source: http://www.schnews.co.uk/archive/news726.php

REPORT FROM NEW ORLEANS ON THE BP OIL-SPILL DISASTER…

In response to America’s largest ever environmental disaster, Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, said, “I’d like my life back.” We’re sure he does, as would the eleven workers who died on BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig when it exploded 40 miles off the Louisiana coast, in the Gulf of Mexico, on April 20th.

But you have to sympathise with Tony. The fact that BP failed to test the strength of the cement in the well, despite knowing that the casing was “the riskier of two options” and that it “might collapse under pressure” can’t be held against him. Even though the same disregard for safety killed 15 and injured 170 BP workers in the Texas Oil Refinery explosion of 2005.

BP has also had over 20 years since the Exxon-Valdez oil spill in Alaska to learn from its botched response to that disaster. Yes, despite Exxon having its name on the tanker, it was actually BP who disastrously failed to contain the toxic sludge that spewed into pristine wilderness. But that was then. BP has since spent billions of dollars on advertising telling us they are ‘Beyond Petroleum’ – so beyond it in fact they don’t care how much they lose.

BP has had over 8,000 minor and major recorded spills since 1990 alone. While all eyes have been on the current ecocide in the Gulf of Mexico, their Alaskan Pipeline burst in late May, spewing 100,000 gallons of oil into the environment. State inspectors say this occurred because “procedures weren’t properly implemented,” in other words – they didn’t give a damn.

The ho-hum lackadaisical attitude of Tony Hayward is indicative of BP’s disaster response in general. It has been shocking to see BP’s slow response to contain the oil. There is a complete lack of any oil containment technology, beyond stringing some booms (vinyl tubes) over the ocean that deflate and blow away. While the oil industry has poured billions of dollars into riskier deep-water drilling, it has not invested in responses to the leaks and disasters that have increased four fold in the last decade.

CRUDE JOKE

Maybe we’re overreacting. Let us again heed the soothing words of Tony, or Tiny Tony as he is now known in the US due to the following comment, “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.” That would be the estimated 47 million to 235 million gallons of toxic crude oil that has poured into the ocean over the last eight weeks. Not to mention the use in the ‘clean up’ of one million tonnes of the Corexit oil dispersant, a neuro toxin pesticide banned in the UK, arguably as harmful as the oil itself.

We need not worry our silly little heads about the ecological destruction either. Tiny Tony assures us, “the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest.” Come now Tony, it’s you that is being modest. This disaster is going to kill thousands of dolphins and sea turtles, hundreds of thousands of seabirds and billions of fish and shellfish.

The communities along the Louisiana coast, whose main work is fisheries, have lost their catch to a greater predator, and BP are playing on their vulnerability and dividing them by giving the ‘lucky’ few work cleaning up the toxic waste. BP has refused to provide masks and other safety equipment to those in these communities, and when this resulted in several cases of clean-up workers being hospitalised, Tony said it was probably due to food poisoning. Shrimp à la oil?

The Louisiana wetlands that nurture the wildlife and communities have already been decimated by the oil industry. The wetlands are a 4.2 million acre region where the Mississippi River flows into the Atlantic. They have formed over 7,500 years by the rivers flooding and annually depositing silt creating long fingers of land and barrier islands. It has taken just 75 years for them to have been almost completely destroyed. They are disappearing faster than any other part of the world, with an area the size of a football field lost every 38 minutes.

Oil and natural gas were discovered in Louisiana’s coastal areas in the early 1900s. This lead to long canals being cut through the wetlands to transport drilling equipment and oil. As well as being destructive in itself, this allowed more salt water to seep in to the wetlands, which killed the freshwater plants’ roots leading to further soil erosion. These wetlands act as a natural defence against hurricane storm surges. The further they are destroyed the more vulnerable coastal towns all the way up to New Orleans become. The storm surge from Hurricane Katrina in 2005 flooded 80% of the city, killing over 2,000 people.

As New Orleans and the coastal region still struggle to recover five years after Katrina they face a real kick in the teeth. Meteorological experts are predicting, “the most active season on record” for hurricanes, comparing ocean temperatures that contribute to hurricane formation to those in the summer of Katrina. Oil from the BP rig is predicted to continue to spew in to the gulf for months to come. A hurricane sweeping a surge of oil into the wetlands and towns of Louisiana would be apocalyptic for the region.

Tiny Tony put it best last year, saying BP’s “primary purpose was to generate profit for our share holders” and that “our primary purpose in life was not to save the world.” Really Tony, you don’t say.

Some different related links:

Caught in the oil :AP Photographer Charlie Riedel just filed the following images of seabirds caught in the oil slick on a beach on Louisiana’s East Grand Terre Island

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/06/caught_in_the_oil.html

BP is sadly just one of many players in the appalling offshore drilling picture, the latest oil-soaked pelicans among many victims.  ByJohn Sorenson

http://beta.themarknews.com/articles/1665-the-birds-and-the-bps

Animal Rights Activists Protest Oil Giant BP

http://www.examiner.com/x-46236-West-Palm-Beach-Animal-Rights-Examiner~y2010m5d28-Animal-Rights-Activists-Protest-Oil-Giant-BP

Counting the Carcasses by John Collins Rudolph

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/counting-the-carcasses/?partner=rss&emc=rss

WVBS for Gulf Coast Wildlife

http://animalrightscollective.wordpress.com/2010/05/21/wvbs-for-gulf-coast-wildlife/

Hunt monitor Bryan Griffiths is looking at a manslaughter conviction
following huntsman Trevor Morse’s death by gyrocopter (See
SchNEWS 669). Griffiths, who was was tracking from above, had landed
his ‘copter to refuel when Morse looked at the gyrocopter
straight in the blades and thought “I can win this…’ He
purposely strode across the field and valiantly stood in its path
where at a breakneck speed of 200mph the propellers went right through
his head.

As a result of Morse’s idiocy Bryan Griffiths, is on trial in
Birmingham Crown Court accused of manslaughter by gross negligence.
The sentence carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. Bryan
Griffiths’s future dangles uncertainly as Mr. Morse’s
choice brought things to a head. The trial perseveres…

SOURCE: SCHNEWS

SEE ALSO:

indymedia.org.uk Support Bryan Griffiths – Charged With Murder Over Hunt Death 25.03.2009

shoreham-protester.org.uk Hunting and the election

BBC Warwickshire gyrocopter pilot ‘feared hunt attack’ 4 March 2010

The Times Hunt supporter died after pilot Bryan Griffiths drove gyrocopter at him March 3, 2010

Is it you yourself who decides about what you consider to be your “right”? It’s an inner process, isn’t it, that you believe you ought to have a right to breathe, a right to walk wherever you want to, a right to say whatever you feel like saying.

There is another layer of the term “right” that is not an inner process but that marks instead that what the society, or the whole human world considers to be a “right” or your “right” respectively. This form of a “legal right” – lets ground it upon the basis of a generalized form of all legal human rights taken together as, so to speak, a “generic” type of a right the humans actually “grant” you, themselves as a group, or a group within the human group – this generic type of an exclusively human right (our current “legal right”) can be detached and even really be something different than the type of right you give yourself.

Without the outer form of a right that is given to you as a person or that is in contrast NOT given to any other living sentient being, you or any sentient being still has their inner sense of what I would call a right. It’s not so that a sense of right (which has something to do with rights and wrongs, as strange as we may think this would be) is something that only exists if you are told what is wrong and what is right. A sense of what you personally may consider a right is something dependent on the beings socialization, on its social contexts. And yes, I do call the behaviour of nonhuman animals amongst other nonhuman animals too a form of social behaviour.

Now if people say “rights” are nothing natural in the case of “animal rights”, and Animal Rights can only be granted on a more or less arbitrary basis, they are wrong insofar in which one can easily realize that all rights in the purest form are something that has to be dealt with on a subjective and a socio-ethical plane.

Rights are natural, because rights stem from self-experience and social interaction. Legal rights on the contrast are quite arbitrary.

What is important is to distinguish where a moral basis of a right has its validity in the context with the experienced reality of a subjective living sentient being and its broader contextuality.