Conspiracy theories; Website tracking EPA response to BP oil "spill"

For those of you interested in the EPA take on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, a new webpage at the EPA site has Q & A's,  air quality monitoring, and government actions.  Not much finger-pointing going on yet at the EPA, at least not that the agency is making public, and not much of the  real sense of catastrophe that many of us feel.  Still, it's interesting reading.

Just what are we to call this catastrophe, anyway?  Calling it a "spill" makes no sense: a spill is an overturned glass of water; a spill is a hole in the side of a leaking oil tanker; a spill is finite.  What we have here is an open faucet to the oil in our earth's crust which we will not be able to turn off for months.

Conspiracy theories:  I don't have to think too hard to figure out how this catastrophe happened, because man-made catastrophes occur whenever profit is placed before people's wellbeing.  Those catastrophes may unfold slowly, like our current recession, or all at once. But almost all could have been predicted.  The Houston Chronicle reports on the fines that BP was fighting for safety violations.  And I know I read-- but now can't find-- an article that says that equipment required in Europe for these rigs is not required in the U.S.  I did, however, find a reference to BP's attempts to avoid additional safety regulations. 

BP's Haywood  'will also be asked to explain more distant actions, including the company's resistance to Washington's attempts to introduce a new rule to make deep-sea drilling safer. A letter from BP to the US government dated 14 September 2009, made its position clear. "While BP is supportive of companies having a system in place to reduce risks, accidents, injuries and spills, we are not supportive of the extensive prescriptive regulations as proposed in this rule," the letter said.'  Independent UK.

 Remember Halliburton from the Iraq War?

Halliburton IS the War Machine: Finally, we come to the most likely culprit in all of this, and a sure sign that indeed this is an act of war. Wherever Halliburton goes, so goes the war machine, and vice versa. From no-bid and no-account contracts in Iraq (and post-Katrina New Orleans, by the way) to a massive corporate presence in the Gulf region, these folks seem to have an acute capacity for making a buck on cataclysms of all sorts. Perhaps more to the point, they appear to be at the nexus of most disaster zones, including the erstwhile Bush Presidency and now the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. As a recent article in the Huffington Post notes:

"Giant oil-services provider Halliburton may be a primary suspect in the investigation into the oil rig explosion that has devastated the Gulf Coast, the Wall Street Journal reports. Though the investigation into the explosion that sank the Deepwater Horizon site is still in its early stages, drilling experts agree that blame probably lies with flaws in the 'cementing' process -- that is, plugging holes in the pipeline seal by pumping cement into it from the rig. Halliburton was in charge of cementing for Deepwater Horizon."  Huffington Post.

The rest of this Huffington Post article by Randall Amster is worth a read, because apparently the conspiracy nuts are going to have a good time with the Deepwater Horizon event.  Al Gore, eco-terrorists, even North Korea, in a plot to make us use our nuclear weapons to stop the oil leak.  Get ready.  Wonder what the Tea Party folks think, or do I have to ask?

Photo: nesting pelicans on Bretton Island, containment booms behind them.  Alex Brandon, Axis of Logic.