Yes, it’s been 22 days since the Oilpocalypse began. Count on me to mark off calendar days so you don’t have to.
NASA satellite (MODIS) image of the flow at the surface – May 9th
CBC News | BP turns to new options in oil cleanup – First the Macondome, now the Top Hat. “The smaller dome is able to inject methanol, an alcohol used as antifreeze, into its top to prevent the same type of crystals, or hydrates, from forming … the company hopes to have the smaller dome in place by the end of the week.”
Back close to the shore, the slick spreads west.
NOLA.com | Gas surge shut well a couple of weeks before Gulf oil spill – “[UC Berkeley engineering professor, Robert] Bea believes the narrative he is creating raises serious questions about the risk assessments used by BP and the Minerals Management Service.”
Speaking of the MMS, it could be split, giving the rig inspection arm more autonomy.
For every disaster, there’s always the disaster on top of the disaster: The New Orleans Lens reports that BP oil cleanup jobs are not the stimulus Vietnamese, who constitute half of the fisherpeople hurt by the spill, hoped for.
Guess they can always go work for the oil industry, while their families reside on polluted land. Southeastern Louisiana ranked #1 in Mike Mandel’s recent calculation of metro areas with the biggest real per-capita income gains between 2000 and 2008.
The top ten cities, measured by growth in per capita income, had an average college graduate rate of 17.7%. The bottom ten cities had a college graduate rate of 31.8% … my personal view is that the lack of rewards for educationwhich show up in the individual income statistics as wellis correlated to the lack of commercially-successful breakthrough innovations, which would immediate sop up all the excess college graduates.
To put it another way, innovative industries tend to locate where they can get a lot of college graduates. That means high education areas attract new companies, boosting growth.
But without innovation, the whole economic development dynamic changes. You can’t attract growing innovative companies because they are few and far between. For their part, companies are more likely to view cost as a main consideration in deciding where to locate. Goodbye San Jose and Austin, hello China and India.
