Charlie Rose

POLLUTICO  07/02/2010 12:11 PM Report

- ATLANTIC UNBUNDLING – confrontation or intervention?

Dear John / Mr. Hofmeister,

I think you’re doing a great job in opening up people’s clean energy awareness by opposing the pollution politics to prepare them for the big mind-shift: the American scream echoes in Europe!

The big global question seems to be wether the costs of cheap & dirty are worth the price.

Your idea and proposition is that God’s earth needs a fundamental grassroot ‘intervention’ in the global oil economy because world leaders for the last fourty years didn’t understand the future’s human needs and sophisticated but abused US technology advantage which resulted in worldwide industrial dominance, non-transparent public-private relationships and information disorder related to the consolidation of the global energy agenda in 1963 when oil and gas prices were linked:

the New Oil Order of the lock-in society, international consumer community and foreknowledge-economy of excess, arrogance and abundance that facilitated the United States of America in imposing coverted insider trading on the remainder of the world. Hence the global disorientation.

Your answer to my question about the world’s biggest public-private partnership, the Dutch Gasunie (Exxon-Shell-Gov.nl) holding the global energy agenda hostage, boiled down to diplomacy and energy-politics not being part of corporate concern and contract.

Now, for the broader caucus of knowledge and technology management related to the need to restore global imbalances ‘back to normal’, why not instate the global Big Crunch Preventor by direct implementation of transatlantic fair, sound and real competition based on sustainable energy innovation by means of new fundamentals decoupling the toxic petrodollar from the suffering euro in order to force a sane natural gas market in Eurasia?

Ending “cheap & dirty” for the sake of stopping gross human incompetence caused by public-private miscommunication – parliamentary deficit & democratic deceit – would undoubtly be welcomed by the global citizenry backing clean energy and affordable life for all of us.

Don’t you think voters have to know and understand why and how the oil companies have stamied sustainable energy innovation?

Sincerely yours,

Stephan Tychon

http://pollutico.com

CHECK IMBALANCES: http://x.vu/GreatCoalDebate

QuietTraveller  06/20/2010 11:16 AM Report

After viewing the broadcast on television and watching it again here on the internet, I was under the impression, led in the wrong direction by former Shell president that the problem was the Jones Act. The Saudi's have used super-tankers to clean up larger oil spills. For a while I thought the Jones Act was preventing OUR ALLIES from helping us with this EMERGENCY.

With the largest military in the world, we do not have six supertankers ourselves?!!!!

It's BPs spill, the British do not have supertankers?

C'mon Charlie Rose. Ask the questions.

NeilMacCallister  06/20/2010 05:19 AM Report

Hah! ..Maybe easier than trying to "harness" the sun's fusion energy, and put that reaction in a shoebox to be located downtown somewhere, ..maybe we should try to build biologic "generators" which use a synthesized photosynthesis reaction, akin to our terrestrial plants, ..or a cytochrome mediated "Electron Transport System" as used by most of us animals, to generate electricity?

**

We are working on all that stuff, ..aren't we????

NeilMacCallister  06/20/2010 04:47 AM Report

@JimBullis: I agree with you that stopping the oil outflow is the first of priorities in a responsible engagement. I like your idea of using the first (30 ft. tall) "bell jar" welded-steel collector as a submersible concrete form, which could be lowered down over the oil-belching pipe-stub to be then pumped full of concrete. A wire-fabric covered "bleed" hole at the top of the bell could allow the displaced water and oil to escape during the fill, yet retain the aggregate bearing concrete mix.

Could the upward pressure of the rising oil in the leaking oil-pipe lift off that massive metal "concrete form" now filled with another 160 tons of concrete? ..Shouldn't we find out?

**

@Kapanda: Our sun's power is nuclear fusion power, ..so shouldn't our mastery of "solar energy" be defined as our ability to contain and control a hydrogen-hydrogen fusion reaction, through which we derive the universe's preferred "green energy"?

Which nation is working on fusion? ..Is the United States?

Is fusion power the actual goal of that Large Hadron Collider (LHC) we heard discussed right here on March 30 of this year?

Who will own the output of that LHC should they in fact win that fusion-energy "Mega-Quadrillion Dollar Lottery", and go on to rule the world?

Whoever it is, ..do you think they will be nice to the rest of us who didn't even compete???

Kapanda  06/19/2010 02:08 PM Report

"Wind and solar are great, but they are not going to give us a new energy system, there's just not enough of it."

That obviously didn't come out right.

JimBullis  06/19/2010 01:39 AM Report

John Hofmeister recognizes at least that there was a failure to "go to scale" but weakens his position somewhat by accepting that there was misunderstanding of the rate of spill. Still he says it was widely known that this was a huge disaster. I saw no need for accurate estimates myself; it was clear that there was far more than we were prepared to handle and time to pull out all the stops from the earliest days - - no fiddling around with measurements needed. When you are engulfed in flames in a burning house, it is time to run like heck; who would wonder if the temperature was 1000 degrees or 2000 degrees?

Of course it was the fact, and apparently it is known that supertankers had worked in the Iraq oil cleanup.

But it has to be laid to Pres. Obama's door that he did not order in large scale actions such as bringing in the supertankers. Could he really have been stymied by fear of the unions and the Jones Act?

Hofmeister then takes a stance that this thing will continue to spew. And then we hear that the best minds were called in and that meeting failed. Something is very wrong here. Apparently we do not know who the best minds are. The best minds should be telling Pres. Obama and BP about their actions that are clearly incompetent.

I list some of the accumulating evidence that BP is not capable of operating in unusual circumstances. (1)Currently we are dumping much oil that could be collected because the processing is incapable of handling the rate. But oil can be separated from water or whatever after being tranported to shore, (2) We are told that it takes 4 days for a tanker to get to shore and return, you use two or three tankers, and we are here only talking about unloading the collected oil after the processing. (3) BP seems unable to distinguish between a relief well that will relieve pressure from below by tapping into the reservoir, and a cut off operation that will plug the existing well at a point down below; and a cut off operation would not need to go anywhere near as deep, (4) We watched, some bamboozled by gee whiz robotics, the cutting off a pipe with a circular blade diamond saw. There are many good minds that know it is not possible to cut a pipe with a circular saw blade if there is high pressure fluid running in the pipe. (5) Such minds would also know that there is no need to cut off a pipe just above a flange connection; you unbolt the flanges with a very simple wrench. (6)And going back from the initial weeks, it is puzzling that there were no engineering minds that would not have seen the possibility of a containment dam being cast in place using concrete, poured with first 'top hat' box modified to function as a concrete form, where the concrete could form a seal with the steel casing to clamp down this monster. (7) But top minds from the oil industry would surely know about bottom hole pumps that would overcome much of the tendency of methane crystals to impede flow and would enable negative pressure at the leak which would have sucked oil and water into the pipe. (8)And of course when the connection to the cut off pipe was made, the seal should have been made at the flange rather than trying to tie into the ragged pipe stub. (9) And now we hear with amazement that they are having to burn off oil rather than pump it to a tanker is beyond comprehension. Sitting next to Pres. Obama, Energy Advisor Carol Browner said some time ago that they would not let the Jones Act limit their response. So what is the hang-up that is keeping tankers from being utilized? (10) And we also heard that BP had located a tanker in the North Sea which they were bringing down to help. This last absurdity has to clinch the case that BP has not a shred of competence to deal with this. So how could John Hofmeister not understand these things?

The rest of the panel have no experience that would bear on the matter, though they brought interesting comments about the leadership issue. Truly a Churchillian roar is required. And accordingly, the leader we need would have ordered in the tankers without a moment of hesitation.

But the biggest failure was the acceptance of Admiral Allen's long ago statement that BP was best equipped to handle this. The pyramid of advisors to Pres. Obama has dismally failed, and we have to blame him for that failure.

I was glad to see some recognition that cap and trade was not a viable possibility for the energy bill at this time, though the reasons for that were not adequately discussed. This disaster might make people upset with the oil drilling process, but what it is bound to do is to limit and make more expensive that very important substance itself. And with that there is going to be even more pressure on the fuels that we now are using. Clearly this is not a time to kick our economy further into the mud by loading it with much higher priced electricity which would be the result of making coal much higher priced by taxing the carbon in that fuel.

I wonder if the best minds we can muster are aware that a ton of actual carbon, which is the useful part of coal, is 44/12 tons of CO2. So a $25 tax on CO2 works out to be a $92 tax on carbon; depending on carbon content of coal, this can be a tax on a ton of coal ranging from $46 to about $80. Since coal underpins the price of electricity, this would be a grim burden for our energy based economy to bear.

(On May 1, I emailed John Frederickson of Frontline, owner of the largest fleet of supertankers in the world, to send by a few of his tankers, and emails went to other tanker owners as well, while also emailing EPA and other agency folks to call for such. Nothing happened, and I guess I now know why.)

ecr  06/18/2010 09:32 PM Report

No more talking. Show me.

Cejpat  06/17/2010 07:39 AM Report

Review & discuss a scientist's reply to climate change skeptics: http://www.stthomas.edu/engineering/jpabraham/

The US consumer/military is a petro-druggie. The US government, Petro-states, BP, Exxon Mobil, et al fund the Lord Christopher Moncktons of the world.

Sell your car to the scrapyard, and get a bike!

vernongalt  06/16/2010 09:46 PM Report

Energy policy: one impression is that many people live as far as possible from their work. on a trip to England we discovered that people who drive into London to work must pay a special fee. maybe someday we will butcher the sacred cow of driving as far as we please. never heard the issue mentioned on TV. if gasoline is the drug of choice maybe it should cost more.

robdverity  06/16/2010 05:09 PM Report

Where the hell are the supertankers a la the Saudi's supposedly used successfully? Surely unions don't want to be held up as obstructionists in this calamity. Suspend the rules for the duration, or be drummed out of existence. The ecology is more important than agreements that impede cleanup.

robdverity  06/16/2010 04:59 PM Report

SIZES loom large: peak oil?, spewing oil?, total production oil?, total oil consumption? All seem to be questionable. If this one well has tapped into a seemingly bottomless pit, how much is on tap and tappable in all the multiple sites (on and off shore) world wide? Spoon fed peak pablum by big oil to keep prices artificially high?

Further, conventional wisdom(?) espouses urgency in breaking our addiction to OPEC oil. Ecologically YES! Economically ? Becoming problematical. The spill's ecological gulf costs are spilling into the economic cost.

As a cautionary tale for starters: for each trillion dollar cost of the spill (long-term several times BP net worth?) the US could buy 10 billion bbls of $100 per bbl OPEC oil. [Need math check - too many zeros.]

The ecological damage will not be repaired in a year, two, three or more. Decades will unfortunately be more like it.

(We need a version of cap and trade.)

We are a sicko dollar-addicted venal culture. Everything is ultimately for sale; starting with integrity and statesmanship; followed by govt.; regulations (finance, SEC, MMS, yadda); corporate greed; cost-cutting (social costs be damned); etc.

Trade one dolphin for two CEOs: starting with BP and GS.

Check that. A nobility imbalance. Make that two pelicans, both oil soaked and throw in the heads of the MMS and the SEC with the CEOs. Apologies to all dolphins and pelicans.

charlizecourriers  06/16/2010 04:58 PM Report

Comrades of the Democracy! In order to change tomorrow, something must change today. Obama needs your help. What you said last night didn't help. Not, especially, the giggles. It seems to be another case of borrowed money and borrowed time-- with an election about four months away. Practice your giggles!

NeilMacCallister  06/16/2010 04:28 PM Report

The oil appears to be exiting that roughly 2-foot diameter.pipe at less than 5mph, ..a thin torpedo-like device should be able to propel itself downward against that moderate "headwind" rather easily, no? ..and in that near zero-oxygen environ, secondary burning should be restricted. To help isolate the explosion further, have the projectile bear a "mushrooming" 1 ton nosecone, which will be driven further down to expand and seal the flow, to be then buried under another 100 tons of crushed rock and sediment.

Would that have a chance?

NeilMacCallister  06/16/2010 03:33 PM Report

Dear Mr. President,

I noticed that in tonight’s speech you did not give an explanation of how the BP promised “relief wells” were going to stop the already erupting oil well from continuing to spit out its polluting oil.

You did promise a due diligence in the cleaning-up of what is being expelled “for as long as it takes”; and to both pursue down-the-road collections against BP, and to increase oil regulations for the future.

But still, ..must we really wait 2 more months to see if BP is going to be correct in its promise that their “relief wells” will finally stop this disastrous oil outflow?

Or should we call in the U.S. Navy right now to destroy that well-pipe a quarter-mile or more down under that Gulf seabed (sent down inside the pipe), and just be done with the source of these still outpouring damages?

Has BP ever detailed to you how their relief well is considered so fool-proof?

If they have, can that information please be shared with the public in your next address?

_______

From the June 10 episode:

CHARLIE ROSE: The two relief wells will be in by August

CHRIS MATTHEWS: We don’t know if that will work. We don’t know.

_______

I agree that we don’t know if those “relief wells” will work, ..and I believe the present and ongoing environmental and economic damages, and the significant risk of further mechanical failures and disappointments, are just too great for us to be gambling that another unproven and unsecured promise made by BP will in fact come true after allowing this devastation to continue for another two months.

Alternatively, I vote that we call the U.S. Navy and get the necessary demolition experts, and that we do so quickly.

Thank you very much, Sir.

Slim  06/16/2010 03:11 PM Report

As usual, before even listening to what your assembeled talking heads had to say, I placed and won the umteenth bet with myself that no black pundits would be included in this latest kangaroo court incarnation so popular in America's lily white mainstream media. Come-on now, even to you and your colleagues color phobic insensitivities, these long running and over the top omissions have had to intrude into your apparently long dead instinct toward some semblance of fairness. Maybe, just maybe, there may exist in a nation of black experience and thought, a view-- perhaps many views, of our nation, our societal challenges and their solutions, to which our unique perspective might lend a solution or at the very least, a needed fresh commonsense analysis devoid of the usual elaborately hidden prejudices that infect and inform our here-to-for lily white media discourse. I won't even get into white media fixation on everything and anything attached to our black president and their mission to hold him to a new higher standard of performance previously reserved for dieties.

REMant  06/16/2010 01:52 PM Report

From a political point of view I'd suppose the speech was an attempt to make it sound like the president had wanted to avoid stuff like this to begin with, but I think that would be a bit of a stretch. Of course, it was also an attempt to boost his energy legislation, and certainly more alternative energy has at least the potential to reduce offshore drilling, tho it does seem that he missed making goals and strategy clear, or mouthing memorable sound bites such as "we shall fight on the seas and oceans...we shall fight on the beaches...we shall never surrender." As Hoffmeister remarked it is said that available cleanup vessels are not being used because under the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 (the so-called Jones Act) they would have to replace their crews with Americans in order to operate in US coastal waters, however this can be waived and the admin has said it would do that, but no one has asked them, yet the reason seems to be that the president would rather take the time to put the technology on union ships. While I think this is a disaster, and probably as he says yet another reason to get off liquid fossil fuels asap, I don't think it is going to quite mean the end of the world as we know it. As for a "Federal Energy Resources Board," I would feel the same about it as the Federal Reserve, and the new healthcare apparatus, because while we might expect conservation from it, it clearly would be in a position to do exactly the opposite. Sequestering, regulating and bureaucratizing things is NOT a means to efficiency and we ought to know that above all by the way the Federal Reserve has been run for the past century. I might add that as for so much else, if we can get our financial house in order, it will take care of the rest. Obviously a good part of "living beyond our means" has gone into buying and burning oil. If we can develop our own alternatives it will by increasing employment alone make energy more affordable.