h/t the Captain

Roofing tar and a river bank. Problem solved.

*

As usual, in-depth of analysis of current events is best found at a place we call “not the media”. This summary, titled Congressional Testimony and the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, at The Oil Drum;

What caused that catastrophic, sudden and violent failure? Was the well properly designed? Was the well properly cemented? Were there problems with the well casing? Were all appropriate tests run on the cement and casings? These are some of the critical questions that need to be answered in the coming weeks and months.
Over the past several days, some have suggested that the blowout preventers (or BOPs) used on this project were the cause of the accident. That simply makes no sense. A BOP is a large piece of equipment positioned on top of a wellhead to provide pressure control. As explained in more detail in the attachment to my testimony, BOPs are designed to quickly shut off the flow of oil or natural gas by squeezing, crushing or shearing the pipe in the event of a “kick” or “blowout” – a sudden, unexpected release of pressure from within the well that can occur during drilling.
The attention now being given to the BOPs in this case is somewhat ironic because at the time of the explosion, the drilling process was complete. The well had been sealed with casing and cement, and within a few days, the BOPs would have been removed. At this point, the well barriers – the cementing and the casing – were responsible for controlling any pressure from the reservoir.

Read on. Some of the industry discussion in the comments is just as interesting.
h/t Adrian

“Here’s a picture of Dwain and his 4th wife…”

Deputy Commissioner Killam has instructed – in a signed internal memo – RCMP members to refrain from providing their own opinions on the firearms registry all while senior RCMP brass and organizations like the CACP claim that they represent the almost unanimous voice of Canadian police officers.

Discuss:

Irony isn’t lost on retired CIA general counsel John Rizzo

Meanwhile, all we have in Canada is all detainee abuse, torture, all the time (except that’s not the real interest). By someone else. Maybe leading to an election. Go figure.

More historical perspective on the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico can be found here at the ITOPF website.
The best estimate I can come up with suggests the current spill is around 700 tonnes a day (based* on the current official 5000 barrels/day estimate) – but if someone has a more accurate figure than that, drop it in the comments and I’ll update.
h/t Eric Anderson who adds in the comments, “For an even more shocking comparison, between Jan and May 1991 during the Gulf War – 11 million barrels were spilled (or dumped). That would 2,200 days, or about 6-[years], of the current flow-rate in the Gulf of Mexico.”
Related: I blame Bush.

At The Torch:

No bleed, no lead. And almost no coverage at all. The invaluable and brave Christie Blatchford of the Globe and Mail takes on her own industry…
…quite sad. I guess a country gets the media it deserves.

Much more on related matters:

Afstan: The true nature of up and at ’em Attaran/Speaker Milliken’s ruling is right

Update: Meanwhile, behind the curtains:

…
What an irony it would be if in the end the Liberals effectively shamed the government into agreeing to a post-2011 CF Afghan mission of some sort. I would think that Prof. Amir Attaran, amongst others, would be most disappointed at such an eventuality–and that the pesky detainee docs business would have to be put out of the way first.
It would also be nice, for planning purposes at a minimum, for the CF to get firm political guidance on any future Afghan commitment pretty soon.

Lots more here.

The Humane Society of the United States is to animal welfare what Bernie Madoff is to secure retirement.

(language advisory)

Bishop Hill;

GLOBE was incorporated in 2006, the founding directors all being British legislators […]
“To provide a forum for ideas and proposals to be floated in confidence and without the attention of an international spotlight“.

And out of reach of FOI requests.
Globe Director, Lord Oxburgh has been appointed to lead the inquiry into the scientific aspects of Climategate scandal.
GLOBE Director Lord Julian Hunt is “a climate modeller, former head of the Met Office, and an Honorary Graduate and Honorary Doctor of Science, University of East Anglia.”

The Directors acknowledge the support of International Organisations, Governments, Parliamentary Bodies and Industry, both financially and politically, with paticular acknowledgement to United Nations, The Global Environment Facility, The World Bank, European Commission, the Governments of Canada and Great Britain, the Senate of Brazil and Globe Japan.

Your tax dollars at work? (There you go, war rooms.)
Interesting stuff. But read the whole thing, including the comments.

Think again.
h/t

(Click image for interactive table)

How come Los Angeles has all of the smog?

“The cap-and-trade proposal assumes there is no difference in the impact of carbon dioxide, regardless of where it originates,” Jacobson said. “This study contradicts that assumption.”

More: Alberta Air Quality Map … Oil Sands Environmental Fact Sheet

Read all about it at The Torch.
Update (including “God help me these people are morons”):

Afstan: “Liberals feared Abu Ghraib-type detainee scandal: source”

Further to EBD’s post below, “Night of the Living Public Broadcaster”, there’s another aspect to the Afghan detainee abuse matter that our media manage to ignore–willfully? Relevant posts at The Torch:

Maybe some former Liberal ministers should be worrying about their asses
Facts: The previous Liberal government and Afghan detainees
“Torture in Afghanistan: The Liberals knew” redux
Afghan detainees and the former Liberal government/Human rights Update
(letter in Globe and Mail)

Remember that even back in early 2007 Prof. Attaran, source of the lastest attack on the government and CF (CBC video here), was trying to tie our troops to abuse. From Damian Brooks:

More spinning than a figure skating competition
Desperate fabrication

Meanwhile, Bruce R. weighs in at Flit on the CSIS angle and other things:

Wrong-tree barking watch
This is an interesting story. Not sure why they’re going with the CSIS involvement angle, though. The allegations about commanders putting orderly transfer to the Afghans ahead of intelligence-gathering would be more worth pursuing, I would have thought. Shows what I know.

And from the article, I’m not exactly clear what is is they’re accusing CSIS of: all the witness appears to be saying is military police don’t interrogate (they don’t), that the Canadian Forces in 2007 had no interrogation capability of its own (they didn’t) and so would have had to rely on CSIS personnel in theatre if it had done any, and that Afghan government’s procedural time limits would have prevented anything more than tactical questioning to establish identity in any case. The upshot being any detainees would have been of limited intelligence value at the time. Anyone who was there surely knows all of this to be true…

…Prof. Wark’s idea that Canadians were “outsourcing interrogation to the Afghans” at the time is ludicrous. In order to “outsource” we would actually have had to get something in the way of return or output, presumably. And if there was ever an item of intelligence that came from an Afghan NDS interrogation of a detainee taken on one of our ops, neither I nor my ANA counterpart ever saw it. The NDS weren’t big on the whole info-sharing thing to start with, and in my conversations with them at the time were generally bitter that the dysfunctional court system was springing most of their detainees free before THEY could do any questioning, either [emphasis added, not much time for, er, abuse it would seem]…

There’s a way out of their mess…

Suppose we didn’t want the publicly held debt to rise more than 2 trillion over the next 10 years. Here’s some numbers. Starting with Treasury Direct’s Debt to the Penny, we discover that on December 31st, 2009, publicly held debt was 7.8 trillion. As of March 4th, 2010, it was 8.06 trillion. Thus we are going add about 1.16 Trillion a year to publicly held debt.
The estimate for 2010 (see the Monthly Treasury Statement for Dec 2009) is that all individual income taxes will total 1.03 trillion for this fiscal year (Oct 09.Sept 2010). Because our interest rates will rise when the economy recovers, our debt servicing costs are going to rise quite a bit.
In any case, to fend off further increases in the publicly held debt (and higher interest payments), we would need to pretty much double each taxpayer’s individual income tax bill. So whatever you are paying in taxes this year, multiply by 2. That’s what it requires.

That’s just the teaser.
I love this: Annual Growth of Federal Revenues and Gross Domestic Product, 1970 to 2020.

Meanwhile, “cash-strapped states such as North Carolina, Alabama and Hawaii have been forced to slow down issuing income tax refunds to individuals and businesses because of a lack of funds in their budget”.
But not to worry, in the minds of the “Obama Recovery Watch High Alert” media: 36,000 workers laid off in February = “positive jobs report”.
With our national economy so dependent on trade with the elephant to the south, you’d think those numbers would be scaring the bejesus out of each and every one of us – beginning with our finance ministers. But by all indications, you’d think wrong.

# Context: Before 2009, the largest budget deficit recorded since the end of World War II had been 6.0 percent of GDP in 1983. The Bush Administration oversaw budget deficits averaging 3.2 percent of GDP.
# The 2009 budget deficit of 9.9 percent of GDP shattered the postwar record. Furthermore, the budget deficit is projected to remain above 5.8 percent of GDP indefinitely.
# By 2020, the budget forecasts a $1.9 trillion annual budget deficit, a public debt of 98 percent of GDP, and annual net interest spending surpassing $1 trillion.

Read on…
Update: Here’s a poll!

Featured comment by Eric Anderson;

SaskPower’s Centennial Wind Power Facility
• 83 “Vestas-V80” with a potential capacity of 150 megawatts of power on 30 km2 or 11.7 mile2
• 2nd largest wind facility in Canada when opened in 2006
• But, in SK they generate about 40% of this potential or 60 megawatts (see Saskatchewan Legislature Hansard, January 2007, page 794)
• They require a minimum wind speed of 14km/hr to operate and reach maximum power at 50km/hr
• They do not work at temperatures below -30 Celsius
• Footprint is thus 2 MW/km2 or 5.13 MW/mile2
• Each unit;
• is 351 ft tall , or 107 meters, or over 30-stories
• weighs 222 tonnes or 489,510 pounds
• has 3 x 39-meter blades, with tips moving at speeds up to 256kms/hr
Footprint of Wind vs. Nuclear is 1,440:1
• Bruce Power proposal for AB and “eluded to” for SK is, for example;
– 2 Areva EPRs
– 3,200 megawatts from a 250-acre facility (1 km2 or less than ½ mile2)
– Operates 90% of the time at full capacity or 2,880 MW
– Footprint is 2,880 MW/km2
• To get 2,880 MW from wind, at same scale as the Centennial project and efficiency (0.72 MW/turbine) (2 MW/km2), it would require;
– 4,000 turbines covering 1,440 km2
– or, a wind farm over 4.6 kms wide, stretching from Regina to Prince Albert (or 1 km wide from Regina Victoria, BC)
– The total weight of 4,000 turbines themselves (mostly steel, and without the concrete pads they sit on) would be 888,000 tonnes or 1,958,040,000 lbs (a lot of GHG).
• The Centennial Project was placed in the best wind producing area in the province (south of Swift Current) so its abilities cannot be reproduced elsewhere, so the farm would need to be even larger than described.
• See this link for wind averages/resource in SK
http://generationprocurement.saskpower.com/pdf/SPD_80m_021403.pdf
Nuclear capitol costs are less than wind
• The Centennial Project cost $275 million to generate 60 MW (see Saskatchewan Legislature Hansard, January 2007, page 793 for costs); that is $4.5833 million/MW
• A nuclear complex generating 2,880 MW would thus have a comparable cost allowance of; $4.5833 million/MW x 2,880 MW = $13,199.99 million
• A will-reported Finland reactor complex being built by Areva had a budget of $3,300 million that is now 50% over budget at $4,950 million. However, even at $4,950 million this reactor facility has less than half the capitol cost of wind, on a per MW basis.

We could have told you… the wind don’t blow when it’s cold.

The cold weather has been accompanied by high pressure and a lack of wind, which meant that only 0.2pc of a possible 5pc of the UK’s energy was generated by wind turbines over the last few days.
Jeremy Nicholson, director of the Energy Intensive Users Group (EIUG), gave warning that this could turn into a crisis when the UK is reliant on 6,400 turbines accounting for a quarter of all UK electricity demand over the next 10 years.
He said the shortfall in power generated by wind during cold snaps seriously undermined the Government’s pledge on Friday to build nine major new wind “super farms” by 2020.
“If we had this 30 gigawatts of wind power, it wouldn’t have contributed anything of any significance this winter,” he said. “The current cold snap is a warning that our power generation and gas supplies are under strain and it is getting worse.”

But nobody bothers listening.
h/t John B.

…concerning what the Liberal government knew and when they knew it.’ A post at The Torch:

Facts: The previous Liberal government and Afghan detainees
…here is a translation from a friend of a story in La Presse, April 28, 2007; draw your own conclusions over what should be the extent of any enquiry, should one be held. And what happened to those detainees transferred to the Americans? Where is, and was, the outcry?

The Liberals were in the know…