Tag Archives: BP

Political Rants

Mount denial.

Another one of those weeks. Seems like there have been a lot of them just lately. In any case, it was notable that the President spent part of the week up in northern Alaska, getting his picture taken in front of melting glaciers. This represents political jiu-jitsu of positively Clintonian proportions, as it was only last week that Obama’s administration gave the nod to Gulf Oil to start drilling in the arctic – a region so remote that even the inadequate remediation services available in places like the Gulf of Mexico are unavailable. Gulf’s business plan, I assume, relies on a lot of good luck (as well as a steadily warming climate). Their disaster response plan is probably the same boilerplate bogus document BP used.

Somebody should do somtehing ... Right, so … Barry let Gulf oil start drilling in ocean recently freed up by the effects of burning hydrocarbons, but that’s okay, because he renamed Mount McKinley and talked about how we’re not moving fast enough on climate change. Yeah, no shit, Mr. President – there’s an obvious solution to that, of course. Stop dragging your own damn feet. Obama’s efforts to address the impending climate catastrophe are progressing so slowly that those glaciers he visited seem speedy in comparison. He should have named that mountain “Denial-ly”.

I’m not sure what’s more aggravating, a right-wing politician (name pretty much any one) who champions climate change skepticism or someone like the President, who obviously knows better but lacks the will (or perhaps the spine) to do what needs to be done – to propose solutions appropriate to the scale of the problem. This eight years may turn out to have been the last best hope for putting the worst effects of global climate change in check. My guess is that Obama knows this, but if so, how can he not at least try to take the necessary steps, not the usual scrum of half-measures?

Climate change will not be blown back by rhetoric. It doesn’t yield to compromise solutions. We have to stop thinking in terms of short-term political expediency and realize that when it comes to survival on this planet, half-measures won’t do.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Power.

A year ago this time, on the eve of Earth day, millions of barrels of oil began spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, accompanied by millions of gallons of a toxic dispersant banned for use in the U.K. (but still, apparently, okay to use over here). Both substances were disastrous by-products of a rush to profit by multinational corporations tied to our seemingly unbreakable addiction to fossil fuels. As was pointed out at the time and many times since, such catastrophic events are inevitable at this stage in the depletion of global energy resources. All of the easy-to-get oil is gone or spoken for, so expanding this highly profitable extraction industry requires brinkmanship of the type that has soured the waters of the Gulf beyond the sorry point to which they had sunk previously.

This is generally true of the extractive energy industries. Oil is being sought from ocean depths far more profound than either drilling or safety technologies can facilitate. It is being rendered from the tar sands of western Canada, where the very earth is being ground to squeeze every ounce of the precious fluid for export to the U.S., mainly. (As a result, Canada was recently our single largest source of oil.) The volume of global reserves is calculated based upon those deposits that are economically feasible to extract – as the price per barrel rises, more reserves enter the equation. The trouble is, the very act of extracting them from an exhausted mother earth causes as much environmental degradation as burning the oil in generators and vehicles.

Last year’s spill did teach us one valuable lesson: the energy companies fear nothing more than public opinion. Before the Deepwater Horizon explosion, cable television was choked with ads about “America’s Gas and Oil Industry” and all the jobs they were creating, not to mention BP and other oil companies touting their commitment to the preservation our environment and the development of renewables. When the rig blew, they vanished – Poof! No ads until well after the hole was plugged. Now they’re back again, though a bit more muted than before the disaster. They know their limits … and they know that they can only push the public so far. The real power is with us, if we can manage to use it.

We have an opportunity, right here in my backyard. Local landowners are preparing to play host to hydrofracking – another post-peak energy extraction method now destroying water resources in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. We need to make our voices heard now, before the industry gets a foothold and destroys New York the way the coal industry has riddled West Virginia.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Stuff and nonsense.

Just a few short takes this week. I’ve got a splitter of a headache – one of those neck and shoulder jobs. So my concentration is a bit compromised, but here goes.

Again-and-againistan. That Rolling Stone reporter who wrote the recent article on Gen. McChrystal has drawn a lot of criticism from various mainstream corporate press mavens. No surprise there. They are so obsessed with covering the ball-game stories – the ins and outs of policy making, careers, and personalities – that they neglect to examine these stupid wars that have been dragging on year after year. How closely have any of them scrutinized the rationale behind this policy?

Why the hell are we in Afghanistan? Our leaders say it’s to disrupt and destroy Al Qaeda so that they cannot plan new attacks on us. But to the extent that people like Osama Bin Laden are involved in operational planning for global terror attacks, all he and his pals need is a room (or a cave, but I suspect a room) big enough for a white board. Can anyone claim that we have denied him that in nearly nine years of war? Did our drones stop the Times Square bomber? (Fact is, they helped push him over the edge.) Where’s the story on that, kids?

No settlement. Despite Netanyahu’s fence-mending visit to the White House, there is no light at the end of the Israel/Palestine tunnel. His government is still strangling Gaza, still encroaching on more and more of the West Bank (in spite of the so-called settlement “freeze”, which is so conditional as to be meaningless). Old Bibi, like so many Israeli leaders, is beholden to the Frankenstein-like settlement movement that is a political lynchpin of his ruling coalition. Even if he wanted to close the settlements, he couldn’t (and trust me, he doesn’t want to). So the suffering goes on, and we keep underwriting it.

Gusher that keeps on giving. It’s been more than 70 days since BP blew a hole in the Earth, and the hemorrhaging continues. Do you sense a pattern here? Crises that never seem to end. This is a bad one. And yet, we shouldn’t pretend as though all of this oil, gas, and dispersant is spewing into a pristine Gulf ecosystem. According to the Coast Guard, millions of gallons of oil routinely spill into the Gulf every year – something like an Exxon Valdez size spill every three or four years for the past decade. Big as this blowout is, our problem is bigger than that. Let’s make the solution bigger, too. 

That’s all I’ve got. Bed time.

luv u,

jp