And from The Onion, “Massive Flow of Bullsh*t Continues to Gush From BP Headquarters“:
As the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico entered its eighth week Wednesday, fears continued to grow that the massive flow of bullshit still gushing from the headquarters of oil giant BP could prove catastrophic if nothing is done to contain it.
The toxic bullshit, which began to spew from the mouths of BP executives shortly after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in April, has completely devastated the Gulf region, delaying cleanup efforts, affecting thousands of jobs, and endangering the lives of all nearby wildlife.
“Everything we can see at the moment suggests that the overall environmental impact of this will be very, very modest,” said BP CEO Tony Hayward, letting loose a colossal stream of undiluted bullshit. “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean, and the volume of oil we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total volume of water.”
Click here for the rest of the article.
Not many articles I read on climate change make me laugh out loud, but this column of Bill Maher’s from The Huffington Post sure did. It’s called “New Rule: Al Gore Must Come Out With a Sequel to His Film and Call It An Inconvenient Truth 2: What The F**k Is Wrong With You People?”:
A bunch of depressing new surveys reveal that people in droves are starting to believe that global warming is a hoax — and this time, it’s not just us. People are always accusing me of hating America and calling it stupid, so tonight I’d like to take a few moments to hate England and call it stupid. Because now English people don’t believe in global warming either. I thought the English were smarter than that. The home of Newton and Darwin. I can’t believe we let these people build our exploding oil platforms.
Even scarier is why people have stopped thinking global warming is real. One major reason pollsters say is we had a very cold, snowy winter. Which is like saying the sun might not be real because last night it got dark. And my car’s not real because I can’t find my keys.
You really need to go to THP and read his whole rant – click here to do just that!
fyi, a bit more on what “debate” might mean from the Boykoffs: a review at http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1978 and the original paper at http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/publications/downloads/boykoff04-gec.pdf
on the stupidity of BP (and you could say, the whole shebang from Obama to Thad Allen to the hotdog sellers on the beaches) – is this really stupidity? I have worked for Halliburton and Exxon/Mobil and other such like, they may be morally bankrupt but they are not stupid, if anything they are the smartest, the best educated, and so forth, this Tony Hayward is stupid? … think again … and it does seem to me that calling people stupid polarizes the exchange in ways that do not help
but yeah, the Bill Maher article is a hoot, thanks for that, David.
Great links, thx David – I’ve bookmarked them for future reference.
Re: “stupidity” – you have an interesting perspective, David, having worked for those companies. And if it isn’t stupidity (although I think The Onion doesn’t say they are stupid, just that BP et al have been spouting BS nonstop since the catastrophe began), what, in your experience, is going on? Hubris (ie it could never happen to us, therefore we won’t prepare for a ‘spill’), or just plain disregard for safety and environmental standards?