Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Randi Rhodes Newsletter for Tuesday June 15th 2010

If you’re tired of watching pelicans squirm, you might want to tune into today’s hearings before the House Energy and Commerce Committee and watch some oil executives squirm. The oil executives testifying today tried to say that the BP spill was an aberration. Essentially they’re saying “It won’t happen again.” Unfortunately, these are the same people who told us it wouldn’t happen in the first place. Is saying it won’t happen again the best they could come up with? “That is absolutely the last time that we will destroy the Gulf of Mexico . Promise.”
The execs from the other oil companies were called upon to explain how their safety practices differed from BP’s. Well, if they had any safety practices at all, that would be a difference right there. Rex W. Tillerson, chairman of Exxon Mobil, testified that if companies do things right, then spills like the BP spill “should not occur.” Right. And if I drive under the speed limit, then a car accident should not occur. But I’d be an idiot to count on that. By the way, it’s nice getting safety assurances from Exxon Mobile! BP created a disaster by drilling at record depths. In the Valdez spill, Exxon managed to create a disaster with nothing more than a tanker full of oil and a captain full of vodka.
Chevron’s chief executive said “Chevron’s deepwater drilling and well control practices are safe and environmentally sound.” Great, except that I’m sure Tony Hayward would have said the exact same thing 3 months ago. Actually, Tony Hayward has enough chutzpah that I’m sure he’ll say the same thing even now when it’s his turn to testify.
Lamar McKay, the president of BP America, said that reducing offshore drilling would “place millions of additional barrels per day into tanker ships that must traverse the world’s oceans.” Well, I would say that oil is a lot safer than any oil that’s under the authority of you idiots at BP. Is McKay saying that without offshore drilling there would be a bigger risk of a tanker crash? Because oil tankers would have to crash at the rate of one a week to match the amount of oil that BP is spewing into the gulf as Lamar McKay is speaking! And that thought brings us back to the squirming pelicans…>>> MORE



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1 comment:

~~Just Me in T~~ said...

They have admitted that the only way to prevent this ever happening again is to STOP drilling for oil and find other renewable energy sources.

This toxic gusher is certainly frightening for us all.

Did You Know?
BP engineers alerted federal regulators at the Minerals Management Service that they were having difficulty controlling the Macondo well (Deepwater Horizon) six weeks before the disaster, according to e- mails released by the Energy and Commerce Committee.

“I don’t think this would have happened on Exxon’s watch,” Tom Bower, author of “The Squeeze: Oil, Money and Greed in the 21st Century,” said in a June 11 Bloomberg Television interview. “They’d be much more careful and much more conscious of the need to supervise subcontractors.”

WELL excuse me your sainted Exxon....... and Chevron and ConocoPhillips.

Let’s just take a look at a few of your past misdemeanours, and then we can consider again – if the moratorium on deepwater drilling should be lifted, and place it all firmly back into your nice clean hands!

http://just-me-in-t.blogspot.com/2010/06/fairy-stories-about-oil-companies.html