Comment to Keerthana's (Mark an X if you want a tax break)

I think this is a very interesting article.
I agree with Keerthana on this point. Teenagers just sit around while the elections go on and also people misuse their votes too much. I don't think they should pay people to vote pretty much. It seems unethical. If somebody is not voting it is usually because they do not have a good opinion on it or they just don't know what to pick. If you make somebody pick they are just going to throw down a random vote which is not the kind of votes you want.

Comment to Keerthana's (Halifax principal wrestles student to ground, escapes dismissal)

WOW!
I'm so surprised this actually happened.
I think principles should be good role models, not bad ones. This shows how bad this school is if they have the highest point of power in the school tackling students.

Principles should be doing things to help students not injure the. This principle needs to learn how to have some self control and use his power to help and not hurt. This principal should be fired immediately and should never be able to work in an area with children ever again.

Comment to Naresh's post (Infrastructure security plan unveiled)

As much as I dislike Harper, in this case it would not matter who was PM. It;s the idiotic protesters that cause trouble and destroy private citizens property that are responsible for the cost of the security. It is cheaper for similar events in other countries because for the most part they don't let these loser protesters get away with what we let them get away with in Canada.

If these losers would stop destroying taxpayers property, than a smaller budget could be achieved. These protesters could care less what political party is in power. They are too lazy to work and resent those who make it possible to get their welfare. It is actually pretty pathetic.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/politics/story/2010/05/28/ottawa-infrastructure-plan.html#socialcomments#ixzz0q83vfKoB

Dalton McGuinty in Israel to talk energy, water

Robert Benzie
Queen’s Park Bureau Chief

JERUSALEM—Premier Dalton McGuinty came to one of the oldest cities in the world to discuss a future of clean water and green energy with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

McGuinty, who has been treated like a head of state in his trade tour of Israel, pointedly did not discuss politics in this holy and disputed city.

“We didn’t get into that at all,” he told reporters Monday at the Jaffa Gate before privately touring the Old City of Jerusalem and praying at the Western Wall.

“We quickly discovered that while we live continents apart (and) have different political circumstances and different histories, when it comes to building an economy we’re actually on the same track and we can and should do more together.”

While the premier is visiting the West Bank on Thursday and Beirut on Friday, Israel’s ongoing tensions with its Arab neighbours — including controversial Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem — were not broached.

Indeed, the one-hour meeting in Netanyahu’s office, coming the day after McGuinty had an eventful audience with Israeli President Shimon Peres, began on a light note.

“So this is your first visit?” Netanyahu asked him.

“My very first visit — Israel is a small country with a big history,” the premier replied.

“It’s about the size of Canada,” Netanyahu cracked, ignoring the fact Israel is just 1/450th the size of Canada

“We’re just the opposite. Big country, small history,” said McGuinty.

Unlike the session Sunday with Peres, where the president sold the premier on a new “virtual” Israel-Ontario brain research institute, the Netanyahu meeting was held behind closed doors after a one-minute photo-op.

“Very positive, very constructive — one of the most constructive and positive meetings that I’ve ever had with an international leader,” a visibly pleased McGuinty said afterward.

“We ended the meeting by saying that what we’ll do is we’ll put in writing a concrete proposal because there are so many different areas and in particular we want to focus on the brain research, water, energy and renewables,” he said.

Netanyahu, who is travelling to Canada later this week and will speak Sunday to more 5,000 people at Toronto’s Direct Energy Centre to launch the United Jewish Appeal’s Walk With Israel, was keen to learn about Ontario’s efforts on education.

“He wanted to know what we were doing in Ontario in terms of education, how it was working, why it was working. He asked if we might immediately set up during the course of this trip another meeting between his education people and some of our people,” said McGuinty.

The Israeli leader was especially interested in Ontario’s new all-day learning for 4- and 5-year-olds, which is being phased in starting in September, and in the province’s success at posting online school rankings based on standardized tests results.

“Then we switched gears and we talked about energy from renewables. That’s a big issue here as well, obviously. They’re trying to reduce their energy from . . . carbon-based fuels so we have some common ground there,” the premier said.

“Then we talked about water. They have a tremendous expertise here. They’re very conservation-oriented. They understand that there are global opportunities as well. Then we talked about the proposal put forward (Sunday) by President Peres and he was very keen on that as well.”

Netanyahu’s warmth toward McGuinty is in part fuelled by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s staunchly pro-Israel stance that has Canadians very popular here.

Earlier Monday, in Tel Aviv, Jon Allen, Canada’s ambassador to Israel, told Ontario delegates with McGuinty that “we are at the apex of a bilateral Canada-Israel relationship.”

McGuinty noted Israel’s “innovation-based economy,” and agreed Ontario can learn from Israel and vice versa. “It’s a simple but profound truth that we’re doing well on our own but we can do better together.”

Dr. Eli Opper, the chief scientist for Israel’s Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labour, said collaboration is key.

“So you need to be modest or humble to accept the notion that you can’t go it alone with your knowledge,” Opper told the Ontario delegation.

“Even the largest companies in the world are aware of the fact that the state-of-the-art new products, they do not have all the new knowledge they are needing. So the answer is cooperation.”

Nuclear Option on Gulf Oil Spill? No Way, U.S. Says

The chatter began weeks ago as armchair engineers brainstormed for ways to stop the torrent of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico: What about nuking the well?

Decades ago, the Soviet Union reportedly used nuclear blasts to successfully seal off runaway gas wells, inserting a bomb deep underground and letting its fiery heat melt the surrounding rock to shut off the flow. Why not try it here?

The idea has gained fans with each failed attempt to stem the leak and each new setback — on Wednesday, the latest rescue effort stalled when a wire saw being used to slice through the riser pipe got stuck.

“Probably the only thing we can do is create a weapon system and send it down 18,000 feet and detonate it, hopefully encasing the oil,” Matt Simmons, a Houston energy expert and investment banker, told Bloomberg News on Friday, attributing the nuclear idea to “all the best scientists.”

Or as the CNN reporter John Roberts suggested last week, “Drill a hole, drop a nuke in and seal up the well.”

This week, with the failure of the “top kill” attempt, the buzz had grown loud enough that federal officials felt compelled to respond.

Stephanie Mueller, a spokeswoman for the Energy Department, said that neither Energy Secretary Steven Chu nor anyone else was thinking about a nuclear blast under the gulf. The nuclear option was not — and never had been — on the table, federal officials said.

“It’s crazy,” one senior official said.

Government and private nuclear experts agreed that using a nuclear bomb would be not only risky technically, with unknown and possibly disastrous consequences from radiation, but also unwise geopolitically — it would violate arms treaties that the United States has signed and championed over the decades and do so at a time when President Obama is pushing for global nuclear disarmament.

The atomic option is perhaps the wildest among a flood of ideas proposed by bloggers, scientists and other creative types who have deluged government agencies and BP, the company that drilled the well, with phone calls and e-mail messages. The Unified Command overseeing the Deepwater Horizon disaster features a “suggestions” button on its official Web site and more than 7,800 people have already responded, according to the site.

Among the suggestions: lowering giant plastic pillows to the seafloor and filling them with oil, dropping a huge block of concrete to squeeze off the flow and using magnetic clamps to attach pipes that would siphon off the leaking oil.

Some have also suggested conventional explosives, claiming that oil prospectors on land have used such blasts to put out fires and seal boreholes. But oil engineers say that dynamite or other conventional explosives risk destroying the wellhead so that the flow could never be plugged from the top.

Along with the kibbitzers, the government has also brought in experts from around the world — including scores of scientists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and other government labs — to assist in the effort to cap the well.

In theory, the nuclear option seems attractive because the extreme heat might create a tough seal. An exploding atom bomb generates temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun and, detonated underground, can turn acres of porous rock into a glassy plug, much like a huge stopper in a leaky bottle.

Michael E. Webber, a mechanical engineer at the University of Texas, Austin, wrote to Dot Earth, a New York Times blog, in early May that he had surprised himself by considering what once seemed unthinkable. “Seafloor nuclear detonation,” he wrote, “is starting to sound surprisingly feasible and appropriate.”

Much of the enthusiasm for an atomic approach is based on reports that the Soviet Union succeeded in using nuclear blasts to seal off gas wells. Milo D. Nordyke, in a 2000 technical paper for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., described five Soviet blasts from 1966 to 1981.

All but the last blast were successful. The 1966 explosion put out a gas well fire that had raged uncontrolled for three years. But the last blast of the series, Mr. Nordyke wrote, “did not seal the well,” perhaps because the nuclear engineers had poor geological data on the exact location of the borehole.

Robert S. Norris, author of “Racing for the Bomb” and an atomic historian, noted that all the Soviet blasts were on land and never involved oil.

Whatever the technical merits of using nuclear explosions for constructive purposes, the end of the cold war brought wide agreement among nations to give up the conduct of all nuclear blasts, even for peaceful purposes. The United States, after conducting more than 1,000 nuclear test explosions, detonated the last one in 1992, shaking the ground at the Nevada test site.

In 1996, the United States championed the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty, a global accord meant to end the development of new kinds of nuclear arms. President Obama is pushing for new global rules, treaties and alliances that he insists can go much further to produce a nuclear-free world. For his administration to seize on a nuclear solution for the gulf crisis, officials say, would abandon its international agenda and responsibilities and give rogue states an excuse to seek nuclear strides.

Kevin Roark, a spokesman for Los Alamos in New Mexico, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, said that despite rumors to the contrary, none of the laboratory’s thousands of experts was devising nuclear options for the gulf.

“Nothing of the sort is going on here,” he said in an interview. “In fact, we’re not working on any intervention ideas at all. We’re providing diagnostics and other support but nothing on the intervention side.”

A senior Los Alamos scientist, speaking on the condition of anonymity because his comments were unauthorized, ridiculed the idea of using a nuclear blast to solve the crisis in the gulf.

“It’s not going to happen,” he said. “Technically, it would be exploring new ground in the midst of a disaster — and you might make it worse.”

Not everyone on the Internet is calling for nuking the well. Some are making jokes. “What’s worse than an oil spill?” asked a blogger on Full Comment, a blog of The National Post in Toronto. “A radioactive oil spill.”

Henry Fountain contributed reporting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/us/03nuke.html?ref=politics

Lock in safety regime for high-Arctic drilling

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has raised the bar on what will be needed for safeguards if Canada allows companies to drill for oil in its part of the Beaufort Sea. Canadians will not stand for the slightest possibility that an oil spill will mess up the Arctic.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that international energy consumption will have increased by 49 per cent in 2035 from its 2007 base year. The use of hydroelectric, nuclear and wind power will increase, but oil will still rule. Costly energy sources such as solar, geothermal, biomass, waste and tidal power will not grow markedly in importance.

So anyone who thinks that the Gulf of Mexico disaster will put an end to exploration and drilling in problematic places like the Beaufort is dreaming. The truth is that we humans are stuck with our oil dependence for a long time to come, and the stuff is increasingly difficult to get at. But you can be sure that we will go after it — everywhere. So both politicians and oil companies must come to grips with the fact that spills cannot be an option, any more than nuclear meltdowns are an option.

It is time for the oil companies to stop whining about excessive government safeguards and acknowledge that more rigorous safeguards — that will cost them a whack of money — are needed in difficult offshore locations.

The problem is not that the oil companies don’t do a great deal to avoid mistakes — mistakes cost them billions. The problem is that they don’t do everything possible to avoid mistakes. Following up on mistakes is next to futile: even in the best of situations, only about 15 per cent of oil gets recovered after cleanups.

So prevention has to be the watchword. There are no perfect plans for prevention, but there can be plans that exponentially decrease the likelihood of disasters in places like the Beaufort. There are dozens of safety mechanisms at play with every well, but here are three that deserve the public’s attention.

The first is a blowout preventer, the device that failed in the Gulf of Mexico. It is a large valve that blocks the line through the application of hydraulic pressure on massive pistons when things go wrong, shutting down the hole. This is advanced technology that rarely fails — but rarely obviously isn’t enough. This technology should be applied so it never fails. If two or more blowout preventers were stacked, the probability of failure would be infinitesimally small. So stack them.

The second safeguard involves the drilling of a backup relief well. If the process of retrieving oil from the main hole is somehow compromised, an adjacent well can be activated that will pierce the leaking well and divert its flow. Oil companies have quite stupidly been asking the National Energy Board to relax Canadian regulations regarding relief wells. In fact, the regulations need to be tightened.

Current regulations require drilling a relief well in the same season the working well is drilled. Oil companies argue that makes drilling in the Arctic difficult because seasons are so short (usually July to October) that it typically takes more than one season to install a producing well — with no time left to drill a relief well. They are thinking backwards. The relief wells should be substantially drilled before the working wells so they only need to be poked down a little further if something goes wrong. That way there will be minimal lag time when a relief well is needed.

The third safeguard is something called a glory hole, an excavation that is dredged on the seabed around blowout preventers and other wellhead equipment to assure that drifting icebergs — which often scour shallow sea beds — do not damage them.

Islands surrounded by concrete berms can be constructed in shallow seas such as the Beaufort to assure durable platforms. Directional drilling allows companies to drain contiguous pockets of oil from the same platform. The government should require that glory holes are extraordinarily deep to protect every blowout preventer from ice scouring the sea bottom and then some.

By stacking blowout preventers, drilling relief wells in advance, and excavating deep glory holes, companies can reduce blowout potential to the point that futile cleanup attempts are a thing of the past.

Have no doubt — nations will remain desperate for oil for many decades and will go anywhere to recover it. Eventually humanity will be forced to shake its dependence on oil, but it won’t happen in my lifetime or the lifetime of my children or grandchildren.

But if we don’t learn a profound lesson from this Gulf of Mexico oil spill and take measures to prevent a repeat in places like the Beaufort, we should all stop having children and grandchildren anyway.

Colin Kenny was a member of the Senate energy and environment committee for over 20 years and served as its deputy chair. Prior to that he was an executive with Dome Petroleum.

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/818248--lock-in-safety-regime-for-high-arctic-drilling

Shareholders sue BP for spill liability

WILMINGTON, Del. - Shareholders have sued the board of BP Plc for failing to monitor safety and exposing the company to potentially enormous liability related to the Deepwater spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, according to court documents.

A month ago a rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and sending heavy oil into fragile marshlands on the fringes of the Mississippi Delta.

Saturday, U.S. President Barack Obama blamed the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill on “a breakdown of responsibility” at BP.

“The Deepwater disaster will cause financial consequences to BP and the BP subsidiaries, which will be tabulated in the billions of dollars, including liability for damage to property, commercial interests and wildlife,” said the complaint.

The complaint said the disaster has wiped about $40 billion from BP’s market value.

The lawsuit was brought on behalf of shareholders by individual investor Robert Freedman and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, or SEPTA, which runs Philadelphia’s regional public transit and owns BP’s American Depository Shares.

The plaintiffs are seeking damages as well as seeking to direct the board to take steps to improve corporate governance, such as limiting the number of inside directors and setting up an environmental exposure oversight committee.

A BP spokesman said the company does not comment on active litigation.

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Shareholders+spill+liability/3066086/story.html#ixzz0ou7Nhiez