RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, I have something here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers. The official climatologist of the EIB Network, Roy Spencer, has sent in a chart of oil spills through the years. The second-to-smallest oil spill through the years since 1991 to present is the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico. A deliberate spill by Iraqi forces 1991-1992 spilled 500 million gallons of oil. Average yearly spills, rigs and tankers, global, every year, 250 million gallons of oil spilled from rigs and tankers. As I keep talking about: In 1979, the Ixtoc 1 rig in the Gulf of Mexico spilled about 140 million gallons. Then the Amoco Cadiz, which is a ship, the English Channel, about 60 million. Torrey Canyon, south England, a ship, about 30 million. The Exxon Valdez was 11 million. And so far we’re at about 25 or 30 million gallons; this is assuming 15,000 barrels a day through May at the Deepwater Horizon rig. So it’s the second smallest oil spill since 1991 or ’92. Not that it isn’t bad, don’t misunderstand. I’m just trying to put things in perspective.
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RUSH: Those of you expecting video at the Dittocam, hang on. You’re going to see it here in just a second. What I want to do here, I’m going to hold up this chart. Dr. Spencer put together this chart, our official climatologist, from various sources. For of those of you watching on the Dittocam I want you to see the chart. We have a high-definition camera. You will be able to see it. One thing that I want to point out about this is if you look, the deliberate oil spill by Iraqi forces (this from 1991 and ’92) was 500 million gallons. That was a deliberate spill by Iraqi forces. If you go through this list, you will see that there are only two oil spills from oil rigs of any consequence since 1991. That’s the Ixtoc 1 rig in Mexico and this one, the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico. The others are purposeful or ships like the Exxon Valdez, and this chart does not even include the average or the annual leakage or spillage in Nigeria that we told you about.
So, here we go. Where my left index finger is [pointing] is the Deepwater Horizon rig. Number of gallons spilled, that big number as you look at it on your left, the top left-hand column, that’s the Iraqi oil spill purposeful 500 million gallons in 1991 and ’92. Ixtoc 1 is the third one here. That’s from Mexico and that’s the largest rig leakage or spill since 1991. All the way down here is ours, the one in the Gulf of Mexico. So we’re going to send this thing up to the website, and Koko Jr., who is running the website today, will put it up and you’ll be able to see it there, but I wanted to show you this. Now, again, folks, this is not to diminish what’s happening in the Gulf of Mexico. It is simply a means of adding or bringing some perspective to this. Five hundred million gallons — remember those oil fires and Carl Sagan was out predicting nuclear winter, the destruction for part of the world for who knows how many decades? It hasn’t happened. Whenever I have the chance to point out how resilient our planet is and how wonderful it is at cleaning up messes, especially when we help, I take the opportunity to do that.
Oil spills are not uncommon. This one is by no means anywhere near the largest. It’s not even the largest in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s the second largest. That doesn’t make it okay. I don’t want anybody to misunderstand me here. It’s bad as it is, but the planet’s still here, people are still alive and animals are still alive where all these things have happened, and that will be the case here as well. It’s not going to be easy. There’s going to be a tremendous amount of pain, and there ought to be steps being taken now that aren’t being taken to plug this well or do something like Jindal wants to do with these sand berms. There are a number of steps that could be taken. We don’t need to be sending Eric Holder down there, a lawyer, meeting with prosecutors. We don’t need to be sending commissions down there or setting commissions up. We need to find the best and brightest engineers possible in the private sector and get ’em all working on this.
Macon, Georgia, and this is Tom. Great to have you on the program, sir. Glad you waited.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, mega dittos. I’m a college student and I study chemistry and what I wanted to comment on was this ‘Not Invented Here’ method that the Saudis have perfected for purifying the water that’s contaminated with oil.
RUSH: The ‘Not Invented Here,’ you correct me if I’m wrong here, but I think what Hofmeister was saying is it’s been rejected because it wasn’t invented here, a little bit parochial, ‘No, no. When it’s not invented here we can’t do that.’
CALLER: Okay. Well, it sounded to me like it was a distillation, which basically can separate liquids based on their boiling point.
RUSH: I don’t know how it works.
CALLER: Well, I could talk a little bit about it. Basically different molecules can stick together in different ways —
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: — and some molecules, because of the atoms that make them up, can stick to each other with the greater strength than others. Say take water, for example. Water molecules are pretty small. They can fit together really well, and they have forces between the individual molecules that cause them to stick together very well and very strongly. So that’s why water has a pretty high boiling point.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: But if you take a longer, a different size structure — like crude oil has structures made of long carbon chains, and they have a lot of branches in them, and they don’t stick to each other as well as water can stick to itself. And so that’s one of the reasons why the oil, for example, could eventually evaporate off of the water, if given enough time.
RUSH: Precisely. Okay, I’m glad you said that. Now I understand. But I think in this case, the ‘Not Invented Here’ means that — ‘parochialism’ is probably the closest term I can come to it. But what Hofmeister meant was there’s all kinds of ideas out there, but they weren’t invented here, so we’re not considering them. He was talking about the method the Saudis have that you just described of separating the water from the oil, cleansing it, and putting the water back and being able to harvest the oil. Then Fran Townsend followed up by saying, (paraphrasing) ‘Yeah, I’ve heard of ‘Not Invented Here,’ and basically the way it’s manifested itself is we’re redoing the Katrina plan, which Katrina is a whole different set of circumstances than this oil spill.’ Now, a couple other things — again, trying to keep things in perspective, and again to let you know as best you can not to get all hyped up into a frenzy by the media here.
When you look at that chart — if you remember I just showed it to you, those of you watching on the Dittocam — it is obvious that the number of oil spills from seagoing tankers is much greater than the spills from rigs, which to me, ladies and gentlemen, shows just how much safer and better drilling for oil is at home versus importing it via tankers from all over the world. And you remember (this is interesting) the left, the media, Obama, they want to hang all these executives at BP. They want ’em in jail. Obama is out there today talking about criminal charges, civil charges, liability. Not even the New York Times wanted to hang Saddam for setting off those oil fires in the Kuwait oil fields.
They didn’t want to criticize Saddam Hussein. Why, it was just part of war! They were more angry at Bush for going in there. And it’s interesting. You mention shut ’em off. Guess who did that? Guess who the brain was that went in there? Red Adair. Red Adair did it. They made a movie about Red Adair. It starred John Wayne. The way Red Adair — and you experts are going to have to forgive me here for my rudimentary explanation. But Adair’s method was to simply go in and set off charges near the rigs, near the wells, that would soak up all the oxygen in the explosion and therefore snuff out the oil fire. Now, I don’t know what Adair would have come up with for this, but Red Adair is the guy who everybody turned to to put out the Saddam Hussein-set Kuwaiti oil fires 1991-1992.
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RUSH: Now, just to put things in perspective even more on this oil spill in the Gulf. Saddam Hussein, setting off all the Kuwait oil wells, putting them on fire. In addition to doing that (I wonder how many people will remember this) Saddam Hussein even put land mines around the wells to retard efforts to put out those fires. Red Adair braved his way through those minefields at age 75 to snuff out all of those oil well fires. But that’s not all Hussein did. He opened all the pipelines that he could and all the hulls of oil tankers. He flooded the whole region with oil, tried to set the whole thing on fire, and not one media organization in this country was as outraged by that as they are at British Petroleum. Over the weekend, the environmentalist wackos were going nuts accusing BP of greed. Remember one of the things they first did was to send down a hose-like apparatus to try to siphon some of the oil to the surface into tankers so that they would be able to use it? The wackos were running around all weekend saying, ‘See? See? They only care about profit! They only care about greed. They’re not trying to put out the leak. They just want to profit.’
They were trying to salvage some of the product! The product is necessary. By salvaging it, it wouldn’t foil the Gulf. It was one of the many techniques, but there has been more animus, more anger expressed at BP and their executives than there has been at Saddam Hussein. And what Saddam Hussein did in 1991-’92 with those oil fires? I mean, this doesn’t even compare. We’re talking about a thimble — and what Hussein did was on purpose. Those land mines around those oil wells to retard efforts to put out those fires, we’ve never seen anything like that. He opened all the pipelines, the hulls of oil tankers. He just tried to destroy and put all that oil on fire.
Dave in Roseburg, Oregon. Welcome to the EIB Network, sir. Great to have you here.
CALLER: Hey, thanks, Rush. Real pleasure to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I want to thank you for all you do for the conservative cause, and especially for our military men and women. Appreciate it.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: You touched on one of my topics, and if we have time I have just a comment and then a very short story.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: My comment was on the prognostications of these scientists and how the American people just believe it. You know, if it comes out of the mouth of a ‘scientist,’ we believe it. And the one that I was thinking about was Kuwait. Carl Sagan back in the late eighties had developed this theory of the ‘nuclear winter.’ If we ever get into the nuclear war, there was going to be so many particles in the atmosphere that it would cool the temperature. It would be the tipping point. We would go into an ice age and that’s it for humankind. We’re done. And then when Saddam invaded Kuwait, and it looked like there was going to be war, well, he was right out there. ‘Boy, if we go to war and they fire up all those oil rigs, the same thing is gonna happen: Nuclear winter! We’re all dead.’ So, of course, that happened. And, you know, a lot of people were uneasy about it, but like you said, Red Adair came in, and he did his thing. But a lot of them burnt for a long time, and, you know, the news media were just covering it from the ground and saying, ‘God, it looks terrible!’ You couldn’t see. But I think like two or three revolutions of the earth, it was gone. I mean, it wasn’t a fart in the wind.
RUSH: Yeah, you’re right. I remember Carl Sagan on TV, ‘Billions and billions and billions and billions of molecules!’ And you point this stuff out to the wackos today and they just get livid because all these dire predictions never happen. They never do happen, and it’s because there’s simply no knowledge of or respect for the absolute complexity — the magnificence, incomprehensible complexity and magnificence — of our planet, the ecosystem and all this. And again, it boils down to this whole thing of vanity. We human beings tell ourselves — especially, you’re right, when some scientist comes down from the mountaintop saying, ‘Billions and billions and billions and billions of molecules will be burning fires! Nuclear winter!’ We all buy it because everybody is oriented toward disaster. For some reason we human beings are hardwired this way. We want to believe the absolute worst is right around the corner.
Nobody has to go to a library to find a book on how to fail. Nobody has to go to the library and get a book on how to create a crisis because we all know how to do that ourselves with no effort. (You also will not go to the library and find a book, Great Moderates in American History, but that’s another thing.) But you do have to go to the library or a bookstore to find stories of how to succeed and how to be positive, because that takes effort. Being negative, pessimistic, oriented to crisis and disaster? Why, we glom onto that. And then somebody like me comes along and starts to pooh-pooh it, ‘Well, easy for you to say! You don’t have to worry about things.’ No, no, no. I just have a heightened resistance. It’s because of my faith and religious beliefs, pure and simple. It’s my awe, respect and my absolute knowledge that I haven’t the slightest notion of how all this works and that nobody else does, either. Any of them that tell you they do are lying through their teeth. I believe that there are questions that human beings are capable of asking that we will never answer while on this earth — and I think that’s part of the design.
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RUSH: I’ll never forget watching this. It was Nightline and Carl Sagan was debating Dr. Fred Singer on the nuclear winter that would happen from the Kuwaiti oil fires. Sagan was citing all these investigations and statistics from a volcanic eruption in 1815, going on and on and on, and Fred is saying, ‘Naw, naw, naw, naw. The wind and the rain are just going to get rid of the smoke in a matter of days.’ Who was right? Fred Singer, and he’s still on the scene today arguing against man-made global warming. He’s called a ‘denier.’
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RUSH: Now, one more thing about Saddam Hussein. I love putting all this stuff in perspective because people have forgotten all this. We talked about it at the time it happened. There was a reason besides spite that Saddam Hussein set all those oil wells in Kuwait on fire and another reason besides spite that he set all the pipelines and opened all the hulls of the tankers. He was upset at the Kuwaitis flooding the market with oil. He wanted the price up. He wanted to do something about the supply. Saddam was much closer to Obama and the environmentalist wackos than anybody wants to admit because they want to do the same thing. They want to limit supply; they want to raise the price; they want a lot less used for whatever reasons — you know, ‘save the planet,’ global warming. So it’s fascinating to me to point out to you people that the environmentalist wackos (this ought to not surprise anybody) simply chose the environment when the Soviet Union imploded. It was the new home, environmentalism was, for displaced communists. And it makes perfect sense that they would have more in common with a totalitarian dictator than they would with anybody in a democratic regime, democratic country. So Hussein was mad. H e was upset the Kuwaitis would not limit their supply of oil and cut back. He wanted the price raised, so he puts the oil on fire for that reason in addition to spite. Same reasons, same philosophy as the Democrat Party in this country and in the worldwide left.