Congressional Gum Flapping on Oil Spill
Posted by madjillmom on May 12, 2010
While Congress certainly has the right and even responsibility to hold hearings on the BP oil explosion and spill, doing it now is just grandstanding. They called the warring parties together yesterday in a dog and pony show that does nothing to clean up one drop of oil. It is too early to determine a cause or assess blame. Why to they do this? To grab power and headlines. When a postmortem is done on this situation, a government agency or two will be partially at fault. It is just like Freddy and Fannie, lots of finger-pointing and no real action. What a waste of time. Remember this during upcoming primaries and in November.
Mama Bin Cranky 
The Destructionist said
I have a sinking feeling that this oil disaster is being downplayed and may be much larger than we think. I wanted to know just how much oil was flowing into the ocean from that broken pipeline (in both barrels and in gallons) so I did some research on my own.
Barrels vs. Gallons
Most news articles claim that since April 21, 2010 roughly 4 million gallons of sweet crude have been leaked into the Gulf at a rate of 210,000 gallons per day. But according to an Associated Press article just posted today (What went wrong at oil rig? A lot), approximately 4,000,000 barrels have already spilled into the Gulf. When you convert those barrels into gallons, you end up with a whopping 168,000,000 gallons of oil: that’s a difference of 164,000,000 gallons from the previous estimate!
(Don’t believe me? Read the articles and convert the measurements for yourself.)
http://www.examiner.com/x-42484-Environmental-Health-Examiner~y2010m5d12-Toxic-chemicals-used-in-BP-oil-spill-cleanup-oil-to-remain-flowing-through-Gulf-VIDEO
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_gulf_oil_spill
http://www.calculateme.com/Volume/Barrels(Petroleum)/ToGallons.htm
madjillmom said
Thanks for your comment. While this is a disaster, I suspect it is smaller than reported because of the slight press of oil covered beaches. Predictions regarding the landfall have not panned out as of this date. Still a major disaster. Drill here, drill now, pay less, starve OPEC, conserve and support viable renewable energy.