John Wathen: Eyewitness to BP’s destruction of Gulf warns New Zealand

38-minute video presented by Greenpeace NZ
With Support by Waterkeeper Alliance

John Wathen is an award winning photo journalist who recently toured Aotearoa recounting his experience both on the ground and in the air documenting the catastrophic 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

BP gets Gulf oil drilling permit amid 28,000 unmonitored abandoned wells

“Stage Two” of the BP Gulf of Mexico Environmental Disaster

24,486 permanent and 3,593 temporarily abandoned wells in the Gulf of Mexico

[Image]

By Rady Ananda

Since BP’s catastrophic Macondo Blowout in the Gulf of Mexico last year, the Obama Administration has granted nearly 300 new drilling permits [1] and shirked plans to plug 3,600 of more than 28,000 abandoned wells, which pose significant threats to the severely damaged sea.

Among those granted new permits for drilling in the Gulf, on Friday Obama granted BP permission to explore for oil in the Gulf, allowing it to bid on new leases that will be sold at auction in December.

Gulf of Mexico Sea Floor Unstable, Fractured, Spilling Hydrocarbons

Getty Images

By Luis R. Miranda
The Real Agenda

Oil and gas are still seeping unabated, says expert. Toxic leakage poses significant public health risks.

The Gulf of Mexico disaster has not gone away.  In fact, it has grown exponentially since the main stream media stopped talking about it. According to the Gulf Rescue Alliance, an organization composed of scientists, medical professionals and seafood industry professionals, among others, the problem cannot be simplified to the damage already caused by the oil spill. It is worse, much worse.

The Real Agenda received exclusive information regarding the current state of the ongoing emergency in the Gulf of Mexico.

Environmental Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico: The Escalation of BP’s Liability

Louisiana seafood distributor Dean Blanchard, with recently found oil taken from a nearby marsh. © Erika Blumenfeld/Al Jazeera

By Dahr Jamail
Global Research

As oil, sickness and contamination persist, Gulf residents and lawyers file thousands of lawsuits against the oil giant.

“If you got caught humping another woman – [if] you’re both naked and caught in the act – you’d want BP to explain to your wife how it didn’t happen.”

This colorful analogy was proposed by Dean Blanchard, a seafood distributor on Grand Isle, Louisiana, to explain oil giant BP’s continuing machinations to evade liability in the aftermath of the April 2010 disaster.

Beyond Protest: Saving our planet with ‘Deep Green Resistance’

By Rady Ananda

From what makes an effective resister to effective resistance strategies, in Deep Green Resistance, Aric McBay, Lierre Keith and Derrick Jensen lay out the reasons for and methods of bringing down industrial civilization.  The goal is saving the biosphere, and with it, Homo sapiens.

In Endgame, a two-volume tome that everyone should read, Jensen writes, “Bringing down civilization means depriving the rich of their ability to steal from the poor, and it means depriving the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet.” He backs this up with his Twenty Premises.

DGR agrees: “It means thoroughly destroying the political, social, physical, and technological infrastructure that not only permits the rich to steal and the powerful to destroy, but rewards them for doing so.”

Ecocide: Obama approves Shell Oil deepwell drilling in Gulf of Mexico

If you doubt the War on Nature, from fracking to deepwater drilling to genetically engineered food and tons of pesticides, then test the nearest stream or air quality outside your home. Corporations, protected by governments, are killing the planet and they will not stop until WE stop them.

O beautiful for chemtrail skies,
Monsanto waves of grain;
For mining mountain travesties
Above the blighted plain…

Corporate America!
America!
They piss toxicity
They kill the birds and dolphins, too
From sea to oiled sea.

Shell wins approval to drill new Gulf of Mexico deepwater wells

Royal Dutch Shell has won approval to drill the first new deepwater oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico almost a year after a spill by rival BP halted the industry’s expansion.

By Richard Blackden
Telegraph UK

US authorities have given the green light to the Anglo-Dutch company’s plan to drill three wells to a depth of about 2,950 feet in a field 130 miles off the coast of Louisana.

Gulf spill sickness wrecking lives: Meet the sick, dying and dead

Nearly a year after the oil disaster began, Gulf Coast residents are sick and dying from BP’s toxic chemicals.


National and State Parks along the Gulf Coast have posted health warnings along the coast [Erika Blumenfeld/AJE]

By Dahr Jamail
Al Jazeerah English

“I have critically high levels of chemicals in my body,” 33-year-old Steven Aguinaga of Hazlehurst, Mississippi told Al Jazeera. “Yesterday I went to see another doctor to get my blood test results and the nurse said she didn’t know how I even got there.”

Aguinaga and his close friend Merrick Vallian went swimming at Fort Walton Beach, Florida, in July 2010.

“I swam underwater, then found I had orange slick stuff all over me,” Aguinaga said. “At that time I had no knowledge of what dispersants were, but within a few hours, we were drained of energy and not feeling good. I’ve been extremely sick ever since.”

Woods Hole: Dispersant failed to degrade in Gulf of Mexico

By Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

To combat last year’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill, nearly 800,000 gallons of chemical dispersant were injected directly into the oil and gas flow coming out of the wellhead nearly one mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, as scientists begin to assess how well the strategy worked at breaking up oil droplets, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) chemist Elizabeth B. Kujawinski and her colleagues report that a major component of the dispersant itself was contained within an oil-gas-laden plume in the deep ocean and had still not degraded some three months after it was applied.

BP Genetically Modifying the Gulf of Mexico

By Michael Edward
Blue Plague.org

Evidence that BP used synthetic microorganisms to clean up the oil in the Gulf of Mexico indicates that the genetically modified bacteria are altering the DNA of species throughout the food chain impacting all biota, including humans, writes Michael Edward.

Corexit? Phosgene gas? What Else? Now over 30 mass kills around the globe

Continual updates posted at Food Freedom’s Mass Kills page

By Rady Ananda
COTO Report

WTF is happening? Are some of these mass die-offs a result of Corexit sprayed in the Gulf of Mexico last year and now making its way up the coast and over to England? Corexit can’t explain all the mass die-offs. We have one report from Russian intelligence that Phosgene Gas was sprayed in Arkansas, resulting in those die-offs. But what about New Zealand? And Ontario? Have the psychopaths gone on a murderous rampage around the globe?

Consequences of the BP Oil Spill (Video)

Video by Global Voices for Justice and Global Access Media

Consequences of the BP Oil Spill (Oct. 2010, 15 mins) Produced and directed by Mark Manning.

The first in a 12 part documentary series investigating the real effects of the BP oil disaster on the people and environment of the Gulf. Featuring Dr. Riki Ott, marine toxicologist specializing in oil spills.

Thousands along the Gulf Coast Suffer ‘BP Crud’

The Untold Story of Human Health Effects From BP’s Oil Disaster

By Glynn Wilson
Locust Fork News Journal
Sept. 7, 2010

ORANGE BEACH, Ala. — Wherever disaster strikes, there’s always an associated crud. There was the Exxon Valdez Crud. The Nine Eleven Crud. The Katrina Cough, and then the TVA coal ash cough. Now, along the entire coast of the Gulf of Mexico, there is the BP Crud, afflicting workers and the general population from Louisiana to Florida.

Can you dig it?

Michael Collins
Now what could this mean? TV crew stopped from taking samples from polluted Florida beach. Pat Gonzales, US Fish and Wildlife (to WEAR ABC 3 reporter taking a sample from polluted beach): “You can not come out here and do your own investigation if you’re looking for oil product.” WEAR ABC 3

Is the government protecting the sovereign state of BP? Is a pattern emerging?

It seems so. In addition to chasing off WEAR-ABC off the beach, federal officials discouraged scientists from taking samples in the Gulf, other federal officials confiscated samples gathered by scientists at LSU, and state officials refused to test fish for pollution claiming they’d seen no oil in the area in question. Who benefits?

Big Oil – First Nigeria then the World

Big oil in Nigeria – executions, pollution and suffering (Image)

BUZZ THIS

By Michael Collins

The big oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico is not the first to threaten a people’s way of life.

Just ask the Ogoni people from Nigeria’s oil rich central Niger Delta. Their experience over decades offers a model of things to come without serious changes in consumption and regulation.

Since the early 1960’s, oil spilled from Shell pipelines has fouled their region. Food and fresh water sources vanished. Their economy collapsed. While Shell and the Nigerian elite reap their rewards, the people in the polluted oil regions live with steadily declining jobs, incomes, and living standards.

The amount of oil spilled in just this region during the 1970’s far exceeds that of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster. The problem has been continuous since then. Most of it is still sitting there.