WASHINGTON -- The Interior Department's Michael Bromwich on Thursday pushed back against GOP lawmakers who denounced the administration for its response to last year's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and rejected Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour's (R) contention that the moratorium on deepwater drilling is too burdensome for residents.
In a hearing before the House oversight committee, Bromwich, the Interior Department's top drilling official, defended the Obama administration's handling of Gulf Coast recovery efforts even as Barbour insisted the federal drilling ban enacted by the Obama administration was more harmful to the Gulf Coast economy than the spill itself.
"While we and many others will continue to monitor and analyze events and readings from the Gulf to learn if some currently unrecognized or future development changes the situation, it appears the Gulf has essentially digested the oil and other chemicals thus far," Barbour said in a statement Thursday. "Further, in our state, on-shore impacts were quickly remediated, and there is no apparent residual environmental damage."
Barbour said there have been more than 31,000 oil wells drilled in the Gulf of Mexico in the last 50 years and that nothing like the last year's spill, which killed 11 rig workers and dumped almost five million barrels of oil into the Gulf, has ever happened before.
"The president's commission says that that's not so," countered Bromwich, noting there have been dozens of similar incidents in the past 15 years.
“They cite 79 incidents of loss of well control ... between 1996 and 2009," Bromwich said. "So another way to describe that is 79 near-misses, 79 almost-Deepwater Horizons. So without going into the details of each one, that's what the president's commission found. So to say that the risk is one in a million, or one in 'x'-thousand of deepwater wells drilled is not accurate."
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Democracy Gone Astray
Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.
All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.
[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]
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