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Posted on YouTube: May 18, 2010
By YouTube Member: MoxNewsDotCom
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Posted on DU: May 18, 2010
By DU Member: Turborama
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First up tonight: "Keeping Them Honest," the disaster in the Gulf, a lot of developments to tell you about tonight, but, first, let's just cut through the B.S. So, excuse the language.
BP today is spinning a story that they're making good progress. Now, you have probably seen the headlines today. Take a look. This was one in the "L.A. Times." It says, "BP Makes Headway in Containing Oil Leak." Well, that sounds good, right? They have inserted a tube into the leaking oil that is sucking up some of it into a barge.
Now, BP executives have been trumpeting this all day. Listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DOUG SUTTLES, COO, GLOBAL EXPLORATION, BP: Our efforts offshore are making a big difference now. The combination of the riser insertion tube was using dispersants and other tools, this is probably the smallest amount of oil I have seen on the surface since the effort began.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COOPER: (AUDIO GAP) saying this is the smallest amount of oil he has seen on the surface. Of course, it's now believed there are huge what they call plumes of oil underneath the surface, but let's just keep them honest here.
Let's go over to the wall. I want to show you -- show you this tube that they say is working. We made an animation of how they say it's working. We will just hit play right here. It's been inserted into the leaking wellhead. It's like a giant -- basically, a bendy straw kind of sucking up the oil, bringing it up to the surface into a tanker.
It goes all the way up -- that's the idea at least -- sucking it up into that tanker up onshore. All right, so, some of what's coming up is natural gas, and you can see them actually burning it off here -- that's what these flames are -- in these new pictures from BP.
But BP says they're now capturing about 1,000 barrels of oil a day from the hookup, 1,000 barrels day. Now, all along, they have been estimating that about 5,000 barrels a day are pouring into the Gulf. So, if they're now capturing 1,000 barrels a day, that would be a big deal, right? That's 20 percent of the oil they're extracting.
But the truth is, they have no idea how much oil is actually pouring into the Gulf. The 5,000-barrels-a-day estimate was from a government analysis weeks ago. But when they released these pictures -- reluctantly, I should point out -- they -- which actually shows the oil pouring out, leading experts who analyze velocity of particles looked at this video and now say as much as 70,000 barrels a day could be leaking out.
So, what -- so, that would mean that they're not sucking up 20 percent of the leak right now, but maybe just 2 percent of the leak. I thought BP was going to attack those independent analysts, saying there's no 70,000 barrels are leaking out every day.
But they didn't. In fact, they said, we don't know how much oil is leaking out. And, on Saturday, BP actually stated that it's not important to know how much oil is leaking out.
The spokesman, Tom Mueller, said this. He said: "We're not going to take any extra efforts" -- it's right here on the screen. "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."
Now, look, I'm no expert, but how is it not relevant to the response effort. If you're fighting a fire, you don't need to know how big the fire is? And the notion that paying some independent experts to analyze the size of the spill, that's going to detract from the response effort, you're telling us you can't solve a problem and investigate it at the same time?
This is like in Katrina, when politicians said, now is not the time to point fingers. Remember that? Look, you -- you all know what's going on out there. It's not in BP's interest to have accurate figures on how much oil is gushing out of that pipe every single day. It's not good public relations.
What is in their interest? Well, the headline I showed you earlier, headlines like this: "BP Makes Headway in Containing Oil Leak." Those are the kind of headlines they want you to see.
President Obama is going to sign an executive order setting up a commission to investigate what went wrong. That was the news today. Maybe there's -- for all we know, the Obama administration is just trying to get some political cover. We don't know. Maybe it's legitimate. We will have to see about that.
But the other development today is about this guy. Now, you don't recognize him. His name is Chris Oynes. He's head of the Offshore Minerals Management Program. He was supposedly one of the watchdogs. He's quitting.
It turns out -- look at this -- he gave an award to Transocean just last year -- get this -- for safety. Again, we would like to point out that 360 has repeatedly tried to get this guy, BP's -- well, BP's chief, CEO Tony Hayward, onto the program. He's passed repeatedly.
At this point, I want to invite anyone from BP on this program. I was just -- I was just down in Louisiana over the weekend, and there are a lot of folks want some answers. And these BP executives are not giving them answers.
Douglas Brinkley, presidential historian, joins me now.
Doug, I mean, it's stunning when you hear, you see those headlines today saying, look, progress is being made, but, when you actually bear down and look at the numbers, even if they're sucking 1,000 -- 1,000 barrels of oil, we have no idea how much oil there is. If there's 70,000 barrels pouring out every day, 1,000 barrels is nothing.
DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIAN: Well, exactly. I mean, it was just a P.R. stunt. BP has had a horrific time the last few weeks. They decided to kind of get the news cycle working in their favor this weekend. It worked for about three hours or four hours today.
They did garner a couple newspaper headlines, but people like yourself and others are saying, you know, about 90 percent, 95 percent of the oil is still gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.
And where's the camera? What -- let's see this tube in action right now. We, while I'm talking on the other side of the screen, could be showing video from the Gulf of -- of this stemmed oil rushing out. And it's not there.
COOPER: Well, and, I mean, that's a good point. We're showing this video right now. But this is from days ago, and it took BP weeks to release this video. It's not as if they didn't have it. They don't want people to see these pictures.
(CROSSTALK)
COOPER: I mean, they don't want -- I mean, as you said, there could be a camera there 24 hours a day. You could just watch it all the time.
BRINKLEY: And if we saw it right now, we would just see oil pouring out of the hole, and we would know that BP was just doing another bad P.R. stunt today.
This company -- you mentioned Tony Hayward. Not just Hayward, but nobody from BP has ever gone to Louisiana and say, we love Louisiana. We love the coastal marshes. This means so much to us. We're here for the long run. We're going to make this right eventually.
They're -- they have taken a very snide attitude, to the point where the -- the CEO of BP said this is a drop of the bucket into the sea. And you mentioned someone from MMS, an important person, resigning, stepping down today.
It truly has come to the point that BP has to be held accountable. The board of British Petroleum has to have some of these bunglers, who have done nothing to educate the public from day one, I think, fired and dismissed, or, otherwise, we're just going to be living this sort of surreal BP P.R. jargon, misinformation every day.
People are getting angry, and there's also a feeling of hopelessness, because we like to think that people that know how to drill 5,000 feet in the Gulf know how to fix and use technology to close the -- an oil well, and BP doesn't know how to close the well.
COOPER: The thing I also just don't understand logically -- and, I mean, look, I try not to take sides on politics and stuff like that. But facts are important.
And when you see something that just factually doesn't make sense, you have got to raise the question. I don't understand how BP can say it doesn't matter, it's not important for us to know how much oil is pouring out every day, and, in fact, it may take away from, you know, rescue efforts.
I mean, they could hire independent -- they could hire independent scientists who aren't associated with BP to study how much oil is coming out. How -- how can they say that it doesn't matter?
BRINKLEY: Because BP, when they operate -- they're treating the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska as Third World places.
And their feeling is that, look, nobody really needs to know what we do. We're the fourth richest company in the world. We're powerful. How dare you people demand accountability?
And this is a company that's a petroleum company that was trying to tell us they're beyond petroleum. What they're doing is drilling oil and speed-drilling oil all over the world. So, we probably should have known something was wrong with this company before this crisis.
But the lack of leadership and this kind of honesty with a very -- the Gulf -- not -- the whole country is hurting over this, and British Petroleum, whether they are testifying in the Senate or whether they're, you know, giving misinformation every day, they're -- they're really letting people down on a daily basis.
And I think the anger level towards that company is getting to a point of no return right now.
COOPER: Yes. I mean, again, this quote: "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."
There is sort of a level, it does sound, of arrogance.
BRINKLEY: Arrogance, and it's absurd.
I mean, Joseph Heller in "Catch-22" or a satirist, Terry Southern, couldn't create such an idiotic statement as that. People want to know how much oil is going in the Gulf of Mexico because it's our great place for shrimp harvest and oysters and fish.
And the marine -- these plumes that are down there, they -- we're -- the dispersants are dropping the oil on the ocean ground. It's the bottom, the seafloor, where life is in the ocean right now.
And it's -- it's -- somebody has got to do something to rein in BP and control the situation. And it's going to have to be the -- the federal government. President Obama did something right today, I think. This commission, with an executive order, is important.
He needs to get a couple of high-profile people to at least be the heads of it, maybe former Secretary of Interior Babbitt on the left, and -- and...
COOPER: You know, some folks, look, are going to be understandably cynical and doubtful about this and say, look, this is just like -- they're trying to do a fig leaf to cover up their own mistakes or their own lack of oversight on this.
BRINKLEY: We are going to have a lot of engineers, scientists, oceanographers, a couple politicians to front the commission, but underneath it, we need to have a crackerjack crew.
And, also, I have talked to some -- a Republican senator today who is very concerned that BP's not listening to alternatives of what to do. They don't even want other oil companies to see what they're doing, because they have done so many things wrong that they're fearful to let anybody into the crime scene, if you would like, that new, truth and -- true information will come out, and they can't have any of that.
COOPER: Well, again, we would love to have anyone from BP on the program any time.
Doug, appreciate you being available. Thanks for -- for coming on, Douglas Brinkley.
BRINKLEY: Thanks, Anderson.
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