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Photo: IBRRC (International Bird Rescue Research Center)

Government scientists confirm massive oil plumes

On Tuesday scientists working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed the existence of massive underwater plumes of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, first identified by independent scientists three weeks ago. BP, which continues to control the cleanup and spill site, responded by once again denying the existence of the plumes. The plumes, which could create enormous oxygen-depleted “dead zones” in the Gulf, likely have been caused by the depth of the spill coupled with the application of hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemical dispersant. The dispersed oil has not vanished, but has been broken up into clouds of particles called hydro-carbons grouped together in the plumes.

Unlike the spill on the surface, which is moved by winds, tides, currents and eddies, the underwater plumes appear to move in somewhat unpredictable ways. NOAA confirmed that one of the plumes has moved northeast about 42 miles from the spill site toward Alabama, reaching depths of 3,300 feet. University of South Florida scientists found a plume at a similar location at the end of May, which they estimated was 22 miles long and 100 feet thick. Other plumes have been identified, one about 142 miles southeast of the Deepwater Horizon site.

Scientists fear that the plumes may effectively suffocate large areas in the Gulf, including critical deep-sea coral reefs. As expected, the oil is under attack by microbes, which serve to decompose it. But in doing so the microbes also remove large amounts of oxygen from entire strata in the water column, potentially choking off organisms low on the food chain that cannot freely move away, from plankton to mussels, crabs, clams, oysters and small fish. With all higher forms of ocean life ultimately based on these lesser forms, the plumes could break the food chain at its most important links, devastating fish populations as well as marine mammals such as dolphins and sperm whales.

It is natural for us to naïvely expect our leaders—be they corporate executives or their increasingly decorative and superfluous adjuncts in government—to be our betters, having been picked for leadership positions by their ability to lead us through difficult and unfamiliar terrain. We expect them to have the mental agility and flexibility to be able to revise their mental maps as the circumstances dictate. We don't expect them to be stupid, and are surprised to find that indeed they are. How is that possible? Mental enfeeblement of the ruling class of a collapsing empire is not without precedent: the British imperial experiment was clearly doomed as early as the end of World War I, but it took until well into World War II for this fact to register in the enfeebled brains of the British ruling class. In his 1941 essay England your England, George Orwell offers the following explanation:

...[T]he British ruling class obviously could not admit that their usefulness of was at an end. Had they done that they would have had to abdicate... Clearly there was only one escape for them—into stupidity. They could keep society in its existing shape only by being unable to grasp that any improvement was possible. Difficult though it was, they achieved it, largely by fixing their eyes on the past and refusing to notice the changes that were going on [a]round them."

And so it is now: as the American empire has been crumbling, its leaders, both corporate and corporatist, were being specially selected for being unable to draw their own conclusions based on their own independent reasoning or on the evidence of their own senses, relying instead on "intelligence" that is second-hand and obsolete. These leaders are now attempting to lead us all on a dream-walk to oblivion.

And, you know, to his credit, when Salazar came into office, he also threw out Bush’s plan to open up essentially every coastline in America to offshore drilling. And this was just sort of a last-minute wet dream for the oil companies, that was not a serious proposal, and no one expected that to stand. The Bushes put it in the federal register either at midnight or after midnight on the day that they left. So this was not anything more than a gesture on their part. And so, Salazar, to his credit, took that off the table, but a year later came back with his own plan, which essentially split the baby and seemed to split the baby along political lines, so that red states were exposed to new drilling and blue states, including the Pacific coast, were not, and the Atlantic coast north of New Jersey.

And so, he and President Obama appear at an Air Force base in front of an F-18 fighter jet and a giant American flag in this sort of stage craft that had all the trappings of the "mission accomplished" photo-op. And they said, "You know, we’ve looked at this for a year. This is a hard decision. We’ve looked at it for a year. We’re ready to roll here." And Salazar said, you know, "Our forms are working. We have an agency that’s capable of handling this." And, you know, then a couple days later, President Obama, unbidden, says, you know, oil rigs are safe. And so they took ownership of this completely, right before the disaster, without having implemented any of the substantive reforms that they should have, but the Bush environmental reviews were structured so that you would have a detailed environmental assessment of the region, an environmental assessment of the individual leasing blocks, and then for each drilling project they would get a categorical waiver, just a get-out-of-environmental-review-free card. And so, the BP drilling site had gone and so, each drilling permit was based on these three levels, and so he said, "Well, we did the review at the top, and then we did the secondary review. And the tertiary review, we don’t have to do, because we did the other two reviews." But the other two reviews were crap. They didn’t account for the possibility. They called a blowout a low-probability, low-risk event, which is I could understand the low-probability part, but the low-risk is just absurd.