All Talk No Action: Obama, BP and the Pentagon

Tom Dispach - It couldn’t be worse, could it? In the Gulf, BP now claims to be retrieving 15,000 barrels of oil a day from the busted pipe 5,000 feet down. That’s three times the total amount of oil it claimed, bare weeks ago, was coming out of that pipe. A government panel of experts now suggests that the real figure could be up to 60,000 barrels or 2.5 million gallons a day, the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill every four days -- and some independent experts think the figure could actually be closer to 100,000 barrels a day.

In the meantime, we just learned from the Los Angeles Times that -- go figure -- the “primary responsibility for safety and other inspections” on the oil rig that blew in the Gulf “rested not with the U.S. government but with the Republic of the Marshall Islands,” and that those impoverished islands had outsourced their responsibilities to private companies. Go BP! We also learned that the relief wells sure to staunch the flow of oil by “early August” could take far longer, fail, or even make matters significantly worse; that BP cut every corner in the book to save money when drilling its well; and, oh, that evidently even the heavens are angry at the oil giant, since on Tuesday a lightning strike put its sole drill/retrieval ship in the Gulf out of action for hours, leaving all that oil pouring into the water unimpeded. However bad the bad news is, each new dawn it only seems to get worse, as does the “collateral damage,” whether to pelicans or the Gulf's beaches and wetlands. Read more.