year, where we had to deal with the largest oil spill in history. i know some of the fishermen on the gulf coast haven t forgotten. and what we learned from that disaster helped us put in place smarter standards of safety and responsibility. for example, if you re going to drill in deepwater, you ve got to prove before you start drilling that you can actually contain an underwater spill. that s just common sense. just common sense. we learned from that disaster. we learned our lessons, president obama is saying. that s why the administration has started issuing new permits for deepwater drilling. we learned and now it s safer. i don t actually think that is true. the reason why is because of information that we have reported on this show. what we have discovered would seem to prove the president s assurances about learning from the bp disaster and higher safety standards, what we have reported seems to indicate the
the government knows about it. the government could be stopping it. and they appear to be trying to let it slide without explanation. let me explain. here s what we found. the process of exploring for oil is of course a dangerous process. accidents happen. when you re drilling into the earth s crust, there s all sorts of pressure that builds up below the surface of the earth. oil drilling is essentially about controlling that pressure while extracting the oil that you re down there for in the first place. right? but sometimes accidents do happen. sometimes that pressure builds up and builds up and essentially surges up through the drilling pipe the drilling pipe. it s a well blowout. that s where the blowout preventer is supposed to come in, right? you ve had a serious malfunction in the drilling process. now it is about containing the damage. the car crash has happened. the air bag is deployed. the blowout preventer is basically a piece of equipment that s attached to the top of an
might be. we were told they contain proprietary information and cannot be released. as a veteran of that industry are you aware of what new safety measures are in effect since the bp disaster? what i ve seen, rachel, in terms of communication from the b.o.e., m.r.e., the new agency of the interior is designated to regulate the industry in the gulf of mexico, the new regulations are primarily around safety training and in third-party certification that supposedly assures the government that the companies who normally self-regulate are actually doing what they say they re doing. there s real no no real change to deepwater drilling. the only real kind of systematic change is this subsea well containment procedure that they ve developed, that a company has to certify that they are a part of before they receive a drilling permit. in terms of subsea
if the federal government was granting new permits to drill we wanted to see the updated response plan. he wanted to see all the lessons learned from the big bp disaster if we were going to be drilling again. during the bp disaster we all got really familiar with that company s ridiculously inadequate oil spill response plan. remember? the bp oil disaster took place on april 20th, 2010. this is noble energy s official oil spill response plan for their drilling that they just had newly approved. check out the date on their oil spill response plan. september 2009. so the government is assuring us that they are only granting new permits for drilling because of all the lessons learned from the bp oil disaster. look at this. the oil spill response plan for the first permit they issued, this oil spill response plan was written the year before the bp oil disaster. so no lessons learned from the bp oil disaster. no new containment capabilities developed after the bp oil
out there and drill. reopen the gulf to deepwater drilling. reopen the gulf. all those drilling wells that were closed down. reopen them now and start a serious plan. yet, you could have a long term impact on the price. not much. but you would have some impact. all right. let s talk about something that is having a big impact and that is what s going on in wisconsin. now the nation s consciousness is worried about teachers and what s going to happen next. it s interesting, this past july, there was a bigwig in the union and made it clear, oh, sure, we re worried about the kids but we re really about power. it was a gentleman from the nea in july of 2009, he said we have power because 3.2 million teachers pay hundreds of millions of dollars to us in dues. let s listen to him say it. you got it. it is not because we care about children. and it is not because we have a vision of a great public school for every child.