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BP Successfully Disposed of the Oil ... In the Gulf Food Chain
There's a great American tradition of "disposing" of toxic waste by putting it into things we eat.
For
example, some folks have found a great way of disposing of toxic
sludge: they helpfully relabel it as "organic compost" and then give it
to people to grow food in. See this, this and this.
The
Department of Energy also helpfully created the National Center of
Excellence for Metals Recycle (NMR), which allegedly has allowed scrap
metal from nuclear power plants to be recycled into utensils and other
consumer items. See this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this.
And as I wrote in August:
The
government allegedly ordered Manhattan Project scientists to whitewash
the toxicity of flouride (flouride is a byproduct in the production of
weapons-grade plutonium and uranium). As Project Censored noted in 1999:Recently
declassified government documents have shed new light on the
decades-old debate over the fluoridation of drinking water, and have
added to a growing body of scientific evidence concerning the health
effects of fluoride. Much of the original evidence about fluoride, which
suggested it was safe for human consumption in low doses, was actually
generated by “Manhattan Project” scientists in the 1940s. As it turns
out, these officials were ordered by government powers to provide
information that would be “useful in litigation” and that would
obfuscate its improper handling and disposal. The once top-secret
documents, say the authors, reveal that vast quantities of fluoride, one
of the most toxic substances known, were required for the production
of weapons-grade plutonium and uranium. As a result, fluoride soon
became the leading health hazard to bomb program workers and
surrounding communities.
Studies commissioned after chemical
mishaps by the medical division of the “Manhattan Project” document
highly controversial findings. For instance, toxic accidents in the
vicinity of fluoride-producing facilities like the one near Lower Penns
Neck, New Jersey, left crops poisoned or blighted, and humans and
livestock sick. Symptoms noted in the findings included extreme joint
stiffness, uncontrollable vomiting and diarrhea, severe headaches, and
death. These and other facts from the secret documents directly
contradict the findings concurrently published in scientific journals
which praised the positive effects of fluoride.
Regional
environmental fluoride releases in the northeast United States also
resulted in several legal suits against the government by farmers after
the end of World War II, according to Griffiths and Bryson. Military
and public health officials feared legal victories would snowball,
opening the door to further suits which might have kept the bomb
program from continuing to use fluoride. With the Cold War underway,
the New Jersey lawsuits proved to be a roadblock to America’s already
full-scale production of atomic weapons. Officials were subsequently
ordered to protect the interests of the government.After the war, ... the dissemination of misinformation continued.
Now, the nice folks at BP have done a great job of disposing of oil from its spill: in the Gulf food chain.
As AP notes:
Scientists
say they have for the first time tracked how certain nontoxic elements
of oil from the BP spill quickly became dinner for plankton, entering
the food web in the Gulf of Mexico.
***
"Everybody is
making a huge deal of where did the oil go," said chief study author
William "Monty" Graham, a plankton expert at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab
in Alabama. "It just became food."
***
Michael Crosby of
the Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida didn't take part in the study but
said what fascinated him was that the carbon zipped through the food
web faster than scientists expected. That in itself isn't alarming, but
if the nontoxic part of the oil is moving so rapidly through the food
web, Crosby asks: "What has happened to the toxic compounds of the
released oil?"
***
Graham's study, released Monday, is
published in Environmental Research Letters. It was mostly funded by
the National Science Foundation, with additional money from the state
of Alabama and BP's Gulf Research Initiative, which distributed money
through the Northern Gulf Institute in Mississippi.
Of course, if BP had used standard clean up procedures instead of hiding the oil with Corexit dispersant, things would have been much better.
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OT, but +$357B...
Fuck you troll. Get a life.
JUNK! Someone ban this meatball, it's all he posts.
Please make up your minds, this is driving me nuts! (not really). Either you want regulation to protect you from all the big bidness meanies who will poison us all and steal all our money, or you don't want regulation and it can be business as usual, like it is in all these polluted to the max, thieving, no-good bastards 3rd world countries. I think there must be a Goldilocks party here somewhere - those that want the regulations not too hot and not too cold but "just right". Yeah, like that'll happen.
Oh yeah - if you wanna smoke something minus the Heinz 357 chemicals added, smoke cigars; little to no additives in those. I quit smoking cigarettes by trading to cigars and after 2 weeks I had stopped my smokers cough and could exercise vigorously without getting winded. Besides not having all the chemicals in cigarettes, the tar and nicotine is much lower. Then I quit smoking totally with no jonesing at all.
As for BP, well - the ocean is our toilet and our trash depository and has been for a long time. Suddenly everyone is picky about what the fish might be eating (oil and CoreExit) as opposed to what they've been eating all these years? Little too late for that, doncha think?
We're a crazy bunch of monkeys, aren't we?
Imagine how much WORSE it is in China!?!?
And just at the point where the only things we can afford to produce anymore are Soda, Porn, and Oil (oh wait, and weapons) a country like China with almost ZERO environmental controls takes over production of nearly all our consumer goods!
Big picture this is a problem of the SPECIES, not the U.S. or the West or Green Energy or any other fantasy of having an industrialized civilization based on petrochemicals and expanding populations without damaging the extant ecosystem.
I feel your pain.
How about the good people of Florida lay out a red-carpet invitation to Obama to drop by once a week to chat at the local seafood buffet. See how much of the fishy (pun intended) produce he consumes.
+100! What an awesome idea!
Would love to see the shrimping/fishing industry in the gulf (maybe one of those non-profit envrionmental windbag types could use the press?), scare up some fresh-caught, local produce. Dig up some clam's from the shallow's and outlying islands, just rinse that crap off them, they'll be fine.... Then invite the press, every local politician, state and federal, all the way to the big cheese, and ask them to come down to a roundtable neighborhood discussion while enjoying some of the local products the region has to offer. What a great way to photo-op some newly elected candidates into stimulating the downtrodden econmies. Spin-Doctor couldn't write a better setup....
Nah, I don't think anyone will come either, but by hosting, and inviting, you'll be shaming them in the process for not showing.
Good idea. We can even build him a bullet proof catwalk to the beach for his girls to go and build some sand camps!
I will never eat gulf shrimp again.
George, thank you for the spotlight on the addition of toxic substances to the food chain.
Another example of the Conspiracy Theory being neither; the Conspiracy itself being perpetrated by the government and criticism thereto denigrated as imaginary ruminations of fools. Propaganda 101. Discredit to dismiss.
BTW, fluoridation of public water supplies today meets the DHS's definition of a terrorist act.
Fluoride is bad...again? So these big bad corporations want to poison the whole country's water supply so they can get rid of their waste? Funny, I believe I went to college with several kids whose parents owned or were high ranking execs at various multinational corporations and I recall them drinking and brushing their teeth from teh same faucet as I did. Is this fluoride thing the same crock as the old DDT and current BPA scare? Give me something real here...
Fluoride is AWESOME! The kids in India with high levels in their water and tiny faces growing out the side of their heads really enjoy the company!
I've been drinking tap water and using it to brush my teeth my whole life- I guess I am DOOMED. Maybe I am, it just doesn't pass the logic test when I see all the same captains of industry who are supposedly in on the plan, drinking from the same supply as teh rest of us.
You should study some chemistry before you start babbling about fluoride.
If you're going to babble about chemisty please demonstrate some chemistry knowledge, or provide a valid criticism of the topic.
Thanks,
Tally
p.s. I'm holding in my hand a beautiful chunk of Flourite from the Hicks Dome region of S. Illinois. If I ate it I would die. Fluoride ions love calcium, that's why your bones absorb fluoride. Very difficult to remove fluoride from the body once it is absorbed .
Hey look, here's the truth.
When fishermen said that their nets and anchors were coming up covered in oil, BP responded that most of the stuff they were finding was "organic."
True.
First rule of Propaganda.
Obfuscate and Mis-direct
Oil is "organic"
Truth
The microbes and sea food are natural. They've ingested oil.
Oil is organic.
Organic is natural.
The administration wants it to go away.
Administration is comprised of nature lovers.
Nature cleaned up its own.
Move along nothing to see here.
Mission Accomplished.
Back to watching "Moving on Up" reruns and posing for "Wookie Wear Daily"
Fucking case closed, John Q. Jackwagon.
I have no idea whether they'd think of it or do it but the repubs have a massive chance to make enviro points by having serious committee hearings about this.
There's a hell of a lot of room between enviro-nutcake and completely indifferent to environmental issues. If they were smart they'd make hay on this low hanging fruit of an issue.
the repubs have a massive chance if they put folks in jail that belong there.
corrected that for ya
fuck bp! they are all god damned assholes....
capital punishment for those murderers....
Chicken of the Seas bitchez!
GW's post is toxic punditry. It makes an outrageous comparison of something not proven to something else not proven. Non-bravo....
I didn't junk you (not that theres anything wrong with that) but I thought we paid all that money and gave all that power to the FDA so they would test our food and stuff before it kills us. But as with many meds and vaccines they will look the other way and just keep checking the cage to see if the guinea pigs are still breathing.
the chemical fertilizer industry sprang up after WWII - the ammunition companies were expecting the war to last much longer than it did and, when the war ended, they had lots and lots of ammonium and nitrate - presto chango, the ammunition companies became chemical fertilizer companies and a new industry was born
if you ever study micro-biology and soil fertility, you will quickly realize that we are destroying our future by using chemical fertilizers - but who cares as long as the corporations can make a buck in the process ...
You know those Bidis that young 'avant garde' smokers love - those clove cigarettes? The real thing, imported from Indonesia or India, is literally made with cigarette butts collected from the street gutters by poor urchins and sold through a network to the manufacturers of the Bidis. You can imagine what the street gutters these butts were lying in contained. That clove oil will kill the smell of a corpse if you use enough.
third world tobacco is produced in the field using completely unregulated toxic pesticide soup, tobacco storage warehouses use even worse chemicals to control bugs, mold etc, and the tobacco waste being imported is literally the floor sweepings left over after this crap is processed.
Love the Kingsford Briquette story! Here's another - for those who like to smoke while barbequeing. RJR says, in records several years old now, that it has in past years imported 70 million tons/year of waste from third world tobacco processing plants, then fabricated it into 'sheet tobacco' and then made all those little golden 'tobacco' curls packed into that paper tube so conveniently for every cowboy's smoking pleasure. In 2002 RJR actually went to court because the State wouldn't give it a tax credit for disposing of its waste in an environmentally sound manner - by making it into cigarettes. Evidently by dispersing it into the lungs of millions of smokers the environmental impact of waste disposal was mitigated. Gotta love that ingenuity! Citation follows:
NO. COA01-74
NORTH CAROLINA COURT OF APPEALS
Filed: 19 February 2002
R.J. REYNOLDS TOBACCO COMPANY
Petitioner
v
.
NORTH CAROLINA DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENT & NATURAL RESOURCES
Respondent
Does cigarette tobacco contains pollutants?
WTF?
Guess its OK to pick up a turd by its clean end?
Here's the opinion. A quick skim doesn't reveal that the tobacco waste imported from abroad was hazardous. Am I missing something?
Here's another data point. Whenever you use Kingsford Charcoal Briquettes, you're cooking your food in hazardous waste. Apparently the Oil Refineries take the leftover sludge, which is a hazardous material, and sell it. Kingsford buys it, packages it up into Briquettes, and sells it off. Apparently the Federal rules are such that this "magic" is sufficient such that the sludge + binder is no longer a hazardous material.
If ever you've wondered about the ammonia taste of your BBQ'd meat, well, now you know.
Is there any reason NOT to use one of the following: mesquite, apple, hickory, cherry, alder, oak, pecan? All far tastier than any charcoal.
None known. I use lump charcoal myself, and I know the source. I also use some of the above wood chips for smoking.
Link, please?
Just a personal conversation with a guy who used to be in charge of California's Hazardous Waste Department from years ago. If he said something like that about stuff that he was in charge of, it was true.
Not bashing Kingsford, just looking up their Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDSs) for Kingsford's products shows the reported hazardous ingredients in their products, which is a good thing so people can make informed decisions.
For the lighter fluid the MSDS shows its 100% apliphatic petroleum solvent
http://www.thecloroxcompany.com/products/msds/charcoalproducts/kingsford...
A quick link to the trusty wikipedia for a brief desription http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_spirits (compare CAS numbers to be sure you are looking at the same chemicals).
For some of the charcoal products Kingsford reportedly uses hydrobarbon solvent
http://www.thecloroxcompany.com/products/msds/charcoalproducts/kingsford...
If Kingsford buys in large quantities they could purchase from a separate distributor or maybe from a refiner (these are petroleum products) so I could see where the "waste to raw material" connection might be argued/stated, but it looks more like prouduct to raw material.
It's the way the whole system is set up bro. One side of the house is rewarded to drive input costs to zero or below.
In the case of Purina, they pay Coors Brewing Co(and others) to collect their garbage. After the beer is drained from the brewing vats all the grains left over are waste, zapped of nutrition.
I've seen the Purina trucks picking it up in Golden, CO. Following your head in the sand thought process I imagine you will find a source that says Purina takes the garbage grains to the local landfill? Yes?
I argue that they bring it home and turn it into pet food that the consumer thinks has nutritional value for their pet.
You wonder why you dog only lives 10-15 years? Because you are unknowingly feeding them cardboard shaped into dog food pellets.
They like us are the products of corporate greed and deception.
All I know is what I was told. That the Oil Companies had to deal with the sludge, and this was one of their avenues. A loophole, if you will.
I heard this story on NPR this afternoon.
It was very brief, and sounded like a reading of a press release.
Microbes ate the oil and then up the food chain went the 'transformed'
oil.
No mention of where the Corexit components went.
Indeed, no mention of much else at all.
Underlying message = "Problem Solved".
Interesting that the MSM is covering this up, including toxic rain from the Gulf causing rashes and God knows what else in people who come into contact with it. How many deaths before it becomes news? All I know as a resident of Florida is that Gulf seafood is still on the shelves and in restaurants. All I'm eating now is frozen seafood from western Central America.