[unishisse]

I would take anything Lawrence Solomon has to say with a grain of salt. A cursory googling of him and his book tells me he downplays global warming, thinks industries are perfectly capable and willing to regulate themselves (they're not on both counts) and his book was not well-received by either side of the GW debate. He strikes me as some sort of conservative-hippie abomination.

Anyway, Wiki has this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwat..._of_assistance
International offers of assistance

Three days after the oil spill began, the Netherlands offered to donate the use of ships equipped to handle very large scale spills. Spill Response Group Holland, the operator of the vessels, claimed that each ship could each process 400 cubic meters per hour—more capacity than the total for all ships that the U.S. was then employing.[195]

The Netherlands also offered to prepare a contingency plan to protect Louisiana marshlands with sand barriers and a Dutch research institute developed a strategy to begin building 60-mile-long (100 km) dikes within three weeks. Dutch regulations allow only 12 hours for an oil company to demonstrate it has a spill under control before government-owned ships and high-tech skimmers are dispatched at the company's expense.[195] According to a Dutch official, the U.S. government responded to the Dutch offer with "Thanks but no thanks", despite BP's desire to bring in the Dutch equipment.[196] US regulations require that oil-contaminated water must be stored on board in US waters. The Dutch vessels continuously extract the majority of the oil, but the water that returns to the ocean does not comply with the U.S. standard of 15 parts per million and so the technology was rejected.[195] By May 5, the U.S. had also turned down offers from 12 other governments that maintain spill response fleets.

Dutch officials have criticized the requirement, as it requires many additional trips to on-shore storage facilities, an approach Spill Response Group head Weird Koops calls "crazy."[195] Admiral Allen explained on June 11, "We have skimmed, to date, about 18 million gallons of oily water--the oil has to be decanted from that [and] our yield is usually somewhere around 10% or 15% on that". The US later relaxed its requirements and took the Dutch up on part of their offer, airlifting Dutch equipment to the Gulf and retrofitting it to U.S. vessels.[195] To avoid using Dutch ships and workers, the U.S. government asked them to train American workers to build the sand berms. According to Floris Van Hovell, a Dutch spokesman, Dutch dredging ships could complete the Louisiana berms twice as fast as the U.S. companies.[195]

However, the U.S. Jones Act prohibits the use of foreign ships and foreign crews in port-to-port shipping.[196] U.S. officials have offered conflicting statements about its applicability to the cleanup task.[196] On June 19, the Coast Guard actively requested skimming boats and equipment from the Netherlands, Norway, France, and Spain.[196]

As of June 25, The U.S. State Department listed 70 assistance offers from 23 countries, and indicated that 8 had been accepted, counting the Dutch skimming equipment (but not ships) as such an acceptance.[197]

[angelxmagic]

Like I said, a grain of salt...

[entaifsfets]

A cursory googling of him and his book tells me he downplays global warming, thinks industries are perfectly capable and willing to regulate themselves (they're not on both counts) and his book was not well-received by either side of the GW debate. He strikes me as some sort of conservative-hippie abomination.

What does this have to do with the question of whether or not the Obama Admin is allowing bureaucratic roadblocks to hinder spill containment efforts as your own posting seems to indicate?

[pfcwlkxav]

Why do we need the Dutch, when we have Crash Davis?

ACK!

[trilochana.nejman]

What does this have to do with the question of whether or not the Obama Admin is allowing bureaucratic roadblocks to hinder spill containment efforts as your own posting seems to indicate?

So you trust now every liberal news source to have their facts straight as they present them? If not, you really expect me to take a conservative's view on any subject at face value?

[ZwHRoTTn]

The second source was Wikipedia, unless you weren't already aware you should take anything IT says with a grain of salt without having to be told. And apparently what I quoted from it was already quoted ... from the first source I was questioning. Do try to keep up.