"fishgrease" and an explanation of "booming"

Normally I don't care that I'm way, way the hell behind on news and current events, because you can generally hear the echoes for weeks so you don't end up missing much. However, that means I occasionally miss good tidbits whose impact doesn't create echoes loud enough for me to hear, even though the content is, or at least looks, accurate and important. Such is the case with "fishgrease"'s introduction to booming, or the art of diverting and redirecting the flow of oil in large bodies of water. Warning: the linked piece contains copious profanity. I think that's far less offensive than what is happening in the Gulf of Mexico, but your mileage may vary.

Caveat: I have no idea whether whether "fishgrease," the otherwise unidentified DailyKos poster's handle, is actually what he claims to be, an oil industry worker with more than thirty years' experience. I also have no idea whether his summary of booming and his criticisms of the BP-led booming efforts in the Gulf of Mexico is accurate.

All that said, "fishgrease" sounds like somebody who knows what he's talking about. Unlike everything coming from BP and the federal government, this information makes sense. There is no easy solution here, but if "fishgrease" is right, what BP and the Coast Guard are doing is about as far from anything like an actual solution as you can get.

I've been searching in Google for someone who is willing to go on the record as a verifiable oil industry employee or former employee to confirm or to refute "fishgrease"'s posting. It has only been a half-hour of searching but I'm already predicting I won't find anyone.

Usually, remarks as direct and as pungent as "fishgrease"'s elicit a contradicting response from an industry as big and as sensitive to its public image as Big Oil. Given BP's demonstrated record of indifference to safety, its credibility on technical matters affecting the safety of Gulf residents--technical matters like booming, for instance--should be priority number one for its public relations department. In this case, silence speaks volumes.

If that's the case, you might be asking (especially if you lean conservative and notice that it's the progressive blogosphere that has embraced "fishgrease"'s postings), why is "fishgrease" seemingly the only one blogging about how badly BP and the federal government are mismanaging the spill response? My guess is that the people who actually know how to do spill remediation all work for either the oil industry or the Coast Guard. If these people were caught contradicting their superiors, they'd be disciplined, probably fired.

The better question is, why has the Obama administration been all but complicit in BP's criminal mismanagement of both the spill and the original drilling? Why, in particular, did the administration, via the Coast Guard, rely so heavily on BP's estimates of the severity of the spill in the immediate aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon explosion?

Rolling Stone claims that the administration has embraced offshore drilling in exchange for Senate action on climate-change legislation. If true, that's ... really, really, really dumb. Obama needs to realize that placating less well-informed politicos -- and their even less well-informed constituents -- is a losing proposition. If he wants to justify his election, he has to stop treating with these people and start educating them. That's why the bully pulpit exists.