BP’s effort to contain the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico suffered another setback Wednesday, when a discharge of liquid and gases forced the company to remove the containment cap that for three weeks had been able to capture much of the oil gushing from its damaged well.

Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, at a briefing in Washington, said a remote-controlled submersible operating a mile beneath the surface had most likely bumped a vent and compromised the system. Live video from the seafloor showed oil and gas storming out of the well unrestricted.

This was yet another complication in BP’s two-month-old struggle to contain the tens of thousands of barrels of oil spewing into the gulf.

Read the whole thing.

A good portion of the book is given over to setting out the problems. This is not as dry as it sounds; Collier has a good line in the wry anecdote, the telling statistic and judicious use of research studies. He makes complex economic theories accessible to the lay reader in a briskly chatty style.

Early on, Collier tells us he is breaking fresh ground. He faces two opposing armies: the environmentalists, characterised as deluded romantics, and the traditional economists, or ostriches as he calls them, who bury their heads in their theories without paying heed to the plunder of the real world around them.

Collier is right to portray aspects of the green movement as foolishly romantic, and many mainstream economists as too doctrinaire….

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The oil spill catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico must be a lesson in humility for all human activities, not only for the energy industry, a Vatican spokesman said.

Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office, spoke on the latest episode of Octava Dies about the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico following an April 20 well blowout on the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil drilling platform.

“It is difficult to calculate the dimensions of the disaster, but they are certainly enormous and continue to grow,” he said.

“There come to mind other grave environmental disasters connected with human activity,” the priest observed, “like those of the chemical factory in Bhopal, India in 1984, or that of the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986, which caused a number of deaths and serious harm to people.”

He continued, “What is striking in this case is the sense of impotence and slowness in finding a solution in the face of the disaster, on the part of one the largest and most well-equipped multinational oil companies in the world, but also on the part of the most powerful country on earth.”

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That said, the most worrisome long-term economic impact of the Gulf spill lies elsewhere: The catastrophe is adding to the gradual erosion in trust in U.S. professional elites and major institutions, from government to business. It has hardly inspired confidence to watch the White House scramble to prove that President Barack Obama wasn’t as detached from the crisis as he often seemed, or to witness the inability of the world’s best oil engineers to stop the underwater gusher.

Confidence in the economy’s commanding heights has taken a beating following a long run of scandals and malfeasance. The list includes everything from the Enron and Worldcom failures, Bernie Madoff’s massive fraud, the subprime loan mess, the government rescues of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG (AIG), the controversy surrounding Goldman Sachs’ (GS) collateralized debt obligations, and so on. The Tea Party movement may grab all the attention with its antigovernment rhetoric, but surveys have repeatedly shown that its sentiment is widely shared. For instance, a series of long-run surveys by the Pew Research Center find that only 22 percent of those surveyed say they can trust government. That’s about the lowest measure in half a century. The ratings are similarly abysmal for large corporations and banks and other financial institutions: respectively 25 percent and 22 percent.

Trust isn’t as easy to measure as land, labor, and capital. It’s more like a recipe or a software protocol that allows for economic exchange and all kinds of innovation. Nobel Prize Laureate Kenneth Arrow famously remarked that “virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust.” Societies with high levels of trust are fertile ground for developing large corporations and innovative enterprises. Low-trust societies feature people who don’t like to do business with folks outside their family or community; smaller, family-run companies are the norm.

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…beyond speculation about this crisis’ political impact lies re-confirmation of this far more critical reality: As the oil appetite of the world (not just the U.S.) continues to grow, the difficulty in finding enough to go around is growing, too.

Oil will remain an indispensable energy source for decades to come. America must boost domestic production of it within reasonable regulations.

But the Gulf mess is a vivid reminder of the environmental — and economic — hazards of offshore drilling. Those risks are particularly pertinent for South Carolina. We depend heavily on tourism dollars generated by our healthy beaches and coastal wetlands. It’s discouraging to see some of our state’s prominent elected officials, including both of our U.S. senators, remaining supportive of drilling off our precious shores. It’s also frustrating to see so many Americans buying into the myth that “environmental chic” is to blame for the Gulf catastrophe — and for our dangerous dependence on foreign oil.

Long ago, oil virtually leaked from the ground in Texas and Oklahoma. Now it leaks in massive quantities from a mile below the water in the Gulf.

And now we must develop new sources of energy — and a stronger commitment to conservation.

Read the whole thing.

The Prime Minister called for the company to be protected from excessive compensation claims as President Barack Obama made it agree to potentially unlimited damages.

BP provisionally agreed the biggest compensation payment in corporate history, setting up a fund worth at least £13.5 billion to cover the damage caused by its leaking oil pipe in the Gulf of Mexico.

But the US president last night made it clear that BP’s payments could be just the start, warning that the company could still face lawsuits from individuals and American states.

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[Russell] Moore served as chairman of the resolutions committee this past week in Orlando when Southern Baptists gathered for their annual national meeting. Thus, in addition to dealing with scores of internal SBC issues, the convention expressed its concerns about the unfolding catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico.

Noting that the Bible teaches that those who harm the vulnerable should be held accountable, the convention called on “governing authorities to act determinatively and with undeterred resolve to end this crisis; to fortify our coastal defenses; to ensure full corporate accountability for damages, clean-up, and restoration; to ensure that government and private industry are not again caught without planning for such possibilities; and to promote future energy policies based on prudence, conservation, accountability, and safety.”

It urged Southern Baptist churches to recruit waves of volunteers for clean-up crews, just as they did after hurricane Katrina.

The resolution stressed that “our God-given dominion over the creation is not unlimited, as though we were gods and not creatures, so therefore, all persons and all industries are then accountable to higher standards than to profit alone.”

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The White House and BP tentatively agreed on Wednesday that the oil giant would create a $20 billion fund to pay claims for the worst oil spill in American history. The fund will be independently run by Kenneth Feinberg, the mediator who oversaw the 9/11 victims compensation fund, according to two people familiar with the deliberations.

The agreement was not final and was still being negotiated when President Obama and his top advisers met Wednesday morning with BP’s top executives and lawyers. The preliminary terms would give BP several years to deposit the full amount into the fund so it could better manage cash flow, maintain its financial viability and not scare off investors.

The talks have been complicated by the fact that BP’s ultimate liabilities for the cleanup and lost business are unknowable since the two-month-old leak of its well in the Gulf of Mexico could be spewing oil for months more. To date, BP has spent more than $1 billion on containment, cleanup and claims from the Coast Guard, fishermen, oil workers and other businesses from Louisiana to Florida.

Since late last week, the negotiations have been closely held given the market sensitivity for BP, which has seen its stock lose about half its value since the spill. BP’s next dividend for shareholders is another issue on the table. Some members of Congress have called for blocking any dividend payments, though the legality of such action is in dispute, or for putting the dividend in another escrow account pending payment of claims to victims. Either option would be problematic for many institutional investors and pension funds with stock in BP.

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Terry Vargas is living with the oil. Nearly three weeks ago, the third-generation shrimper pulled into port in Grand Isle, in southeast Louisiana, with a catch worth $1,400. But that was before authorities closed the rich Delta waters to fishing, thanks to the massive oil spill that has swamped the shoreline. Like many furloughed Louisiana fishermen, Vargas took a check from BP ”” part of the energy giant’s promise to Gulf Coast residents to “make things right” in the wake of the biggest environmental disaster in U.S. history. It was for $5,000, an amount Vargas says he can make in two nights during a good shrimping season. Still, $5,000 is better than nothing, but Vargas knows it won’t cover his expenses now or in the uncertain weeks ahead. So he has taken on carpentry jobs ”” the only paying work he can find ”” and today is building a small shed among the houses on Grand Isle, many of which stand on stilts, stork-like, to endure the inevitable floods.

Vargas thinks about the hurricane season that began on June 1 ”” forecasters predict a major one ”” and remembers when Katrina hit and left a pile of sand in his living room. Hurricanes pass; people evacuate, and then they rebuild. But the spill is a disaster of a different kind. He worries about a storm hitting the oily waters, raining crude on his hometown. “If that oil comes ashore,” Vargas says, “it’s all over.”

Read the whole thing.

I think [Mark ] Mykleby’s letter gets at something very important: We cannot fix what ails America unless we look honestly at our own roles in creating our own problems. We ”” both parties ”” created an awful set of incentives that encouraged our best students to go to Wall Street to create crazy financial instruments instead of to Silicon Valley to create new products that improve people’s lives. We ”” both parties ”” created massive tax incentives and cheap money to make home mortgages available to people who really didn’t have the means to sustain them. And we ”” both parties ”” sent BP out in the gulf to get us as much oil as possible at the cheapest price. (Of course, we expected them to take care, but when you’re drilling for oil beneath 5,000 feet of water, stuff happens.)

As Pogo would say, we have met the enemy and he is us.

But that means we’re also the solution ”” if we’re serious. Look, we managed to survive 9/11 without letting it destroy our open society or rule of law. We managed to survive the Wall Street crash without letting it destroy our economy. Hopefully, we will survive the BP oil spill without it destroying our coastal ecosystems. But we dare not press our luck.

We have to use this window of opportunity to insulate ourselves as much as possible against all the bad things we cannot control and get serious about fixing the problems that we can control. We need to make our whole country more sustainable. So let’s pass an energy-climate bill that really reduces our dependence on Middle East oil. Let’s pass a financial regulatory reform bill that really reduces the odds of another banking crisis. Let’s get our fiscal house in order, as the economy recovers. And let’s pass an immigration bill that will enable us to attract the world’s top talent and remain the world’s leader in innovation.

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A specially outfitted ship ventures into deep ocean waters in search of oil, increasingly difficult to find. Lines of authority aboard the ship become tangled. Ambition outstrips ability. The unpredictable forces of nature rear up, and death and destruction follow in their wake. “Some fell flat on their faces,” an eyewitness reported of the stricken crew. “Through the breach, they heard the waters pour.”

The words could well have been spoken by a survivor of the doomed oil rig Deepwater Horizon, which exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in April, killing 11 men and leading to the largest oil spill in United States history. But they come instead, of course, from that wordy, wayward Manhattanite we know as Ishmael, whose own doomed vessel, the whaler Pequod, sailed only through the pages of “Moby-Dick.”

In the weeks since the rig explosion, parallels between that disaster and the proto-Modernist one imagined by Melville more than a century and a half ago have sometimes been striking ”” and painfully illuminating as the spill becomes a daily reminder of the limitations, even now, of man’s ability to harness nature for his needs. The novel has served over the years as a remarkably resilient metaphor for everything from atomic power to the invasion of Iraq to the decline of the white race (this from D. H. Lawrence, who helped revive Melville’s reputation). Now, 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, its themes of hubris, destructiveness and relentless pursuit are as telling as ever.

Read the whole thing.

For too long, we evangelical Christians have maintained an uneasy ecological conscience. I include myself in this indictment.

We’ve had an inadequate view of human sin….

We’ve had an inadequate view of human life and culture.

What is being threatened in the Gulf states isn’t just seafood or tourism or beach views. What’s being threatened is a culture. As social conservatives, we understand”¦or we ought to understand”¦that human communities are formed by traditions and by mores, by the bond between the generations. Culture is, as Russell Kirk said, a compact reaching back to the dead and forward to the unborn. Liberalism wants to dissolve those traditions, and make every generation create itself anew; not conservatism.

Every human culture is formed in a tie with the natural environment. In my hometown, that’s the father passing down his shrimping boat to his son or the community gathering for the Blessing of the Fleet at the harbor every year. In a Midwestern town, it might be the apple festival. In a New England town, it might be the traditions of whalers or oystermen. The West is defined by the frontier and the mountains. And so on.

When the natural environment is used up, unsustainable for future generations, cultures die. When Gulfs are dead, when mountaintops are removed, when forests are razed with nothing left in their place, when deer populations disappear, cultures die too.

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KIM LAWTON, host: Repercussions from the Gulf Coast oil spill dominated the news again this week. President Obama pushed BP to do a better job of resolving the crisis and taking responsibility for the damages. Meanwhile, religious groups have been holding a series of prayer vigils across the country. Participants are praying for an end to the environmental disaster. They are also offering prayers for those who have been most severely affected. The crisis has taken a devastating toll on people involved directly and indirectly in the fishing industry. Several faith-based groups have been mobilizing to provide assistance. Joining me now is Margaret Dubuisson of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New Orleans. Margaret, thanks for being here. Tell us a little about the needs you’re serving right now.

MARGARET DUBUISSON (Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New Orleans): Well, Kim, we have five centers set up in the fishing villages in the archdiocese of New Orleans. We’ve seen about 8,000 people so far, fishermen and their families who’ve come in just looking for help, looking for support, looking for financial assistance in some way. The BP claims process is a little cumbersome, and it is going to take some time. So Catholic Charities has been able to provide direct assistance and food much more quickly and put that in the hands of the fishermen through these five emergency relief centers.

Read or watch it all.

Twice a day, precisely at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., alarms ring on dozens of cell phones, alerting those participating in the Rev. Jim Woodard’s week-old Internet prayer initiative to spend one minute praying for relief from the BP Gulf oil spill.

In Meraux, Cesar Lopez rises each morning at 4:30 a.m. and says the rosary, as he does every day, remembering especially to pray for relief for families stricken economically by the spill.

And in Violet, a coalition of Christian pastors has begun laying plans to pray with out-of-work fishers at least three mornings a week in Shell Beach, Delacroix and Hopedale as the men gather before dawn to learn whether BP will put them to work that day.

“Whatever BP decides to do, that’s down the road,” said Brandy Shelton, who lingered after the Sunday service at Christian Fellowship in Violet.

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British business on Wednesday expressed alarm at the “inappropriate” and increasingly aggressive rhetoric being deployed against BP by President Barack Obama, warning that the attacks on the oil company could affect energy security and damage wider transatlantic industry relations.

Richard Lambert, director general of the CBI, a leading British employers’ organisation, told the FT the presidential attack was “obviously a matter of concern ”“ politicians getting heavily involved in business in this way always is”.

He suggested the White House strategy was misplaced, stating that “apart from anything else, BP is a vital part of the US energy infrastructure. So the US has an interest in the welfare of BP, as much as the rest of the world does.”

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BP’s position at the top of the London Stock Exchange and its previous reliability have made it a bedrock
of almost every pension fund in the country, meaning its value is crucial to millions of workers. The firm’s dividend payments, which amount to more than £7 billion a year, account for £1 in every £6 paid out in dividends to British pension pots.

BP is so concerned about Mr Obama’s power to affect share value that it has urged David Cameron to appeal to the White House on its behalf. Downing Street, however, has refused to get involved. “We need to ensure that BP is not unfairly treated ”“ it is not some bloodless corporation,” said one of Britain’s top fund managers. “Hit BP and a lot of people get hit. UK pension money becomes a donation to the US government and the lawyers at the expense of Mrs Jones and other pension funds.”

Mark Dampier of the financial services company Hargreaves Lansdown said: “[Mr Obama] is playing to the gallery but is not bringing a solution any closer. Obama has his boot on the throat of British pensioners. There is no point in bashing BP all the time, it’s not helpful. It is a terrible situation, but having the American president on your back is not going to get it all cleared up any quicker.”

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Oil major BP (BP.L: Quote) believes it may be heading for a showdown with the White House over ever- increasing demands that it cover costs related to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a BP source said on Wednesday.

“At some point a line has to be drawn,” the source said.

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Vast underwater concentrations of oil sprawling for miles in the Gulf of Mexico from the damaged, crude-belching BP PLC well are unprecedented in “human history” and threaten to wreak havoc on marine life, a team of scientists said today, a finding confirmed for the first time by federal officials.

Researchers aboard the F.G. Walton Smith vessel briefed reporters on a two-week cruise in which they traced an underwater oil plum 15 miles wide, 3 miles long and about 600 feet thick. The plume’s core is 1,100 to 1,300 meters below the surface, they said.

“It’s an infusion of oil and gas unlike anything else that has ever been seen anywhere, certainly in human history,” said Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia, the expedition leader.

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As oil continued to pour into the Gulf of Mexico on a recent Saturday, Jennifer Wilkerson spent three hours on the phone talking about life after petroleum.

For Mrs. Wilkerson, 33, a moderate Democrat from Oakton, Va., who designs computer interfaces, the spill reinforced what she had been obsessing over for more than a year ”” that oil use was outstripping the world’s supply. She worried about what would come after: maybe food shortages, a collapse of the economy, a breakdown of civil order. Her call was part of a telephone course about how to live through it all.

In bleak times, there is a boom in doom.

Americans have long been fascinated by disaster scenarios, from the population explosion to the cold war to global warming. These days the doomers, as Mrs. Wilkerson jokingly calls herself and likeminded others, have a new focus: peak oil. They argue that oil supplies peaked as early as 2008 and will decline rapidly, taking the economy with them.

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(ACNS) Members of the worldwide Anglican Communion are working together on a project to discover what the Bible tells the church about saving the planet from environmental damage.

The Bible in the Life of the Church project manager, Stephen Lyon, said that World Environment Day was the perfect moment to reveal that the first issue under discussion would be the Environment.

“We are already seeing the impact of climate change, particularly in the developing world,” he said. “Most Anglicans live in countries like India and Nigeria that will be worst hit by greater flooding, or diminishing levels of potable water.

“All faiths have a duty to protect the environment, for themselves and others. Our particular tradition, Anglicanism, has enshrined the need to protect our world in its mission statement The Five Marks of Mission*. This is one of the reasons why we have picked this issue””to ensure that all Anglicans everywhere realise the biblical imperative to protect and sustain God’s creation.

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Most renewable and clean energy technology will be developed and provided by the private sector ”” and this leaves energy businesses with important choices to make on their strategic direction. Stronger policy incentives are needed to give these businesses and investors confidence to make decisions. Long-term political commitment is needed for new technologies and processes to be developed, piloted and scaled up; inventions in the clean energy sector have taken two to three decades to reach the mass market.

The Copenhagen summit was a missed opportunity but we need global agreement on emissions targets. Governments need to identify a clear path towards sustainable energy that businesses can follow. But making the leap to cleaner energy involves a feat of imagination as well as money.

There’s one other lesson to learn from the attempt to stem the flow of oil from the Deepwater Horizon rig: the longer we wait to take action, the harder it is to clean up the mess.

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BP officials were casting about for another way to slice through a leaking riser pipe located a mile underwater after a diamond-studded wire saw operated by a robot got stuck and was later found to be ineffective. The delay on Wednesday was one more bump in a frustrating obstacle course that BP has tried to run in dealing with a stricken oil well on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, 50 miles offshore and a mile below the surface. Since an explosion on April 20 that wrecked a drilling rig and killed 11 workers, the well has been spewing thousands of gallons of oil a day into the gulf, fouling beaches, shellfish and birds on the coasts of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi.

A technician involved in the effort said that the wire saw had cut less than halfway through the riser when it stopped being effective. The technician, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the work, said that it appeared that there was other material in the riser ”” including, perhaps, some of the objects pumped into the well during the failed “top kill” procedure last week ”” that was dulling the saw.

“It was cutting at a rate far less than it should have,” he said.

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In retrospect, the pattern seems clear. Years before the Deepwater Horizon rig blew, BP was developing a reputation as an oil company that took safety risks to save money. An explosion at a Texas refinery killed 15 workers in 2005, and federal regulators and a panel led by James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state, said that cost cutting was partly to blame. The next year, a corroded pipeline in Alaska poured oil into Prudhoe Bay. None other than Joe Barton, a Republican congressman from Texas and a global-warming skeptic, upbraided BP managers for their “seeming indifference to safety and environmental issues.”

Much of this indifference stemmed from an obsession with profits, come what may. But there also appears to have been another factor, one more universally human, at work. The people running BP did a dreadful job of estimating the true chances of events that seemed unlikely ”” and may even have been unlikely ”” but that would bring enormous costs….

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….here’s this week’s question:

If you were advising Congress and the White House, what would you recommend they do about offshore drilling? Cut it off and sharply cut back on environmental risks? Or continue it so that we can be less dependent upon foreign oil until alternative energies are easily accessible?

Read all the responses.

A top Obama administration official warned Sunday that the Gulf of Mexico oil spill might not be stopped until late summer after BP’s latest attempt to plug the leak failed.

The “American people need to know” that it’s “possible we will have oil leaking from this well until August, when the relief wells will be finished,” said Carol Browner, the White House energy advisor.

Browner said on CBS that Energy Secretary Steven Chu and a team of scientists on Saturday essentially put a halt to BP’s attempt to cap the spewing well through a process known as “top kill.” The administration team worried that the increasing pressure from heavy drilling mud being forced into the well to seal it actually would make the leak worse.

The worst oil leak in U.S. history is now in its 41st day. It is sending 504,000 to 798,000 gallons a day into the Gulf of Mexico, according to estimates by a government panel.

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From here:

The coastline of Louisiana is under attack again this time from oil. The former Bishop of Louisiana is in the UK and will tell us about how Louisianans are coping with this latest disaster and how he was personally effected by Hurricane Katrina.

Click on the “listen now” audio link at the link above and go approximately 13:55 in; note that one question is asked about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Pentecost letter–KSH.

Gasoline prices will be at the lowest level since March as U.S. drivers take to the highways this Memorial Day weekend, the traditional start of the summer driving season in the world’s largest energy-consuming country.

Pump prices have dropped for three weeks to an average $2.749 a gallon for regular gasoline, as of May 26, as crude oil prices collapsed, according to AAA, the nation’s biggest motoring organization. Consumers will be paying 12 percent more than a year ago, though prices are 30 percent less than in 2008, the year crude oil rose to a record $147 a barrel.

About 28 million people will be on road trips during the holiday, a jump of 5.8 percent from a year earlier and the first increase since 2005, according to AAA, which calculates the period over five days, from yesterday through Monday.

“We look forward to this weekend,” said Bill Compitello, senior director of petroleum supply at Wawa, Pennsylvania-based Wawa Inc., a gasoline retailer with 272 outlets in five states from New Jersey to Virginia. “The last few seasons people have been staying closer to home.”

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BP engineers struggled Friday to plug a gushing oil well a mile under the sea, but as of late in the day they had made little headway in stemming the flow.

Amid mixed messages about problems and progress, the effort ”” called a “top kill” ”” continued for a third day, with engineers describing a painstaking process of trying to plug the hole, using different weights of mud and sizes of debris like golf balls and tires, and then watching and waiting. They cannot use brute force because they risk making the leak worse if they damage the pipes leading down to the well.

Despite an apparent lack of progress, officials said they would continue with the process for another 48 hours, into Sunday, before giving up and considering other options, including another containment dome to try to capture the oil.

Makes the heart sad–read it all; KSH.

We know, at least intellectually, that that oil is a limited resource, yet we continue to extract and use it at increasing rates and with apparently decreasing care. The great scandal of this disaster is the one related to all kinds of “commons,” resources held by the whole community. Like tropical forests in Madagascar and Brazil, and the gold and silver deposits of the American West, “commons” have in human history too often been greedily exploited by a few, with the aftermath left for others to deal with, or suffer with.

Yet the reality is that this disaster just may show us as a nation how interconnected we really are. The waste of this oil — both its unusability and the mess it is making — will be visited on all of us, for years and even generations to come. The hydrocarbons in those coastal marshes and at the base of the food chain leading to marketable seafood resources will taint us all, eventually. That oil is already frightening away vacationers who form the economic base for countless coastal communities, whose livelihoods have something to do with the economic health of this nation. The workers in those communities, even when they have employment, are some of the poorest among us. That oil will move beyond the immediate environs of a broken wellhead, spreading around the coasts of Florida and northward along the east coast of the U.S. That oil will foul the coastal marshes that also constitute a major nursery for coastal fauna, again a vital part of the food chain. That oil will further stress and poison the coral reefs of Florida, already much endangered from warming and ocean acidification. Those reefs have historically provided significant storm protection to the coastal communities behind them.

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The “top kill” on the leaking gulf oil well remained a brute-force battle Thursday afternoon between drilling mud and high-pressure oil and gas surging from deep below the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Success remains uncertain, a BP executive said, and it could be another 24 to 48 hours before the outcome is known.

“Success has been in the ability to pump against the well. Next step is to get more fluid flowing down the well. Until the well is stopped and cemented, it will not be killed,” BP managing director Bob Dudley stated in a company press release Thursday afternoon.

Earlier in the day, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander for the federal government, said in media interviews that the top kill was working as planned and that oil and gas were no longer leaking.

“They’ve been able to stabilize the wellhead,” he told a New Orleans radio station. “They’ve stopped the hydrocarbons from coming up.”

Read it all.