Oil spill: A 'Cri de Coeur' in Congress

Dennis Kucinich, from the heart, on the floor of the Congress:

Giant Plumes of Oil Found Forming Under Gulf

An alarming report from The New York Times, May 16:

"Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.
"There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water," said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. "There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column."
The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes. . . 

"Scientists studying video of the gushing oil well have tentatively calculated that it could be flowing at a rate of 25,000 to 80,000 barrels of oil a day. The latter figure would be 3.4 million gallons a day. But the government, working from satellite images of the ocean surface, has calculated a flow rate of only 5,000 barrels a day. . . The undersea plumes may go a long way toward explaining the discrepancy between the flow estimates, suggesting that much of the oil emerging from the well could be lingering far below the sea surface.
BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.
"The answer is no to that," a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. "We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort."

(see full article NYTimes 5/16)

Obama 'Fuming' at Big Oil's "Cozy Relationship"

"President Barack Obama on Friday angrily decried the "ridiculous spectacle" of oil industry officials pointing fingers of blame for the catastrophic spill in the Gulf of Mexico and pledged to end a "cozy relationship" between the oil industry and federal regulators that he said had extended into his own administration..." (HuffPo 5/14)


Watch the video:

Video of Main 'Leak' Released

BP had refused to release this footage of the largest of the leaks, but had to give in under pressure. Here it is (the white is natural gas, the black is oil):

NPR has reported that the flow of oil is estimated at  ten times greater than the Coast Guard's 'guesstimate' of 5,000 barrels a day. (report)  -  (NPR audio)

Video Showing Undersea Oil Spew in the Gulf

In this excerpt of a video released yesterday by the UAC Joint Information Center ("DeepWater Horizon Response ROV May 6 2010") one can see parts of the oil spew happening at 5000 feet below the surface in the Gulf, and the awkward efforts of the remote-controlled robotic vehicles to deal with the crisis.

Oil Spill Disaster Keeps Growing

Yikes! Now it's a estimated at  million gallons a day, with no end in sight, and it could get worse: there is a reservoir of "tens of millions" of barrels according to a company insider (that's tens of millions of barrels, not gallons; 42 gallons per).
This might just kill the Gulf before it's over, turn the whole thing into a dead zone.
And it will likely flow into the Gulf Stream, proceed down along Florida's west coast, through the keys, then up to Miami and on up the Atlantic coast to the Jersey Shore and Long Island and beyond, to Europe. And it will keep flowing, until someone figures out a way to stop it.
Tell me again, how this is less expensive than going with renewable energies?