BBC:

The major oil companies drilling off the US coastline are as unprepared as BP for a major spill, the chairman of a Congressional panel has said.

Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell all have identical response plans to BP, Henry Waxman told the House energy and commerce committee.

BP's US chief Lamar McKay is to give evidence over the Gulf disaster amid damning accusations BP took shortcuts.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

We've been debating whether to put National Wildlife Federation's URL on the cover of this week's Stranger, pointing readers to a place they can donate money to help with oil spill fallout. The question that's been bugging me: Does giving money to help with cleanup efforts ultimately mean BP will have to pay less? Because obviously BP should get stuck with as large a bill as possible.

Susan Kaderka, the regional executive director of NWF's South Central Regional Center, agrees that BP should have to pay as much as possible, but she pointed out that Louisiana has something like 7,000 miles of coastland (it's a very intricate, jagged coast), and BP and government officials need all the help they can get finding animals and nature in distress. It's an overwhelming amount of land to traverse on foot. She also pointed out that NWF has a lobbying arm in DC, where a better-funded NWF can put more pressure on politicians to make sure BP has to pay as much as possible. And she pointed out that NWF has been taking reporters for various magazines, newspapers, and TV stations (including Time and the BBC) to see affected wildlife populations up close—those reporters would otherwise just be standing on a dock somewhere, hoping to see some oil roll in. Getting those reporters up close to the damage gets real information out to people, including the politicians who can do something about it and everyday people, who can further pressure politicians to do something about it.

We're putting the URL on the cover—www.nwf.org/oilspill. (Our cover artist this week, Aaron Bagley, is donating his earnings from this week's cover to the relief effort, too.) At that website, you can find out how to donate money, how to volunteer, and what NWF is doing to make things right for the Louisiana wetlands and all those pelicans, turtles, and other animals. Alternately, if you just want to give $10 through your cell phone carrier, you can text WILDLIFE to 20222.

All this talk of little criminals getting shot, the hateful maniacs at the Family Research Council, and Republican Senate candidates hasn't gotten you down yet?

If this animated map—courtesy of the National Center for Atmospheric Research—doesn't ruin your day, then congratulations. You're invincible.

I have been so wrong. The undying spill in the Gulf of Mexico has a long way to go before it's even close to the worst environmental disaster in human history.

[M]ore oil is spilled from the [Niger] delta's network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP's Deepwater Horizon rig last month.

That disaster, which claimed the lives of 11 rig workers, has made headlines round the world. By contrast, little information has emerged about the damage inflicted on the Niger delta. Yet the destruction there provides us with a far more accurate picture of the price we have to pay for drilling oil today.

On 1 May this year a ruptured ExxonMobil pipeline in the state of Akwa Ibom spilled more than a million gallons into the delta over seven days before the leak was stopped. Local people demonstrated against the company but say they were attacked by security guards. Community leaders are now demanding $1bn in compensation for the illness and loss of livelihood they suffered. Few expect they will succeed. In the meantime, thick balls of tar are being washed up along the coast.

Later in the article:

The scale of the pollution is mind-boggling. The government's national oil spill detection and response agency (Nosdra) says that between 1976 and 1996 alone, more than 2.4m barrels contaminated the environment. "Oil spills and the dumping of oil into waterways has been extensive, often poisoning drinking water and destroying vegetation. These incidents have become common due to the lack of laws and enforcement measures within the existing political regime," said a spokesman for Nosdra.

The sense of outrage is widespread. "There are more than 300 spills, major and minor, a year," said Bassey. "It happens all the year round. The whole environment is devastated. The latest revelations highlight the massive difference in the response to oil spills. In Nigeria, both companies and government have come to treat an extraordinary level of oil spills as the norm."

(This post owes everything to Christopher Meyer.)

Rachel Maddow:

President Obama today promised a full investigation into the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster. Obama said the administration will consider whether what has happened amounts to a crime and won't allow new offshore drilling until we know what went wrong.

As Obama spoke, he was flanked by the two co-chairs of the bipartisan National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. The Republican co-chair, William K. Reilly, has spent a career in the industry he'll now probe. A former chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, Reilly currently serves on the board of directors of:

* ConocoPhillips
* DuPont, which provides technologies for oil and gas extraction
* Energy Future Holdings, a Texas-based electric utility company

Rossi on this?

• jurvetson

Given what's happening in the Gulf of Mexico, Rossi says he favors a moratorium on offshore drilling. He also says the polluters need to pick up the monumental tab. But he says, at some point, the U.S. should keep drilling.

Lesley Hazelton has another excellent post on what will turn out to be the greatest environmental disaster in history:

Yes, I am aware that ‘evil’ is a religious term. How can a proud agnostic use such a word? I trust my guts. As I look at this, I am sickened. The feeling starts in my throat, travels down to the pit of my stomach, then makes its way up again into my throat, leaving me with such a deep disgust that I feel dirty, degraded.

I think this visceral reaction is simply a human response to evil.

From NYT:

Americans have long had an unswerving belief that technology will save us — it is the cavalry coming over the hill, just as we are about to lose the battle. And yet, as Americans watched scientists struggle to plug the undersea well over the past month, it became apparent that our great belief in technology was perhaps misplaced.

This "great belief in technology" is not secular but closely linked with a great belief in American awesomeness. And American awesomeness has always been sustained by the foundations of American Christianity, a form of religion that is humble not toward nature but toward a God who has power over everything and punishes His enemies and rewards His followers. With American Christianity, prosperity is a God-given right, and this frame of thinking has established and reinforced a relationship with nature that is essentially identical with the one that exists between a master and slave.

It is precisely this kind of thinking that in Europe began to crumble in the period that followed the scientific revolution. In Origin of Species (1859), for example, Darwin essentially dethrones humans and pleads, again and again, that this dethronement, this diminishing, decentering is not the end of the world—humans can happily (if not proudly) live as animals among other animals.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

The end of the 19th century was not only the end of British awesomeness but also the emergence of a scientific sense of human littleness and limitations. It is a mistake to read the late-19th century books of H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, and many others without this understanding. What Darwin saw as a grand "view of life," many saw as either "The horror! The horror!" (be it in the direction of the deep past—Heart of Darkness) or "A horror of this great darkness" (be it in the direction of the deep future—The Time Machine). Near the end of The Time Machine:

A horror of this great darkness came on me. The cold, that smote to my marrow, and the pain I felt in breathing, overcame me. I shivered, and a deadly nausea seized me. Then like a red-hot bow in the sky appeared the edge of the sun. I got off the machine to recover myself. I felt giddy and incapable of facing the return journey. As I stood sick and confused I saw again the moving thing upon the shoal—there was no mistake now that it was a moving thing—against the red water of the sea. It was a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black against the weltering blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about. Then I felt I was fainting. But a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful twilight sustained me while I clambered upon the saddle.

True, we find dethroned humans in so many American novels (Earth Abides, for example) and movies (The War of the Worlds), but, culturally speaking, this sense of dethronement is far from universal. The certainty of American awesomeness that led to the war in Iraq or to the current destruction of the Gulf of Mexico, has been rooted in one, politically powerful branch of American Christianity. And what has feed much of this overrepresented group's tireless (and often comical) resistance to the hard facts of, say, Darwinism, has been the belief that American greatness cannot be separated from divine providence, from supernatural agency. What they do best (or famously) is to refuse to register American military power and technological mastery as anything but direct gifts from (and reflecting the power of—and also obedience to) the creator of the universe.

What the spill has made clear is that American awesomeness (technology) has a sure limit. It can only go so far and do so much. Operation "top kill" could not overwhelm that thing that God (technology) is imagined to completely master—nature. But if American awesomeness has a limit, then the God who supports and reinforces it (technology) is also limited. And if God is limited, then He is not a He but only a he, a man, a mere human being (technology).

Not all American Christians have the kind of relationship with nature that has placed this country in such deep waters. And the more the oil spill poisons the gulf, we can expect to see, on the one hand, the steady belittling of the believers of American awesomeness, and, on the other hand, a corresponding increase in the number of Americans whose view of things is much more down to earth.

That's how many barrels of mud—about 1,260,000 gallons—BP pumped into the well before giving up.

Why does this not surprise:

HOUSTON, May 29 (Reuters) - BP Plc (BP.L) (BP.N) gave up on its failed "top kill" effort to smother a Gulf of Mexico oil leak on Saturday and focused on a plan to cap a piece of equipment at the wellhead and corral spewing oil and gas.

"We do think it will capture the majority of the oil if it works. We can't guarantee that," BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said of the next step at a daily briefing on Saturday with the U.S. Coast Guard. He said it could take four days or longer to show results.

While everyone is talking about Bill Nye's concise explanation of Top Kill (and he does a really fine job explaining it both in video and in print), Armagideon Time has made an even more concise, even more scientifically sound explanation of what Top Kill means for the Big Oil Surge. Here's step one:

You should read the rest over here.

First of all, it's about time. This is the speech he should have given weeks ago; he's caused irreparable damage to his image by failing to address this earlier. The White House press corps understandably hammered him when it came time for questions, some even sounded agitated when they spoke. Obama admitted failures in verifying BP's information, particularly the 5,000 barrel estimate, "I think it took us too long to set up our flow tracking group that has since made more accurate estimates, but let me say that this did not change our response." But he stayed on message, which was essentially "We've known the gravity of this situation from day one, and it's been our highest priority. Mistakes have happened and will happen, but we're doing everything we can to stop this." Ultimately, he said: "It's my responsibility to shut this down."

He dissected questions, answering carefully and articulately. When asked if he regretted calling for expanded offshore drilling, he answered: "I continue to believe what I said at the time. I believe that oil continues to be a necessary part of our overall energy strategy. Where I was wrong, was when I believed that Big Oil had it together in terms of being prepared for the worst case scenario." Things took a turn when Helen Thomas abruptly changed the subject to Afghanistan ("And don't give us one of those Bushisms like 'If we don't go there, they'll come here.'")

As expected, Obama extended the moratorium of deep-water offshore drilling for six months.

As of 2006, the NOAA counted 3,858 oil and gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico:

• 2006 NOAA File

At least according to Wikipedia, Independence Hub, at 7,920 ft (2,414 m) and 110 miles from the Mississippi River Delta is the deepest offshore drilling platform.

Reuters:

The Independence Hub is located in 8,000 feet (2,440 metres) of water in Mississippi Canyon 920 in the Gulf of Mexico. It is the largest offshore natural gas processing facility with the capacity to produce up to 1 billion cubic feet per day, or about 12 percent of total U.S. offshore Gulf gas production.

Meanwhile, the top kill on the Deepwater Horizon is only temporary fix that won't be confirmed until enough cement can be added to make it permanent. If it doesn't work, we'll need a solution that doesn't take months, or the Gulf of Mexico and Obama, despite his performance today, are supremely fucked. Hurricane season starts in six days, and scientists are predicting a particularly nasty one this year.

UPDATE: Friend of Slog Fnarf offers a much more fancy and current map, located here.

The head of the federal agency that regulates offshore drilling has resigned.

Elizabeth Birnbaum informed staffers of the Minerals Management Service in an email Thursday that she is leaving the agency, according to a person familiar with the matter, who added that Ms. Birnbaum's email didn't give a reason. He added that she is not expected to stay on in the administration.

The priority of spending more time with her family is surely calling.

Today is the day BP is supposed to try its "Top Kill," pouring drilling mud and then cement into the pipe that points into the Deepwater Horizon leak (one of them, anyway) in an attempt to stop it. Increasingly, however, sources are reporting that BP needs to determine just how much pressure it will take to achieve this, and if it's too much, they won't try.

What's gonna happen?

It's a start:

NEW YORK (CNN) — An online movement to boycott BP for its role in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is growing at a rate of better than 25,000 names-a-day.

"I won't buy their gas any more. I won't patronize a company that's destroying our planet," New Jersey resident Patricia Jarozynski told CNN, one of 118,000 fans of the "Boycott BP" Facebook page as of this writing.

There is also this:

Anger is growing along with the size of the spill in the Gulf of Mexico. BP's environmental catastrophe has Public Citizen, the consumer advocacy group, also calling for a boycott against the oil giant, the first time it's taking such action against an energy company.