Radio Ecoshock
June 25th, 2010
Coast to Coast AM covers the
Gulf:
RICHARD
C. HOAGLAND: "Gas
explosion, 50 miles off Louisiana, that you can imagine. Think Mount St. Helens, underwater. What that would do is create a cloud of
incredible toxic material, which would then drift with the winds over the
shore, where there are millions of people..."
GEORGE
NOORY: "What
about a tsunami?"
R.
Hoagland: "The
next step is you would get a tsunami."
Oh please. And some of this garbage went out over hundreds of stations on Coast to Coast AM. It gets worse. I expect this to triumph on You tube. But the whole story, based on un-named geologists, inside government sources, and, wait for it, aliens, was reworked by DK Matai - and reposted on sites that should know better, like the Huffington Post.
Incidentally, when I added a comment on the Huffington
Post, criticizing their sources, and noting the strict similarity of the story
to that by Richard Hoagland – my comment was never published. Censorship at the Post? Not liking criticism?
Really. Listen to the Hoagland interview, and then
read Matai - it looks like a paraphrase to me - and neither cites any sources
we can check.
As far as
I can tell, the original source for these Gulf terror stories is Richard C.
Hoagland, who explained it all on the George Noory Show. The same theory was remade by Dr.
Bill Deagle, on Bill Ryan's Project Avalon show. And what do all these people have in common?
DR.
BILL DEAGLE:
"This is being driven by trans-dimensional super-beings, the Gods of the
ancient world, the same ones like Apollo, Appoleon - there's a whole list of
the names. And I can actually give you
the names. If people want to know they
can go back to James Wier's
Book of Demonology, 1535. They are
sequestered in the Vatican Library if people are listening that know about
this...”
Dr. Bill
Deagle, talking to Bill Ryan on the Project
Avalon podcast June 16, 2010.
Deagle's
explanation of the coming Gulf explosion and tsunami are so close to that given
first by Richard Hoagland, that host Bill Ryan remarks on it. Deagle says he got it all from his own
sources. The theory all sounds sort
of possible, with lots of faux geology thrown in, but really, all of the
above people, Hoagland, Deagle and Ryan, believe aliens run the show here on
Earth, and probably caused this spill, for their own nefarious purposes.
Meanwhile,
as we'll hear from Stephanie
Mencimer, an investigative reporter for Mother Jones magazine - the
far-right and some Tea Party movement agree the Gulf spill is a plot to move
Dixie into horrible FEMA camps - while Obama kills off America with the
dreaded carbon tax.
Have we lost our collective minds? Why do Americans love to terrorize
themselves?
I'm
going to make a bold prediction. The BP well is not
going to cause the Gulf of Mexico to erupt into a world-ending volcano. Millions of people will not die because of
this. There will be no tsunami.
Any of
these so-called experts could find that out by simply asking a few sane
scientists. That's what I did for this
week's show.
We'll ask
Dr. Samantha Joye,
an expert on both oil and the deepwater Gulf about these viral fears. More important, Dr. Joye is just back from a
research mission in the Gulf, to measure those underwater plumes of oil and
gas. You'll get the latest. For her full press briefing after returning
from the Gulf (49 minutes) click here.
Then we
go to the Chief Scientist of the big conservation group Oceana, Dr. Michael Hirshfield, to investigate
a REAL threat to the Gulf: masses of methane are accumulating under the sea -
and leaking out into the atmosphere as potent climate changing gases. What does that mean for sea life, and for
the oil industry?
Three
interviews, and then I'll return to our deepest fears, looking at the
cranksters who love to wind us up, with bed time stories. And one more rumor about geopolitics -
why America needs BP to feed the war machine.
I'm Alex
Smith. Let's get started, with the
newest science first.
[Dr. Joye
interview 15 minutes, 3 MB ]
In the
interview, Dr. Joye mentioned the plumes wouldn't have formed except for not
only the depth, but the fact that the oil and natural gas are coming out fast,
like a jet. Here
is a place to see a video experiment in a tank, showing how simple oil
leaks go to the top, but as soon as they are under pressure, like the Gulf
well, then a plume forms which does not rise to the surface.
A little
later in the program, we'll check out the new worries about giant plums of
methane in the Gulf of Mexico, and the fear of dead zones. But right now, I'd like to get back to the
crazy side, with Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones magazine. Are you ready to be enslaved?
[Mencimer
interview 15 minutes, 3 MB]
This is
Radio Ecoshock - I'm Alex. Next up: a
shot of science from an expert who just testified before Congress - Dr.
Michael Hirshfield. He says the
time for offshore oil is coming to an end.
[Hirshfield
interview 15 minutes 3 MB ]
We mostly
talked about the new threat of methane coming in high volumes from the
Deepwater drill site. There is lots of
press coverage on it, like this article: "Methane
is newest BP oil spill threat for the Gulf of Mexico." Or this
story from AP.
After I
talked with Mike Hirshfield, I began to think more about those methane
clathrates. Dr. Kessler of Texas A&M
U confirms this
Gulf gusher is indeed the largest single release of methane in the human
record.
Some of
that will get into the air, possibly punching up the temperatures in the coming
decade. Most of it will freeze down in
the deep sea, waiting to erupt 50 or a hundred years from now, a curse for our
descendents. And it all could have
stayed safely deep under the Earth, where Nature put it.
You
have to wonder how much carbon is going up from all those billowing black gulf
oil fires. Some of those burn 2,000 gallons at a
crack. BP says it's main rig and the
Q4000 ship can burn up to 420,000 gallons of oil a day, and they are aiming for
up to 2 million gallons. Another article
says BP is burning 600,000 gallons a day, already.
Professor
Jeff Chanton from Florida State University says somewhere between 10 to 50
percent of the methane coming out of the well is reaching the atmosphere,
partly because oil is coating the bubbles.
Jennifer
Grayson, Editor of the Red, White and Green did some rough calculations,
based on a lowball estimate of just 15,000 barrels of oil a day leaking from
the well.
Grayson
does the conversions, and says that methane equals 13 thousand metric tons of
CO2 equivalent a day - "more than 80 percent of the daily CO2 emissions
for the entire New York metro area."
But really, the spill is at least four times larger than that. It's rough math, but we can all agree, this
ain't good for the climate.
Over at
the Real Climate blog, David gives a different perspective. Just living our fossil-fueled lives, driving
around, we
are all leaking the equivalent of about 2,000 Gulf Oil spills a day. Our lives are just carbon-making machines.
I'm still
wondering what they are doing with all the weathered oil collected in plastic
bags by clean-up workers. One guess: it
will go back into deep injection wells on land. So we've reached complete carbon capture and storage already! Why bother with the middle layer of
consumers. Just haul it out of the sea,
and shoot it straight back underground.
We'd be better off than if we burned it all into the atmosphere.
Talking
about the whackos and fear-merchants opening this program, I forgot about Pastor Lindsey Williams on
the Alex Jones show. He'll put the
fear of God into you, and help Ted's GCN network sell you some gold, with tales
of chemical poisoning of the Gulf population.
It's over the top, and it's maybe kinda true. Catch that
on You tube, all those links are in my Radio Ecoshock show blog for June
24th, 2010.
For a
cleansing breath of fresh air, try
this article by Naomi Klein in the Guardian newspaper.
Speaking
of over the top and maybe true, I promised you the
geo-political grand-daddy rumor of the Gulf. This one
comes from Wayne Madsen, a kind of spook investigator, Washington insider,
broadcaster and podcaster.
Writing
at oilprice.com, Madsen says, quote:
“…sources
within the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency
(FEMA), the Pentagon and Interior and Energy Departments told the Obama
Administration that the newly-discovered estimated 3-4 billion barrels of oil
in the Gulf of Mexico would cover America’s oil needs for up to eight months if
there was a military attack on Iran that resulted in the bottling up of the
Strait of Hormuz to oil tanker traffic, resulting in a cut-off of oil to the
United States from the Persian Gulf. Obama, Salazar, Chu, and Gates
green-lighted the risky Macondo drilling operation from the outset, according
to WMR’s government sources.
WMR
learned that BP was able to have several safety checks waved because of the
high-level interest by the White House and Pentagon in tapping the Gulf of
Mexico bonanza find in order to plan a military attack on Iran without having
to be concerned about an oil and natural gas shortage from the Persian Gulf
after an outbreak of hostilities with Iran."
end
quote.
You can
find out more at http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/
According
to the Wall Street Journal, quote:
"BP
is the single biggest supplier of fuel to the Department of Defense, with
Pentagon contracts worth $2.2 billion a year, according to government records.
BP is also the largest producer of oil on federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico,
which makes it a significant contributor of revenue to the government."
Several
sources, like here,
and here
- report eleven American warships, including the aircraft carrier USS Truman,
plus some Israeli navy ships, passing through the Suez Canal in mid-June. The Iranians complain they are being set up
for an attack.
So who
knows, maybe the Administration and the Pentagon are really counting on their
single biggest supplier of fuel. It's
possible they helped BP speed up the Deepwater Horizon hole, to get a
production rig on there ASAP. If so, the
geopolitics of the Middle East may have contributed to the Gulf oil disaster. Is it too much to hope that losing this
field, and other coming Gulf production, could deter a crazy attack on Iran?
It's a
strange old world. Almost anything is
possible. Even peace.
Get ready
for a good Summer. It may be the best
we have for a while.
Alex Smith.
P.S. I
was just checking the web server that delivers Radio Ecoshock programs, and was
please do see listeners have downloaded over 20,000 shows in the first 21 days
of June. That’s a decent audience just
from downloads, not to mention our radio stations. Thanks a lot to all of you - for passing on the word!