Sunday, May 30, 2010
This scares everybody — that we can’t make it stop, says BP chief
John Hofmeister, a former president of Shell, complained that BP and the US Government were not doing enough to clean up the spill and did not seem open to new ideas.
“We are still relying on old technology,” he said, claiming that supertankers capable of far more efficient operations were ready and waiting in the Middle East.
“The idea’s been presented to the Coast Guard. This is where I’m concerned we’ve got ‘NIH’ — not invented here — syndrome.”
Theirs is a society – and an economy – fuelled and lubricated by cheap oil (Americans currently pay just 50p a litre for their petrol, in contrast to £1.25 a litre in the UK, for example). And cheap oil has a price. Every time there is an oil disaster there are calls for urgent changes and massive investment – an end altogether to risky undersea drilling perhaps, more stringent rules, a requirement for inflatable containment rafts and emergency teams to be permanently deployed, double skinned tanker hulls and so forth.
If America decides it never wants to see this happen again, it will have to dig deep into its collective wallet and pay a higher price for its oil. And the chances of that happening are even less than the chances of success in the latest plan to cap the Deepwater Horizon well.
IMO: America has been laying off its problems to India and China for a long time. It is perhaps best that it now has to face a little of its own extravagences and vanities at last. Australians, for good reason, had for years talked of the English as "pommie whingers", who couldn't even stand the heat and the flies. I faced 115 degrees Fahrenheit temperature as a child of six, without caring much, and really had to laugh. To me, India for example seems relatively cool. Now the US, with their President Jubilation T. Cornpone Obama, cannot stand their own eccentric economic gambling follies. America seem to be made up of "just US whingers". But it could have been much worse for the US. For example, they could have even been nuked into the ground by a perhaps mistaken but basically well meaning Russia during the US inspired "cold war", the invention of vile capitalist criminal gamblers, who preferred gambling to civilised compromise.
“We are still relying on old technology,” he said, claiming that supertankers capable of far more efficient operations were ready and waiting in the Middle East.
“The idea’s been presented to the Coast Guard. This is where I’m concerned we’ve got ‘NIH’ — not invented here — syndrome.”
Theirs is a society – and an economy – fuelled and lubricated by cheap oil (Americans currently pay just 50p a litre for their petrol, in contrast to £1.25 a litre in the UK, for example). And cheap oil has a price. Every time there is an oil disaster there are calls for urgent changes and massive investment – an end altogether to risky undersea drilling perhaps, more stringent rules, a requirement for inflatable containment rafts and emergency teams to be permanently deployed, double skinned tanker hulls and so forth.
If America decides it never wants to see this happen again, it will have to dig deep into its collective wallet and pay a higher price for its oil. And the chances of that happening are even less than the chances of success in the latest plan to cap the Deepwater Horizon well.
IMO: America has been laying off its problems to India and China for a long time. It is perhaps best that it now has to face a little of its own extravagences and vanities at last. Australians, for good reason, had for years talked of the English as "pommie whingers", who couldn't even stand the heat and the flies. I faced 115 degrees Fahrenheit temperature as a child of six, without caring much, and really had to laugh. To me, India for example seems relatively cool. Now the US, with their President Jubilation T. Cornpone Obama, cannot stand their own eccentric economic gambling follies. America seem to be made up of "just US whingers". But it could have been much worse for the US. For example, they could have even been nuked into the ground by a perhaps mistaken but basically well meaning Russia during the US inspired "cold war", the invention of vile capitalist criminal gamblers, who preferred gambling to civilised compromise.
# posted by uv : 6:57 PM
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