The Rising Influence of Rising Affluence

[OakesCS]

salazar gibberish

http://www.interior.gov/deepwaterhorizon/loader.cfm?csModule=security/getfile&PageID=38375

all kinds of violence done to logic and the English language:
we simply do not know if the BP situation is unique.

Even more ludicrously, he states:
References to the track record for the deepwater drilling industry are of limited relevance, given that deepwater drilling is a relatively young and still-evolving enterprise (having only begun in earnest in the late 1990s)...

I'd like to know the distance or time scale of 'earnest'. deep- and ultra-deep water wells were drilled in the mid 1980's.

BP's inability... to contain the Macondo blowout and spill provides continuing evidence that BP - and the rest of the industry, which has been cooperating with BP in its efforts to contain the on-going spill - had not prepared to contain a blowout in the deepwater environment.

damned collaborators. next thing will be to kill all good samaritans.

those are just a few gems. it makes for some depressing reading - not just from the perspective of how somebody with such poor logic and writing skills has such an influential position but because some of the implied threats to the US off-shore oil industry (e.g. look at the part about risers).

Salazar seems to be fixated on containment and has almost completely missed the point that oil companies focus on prevention of well failures rather than containment of failures. Additional preventive measures would not take 6 months to put in place and are already being done in other places (e.g. Brazil). In addition, it hasn't taken BP 6 months to develop what appears to be an effective containment measure (not to mention that the output from the well seems to be declining on its own). Assuming the industry doesn't suffer an immediate bout of collective amnesia or alzheimer's it would be difficult to imagine that they won't develop upon BP's containment hardware more effectively than the various regulatory, congressional, and presidential Technical Workgroups.