With Bush, it’s always been oil money. Big oil bought and paid for the US Government and they even put their own watchdog in office to look after things in one Dick Cheney. Big oil certainly got their money’s worth with Cheney.
In just his second week in office, Bush formed the National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG), commonly referred to as the Energy Task Force. Cheney chaired the task force, which was made up of energy company executives. We may never know exactly what the NEPDG did because Cheney has actively worked to keep their activities a secret.
In 2003 the Supreme Court ruled that all NEPDG documents be released that contained references to any companies that had made agreements with the previous Iraqi government regarding the extraction of Iraqi oil.
Coincidentally, 2003 was also the year that Cheney decided not to file NEPDG reports with the National Archives and Records Administration, as required by law. The NARA is the organization charged with protecting classified information coming from the Executive Branch, so it’s a tough stretch to claim that it was done for reasons of national security. The NEPDG also refused to allow the NARA to inspect their record keeping.
What specifically was going on at the NEPDG may never be known since Cheney has cited executive privilege in denying congressional information requests. Simply put, records of their activities have never seen the light of day and likely never will, despite this little thing called the Freedom of Information Act. We can connect the dots, however, by taking a look at who the NEPDG met with.
In 2007, the Washington Post reported that the NEPDG had at least 40 meetings with energy companies and special interests groups from energy producing industries. They had one (1) meeting with representatives of 13 environmental groups, who speculated that the meeting was merely an attempt at appeasement, since a draft paper had already been produced by this time and more than half the meeting was spent on introductions.
So what does all of this have to do with the oil slick that is now threatening our entire eastern seaboard? On April 28, 2010 the Wall Street Journal reported that the leaking well lacked a safeguard device called an acoustic switch that may well have prevented this catastrophe. The acoustic control is a backup device that is triggered by acoustic pulses and triggers the blowout preventer, a large valve that shuts down the flow of oil in an emergency. Norway and Brazil, which are major oil producing countries, both require the device. They have been on virtually every rig in Norway since 1993.
An acoustic trigger would have been a 3rd line of defense against a blowout. Anyone who has ever worked in the aircraft industry can tell you that redundancy is the key to safety systems whose failure could cause catastrophic consequences.
An acoustic trigger costs about a $500,000, so why didn’t BP use one on the Deepwater Horizon rig? After all, the rig replacement costs are about $560 million, and BP claimed to be spending about $6 million per day to battle the oil spill. It certainly looks like there is a pretty good cost to benefit ratio.
Some have speculated that an acoustic trigger would not have prevented the spill due to the magnitude of the explosion but that is precisely why it is located off the rig. The people who died in the explosion are the very people who would have trigger the existing shutoff valve, which may explain why it didn’t close. We’ll never know if an acoustic trigger would have worked or not since it didn’t have one.
According to the same WSJ article, “U.S. regulators have considered mandating the use of remote-control acoustic switches or other back-up equipment at least since 2000. After a drilling ship accidentally released oil, the Minerals Management Service issued a safety notice that said a back-up system is "an essential component of a deepwater drilling system."
Nevertheless, US regulators decided against requiring it because they felt it was too expensive.
Brazil begin requiring the use of acoustic valves in 2007 after an incident that was eerily similar to the Deepwater Horizon accident yet US regulators called for more study before requiring implementation.
Bottom line? They didn’t use it because they didn’t have to.
Did I mention that the “special interest groups” that Cheney and the NEPDG met with in 2003 included “James J. Rouse, then vice president of Exxon Mobil and a major donor to the Bush inauguration; Kenneth L. Lay, then head of Enron Corp.; Jack N. Gerard, then with the National Mining Association; Red Cavaney, president of the American Petroleum Institute; and Eli Bebout, an old friend of Cheney's from Wyoming who serves in the state Senate and owns an oil and drilling company.” (from Wikipedia article linked above)
Cheney met personally with the Chief Executive Officer of British Petroleum during the time of the NEPDG’s activities.
At a time when Americans are paying in excess of $3.00 per gallon for gasoline while oil companies consistently make the largest profits in the history of the world quarter after quarter; when BP itself made a profit in excess of $4 billion in the 4th quarter of 2009, it is nothing short of criminal that they couldn’t spend a paltry $500,000 on a safeguard than might have prevented this disaster.
It’s simply not that hard to connect the dots from the takeover of our government by big oil and big business in 2001, to the NEPDG’s nefarious and secretive activities, to drill baby drill, to what may well turn out to be the worst environmental disaster of all time in the Deepwater Horizon explosion.
Smack in the middle of it all? The treasonous traitor, one Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney.
