Titans of Industry category archive

What you don’t know can’t hurt them: peeping through the screen of smoke.

Seeking to quell environmental concerns about the chemicals it shoots underground to extract oil and natural gas, Apache Corp. (APA) told shareholders in April that it disclosed information about “all the company’s U.S. hydraulic fracturing jobs” on a website last year.

Actually, Apache’s transparency was shot through with cracks. In Texas and Oklahoma, the company reported chemicals it used on only about half its fracked wells via FracFocus.org, a voluntary website that oil and gas companies helped design amid calls for mandatory disclosure.

Energy companies failed to list more than two out of every five fracked wells in eight U.S. states from April 11, 2011, when FracFocus began operating, through the end of last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Failed to list two out of five wells–If you get a hit every two out five at bats in the Bigs, you end up in the Hall of Fame.

In a piece right out of Inverse Universe, a story at Tampabay dot com states that Buccaneer Petroleum and Transamerica, the Deepwater Horizon wild well folks, were so focused on safety that they were unable to focus on safety.

Among the blurry areas:

• BP and Transocean’s “bridging document,” designed to align safety procedures between the companies, was generic and addressed only six safety issues, but none of them dealt with major issues.
• The companies didn’t have key process limits or controls for safe drilling.
• There were no written instructions for how to conduct a crucial test at the end of the cementing process, one that ultimately was misinterpreted by the crew after it was conducted several times, each time differently.
• Similar concerns about too narrow a focus on personal safety were raised after an explosion in 2005 at BP’s Texas City refinery that killed 15 people, but few of the panel’s recommendations were implemented on the offshore rig.

As near as I can decipher it, the reasoning seems to be that the two titans of industry were so wrapped up in rules to prevent personal injuries (broken legs, back sprains, and hangnails) to employees (and, no doubt, attendant liability for workers’ comp), that they didn’t pay attention to minor distractions such as exploding wells; spewing oil; burning, sinking oil rigs; and drowning employees.

Nice suits do not correlate with competence.

When you see one of those commercials set against an industrial background and showing a Master of the Universe in a suit with an ill-fitting hard hat talking to some schmuck in work clothes, remind yourself of just who in that scene actually knows what he is doing and does real work.

Hint: It’s not the suit.

What you don’t know can’t hurt them. Facing South reports:

Most of the states where fracking is taking place that do not require any public disclosure of the chemicals used in in the controversial drilling process are in the South, and Southern states are also among those with weak disclosure laws.

Details at the link.

When the earth . . . moved, under my feet. . . .

I want to teach the world to sue,
in perfect harmony.
I want to hold truth at arm’s length,
So it never points to me.

This is not the smartest PR move:

Just days after arousing the ire of Coca-Cola with an exhibit of trash that includes of some of Coke’s most popular brands, an Israel-based company that promotes making soft drinks at home is bringing its message to Atlanta, the beverage giant’s home turf.

(snip)

Earlier this month, in South Africa, the display brought out Coke’s lawyers. They sent SodaStream a “cease and desist” letter demanding that it remove Coke’s products from the exhibit and refrain from using them in the future.

SodaStream Chief Executive Officer Daniel Birnbaum said he is surprised that Coke believes it has ownership of a product after it has been purchased by a consumer. SodaStream, which has more than 30 of the exhibits traveling around the globe, gets the bottles and cans from landfills, not by purchasing them as part of a marketing campaign, he said.

Via Bartcop.

Facing South reports on a veteran of fracking:

Calvin Tillman was elected mayor of Dish, Texas — a community of about 200 residents 25 miles north of Fort Worth — in 2007, at a time when fracking was booming in the area. Dish sits atop the Barnett Shale, which is one of the largest natural gas fields in the United States. Ten massive pipelines run through the town, carrying about a billion cubic feet of gas per day.

Tillman spent much of his time in office fighting to regulate the gas companies, which transformed his once-quiet community into a noisy, polluted industrial center. He finally moved away last year after his two young sons began waking in the middle of the night with severe nosebleeds that the family believes were related to toxic air emissions from the drilling operations.

Before Tillman left, he offered to rent his home to a gas company executive so they could see what it was like to live in the industry’s midst.

“None took me up on it,” he says.

Read the rest.

And you are not very pretty.

Fresh Air considers what you eat. From the recap:

“Since the early 2000s, it’s been illegal to feed cow products to cows — you can no longer render a cow part and feed it back to cows — but the [industry is] getting through in this circuitous way through [feeding] chicken litter [to cows],” he says.

Chicken litter is exactly what it sounds like: a mix of chicken manure, dead chickens, feathers, and spilled feed that has been rendered down into a uniform substance and then marketed to the beef industry as cheap feed for cows.

“Obviously, it’s going to be cheaper than corn or soy or other things that they feed cows,” says Philpott. “So a rather significant amount of this stuff ends up being mixed into cow rations and fed to cows. … But chickens are fed various beef products [throughout their lives]. … And then what you’re getting is cows eating cow protein, which as Americans probably remember, is the source of the mad cow scares.”

Follow the link to read the rest of the story and the transcript or to listen to the audio.

If you can stomach it.

Via the Booman Tribune.

Next up, Utah:

After the Bush administration in its waning days cynically opened up this region’s natural treasures to oil and gas drilling, Americans everywhere protested, filing thousands of public comments in objection. Even though many had never been to Desolation Canyon, they did not want to be the generation that forfeits our past and our country’s natural beauty for more profits for the petroleum industry and a few more drops in the bucket.

Yet Gasco and the petroleum industry lobby are strong, and their pursuit of profits knows no boundaries. Using their partners in Congress, they’re now tapping into Americans’ frustration over high gasoline prices to pressure President Obama and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to approve Gasco’s scheme to develop this wild place. Never mind that drilling for natural gas in Desolation Canyon will do nothing to curb the price we pay for oil-based gasoline, which is set on the global marketplace.

What’s in your gullet?

Radio Times investigates what’s in our food. From the website:

What is in your chicken? A new study found that chickens were eating feed containing a banned antibiotic and the active ingredients for pain relievers, antihistamines, and antidepressants. There’s been growing concern over the use antibiotics in animal farming. Close to three-fourths of all antibiotics are used for farm animals and this overuse, according to public health experts, is breeding antibiotic resistant bacteria that are a serious threat to human health. The Food and Drug Administration recently asked the livestock industry, drug companies and veterinarians to voluntarily limit their use of antibiotics in agriculture. But many people say this doesn’t go far enough. We’ll look at antibiotics in farming, the recent “pink slime” controversy and other issues around the way we produce our food with MICHAEL POLLAN, author of “Food Rules” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” We’ll also talk with KEEVE NACHMAN, Director for Farming for the Future at Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future and one of the authors of the recent chicken feed additive paper.

To listen, follow the link or click here (MP3).

The Chicago Tribune investigates “flame retardant” furniture and finds that they do a lot of things–except retard flames:

The average American baby is born with 10 fingers, 10 toes and the highest recorded levels of flame retardants among infants in the world. The toxic chemicals are present in nearly every home, packed into couches, chairs and many other products. Two powerful industries — Big Tobacco and chemical manufacturers — waged deceptive campaigns that led to the proliferation of these chemicals, which don’t even work as promised.

Follow the link to read the series.

(Hint: It’s not you and me.)

Via PoliticalProf.

Via Facing South.

Will Bunch reports on eyeless crabs and other mutants now showing up in the Gulf of Buccaneer Petroleum Mexico. A nugget:

Definitely not for the seafood lover in you. I have followed the aftermath of the BP oil spill — which happened exactly two years ago — pretty closely, and I can assure you it’s nothing like those sunny BP-sponsored commercials you see on TV. The spill and perhaps more importantly the efforts to contain the spill caused long-lasting environmental damage to this precious natural resource, and the Obama administration is highly complicit, especially in the cover-up.

Tampabay dot com reports on the continuing legacy of Buccaneer Petroleum’s wild well.

While great greasy globs of tarballs are no longer a common sight, oil persists.

A nugget:

But with an ultraviolet light, geologist James “Rip” Kirby has found evidence that the oil is still present, and possibly still a threat to beachgoers.

Tiny globs of it, mingled with the chemical dispersant that was supposed to break it up, have settled into the shallows, mingling with the shells, he said. When Kirby shines his light across the legs of a grad student who’d been in the water and showered, it shows orange blotches where the globs still stick to his skin.

“If I had grandkids playing in the surf, I wouldn’t want them to come in contact with that,” said Kirby, whose research is being overseen by the University of South Florida. “The dispersant accelerates the absorption by the skin.”

By Dick Destiny, who has been sliming pink slime since the story broke.