and why BP won’t release them. I don’t know… Maybe I’m wearing my tinfoil hat too tight this morning… But this stuff seems possible – if it’s only a worst case scenario. What strikes me as odd is the way the leadership of BP and the Obama administration is acting. BP is running around apologizing to everyone they can find. Obama says give us $20 billion in escrow and $100 million for the people Obama put out of work on the oil rigs due to his six month ban – and BP says, “Sure thing mate, no problem.”

And all of this in a 20-minute meeting?

I’ve been dealing with oil companies for a long time and it just doesn’t add up…Contrast it, for instance, with the Exxon situation in Alaska or the Union Carbide disaster in India. Exxon fought tooth and nail for its shareholders; it appealed court rulings for 19 years. Union Carbide wasn’t settled for 25 years.

BP is rolling over like a simpering dog. Why?

The only reason I can think of is that the company knows – better if not as well as the Obama administration does – that it will get worse. Much worse. I’ve put together a list of oil cleanup stocks for the readers of my Crisis & Opportunity. Many are running, and one has pulled back into a solid buy range. Three more are on my buy list. All I know is that this spill isn’t even half over.Oil in the Gulf will lead the news-cycle for the foreseeable future. And the companies that make products that stop,absorb, or disperse oil have an endless supply of work. Their share prices have nowhere to go but up.

Sincerely,
Christian DeHaemer
Editor, Energy and Capital

There is no place on earth that has been as battered by oil, experts say, leaving residents here astonished at the nonstop attention paid to the gusher half a world away in the Gulf of Mexico. It was only a few weeks ago, they say, that a burst pipe belonging to Royal Dutch Shell in the mangroves was finally shut after flowing for two months: now nothing living moves in a black-and-brown world once teeming with shrimp and crab. Not far away, there is still black crude on Gio Creek from an April spill, and just across the state line in Akwa Ibom the fishermen curse their oil-blackened nets, doubly useless in a barren sea buffeted by a spill from an offshore Exxon Mobil pipe in May that lasted for weeks.

The oil spews from rusted and aging pipes, unchecked by what analysts say is ineffectual or collusive regulation, and abetted by deficient maintenance and sabotage. In the face of this black tide is an infrequent protest — soldiers guarding an Exxon Mobil site beat women who were demonstrating last month, according to witnesses — but mostly resentful resignation.

Small children swim in the polluted estuary here, fishermen take their skiffs out ever farther — “There’s nothing we can catch here,” said Pius Doron, perched anxiously over his boat — and market women trudge through oily streams. “There is Shell oil on my body,” said Hannah Baage, emerging from Gio Creek with a machete to cut the cassava stalks balanced on her head.

That the Gulf of Mexico disaster has transfixed a country and president they so admire is a matter of wonder for people here, living among the palm-fringed estuaries in conditions as abject as any in Nigeria, according to the United Nations. Though their region contributes nearly 80 percent of the government’s revenue, they have hardly benefited from it; life expectancy is the lowest in Nigeria.

“President Obama is worried about that one,” Claytus Kanyie, a local official, said of the gulf spill, standing among dead mangroves in the soft oily muck outside Bodo. “Nobody is worried about this one. The aquatic life of our people is dying off. There used be shrimp. There are no longer any shrimp.” In the distance, smoke rose from what Mr. Kanyie and environmental activists said was an illegal refining business run by local oil thieves and protected, they said, by Nigerian security forces. The swamp was deserted and quiet, without even bird song; before the spills, Mr. Kanyie said, women from Bodo earned a living gathering mollusks and shellfish among the mangroves.

With new estimates that as many as 2.5 million gallons of oil could be spilling into the Gulf of Mexico each day, the Niger Delta has suddenly become a cautionary tale for the United States. As many as 546 million gallons of oil spilled into the Niger Delta over the last five decades, or nearly 11 million gallons a year, a team of experts for the Nigerian government and international and local environmental groups concluded in a 2006 report. By comparison, the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 dumped an estimated 10.8 million gallons of oil into the waters off Alaska.

So the people here cast a jaundiced, if sympathetic, eye at the spill in the gulf. “We’re sorry for them, but it’s what’s been happening to us for 50 years,” said Emman Mbong, an official in Eket. The spills here are all the more devastating because this ecologically sensitive wetlands region, the source of 10 percent of American oil imports, has most of Africa’s mangroves and, like the Louisiana coast, has fed the interior for generations with its abundance of fish, shellfish, wildlife and crops.

Local environmentalists have been denouncing the spoliation for years, with little effect. “It’s a dead environment,” said Patrick Naagbanton of the Center for Environment, Human Rights and Development in Port Harcourt, the leading city of the oil region.
Though much here has been destroyed, much remains, with large expanses of vibrant green. Environmentalists say that with intensive restoration, the Niger Delta could again be what it once was.

Nigeria produced more than two million barrels of oil a day last year, and in over 50 years thousands of miles of pipes have been laid through the swamps. Shell, the major player, has operations on thousands of square miles of territory, according to Amnesty International. Aging columns of oil-well valves, known as Christmas trees, pop up improbably in clearings among the palm trees. Oil sometimes shoots out of them, even if the wells are defunct. “The oil was just shooting up in the air, and it goes up in the sky,” said Amstel M. Gbarakpor, youth president in Kegbara Dere, recalling the spill in April at Gio Creek. “It took them three weeks to secure this well.”

How much of the spillage is due to oil thieves or to sabotage linked to the militant movement active in the Niger Delta, and how much stems from poorly maintained and aging pipes, is a matter of fierce dispute among communities, environmentalists and the oil companies. Caroline Wittgen, a spokeswoman for Shell in Lagos, said, “We don’t discuss individual spills,” but argued that the “vast majority” were caused by sabotage or theft, with only 2 percent due to equipment failure or human error.
“We do not believe that we behave irresponsibly, but we do operate in a unique environment where security and lawlessness are major problems,” Ms. Wittgen said.
Oil companies also contend that they clean up much of what is lost. A spokesman for Exxon Mobil in Lagos, Nigel A. Cookey-Gam, said that the company’s recent offshore spill leaked only about 8,400 gallons and that “this was effectively cleaned up.”

But many experts and local officials say the companies attribute too much to sabotage, to lessen their culpability. Richard Steiner, a consultant on oil spills, concluded in a 2008 report that historically “the pipeline failure rate in Nigeria is many times that found elsewhere in the world,” and he noted that even Shell acknowledged “almost every year” a spill due to a corroded pipeline.

On the beach at Ibeno, the few fishermen were glum. Far out to sea oil had spilled for weeks from the Exxon Mobil pipe. “We can’t see where to fish; oil is in the sea,” Patrick Okoni said. “We don’t have an international media to cover us, so nobody cares about it,” said Mr. Mbong, in nearby Eket. “Whatever cry we cry is not heard outside of here.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/world/africa/17nigeria.html?ref=science

I joined the (Australian) Navy when I was 15 and having grown up in the bush, I didn’t see much cause and effect of humans on the environment; however, before I turned 18, I had seen sights of human spoilage in every port, even Japan and Hawaii in 1970.

When al-Jazeera Television first was aired, I watched sort of like looking at a car accident, I didn’t want the Arabs putting their bias on any sort of news, I grew up in a ‘culture’ of disbelief on non-anglo saxon peoples. My ignorance was managed well by those who purported to be looking after our interests, but now we know better.

When I was young, I was taught about inferior blacks (not by my Mum or dad) and that Asians were lesser people; we were brain-washed to feel superior as though that would be enough to carry us through life; but now, more and more people are coming to the realisation that our own governments have done more to delude, shortchange and diminish our quality of life than all other non-anglo saxon types combined.

As the cost of living goes up – whether by local, state or federal government charges and taxes – politicians too are realising their time has about come and people will not accept / are unable to accept too much more; but corporate government is our final undoing. The following is a long article; it doesn’t have a happy ending, but there is a message, and the message is greed is not good and we humans have brought about our own demise.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster is not just an industrial accident – it is a violent wound inflicted on the Earth itself. In this special report from the Gulf coast, a leading author and activist shows how it lays bare the hubris at the heart of capitalism

Naomi Klein
The Guardian, Saturday 19 June 2010

‘Obama cannot order pelicans not to die (no matter whose ass he kicks). And no amount of money – not BP’s $20bn, not $100bn – can replace a culture that’s lost its roots.’ Photograph: Lee Celano/Reuters

Everyone gathered for the town hall meeting had been repeatedly instructed to show civility to the gentlemen from BP and the federal government. These fine folks had made time in their busy schedules to come to a high school gymnasium on a Tuesday night in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, one of many coastal communities where brown poison was slithering through the marshes, part of what has come to be described as the largest environmental disaster in US history.

“Speak to others the way you would want to be spoken to,” the chair of the meeting pleaded one last time before opening the floor for questions.

And for a while the crowd, mostly made up of fishing families, showed remarkable restraint. They listened patiently to Larry Thomas, a genial BP public relations flack, as he told them that he was committed to “doing better” to process their claims for lost revenue – then passed all the details off to a markedly less friendly subcontractor. They heard out the suit from the Environmental Protection Agency as he informed them that, contrary to what they have read about the lack of testing and the product being banned in Britain, the chemical dispersant being sprayed on the oil in massive quantities was really perfectly safe.

But patience started running out by the third time Ed Stanton, a coast guard captain, took to the podium to reassure them that “the coast guard intends to make sure that BP cleans it up”.

“Put it in writing!” someone shouted out. By now the air conditioning had shut itself off and the coolers of Budweiser were running low. A shrimper named Matt O’Brien approached the mic. “We don’t need to hear this anymore,” he declared, hands on hips. It didn’t matter what assurances they were offered because, he explained, “we just don’t trust you guys!” And with that, such a loud cheer rose up from the floor you’d have thought the Oilers (the unfortunately named school football team) had scored a touchdown.

The showdown was cathartic, if nothing else. For weeks residents had been subjected to a barrage of pep talks and extravagant promises coming from Washington, Houston and London. Every time they turned on their TVs, there was the BP boss, Tony Hayward, offering his solemn word that he would “make it right”. Or else it was President Barack Obama expressing his absolute confidence that his administration would “leave the Gulf coast in better shape than it was before”, that he was “making sure” it “comes back even stronger than it was before this crisis”.

It all sounded great. But for people whose livelihoods put them in intimate contact with the delicate chemistry of the wetlands, it also sounded completely ridiculous, painfully so. Once the oil coats the base of the marsh grass, as it had already done just a few miles from here, no miracle machine or chemical concoction could safely get it out. You can skim oil off the surface of open water, and you can rake it off a sandy beach, but an oiled marsh just sits there, slowly dying. The larvae of countless species for which the marsh is a spawning ground – shrimp, crab, oysters and fin fish – will be poisoned.
It was already happening. Earlier that day, I travelled through nearby marshes in a shallow water boat. Fish were jumping in waters encircled by white boom, the strips of thick cotton and mesh BP is using to soak up the oil. The circle of fouled material seemed to be tightening around the fish like a noose. Nearby, a red-winged blackbird perched atop a 2 metre (7ft) blade of oil-contaminated marsh grass. Death was creeping up the cane; the small bird may as well have been standing on a lit stick of dynamite.
And then there is the grass itself, or the Roseau cane, as the tall sharp blades are called. If oil seeps deeply enough into the marsh, it will not only kill the grass above ground but also the roots. Those roots are what hold the marsh together, keeping bright green land from collapsing into the Mississippi River delta and the Gulf of Mexico. So not only do places like Plaquemines Parish stand to lose their fisheries, but also much of the physical barrier that lessens the intensity of fierce storms like hurricane Katrina. Which could mean losing everything.
How long will it take for an ecosystem this ravaged to be “restored and made whole” as Obama’s interior secretary has pledged to do? It’s not at all clear that such a thing is remotely possible, at least not in a time frame we can easily wrap our heads around. The Alaskan fisheries have yet to fully recover from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill and some species of fish never returned. Government scientists now estimate that as much as a Valdez-worth of oil may be entering the Gulf coastal waters every four days. An even worse prognosis emerges from the 1991 Gulf war spill, when an estimated 11m barrels of oil were dumped into the Persian Gulf – the largest spill ever. That oil entered the marshland and stayed there, burrowing deeper and deeper thanks to holes dug by crabs. It’s not a perfect comparison, since so little clean-up was done, but according to a study conducted 12 years after the disaster, nearly 90% of the impacted muddy salt marshes and mangroves were still profoundly damaged.
We do know this. Far from being “made whole,” the Gulf coast, more than likely, will be diminished. Its rich waters and crowded skies will be less alive than they are today. The physical space many communities occupy on the map will also shrink, thanks to erosion. And the coast’s legendary culture will contract and wither. The fishing families up and down the coast do not just gather food, after all. They hold up an intricate network that includes family tradition, cuisine, music, art and endangered languages – much like the roots of grass holding up the land in the marsh. Without fishing, these unique cultures lose their root system, the very ground on which they stand. (BP, for its part, is well aware of the limits of recovery. The company’s Gulf of Mexico regional oil spill response plan specifically instructs officials not to make “promises that property, ecology, or anything else will be restored to normal”. Which is no doubt why its officials consistently favour folksy terms like “make it right”.)
If Katrina pulled back the curtain on the reality of racism in America, the BP disaster pulls back the curtain on something far more hidden: how little control even the most ingenious among us have over the awesome, intricately interconnected natural forces with which we so casually meddle. BP cannot plug the hole in the Earth that it made. Obama cannot order fish species to survive, or brown pelicans not to go extinct (no matter whose ass he kicks). No amount of money – not BP’s recently pledged $20bn (£13.5bn), not $100bn – can replace a culture that has lost its roots. And while our politicians and corporate leaders have yet to come to terms with these humbling truths, the people whose air, water and livelihoods have been contaminated are losing their illusions fast.
“Everything is dying,” a woman said as the town hall meeting was finally coming to a close. “How can you honestly tell us that our Gulf is resilient and will bounce back? Because not one of you up here has a hint as to what is going to happen to our Gulf. You sit up here with a straight face and act like you know when you don’t know.”
This Gulf coast crisis is about many things – corruption, deregulation, the addiction to fossil fuels. But underneath it all, it’s about this: our culture’s excruciatingly dangerous claim to have such complete understanding and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and re-engineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us. But as the BP disaster has revealed, nature is always more unpredictable than the most sophisticated mathematical and geological models imagine. During Thursday’s congressional testimony, Hayward said: “The best minds and the deepest expertise are being brought to bear” on the crisis, and that, “with the possible exception of the space programme in the 1960s, it is difficult to imagine the gathering of a larger, more technically proficient team in one place in peacetime.” And yet, in the face of what the geologist Jill Schneiderman has described as “Pandora’s well”, they are like the men at the front of that gymnasium: they act like they know, but they don’t know.
BP’s mission statement
In the arc of human history, the notion that nature is a machine for us to re-engineer at will is a relatively recent conceit. In her ground-breaking 1980 book The Death of Nature, the environmental historian Carolyn Merchant reminded readers that up until the 1600s, the Earth was alive, usually taking the form of a mother. Europeans – like indigenous people the world over – believed the planet to be a living organism, full of life-giving powers but also wrathful tempers. There were, for this reason, strong taboos against actions that would deform and desecrate “the mother”, including mining.
The metaphor changed with the unlocking of some (but by no means all) of nature’s mysteries during the scientific revolution of the 1600s. With nature now cast as a machine, devoid of mystery or divinity, its component parts could be dammed, extracted and remade with impunity. Nature still sometimes appeared as a woman, but one easily dominated and subdued. Sir Francis Bacon best encapsulated the new ethos when he wrote in the 1623 De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum that nature is to be “put in constraint, moulded, and made as it were new by art and the hand of man”.
Those words may as well have been BP’s corporate mission statement. Boldly inhabiting what the company called “the energy frontier”, it dabbled in synthesising methane-producing microbes and announced that “a new area of investigation” would be geoengineering. And of course it bragged that, at its Tiber prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, it now had “the deepest well ever drilled by the oil and gas industry” – as deep under the ocean floor as jets fly overhead.
Imagining and preparing for what would happen if these experiments in altering the building blocks of life and geology went wrong occupied precious little space in the corporate imagination. As we have all discovered, after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on 20 April, the company had no systems in place to effectively respond to this scenario. Explaining why it did not have even the ultimately unsuccessful containment dome waiting to be activated on shore, a BP spokesman, Steve Rinehart, said: “I don’t think anybody foresaw the circumstance that we’re faced with now.” Apparently, it “seemed inconceivable” that the blowout preventer would ever fail – so why prepare?
This refusal to contemplate failure clearly came straight from the top. A year ago, Hayward told a group of graduate students at Stanford University that he has a plaque on his desk that reads: “If you knew you could not fail, what would you try?” Far from being a benign inspirational slogan, this was actually an accurate description of how BP and its competitors behaved in the real world. In recent hearings on Capitol Hill, congressman Ed Markey of Massachusetts grilled representatives from the top oil and gas companies on the revealing ways in which they had allocated resources. Over three years, they had spent “$39bn to explore for new oil and gas. Yet, the average investment in research and development for safety, accident prevention and spill response was a paltry $20m a year.”
These priorities go a long way towards explaining why the initial exploration plan that BP submitted to the federal government for the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon well reads like a Greek tragedy about human hubris. The phrase “little risk” appears five times. Even if there is a spill, BP confidently predicts that, thanks to “proven equipment and technology”, adverse affects will be minimal. Presenting nature as a predictable and agreeable junior partner (or perhaps subcontractor), the report cheerfully explains that should a spill occur, “Currents and microbial degradation would remove the oil from the water column or dilute the constituents to background levels”. The effects on fish, meanwhile, “would likely be sublethal” because of “the capability of adult fish and shellfish to avoid a spill [and] to metabolise hydrocarbons”. (In BP’s telling, rather than a dire threat, a spill emerges as an all-you-can-eat buffet for aquatic life.)
Best of all, should a major spill occur, there is, apparently, “little risk of contact or impact to the coastline” because of the company’s projected speedy response (!) and “due to the distance [of the rig] to shore” – about 48 miles (77km). This is the most astonishing claim of all. In a gulf that often sees winds of more than 70km an hour, not to mention hurricanes, BP had so little respect for the ocean’s capacity to ebb and flow, surge and heave, that it did not think oil could make a paltry 77km trip. (Last week, a shard of the exploded Deepwater Horizon showed up on a beach in Florida, 306km away.)
None of this sloppiness would have been possible, however, had BP not been making its predictions to a political class eager to believe that nature had indeed been mastered. Some, like Republican Lisa Murkowski, were more eager than others. The Alaskan senator was so awe-struck by the industry’s four-dimensional seismic imaging that she proclaimed deep-sea drilling to have reached the very height of controlled artificiality. “It’s better than Disneyland in terms of how you can take technologies and go after a resource that is thousands of years old and do so in an environmentally sound way,” she told the Senate energy committee just seven months ago.
Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that’s when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” – with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich’s telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be – locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore – was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring about the environment was for sissies: as senator Mitch McConnell put it, “in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty”. By the time the infamous “Drill Baby Drill” Republican national convention rolled around, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-made fossil fuels, they would have bored under the convention floor if someone had brought a big enough drill.
Obama, eventually, gave in, as he invariably does. With cosmic bad timing, just three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon blew up, the president announced he would open up previously protected parts of the country to offshore drilling. The practice was not as risky as he had thought, he explained. “Oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.” That wasn’t enough for Sarah Palin, however, who sneered at the Obama administration’s plans to conduct more studies before drilling in some areas. “My goodness, folks, these areas have been studied to death,” she told the Southern Republican leadership conference in New Orleans, now just 11 days before the blowout. “Let’s drill, baby, drill, not stall, baby, stall!” And there was much rejoicing.
In his congressional testimony, Hayward said: “We and the entire industry will learn from this terrible event.” And one might well imagine that a catastrophe of this magnitude would indeed instil BP executives and the “Drill Now” crowd with a new sense of humility. There are, however, no signs that this is the case. The response to the disaster – at the corporate and governmental levels – has been rife with the precise brand of arrogance and overly sunny predictions that created the disaster in the first place.
The ocean is big, she can take it, we heard from Hayward in the early days. While spokesman John Curry insisted that hungry microbes would consume whatever oil was in the water system, because “nature has a way of helping the situation”. But nature has not been playing along. The deep-sea gusher has bust out of all BP’s top hats, containment domes, and junk shots. The ocean’s winds and currents have made a mockery of the lightweight booms BP has laid out to absorb the oil. “We told them,” said Byron Encalade, the president of the Louisiana Oysters Association. “The oil’s gonna go over the booms or underneath the bottom.” Indeed it did. The marine biologist Rick Steiner, who has been following the clean up closely, estimates that “70% or 80% of the booms are doing absolutely nothing at all”.
And then there are the controversial chemical dispersants: more than 1.3m gallons dumped with the company’s trademark “what could go wrong?” attitude. As the angry residents at the Plaquemines Parish town hall rightly point out, few tests had been conducted, and there is scant research about what this unprecedented amount of dispersed oil will do to marine life. Nor is there a way to clean up the toxic mixture of oil and chemicals below the surface. Yes, fast multiplying microbes do devour underwater oil – but in the process they also absorb the water’s oxygen, creating a whole new threat to marine life.
BP had even dared to imagine that it could prevent unflattering images of oil-covered beaches and birds from escaping the disaster zone. When I was on the water with a TV crew, for instance, we were approached by another boat whose captain asked, “”Y’all work for BP?” When we said no, the response – in the open ocean – was “You can’t be here then”. But of course these heavy-handed tactics, like all the others, have failed. There is simply too much oil in too many places. “You cannot tell God’s air where to flow and go, and you can’t tell water where to flow and go,” I was told by Debra Ramirez. It was a lesson she had learned from living in Mossville, Louisiana, surrounded by 14 emission-spewing petrochemical plants, and watching illness spread from neighbour to neighbour.
Human limitation has been the one constant of this catastrophe. After two months, we still have no idea how much oil is flowing, nor when it will stop. The company’s claim that it will complete relief wells by the end of August – repeated by Obama in his Oval Office address – is seen by many scientists as a bluff. The procedure is risky and could fail, and there is a real possibility that the oil could continue to leak for years.
The flow of denial shows no sign of abating either. Louisiana politicians indignantly oppose Obama’s temporary freeze on deepwater drilling, accusing him of killing the one big industry left standing now that fishing and tourism are in crisis. Palin mused on Facebook that “no human endeavour is ever without risk”, while Texas Republican congressman John Culberson described the disaster as a “statistical anomaly”. By far the most sociopathic reaction, however, comes from veteran Washington commentator Llewellyn King: rather than turning away from big engineering risks, we should pause in “wonder that we can build machines so remarkable that they can lift the lid off the underworld”.
Make the bleeding stop
Thankfully, many are taking a very different lesson from the disaster, standing not in wonder at humanity’s power to reshape nature, but at our powerlessness to cope with the fierce natural forces we unleash. There is something else too. It is the feeling that the hole at the bottom of the ocean is more than an engineering accident or a broken machine. It is a violent wound in a living organism; that it is part of us. And thanks to BP’s live camera feed, we can all watch the Earth’s guts gush forth, in real time, 24 hours a day.
John Wathen, a conservationist with the Waterkeeper Alliance, was one of the few independent observers to fly over the spill in the early days of the disaster. After filming the thick red streaks of oil that the coast guard politely refers to as “rainbow sheen”, he observed what many had felt: “The Gulf seems to be bleeding.” This imagery comes up again and again in conversations and interviews. Monique Harden, an environmental rights lawyer in New Orleans, refuses to call the disaster an “oil spill” and instead says, “we are haemorrhaging”. Others speak of the need to “make the bleeding stop”. And I was personally struck, flying over the stretch of ocean where the Deepwater Horizon sank with the US Coast Guard, that the swirling shapes the oil made in the ocean waves looked remarkably like cave drawings: a feathery lung gasping for air, eyes staring upwards, a prehistoric bird. Messages from the deep.
And this is surely the strangest twist in the Gulf coast saga: it seems to be waking us up to the reality that the Earth never was a machine. After 400 years of being declared dead, and in the middle of so much death, the Earth is coming alive.
The experience of following the oil’s progress through the ecosystem is a kind of crash course in deep ecology. Every day we learn more about how what seems to be a terrible problem in one isolated part of the world actually radiates out in ways most of us could never have imagined. One day we learn that the oil could reach Cuba – then Europe. Next we hear that fishermen all the way up the Atlantic in Prince Edward Island, Canada, are worried because the Bluefin tuna they catch off their shores are born thousands of miles away in those oil-stained Gulf waters. And we learn, too, that for birds, the Gulf coast wetlands are the equivalent of a busy airport hub – everyone seems to have a stopover: 110 species of migratory songbirds and 75% of all migratory US waterfowl.
It’s one thing to be told by an incomprehensible chaos theorist that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas. It’s another to watch chaos theory unfold before your eyes. Carolyn Merchant puts the lesson like this: “The problem as BP has tragically and belatedly discovered is that nature as an active force cannot be so confined.” Predictable outcomes are unusual within ecological systems, while “unpredictable, chaotic events [are] usual”. And just in case we still didn’t get it, a few days ago, a bolt of lightning struck a BP ship like an exclamation mark, forcing it to suspend its containment efforts. And don’t even mention what a hurricane would do to BP’s toxic soup.
There is, it must be stressed, something uniquely twisted about this particular path to enlightenment. They say that Americans learn where foreign countries are by bombing them. Now it seems we are all learning about nature’s circulatory systems by poisoning them.
In the late 90s, an isolated indigenous group in Colombia captured world headlines with an almost Avatar-esque conflict. From their remote home in the Andean cloud forests, the U’wa let it be known that if Occidental Petroleum carried out plans to drill for oil on their territory, they would commit mass ritual suicide by jumping off a cliff. Their elders explained that oil is part of ruiria, “the blood of Mother Earth”. They believe that all life, including their own, flows from ruiria, so pulling out the oil would bring on their destruction. (Oxy eventually withdrew from the region, saying there wasn’t as much oil as it had previously thought.)
Virtually all indigenous cultures have myths about gods and spirits living in the natural world – in rocks, mountains, glaciers, forests – as did European culture before the scientific revolution. Katja Neves, an anthropologist at Concordia University, points out that the practice serves a practical purpose. Calling the Earth “sacred” is another way of expressing humility in the face of forces we do not fully comprehend. When something is sacred, it demands that we proceed with caution. Even awe.
If we are absorbing this lesson at long last, the implications could be profound. Public support for increased offshore drilling is dropping precipitously, down 22% from the peak of the “Drill Now” frenzy. The issue is not dead, however. It is only a matter of time before the Obama administration announces that, thanks to ingenious new technology and tough new regulations, it is now perfectly safe to drill in the deep sea, even in the Arctic, where an under-ice clean up would be infinitely more complex than the one underway in the Gulf. But perhaps this time we won’t be so easily reassured, so quick to gamble with the few remaining protected havens.
Same goes for geoengineering. As climate change negotiations wear on, we should be ready to hear more from Dr Steven Koonin, Obama’s undersecretary of energy for science. He is one of the leading proponents of the idea that climate change can be combated with techno tricks like releasing sulphate and aluminium particles into the atmosphere – and of course it’s all perfectly safe, just like Disneyland! He also happens to be BP’s former chief scientist, the man who just 15 months ago was still overseeing the technology behind BP’s supposedly safe charge into deepwater drilling. Maybe this time we will opt not to let the good doctor experiment with the physics and chemistry of the Earth, and choose instead to reduce our consumption and shift to renewable energies that have the virtue that, when they fail, they fail small. As US comedian Bill Maher put it, “You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash.”
The most positive possible outcome of this disaster would be not only an acceleration of renewable energy sources like wind, but a full embrace of the precautionary principle in science. The mirror opposite of Hayward’s “If you knew you could not fail” credo, the precautionary principle holds that “when an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health” we tread carefully, as if failure were possible, even likely. Perhaps we can even get Hayward a new desk plaque to contemplate as he signs compensation cheques. “You act like you know, but you don’t know.”

Naomi Klein visited the Gulf coast with a film-crew from Fault Lines, a documentary programme hosted by Avi Lewis on al-Jazeera English Television. She was a consultant on the film.

The Macondo oil prospect is an immense deep-Earth oil and gas reserve located below the northern Gulf of Mexico . It is named after the cursed town in Gabriel Marquez’s book “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Since it’s discovery, geologists knew it would take advanced drilling techniques to successfully access the reserve, – it would not be a conventional offshore effort. The contents of Macondo are also not particularly high quality, it is full of methane, natural gases, sulfur, and tarry oil. The current gushing wellhead is essentially an asphalt volcano. As you can see on the beach, or through what images are in the news, it is a rusty, reddish crude which gives off the stink of sulphur.

Due to the composition of the mass, and the difficult geology surrounding it in the undersea Mississippi Canyon, the method chosen to access the slurry of crude was (and is) highly controversial, and illegal. What they did was drill below 35,000 feet at a slight angle, and then pump-in hyper-pressurized chemicals in order to fracture open the Earth. Their method, “deep angular frac drilling,” was one cause of the first Gulf War, as Kuwaiti and western oil corporations (like BP) attempted to drill underneath Iraq ‘s borders in order to rob their oil.

BP and their contractors were operating in secret when they pushed into the dangerous pressurized mass. Even in our lax regulatory culture, their plan would not have been allowed.

Oil trade journals, and whistleblowers with the Army Corps of Engineers, have suggested that BP caused a much larger disaster in the months before Deep Horizon entered the news.

Submarines with the National Undersea Laboratory and the US Navy have apparently been tracking an immense lake of oil (the size of Louisiana ) that is expanding at 3,500 feet below the surface. This may have been caused by the initial “frac” drilling effort.

First Signs of a Coverup

Halliburton was the cement and well-head contractor at the Horizon site.

A few days before DeepWater Horizon blew, Halliburton acquired Boots and Coots, an enormous oil spill cleanup and safety company. This all-too-convenient acquisition was apparently performed AT A LOSS for Halliburton. In the event of an already unfolding disaster, this would be a wise purchase for Halliburton not merely on account of the contracts Boots and Coots would receive, but it would also aid them in a future coverup, as they would be in control of all disclosure within one of the world’s premier oil logistics and safety companies.

Some BP officers and an untold amount of other personnel were apparently on DeepWater Horizon when the disaster occurred. This is highly unusual. BP’s back-story behind this coincidence was that a celebration was underway for Deep Horizon’s safety record. Yet, officials from TransOcean (the company that was leasing the rig) claim there was a major fight on board between BP and TransOcean managers regarding their drill plan on the same day.

We can only speculate right now as to what was really going on, but it’s possible that DeepWater Horizon was digging a relief well for a gushing chasm they had previously opened in the Macondo. Another possibility is that Deep Horizon was intentionally destroyed as a distraction, – a ludicrous attempt to disguise the incident that had already occurred. The employees on board may have been allowed to die in the fire leaving no witnesses to BP’s crime.

Be it 1,000 (as BP first stated) then 5,000 barrels a day – then they were ‘capturing’ 5,000 barrels a day yet camera footage sees tonnes of oil spewing out – but when we burn 86 million barrels a day, it is micro, yet the macro effect on the ‘world’ economy is sending considerable ripples of concern outwards from the Gulf of Mexico.

Can you imagine the pressure some 1,400 metres down, forcing the oil – like a stood on toothpaste tube – out at a great rate of knots; and the ecological damage. For too long, the British, Dutch and American oil companies made other countries absolute shit holes, is this just nature’s karma?

It’s funny in a way how Wall Street is lower as the energy sector takes a hit on New York stock markets. Apparently the Yanks have announced a criminal investigation into BP’s oil disaster and the USA administration has announced a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling.  How will Halliburton fare is a question I would like to know, with former vice president Dick Cheney in there, thick as thieves (fitting terminology ?).

While of micro and macro economics and slippery slopes, the Poms have suggested to the Greeks that they pull the pin on the Euro to save themselves (borrowing all that money and devaluing there stuff will increase the debt); one must ponder as to the motive/s or agenda as the Poms ‘lend/buy’ USA bonds to support a worthless Greenback; by making the Euro shaky, will ‘investors’ be that stupid to ditch the Euro – which is dropping like a leaf – or the USA$ – which is like a mill-stone around the world’s neck, by force rather choice.

Chinese manufacturing has slowed and being concerned about the economic outlook, are reluctant to buy; the US manufacturing sector and construction spending has improved, but is going from depression to a recession – temporarily – a real improvement or just fanciful thinking?

The Aussie $ is down against the Greenback at 82.88 US cents; 56.64 UK pence and 67.89 euro cents with gold at $US1,224.30 an ounce while oil is down to $US71.85 a barrel.  Whatever your thoughts, remember we are all going down the slippery slope and the best has been and gone; enjoy what you have because it will never be cheaper …

Former British prime minister Tony Blair backed Iraq war claimed ‘I’d do it again’ and why wouldn’t he; politicians and senior bureaucrats cashing in on contacts is common and as a British MP said ‘revolving door politics at its worst’.

Mr Blair is using his role as the West’s Middle East envoy for personal gain and revelations also shed fresh light on his astonishing earnings, which include lucrative after-dinner speaking, consultancies with banks and foreign governments, a generous advance for his forthcoming memoirs, as well as the pension and other perks he enjoys as a former prime minister.

Blair Man of Steel John Howard forged close alliances with US President George W. Bush during his invasion of Iraq, and earning blood money – using your own countrymen as front-line troops - doesn’t just look bad, it stinks; being the leader of your country and being on the payroll of big foreign oil corporations and keeping people in the dark about it tells us more than fessing up.

The exact nature of the deal is unknown, but UI Energy is one of the biggest investors in Iraq’s oil-rich Kurdistan region, which became semi-autonomous in the wake of the Iraq war; Blair’s fee have not been disclosed but is likely to have run into hundreds of thousands of dollars and is odd because UI Energy is fond of boasting of its foreign political advisers, who include the former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke and several prominent American politicians.

This is but the tip of the iceberg ….

However, it will be local governments that have escalating financial upkeep problems, extracting money from ratepayers struggling to meet very high transport and food costs on a shrinking householder’s family budget. With exisitng public transport, how will workers get to work with only 15% of their normal fuel usage ?

On 1st March 2010, the Federal Government published a new Australian Energy Resource Assessment (AERA)[1].  In chapter 3 on oil it contains a graph on future oil production on page 79. [fig_3_43_geoscience_australia]. What we can see from this graph (note the inserted comment is by the author of this paper):

* Crude oil production from known oil fields will dramatically decline by 85% over the next 10 years

* This decline is offset by condensate from wet gas (mainly in LNG projects) but because of a lack of condensate splitters in Australian refineries 95% of this is exported and

* The prospect for new oil discoveries is not very good.

Geologically, Australia is better off with natural gas; however, since global oil export volumes are shrinking at the same time (details below), Australia will slide into a huge oil import crisis. While the government hopes coal-to-liquids, gas-to-liquids and 2nd generation bio fuels will come to the rescue, despite the report stating it is very uncertain whether that will materialize in the quantities required, the reality is it will always be too little and forget about the too late; even they do see the light of day, the energy profit ratios of these fuels will be very low:

6/1/2010

Diminishing Returns of Fossil Fuel Energy Invested  – http://www.crudeoilpeak.com/?p=909

Checking the above graph compares with previous government reports and Figure 6 is from Geoscience Australia’s 2005 submission 127 to the Senate Inquiry on Oil Supplies:[2]  figure6geoscienceaustralia.  It shows 3 projections up to 2025: P10, P50 and P90 and each number denotes the probability in percent that this projection will actually occur.

Strangely, the AERA report does not show different probabilities. So let’s superimpose the 2 graphs to see where we are:
fig_3_43_superimposed_ga_subm127_actual_au_petroleum_stats.   We can see from the graph that the actual crude production curve (black line 2006-2009) has just hit the P90 estimate from 2005. It remains to be seen whether it will follow the new projection (light blue columns).  A lot of condensate has been added and that assumes all LNG projects go ahead as planned.

Read more about:

* Australian oil reserves and resources, how AERA omits Geoscience Australia’s conservative 2P reserves
* AERA’s misldeading statement about “enough” oil for 42 years and a factually incorrect “balanced” oil supply
* the problems with propane deficient LPG and butane exports
* Australia’s coming oil import crisis
* Lack of a Strategic Oil Reserve
* Need to save oil in a hurry
* 3 examples of road projects which make no sense in a period of declining oil production: new Clem7  road tunnel in Brisbane, Hunter freeway and Western freeway in Melbourne; by downloading the full article of 10 pages as PDF file: Australian
Crude Oil Decline 85 Percent Over 10 Years [1.27 MB]
http://www.crudeoilpeak.com/pdfs/28

Well as he has a vested interest in rail, airline and travel companies (to name a few), he needs to make business plans that consider all contingencies.

In the Guardian.co.uk on Sunday 7 February 2010, Branson and fellow leading businessmen intend to warn ministers that the world is running out of  oil and faces an oil crunch within five years  … <http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/oil>

The founder of the Virgin group (whose companies are sensitive to http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/energy energy prices, will say that the “coming crisis could be even more serious than the credit crunch”.

“The next five years will see us face another crunch the oil crunch. This time, we do have the chance to prepare. The challenge is to use that time well,” Branson will say.

“Our message to government and businesses is clear: act,” he says in a foreword to a new report on the crisis. “Don’t let the oil crunch catch us out in the way that the credit crunch did.”  Other British executives who will support the warning include Ian Marchant, chief executive of <http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/scottishandsouthernenergy>Scottish and Southern Energy</a> group, and Brian Souter, chief executive of transport operator <http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/stagecoachgroup>Stagecoach</a>.

Their call for urgent government action comes amid a <http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/nov/29/peak-oil> wider debate on the issue and follows allegations by insiders at the International Energy Agency that the organisation had deliberately <http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/09/peak-oil-international-energy agency underplayed the threat of so-called “peak oil” to avoid panic on the stock markets.

As in Australia, Ministers have until now refused to take predictions of oil droughts seriously, preferring to side with oil companies such as BP and ExxonMobil and crude producers such as the Saudis, who insist there is nothing to worry about.

But there are signs this is about to change, according to Jeremy Leggett, founder of the Solarcentury renewable power company and a member of a peak oil taskforce within the business community. “[We are] in regular contact with government; we have reason to believe their risk thinking on peak oil may be evolving away from BP et al’s and we await the results of further consultations with keen interest.”

The issue came up at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos where Thierry Desmarest, chief executive of the Total oil company in France, also broke ranks. The world could struggle to produce more than 95m barrels of oil a day in future, he said 10% above present levels. “The problem of peak oil remains.” Chris Skrebowski, an independent oil consultant who prepared parts of the peak oil report for Branson and others, said that only recession is holding back a crisis: “The next major supply constraint, along with spiking oil prices, will not occur until recession-hit demand grows to the point that it removes the current excess oil stocks and the large spare capacity held by Opec. However, once these are removed, possibly as early as 2012-13 and no later than 2014-15, oil prices are likely to spike, imperilling economic growth and causing economic dislocation.”

Skrebowski believes that Britain is particularly vulnerable because it has gone from being a net exporter of oil, gas and coal to being an importer, and is becoming increasingly exposed to competition for supplies. [We in Australia are a net importer of oil as well; all of our diesel comes from overseas]  “This is likely to put pressure on the UK balance of payments and in a world of floating exchange rates is also likely to put downward pressure on the valuation of sterling. In other words, the positive benefits to the valuation of the pound as a petrocurrency are now eroding,” he said.

The question of peak oil came to centre stage last November when a whistleblower told the Guardian the figures provided by the IEA and used by the UK and US governments for much of their planning scenarios were inaccurate. “The IEA in 2005 was predicting that oil supplies could rise as high as 120m barrels a day by 2030, although it was forced to reduce this gradually to 116m and then 105m last year,” said the IEA source. “The 120m figure always was nonsense but even today’s number is much higher than can be justified and the IEA knows this.”