Provocative Thinking Dispatched to the Gulf Region

There is a need for some at least encouraging news from the gulf and this may be it. Apparently our President and his Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu have reason to believe the oil patch people may not be thinking of all options available to combat the oilpocalypse and have dispatched a group of people to provide other perspectives, and maybe just maybe we're going to get to see an angry Barack Obama

Dispatched to Houston by President Barack Obama to deal with the crisis, Chu said Wednesday that five “extraordinarily intelligent” scientists from around the country will help BP and industry experts think of back-up plans to cut off oil from the well, leaking 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) below sea-level.

Bloomberg link to the story

More below the fold.

I do not have confidence in the management of BP. I don’t have confidence in the oil industry in general. We’ve jumped beyond the concerns of any industry and landed squarely in the realm of an all hands on deck ecological and humanitarian disaster that is going to require the best minds and talents of a great many people. I can imagine had this disaster occurred under a Republican administration. We would be told that the industry is fully capable of handling this disaster, and everything they say can be believed as if it came from the very mouth of truth.

Elections do have consequences and one of the best is that it appears that as the enormity of this problem grows exponentially the response is at least becoming more intelligent.

Members of the Chu team are credited with accomplishments including designing the first hydrogen bomb, inventing techniques for mining on Mars and finding a way to precisely position biomedical needles. ....snip

The group convened at BP’s command center in Houston yesterday, where they met with BP leadership, including Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward, the Energy Department said. BP is using more than 500 specialists from almost 100 organizations and welcomes additional help, Jon Pack, a BP spokesman, said by phone.

diarist note yesterday being Thursday May 13th

Bloomberg link to the story

It is gratifying to see some evidence that this administration does not accept the solutions that are coming from the oil industry and is supplementing their efforts with others, but that can’t be enough. One of the scientists made a statement after the meeting that is going to be a problem.

Their exact activities are cloaked in secrecy. “We saw some confidential and proprietary information,” said one scientist on the team, Jonathan I. Katz, a physics professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

Cloaked in secrecy this effort can not be. The oil industry has in my opinion made this very public and very open when they spewed their product at the rate of 1.1 million gallons a day into our Gulf of Mexico. You don’t get any more secret processes and we don’t care if competitors get to see what's in your war room. We all need to see what you are doing. If a 26 year old engineering geek can figure something out from the information on an open source information board that can help us he needs to see it.