Posted on 06/18/2010 8:16:13 AM PDT by maine-iac7
Actor Kevin Costner today joins with BP officials to tout plans to finally start using a machine Costner has backed that can rapidly remove 99 percent of oil from water.
Costner said it wasn't until this week that BP decided to put his machines into action. Costner still isn't happy it took this long -- since he helped develop the machine a decade ago -- and arrived to help with the Deepwater Horizon disaster less than two weeks after the explosion.
"Twenty-first century technology has sat idly on the shelf for ten years when it could have been deployed as a first, most efficient responder to mitigate the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe," the actor told a U.S. Senate committee, blaming bureaucratic obstacles and general intransigence kept his company sidelined for weeks.
Costner said took weeks to get Coast Guard approval for a test run. After tweaking the machines a bit, Costner says BP official Doug Suttles called this week with good news:
"He told me that it was working against the dispersants, that it was handling the variations of oil mixtures and thickness present in the gulf," said Costner. He ordered 32 machines and told me that this represented the beginning of us working together."
(Excerpt) Read more at wwl.com ...
Who or what is stopping Kevin Costner from trying his technology? It's a big spill and it's not like the Navy or Coast Guard has it sealed off. If KC has a centrifuge-equipped vessel just send it out there & let somebody try & stop you. Better to act and beg forgiveness... (actually his postion would be much stronger than that).
Good for him. Someone that is actually part of the solution, not part of the problem. Obama, get the hell out of the way. Go Kevin!!!!! I wonder if he’ll be hiring factory workers to turn these things out.
Costner didn’t develop the machines, his brother did. That said, he put his money where his mouth is, and DID something to help the environment, rather than just talking about it, apparently without a lot of hoopla. I’d never heard of this technology until the Deepwater Horizon accident. It’s shameful that it’s taken this long to deploy it, but I sure hope it works!
The root of the problem is the Jones act, a protectionist measure passed in the 1920s. It requires that all vessels operating in American waters to be US-registered and crewed by Americans. Obama has the authority to suspend the act (as GWB did after Katrina) but so far has refused to do so.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/24306
What...go against the union buddies to protect those “red” states?
The U.S. government needs BP's deepwater technology to try to shut off the oil well, said Carol Browner, President Barack Obama's adviser on energy and climate change.
"Obviously, we need the BP technology, but we are not relying on them ... we have our own minds in there," she told CNN, referring to the team of government scientists working with BP to battle the disaster.
Carol Browner - American lawyer, environmentalist
Browner worked as legislative director for Senator Al Gore, and became known as a Gore protegé. She helped prepare amendments to the Clean Air Act
Her long-term goal was "to leave the world a slightly better place"
During her tenure, Browner also began efforts to deal with global warming, giving the EPA authority to regulate carbon emissions causing climate change, although the EPA under the following George W. Bush administration chose not to use that authority. Several other policies of hers were reversed in the Bush administration as well.
In the final days of the Clinton administration, D.C. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth ordered the EPA to preserve under the Freedom of Information Act all documents possibly relevant to last-minute EPA regulation issuances. In 2003, Lamberth found the EPA in contempt for not having preserved Browner's files.
Browner is now married to former Congressman Thomas Downey. The marriage, his second, her third. In 2006, she and Downey collaborated on behalf of Dubai Ports World.
She was also on the boards of the Center for American Progress (John Podesta/George Soros), the Alliance for Climate Protection, and the League of Conservation Voters.
Until summer 2008 she was a member of Socialist International's Commission for a Sustainable World Society
In late May 2010 she assessed the spill as "probably the biggest environmental disaster we have ever faced in this country" and said that the administration was "prepared for the worst".
Heck, Seanators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins offered miles of containment boom that was made in MAINE, and the Obama Administration never even answered THEIR letter!
Yeah, Obama's got a lot of 'splainin to do!
But he DID have these things 'sitting around" .
He took 10 to the Gulf weeks ago - he had 2 doz plus available and was ramping up production.
Had they deployed when available, there’d be far less destruction -
It's going to hellaciously hard, with everything available - Costner's machines, the Dutch et al, to play catch up. About all we can hope for now is to slow things down.
...coming from someone who posts "news" that's more than a week old, along with incorrect "facts"...?
Pot, meet kettle.
As an engineer myself, I am greatly offended that you would refer to James Cameron as an engineer. He has neither the education nor professional experience to claim the title. That’s like calling a mother a nurse because she administers medicine and first aid to her children.
I know. I agree. I got some outrageous freepmail last week because I had the temerity to applaud the way Elton John and Rush have treated one another. Apparently I sold out to the “pro-homo nuts” and am now going to hell.
Unfortunately- we are as bad as DU on any given day.
bump for later
Other countries, who have dealt with such spills, have very similar equipment that works on the same centrifugal principal and successfully - who offered their help from the get go...also told 'no thanks' by the obumble administration.
This is a situation that needed "All hands on deck" from Day one.
It still needs any and all solutions that can assist.
She looks like a female John Kerry.
Somehow I think if Costner went out there without permission from the feds and/or Coast Guard there would be legal ramifications for Costner.
Wow! You know more about the company than their press releases. You should tell ol' Kev to have you get their house in order. In their press release last week, they said:
[...] There are 3 V20 centrifuge machines currently operational in the Gulf. Ten more should become operational within weeks. Once production at our factory in Nevada ramps up in July, OTS will be able to produce 10 machines a month, said Pat Smith, Chief Operating Officer for OTS. [...]
BP had ordered six in May, and expanded the order to thirty-two last week.
Again, a bit of research with Google and the actual company website, sparse as it is.
Note also that they don't say it will "remove 99% of the oil"...they say that the water is "more than 99% free of crude." There's an important difference.
Hannity talked about Costner and his machines several weeks ago, and he was impressed. Congratulations to Costner. Maybe 50 years from now he will be more famous for his oil spill clean-up machines than for his movies.
What's important to obumbles is kowtowing to his union buddies...which is why he wouldn't waive the Jones Act, which keeps foreign ships out.
Maintaining his standing with the unions was more important than saving our shorelines and the hundreds of thousands of Americans losing their livelihoods.
How so? If he's chartered a vessel to troll around in international waters away for the immediate area of the well head? Freedom of Navigation, right?
You're just out there like anybody else. The fact that your 'centrifuge' is running is nobody's business. And if they did stop him the ensuing public relations disaster would cut against the US Gov't -- not Kevin Costner.
Maybe you are suggesting that Obama's goons would try some backdoor way of punishing Kevin Costner? THAT I could believe.
Sorta like the fact that your wellbore is leaking?
I see.
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