Free Enterprise and the Gulf Cleanup
Either lead or get out of the @#$% way...
From
The Heritage Foundation:
Free Enterprise Crashes the Oil Cleanup Party
Solving the problem of cleaning up the waters in the Gulf of Mexico may depend not on government, nor on the corporate giant BP, but on innovation and commitment to free enterprise. One promising and persistent example is Mr. Nobu Su of Taiwan, CEO of TMT Corporation.
Thursday morning he is to meet with Coast Guard officials in New Orleans to outline this weekend�s trial run of the A Whale, the huge tanker/oil skimmer which Su has brought to America. He says the ship is the long-needed �big answer to a big problem.�
Although he was dismissed when he originally shared his concept with BP and U.S. officials after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Su forged ahead and spent millions to add intake valves on the bow of the 1,115-foot, 10-story tall ship. These allow it to gather 500,000 barrels daily of spilled oil and water�250 times the capacity of the other ships now engaged in the cleanup.
In a face-to-face meeting in Washington, DC, Su told me he still does not know how many millions he spent to sail the ship from near Shanghai to a Portugal shipyard, there to have its unique oil-skimming system installed, and then dispatch the ship to the U.S. He says he made the decision to act about May 1st and the ship arrived in the U.S. by June 25�a timetable that U.S. officials had considered impossible to achieve.
Su believes so firmly in its potential that he already has retrofitting underway in Portugal on the B Whale, a sister ship that he says could arrive in the Gulf of Mexico by mid-July. And the C Whale not too long afterward.
Despite the original rebuffs from BP and federal bureaucrats, Su charged ahead. Rather than waiting to be invited to help in the Gulf, he wrangled an invitation from Virginia Gov. Robert McDonnell to make port in Norfolk for a media event. Once it was on the scene, it became impossible for the Coast Guard and other federal officials, plus BP, to overlook the Whale. And McDonnell�s avid support was a big help.
In essence, the A Whale had crashed the cleanup party, rather than waiting for an invitation.
And it is cool that it is Taiwan. China wants the world to think that Taiwan is a rebellious little bit of the Chinese outback -- a rogue island. Taiwan is a very vigorous independent nation and very much an ally of the United States. Whenever I buy machine tools, the best quality tools come from Taiwan, India and then China in that order (unless, for cases like my power hammer, the US importer has gone over and established quality control protocols with the manufacturer).
If the EPA continues to insist on it's moronic requirements of 15 ppm of pollutants in the effluent water, they need to be defunded as soon as possible -- the EPA is administered by appointees in the grips of the greens and this is not a good thing. They have the power to act as if they could write laws and this is not Constitutional...
It is not that I go out and trash the environment (hey Jen, toss another oily pelican on the fire; it's getting a bit chilly) whenever I can -- quite to the contrary. My gripe is that I have enough of an education in these things to see what is effective and what is just posturing. To see what is grounded in Science and what is grounded in political agenda. I practice good environmental stewardship and I do not see this practice coming out of anything that the EPA does.
Posted by DaveH at June 30, 2010 8:46 PM