We didn't think it would work, and it didn't work. There's way to much pressure and way too much energy in that well. And it's too deep. The new plan is to cut off the broken riser and fit a new valve over it. It's a delicate maneuver using R.O.V.s at 5,000 feet below sea level. BP says it will take 4 to 7 days to get this new plan underway. That's somewhere between 3 million and 6 million gallons of additional oil spilled into the Gulf.
Obama toured the area Friday, his second trip to the Gulf Coast since the disaster began on April 20th. On Saturday, in response to hearing that the Top Kill effort had failed, he said: It is "...enraging as it is heartbreaking."
That about sums it up for me. Except, I'm as enraged at my government and Obama as I am at the world's obsessive-compulsive dedication to a build-and-spend based economy. We use oil to build stuff that we only intend to use for a short while, then we throw that stuff away and use more oil to build more stuff. It's a never ending cycle of waste. And we call this process, "growth." But it's not growth. What it is, in truth, is a recipe for our own destruction.
Everybody talks about getting the global economic crisis over with. How? By building more shit and selling it. What do we need to build all this new shit? Oil. Zillions of tons of it.
Forget about green technology. Wind farms. And tide generators. Electric cars. It's a drop in the bucket compared to the business of building and making shit and getting this shit from plant to consumer.
Our survival isn't a function of economic growth. It's a function of zeitgeist. And the one we have now isn't working.
~seabgb
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