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Published on Friday, July 9, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
Drill or Die
On
July 8, the Obama administration lost its court appeal to stay an order
issued last month by District Judge Martin Feldman lifting the
administration’s six-month moratorium on offshore deepwater drilling.
The appeal was heard in the Fifth US Circuit Court.
But a funny thing happened only hours before the Fifth US Circuit Court issued its decision against the Obama administration.
“Alliance for Justice,” the non-profit group that, a few months earlier, had launched a campaign to publicize the Supreme Court’s transformation from an independent institution into a “corporate court,” released a white paper titled “Judicial Gusher: the Fifth Circuit’s Ties to Oil (pdf).” The report found that “many US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judges have extensive and multi-faceted ties to the oil industry, a factor which will come into play this week as a three-judge panel hears the Obama Administration’s appeal of a lower court decision blocking a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.”
“Judicial Gusher” asserts that the three Fifth Circuit judges charged with deciding the most recent motions in a legal battle over the moratorium have either defended energy companies as lawyers or invested in energy companies as judges.
Its publication is only the latest in a series of dramatic events that have unfolded since the explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon in April.
The sad saga of American “justice” – Big Oil style
On May 14, when, following the worst, and most relentless oil disaster in US history, the Obama administration announced it would impose a 6-month moratorium on new permits for deep water drilling in order to give a presidential commission time to study safety concerns, its lawyers told US District Judge Martin Feldman that April’s sinking of the Deepwater Horizon rig off the Louisiana coast was a “game changer” that exposed the risks of offshore oil exploration.
But, for a group of Louisiana offshore oil service and supply companies, such risks were not enough to justify a halt to deepwater drilling. So, Hornbeck Offshore Services Inc., along with more than a dozen other oil services companies, sued US regulators to lift the ban in a New Orleans federal court, arguing that if oil drilling were not allowed to continue, the state of Louisiana would lose thousands of jobs, and the region would be economically devastated.
That the moratorium imposed only a temporary pause on deepwater drilling (in waters deeper than 500 feet) was of little import to Reagan-appointee, Judge Martin Feldman, who wasted no time in ruling that the Obama administration had failed to justify the need for such “a blanket, generic, indeed punitive, moratorium on deep-water oil and gas drilling.” The Obama administration responded by immediately requesting that the moratorium be allowed to continue while the issue was being litigated. That request was denied within hours after the Justice Department’s request for a stay was filed -- again by Judge Feldman.
In his opinion, Feldman repeated his criticism of the Obama administration’s moratorium, saying that it was “indeed punitive” because it was too broad, arbitrary and not justified given the impact on thousands of oil industry workers and on local communities.
The administration responded by requesting another stay from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals -- the same court where the initial ruling on the moratorium was appealed.
Subsequent revelations that Judge Feldman held substantial investments in the oil and gas industries (including stocks in Exxon, Halliburton, KBR and Transocean Ltd., owner of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig), have done little to sway opponents of the ban; nor were they swayed by a statement released in June through Feldman’s own chambers revealing that the judge instructed his broker to sell his Exxon stocks and a subsidiary as soon as the market opened on June 22 -- one day after the hearing.
Big Oil cashes in on fiscal fear
The UK Guardian and other financial news sources reported this summer that shares in oil services companies including Halliburton, Diamond Offshore, Baker Hughes, Schlumberger and other oil-related industries are in the tank, so it is hardly surprising that Obama’s moratorium would enrage the industry. With tens of thousands of jobs in the balance, it is equally understandable that such a move would strike fear in the hearts of residents from communities whose livelihoods have long been tied to the oil industry.
Thanks in large part to corporate fear mongering specifically designed to exploit the very real anxieties of those who stand to suffer most from massive unemployment in the Gulf, much of the frustration and anger initially directed at BP has been redirected -- at the Obama administration. Political and corporate fear mongering is a tactic that can hardly go wrong when so many jobs are at stake.
Environmentalists may have found it modestly encouraging that Interior Secretary Salazar, when confronted with the oft-repeated remark that a drilling ban would effectively destroy Louisiana’s offshore industries, responded: “The greater irreparable harm would be if there was another blowout, when there is not the oil response capability to even deal with the current Horizon event.”
Yet, at least so far, it seems that Big Oil remains in charge, having successfully managed -- with the help of a complicit mainstream media and the US judicial system -- to frame the national narrative as one of “jobs vs. environment.”
That would seem to answer the “elephant-in-the-room” question, so poignantly posed by one beleaguered blogger: “Why does Louisiana still support offshore drilling, when its fishing industry is getting slammed by the BP spill?”
(The myth of) executive power in a corporate-owned world
In the immediate aftermath of the spill, Obama resolutely called on Congress to roll back billions of dollars in tax breaks for Big Oil. He urged the Senate to waste no time in passing a clean-energy bill in order to end US dependence on fossil fuels.
He even predicted that, despite the issue’s divisive nature (and despite having remained stuck in the Senate for months), he would somehow “find the political support” for legislation that would dramatically alter the way Americans fuel their homes and cars, including placing a price on carbon pollution.
“The votes may not be there right now, but I intend to find them in the coming months,” Obama told an audience at Carnegie Mellon University.
“The time has come, once and for all, for this nation to fully embrace a clean energy future ... I will continue to make the case for a clean energy future wherever and whenever I can, and I will work with anyone to get this done. And we will get it done.
“Over the last decade,” Obama said, the Minerals Management Agency “has become emblematic of a failed philosophy that views all regulation with hostility -- a philosophy that says corporations should be allowed to play by their own rules and police themselves ... Oil companies showered regulators with gifts and favors, and were essentially allowed to conduct their own safety inspections and write their own regulations.”
But in past weeks, Obama seems to have softened his “anti-industry” rhetoric, and his “clean energy future” is looking more and more distant. The sense of urgency for passing legislation that offers more than token financial incentives for genuine renewables (as opposed to nuclear power) has, yet again, all but disappeared.
While Obama has teased his constituents with the concept of eliminating subsidies and tax breaks to the fossil fuel industries, even floating the idea in his latest budget proposal, the president’s fiscal loyalty remains with the nuclear power industry, which just received another $9 Billion in new loans for nuclear reactor construction this July.
It would seem that now, with the spill casting Big Oil in the worst possible light, calling for the elimination of oil company subsidies would be a “no brainer.” Obama needs to reclaim his moral authority, if for no other reason, to redeem himself in the eyes of his constituents.
But politics is all about perception, and if Obama is to survive politically in a corporate political culture, his options, at least in his own mind, are limited. Taking on Big Oil means engaging in a power struggle with one of the most powerful forces in the political universe -- what some have called the “corporate oligopoly.”
If past behavior is any indicator, that is something Obama is unlikely to do in his political lifetime. The president understands all too well that it is the corporate oligopoly who helped put him where he is today -- and it is they who can take him out.
The more things change ...
Energy experts warn that the US will need what amounts to a “Green Industrial Revolution” if we are to begin to mitigate accelerated climate change, and step away from the brink of a great extinction. Yet, it was only last March that President Obama reversed a decades-long moratorium on offshore oil drilling along the East Coast from Delaware to Florida, in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska.
In lifting the ban, Obama took oil industry engineers and geologists at their word when they assured him that new technologies and drilling methods, had rendered deepwater drilling virtually foolproof.
“Today,” wrote environmental journalist John McQuaid, in an article criticizing the Obama administration’s policy reversal, “the notion that offshore drilling is safe seems absurd.”
Absurd perhaps, but the industry has long dominated government agencies at all levels, including Congress and regulatory agencies. And that hasn’t changed with this administration.
Shell and Chevron, according to Chris Kromm of the Institute of Southern Studies, only recently leased new drilling rigs from Transocean, the company whose Deepwater Horizon rig triggered the BP disaster. Kromm quoted an industry publication story about Transocean that said, “Transocean [is] still strong and growing.” He concluded, “Despite the disaster still unfolding in the Gulf, the energy and offshore drilling industries feel the same way about their future.”
And author Robert Scheer wondered in a recent article, “whether the president who bent over backward to pander to this group has learned anything from this costly mess remains to be seen.”
What also remains to be seen is whether Obama will now, as Scheer puts it, “view through a more skeptical lens the judgments and risk assessments of plunderers who treat national resources as little more than profit centers.”
Twisted logic and false choices
In the court of public opinion, continuing to drill is a relatively easy sell, partly because of political and economic inertia and partly because, as with jobs created by military spending, Americans are faced with false choices. Having been blinded by what author Robert Scheer calls, “lavishly funded corporate PR” to the real costs of such reckless corporate behavior, it is understandable that those struggling to survive would buy into the spin, but, as Scheer says, “it is inexcusable when the political elite in Washington that know better goes along with such chicanery.”
But “ordinary Americans” also bear some responsibility for the predicament in which we find ourselves. The current “drill or die” campaign would not be nearly as effective if American consumers were more willing to challenge heretofore unchallenged cultural assumptions. Foremost among them -- our own habits of consumption.
Surviving the 21st century will require us to think in terms of less, not more. We will need to accept that, in contrast to all we have been taught, growth does not necessarily equal good.
Embracing such an attitude will require Americans to view corporate PR tactics with a far more critical eye than in the past. Frenzied marketing campaigns, such as the one currently being employed by mega-consumer electronics company Apple, to sell its absurdly over-hyped (and “app-heavy”) i-Phone 4, need to be seen for what they are. Whether “creating demand” in a tanking economy or “manufacturing consent,” by saturating the mainstream media, even “embedding” their advertisements into (what today passes as) “news segments,” corporate marketers have succeeded in convincing us that we need their products.
US moratorium not enough
Until Americans are more willing to accept that we will not “save ourselves” by killing the planet on which we depend for survival, there will be no solution to the crisis in which we now find ourselves.
Yet, as author Lisa Margoneli argued recently in an interview with PBS, it is “a morally false choice” to halt drilling in the US, only to send Big Polluters offshore, where environmental regulations are lax or, in some cases, non-existent. It is a very “inconvenient truth” that to ban oil drilling in the US, while looking the other way as the likes of Shell in Nigeria, Texaco in Ecuador or Occidental in Colombia continue to plunder the poorest countries on the planet, epitomizes the myopic attitude and “NIMBYism” held by most US consumers.
If we are to successfully challenge Big Oil’s “right to pollute,” Americans will need to stand in solidarity, arm in arm with the indigenous activists who are now, and have long been, standing up to these corporate behemoths in their own homelands. We will need to stand in solidarity with those who have suffered most at the hands of Big Oil, to challenge these companies not only in the Gulf, but everywhere else they are abusing human rights and wreaking their destruction.
Humanity is at the precipice. We have entered an era unlike any other in global history. What it brings will depend on us.
But a funny thing happened only hours before the Fifth US Circuit Court issued its decision against the Obama administration.
“Alliance for Justice,” the non-profit group that, a few months earlier, had launched a campaign to publicize the Supreme Court’s transformation from an independent institution into a “corporate court,” released a white paper titled “Judicial Gusher: the Fifth Circuit’s Ties to Oil (pdf).” The report found that “many US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judges have extensive and multi-faceted ties to the oil industry, a factor which will come into play this week as a three-judge panel hears the Obama Administration’s appeal of a lower court decision blocking a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.”
“Judicial Gusher” asserts that the three Fifth Circuit judges charged with deciding the most recent motions in a legal battle over the moratorium have either defended energy companies as lawyers or invested in energy companies as judges.
Its publication is only the latest in a series of dramatic events that have unfolded since the explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon in April.
The sad saga of American “justice” – Big Oil style
On May 14, when, following the worst, and most relentless oil disaster in US history, the Obama administration announced it would impose a 6-month moratorium on new permits for deep water drilling in order to give a presidential commission time to study safety concerns, its lawyers told US District Judge Martin Feldman that April’s sinking of the Deepwater Horizon rig off the Louisiana coast was a “game changer” that exposed the risks of offshore oil exploration.
But, for a group of Louisiana offshore oil service and supply companies, such risks were not enough to justify a halt to deepwater drilling. So, Hornbeck Offshore Services Inc., along with more than a dozen other oil services companies, sued US regulators to lift the ban in a New Orleans federal court, arguing that if oil drilling were not allowed to continue, the state of Louisiana would lose thousands of jobs, and the region would be economically devastated.
That the moratorium imposed only a temporary pause on deepwater drilling (in waters deeper than 500 feet) was of little import to Reagan-appointee, Judge Martin Feldman, who wasted no time in ruling that the Obama administration had failed to justify the need for such “a blanket, generic, indeed punitive, moratorium on deep-water oil and gas drilling.” The Obama administration responded by immediately requesting that the moratorium be allowed to continue while the issue was being litigated. That request was denied within hours after the Justice Department’s request for a stay was filed -- again by Judge Feldman.
In his opinion, Feldman repeated his criticism of the Obama administration’s moratorium, saying that it was “indeed punitive” because it was too broad, arbitrary and not justified given the impact on thousands of oil industry workers and on local communities.
The administration responded by requesting another stay from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals -- the same court where the initial ruling on the moratorium was appealed.
Subsequent revelations that Judge Feldman held substantial investments in the oil and gas industries (including stocks in Exxon, Halliburton, KBR and Transocean Ltd., owner of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig), have done little to sway opponents of the ban; nor were they swayed by a statement released in June through Feldman’s own chambers revealing that the judge instructed his broker to sell his Exxon stocks and a subsidiary as soon as the market opened on June 22 -- one day after the hearing.
Big Oil cashes in on fiscal fear
The UK Guardian and other financial news sources reported this summer that shares in oil services companies including Halliburton, Diamond Offshore, Baker Hughes, Schlumberger and other oil-related industries are in the tank, so it is hardly surprising that Obama’s moratorium would enrage the industry. With tens of thousands of jobs in the balance, it is equally understandable that such a move would strike fear in the hearts of residents from communities whose livelihoods have long been tied to the oil industry.
Thanks in large part to corporate fear mongering specifically designed to exploit the very real anxieties of those who stand to suffer most from massive unemployment in the Gulf, much of the frustration and anger initially directed at BP has been redirected -- at the Obama administration. Political and corporate fear mongering is a tactic that can hardly go wrong when so many jobs are at stake.
Environmentalists may have found it modestly encouraging that Interior Secretary Salazar, when confronted with the oft-repeated remark that a drilling ban would effectively destroy Louisiana’s offshore industries, responded: “The greater irreparable harm would be if there was another blowout, when there is not the oil response capability to even deal with the current Horizon event.”
Yet, at least so far, it seems that Big Oil remains in charge, having successfully managed -- with the help of a complicit mainstream media and the US judicial system -- to frame the national narrative as one of “jobs vs. environment.”
That would seem to answer the “elephant-in-the-room” question, so poignantly posed by one beleaguered blogger: “Why does Louisiana still support offshore drilling, when its fishing industry is getting slammed by the BP spill?”
(The myth of) executive power in a corporate-owned world
In the immediate aftermath of the spill, Obama resolutely called on Congress to roll back billions of dollars in tax breaks for Big Oil. He urged the Senate to waste no time in passing a clean-energy bill in order to end US dependence on fossil fuels.
He even predicted that, despite the issue’s divisive nature (and despite having remained stuck in the Senate for months), he would somehow “find the political support” for legislation that would dramatically alter the way Americans fuel their homes and cars, including placing a price on carbon pollution.
“The votes may not be there right now, but I intend to find them in the coming months,” Obama told an audience at Carnegie Mellon University.
“The time has come, once and for all, for this nation to fully embrace a clean energy future ... I will continue to make the case for a clean energy future wherever and whenever I can, and I will work with anyone to get this done. And we will get it done.
“Over the last decade,” Obama said, the Minerals Management Agency “has become emblematic of a failed philosophy that views all regulation with hostility -- a philosophy that says corporations should be allowed to play by their own rules and police themselves ... Oil companies showered regulators with gifts and favors, and were essentially allowed to conduct their own safety inspections and write their own regulations.”
But in past weeks, Obama seems to have softened his “anti-industry” rhetoric, and his “clean energy future” is looking more and more distant. The sense of urgency for passing legislation that offers more than token financial incentives for genuine renewables (as opposed to nuclear power) has, yet again, all but disappeared.
While Obama has teased his constituents with the concept of eliminating subsidies and tax breaks to the fossil fuel industries, even floating the idea in his latest budget proposal, the president’s fiscal loyalty remains with the nuclear power industry, which just received another $9 Billion in new loans for nuclear reactor construction this July.
It would seem that now, with the spill casting Big Oil in the worst possible light, calling for the elimination of oil company subsidies would be a “no brainer.” Obama needs to reclaim his moral authority, if for no other reason, to redeem himself in the eyes of his constituents.
But politics is all about perception, and if Obama is to survive politically in a corporate political culture, his options, at least in his own mind, are limited. Taking on Big Oil means engaging in a power struggle with one of the most powerful forces in the political universe -- what some have called the “corporate oligopoly.”
If past behavior is any indicator, that is something Obama is unlikely to do in his political lifetime. The president understands all too well that it is the corporate oligopoly who helped put him where he is today -- and it is they who can take him out.
The more things change ...
Energy experts warn that the US will need what amounts to a “Green Industrial Revolution” if we are to begin to mitigate accelerated climate change, and step away from the brink of a great extinction. Yet, it was only last March that President Obama reversed a decades-long moratorium on offshore oil drilling along the East Coast from Delaware to Florida, in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska.
In lifting the ban, Obama took oil industry engineers and geologists at their word when they assured him that new technologies and drilling methods, had rendered deepwater drilling virtually foolproof.
“Today,” wrote environmental journalist John McQuaid, in an article criticizing the Obama administration’s policy reversal, “the notion that offshore drilling is safe seems absurd.”
Absurd perhaps, but the industry has long dominated government agencies at all levels, including Congress and regulatory agencies. And that hasn’t changed with this administration.
Shell and Chevron, according to Chris Kromm of the Institute of Southern Studies, only recently leased new drilling rigs from Transocean, the company whose Deepwater Horizon rig triggered the BP disaster. Kromm quoted an industry publication story about Transocean that said, “Transocean [is] still strong and growing.” He concluded, “Despite the disaster still unfolding in the Gulf, the energy and offshore drilling industries feel the same way about their future.”
And author Robert Scheer wondered in a recent article, “whether the president who bent over backward to pander to this group has learned anything from this costly mess remains to be seen.”
What also remains to be seen is whether Obama will now, as Scheer puts it, “view through a more skeptical lens the judgments and risk assessments of plunderers who treat national resources as little more than profit centers.”
Twisted logic and false choices
In the court of public opinion, continuing to drill is a relatively easy sell, partly because of political and economic inertia and partly because, as with jobs created by military spending, Americans are faced with false choices. Having been blinded by what author Robert Scheer calls, “lavishly funded corporate PR” to the real costs of such reckless corporate behavior, it is understandable that those struggling to survive would buy into the spin, but, as Scheer says, “it is inexcusable when the political elite in Washington that know better goes along with such chicanery.”
But “ordinary Americans” also bear some responsibility for the predicament in which we find ourselves. The current “drill or die” campaign would not be nearly as effective if American consumers were more willing to challenge heretofore unchallenged cultural assumptions. Foremost among them -- our own habits of consumption.
Surviving the 21st century will require us to think in terms of less, not more. We will need to accept that, in contrast to all we have been taught, growth does not necessarily equal good.
Embracing such an attitude will require Americans to view corporate PR tactics with a far more critical eye than in the past. Frenzied marketing campaigns, such as the one currently being employed by mega-consumer electronics company Apple, to sell its absurdly over-hyped (and “app-heavy”) i-Phone 4, need to be seen for what they are. Whether “creating demand” in a tanking economy or “manufacturing consent,” by saturating the mainstream media, even “embedding” their advertisements into (what today passes as) “news segments,” corporate marketers have succeeded in convincing us that we need their products.
US moratorium not enough
Until Americans are more willing to accept that we will not “save ourselves” by killing the planet on which we depend for survival, there will be no solution to the crisis in which we now find ourselves.
Yet, as author Lisa Margoneli argued recently in an interview with PBS, it is “a morally false choice” to halt drilling in the US, only to send Big Polluters offshore, where environmental regulations are lax or, in some cases, non-existent. It is a very “inconvenient truth” that to ban oil drilling in the US, while looking the other way as the likes of Shell in Nigeria, Texaco in Ecuador or Occidental in Colombia continue to plunder the poorest countries on the planet, epitomizes the myopic attitude and “NIMBYism” held by most US consumers.
If we are to successfully challenge Big Oil’s “right to pollute,” Americans will need to stand in solidarity, arm in arm with the indigenous activists who are now, and have long been, standing up to these corporate behemoths in their own homelands. We will need to stand in solidarity with those who have suffered most at the hands of Big Oil, to challenge these companies not only in the Gulf, but everywhere else they are abusing human rights and wreaking their destruction.
Humanity is at the precipice. We have entered an era unlike any other in global history. What it brings will depend on us.
- Posted in
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42 Comments so far
Show AllIt's going to take at least one more well head blow out like the Deepwater Horizon to convince people that a moratorium is required. There are over 37,000 (!!!!) drilled and capped wells in the Gulf. How many of them may be improperly capped, just waiting to blow? No problem, really, because the gulf is rapidly dying. Soon there will be no need for deepwater drilling precautions in that part of the world because the gulf will already be dead. This is the goal.
"Soon there will be no need for deepwater drilling precautions in THAT PART OF THE WORLD..."
From my limited understanding of our fragile planet, there is no such thing as "that part of the world". Everything is interconnected. If that part of the world dies, we all die.
I think we may well be over the precipice and all of our "leaders" are still involved in business as usual which means the business of destroying the planet. What is happening in the Gulf is a real international emergency that threatens all life on earth. The ocean is the source of life and it was already in trouble before the latest assault by BP, Halliburton and Transocean.
The assaults on the soil and seeds from Monsanto, Cargil and WR Grace continue. The coal companies continue to wreck mountain tops and pollute rivers. BP makes a fortune as the largest supplier of oil to the Pentagon war machine. The USA continues to reject help in the Gulf from other nations.
If ever there were a moment to call for a stop to the usual business of raping the planet it is now. But Obama and the Pentagon are preoccupied with their idiot wars and those wars prop up our economy so Obama will be unlikely to end them. Capitalist patriarchy is a murderous idiocy that shows no sign of comprehending that it too will be consumed in the earthly meltdown that it has brought about.
Everyday since the oil industry blew a hole in the world, when I listen to the media I only hear people trying to pretend they are in power and have a clue as to what they are doing. All of it feels worthless, less than useless. Nowhere do I hear the urgency that is needed to wake us out of this deadly idiocy of power over the earth and dominance of its peoples.
Only Evo Morales among "world leaders" has acted like one calling on the people to stop the continued ever more brutal rape of soil and seas and rivers and air. The author of this piece points us in the right direction. If the people of the world stand together and demand the end to drilling and wean themselves from the poisonous fossil fuel industries we have a chance of survival. It will take great resistance and it must come from below for the captains of industry and the greedy financiers and the militarist world leaders are all ignorant ecologically and hopelessly addicted to their money/power games as the world burns.
There are solutions, bio remediation in tune with nature is possible, we can organically strengthen soil and sequester carbon. We can learn to work with nature. Will we?
"I think we may well be over the precipice and all of our "leaders" are still involved in business as usual which means the business of destroying the planet."
Your comment reminded of quote from a book that was posted here a while back. Ronald Wright in A Short History of Progress, says this as to why civilizations collapse: “The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer.”
I have saved that quote and post it from time to time because it so describes where we are. It is pretty sobering.
All we have to do is change human nature.
I, for one, do not buy into the argument that it is "human nature" to destroy life while in pursuit of this supposed myopic self-interest. It comes from the same source that argues that "war is inevitable", that we are mere animals constantly in competition, and that only the "fittest" will survive. It is dystopic and regressive. A meme the sole purpose of which is to sustain the status quo.
You're right. It's not HUMAN nature, it's PSYCOPATHIC nature to "destroy life while in pursuit of myopic self-interest". Could have taken that phrase right out of what appears to be very little clinical research on this phenomenon. Google "political ponerology" and fasten your seatbelt.
Or corporate law.
"I think we may well be over the precipice and all of our "leaders" are still involved in business as usual..."
I saw this phrase, and all I could think of was Wile E. Coyote wearing a sign that said 'US Government' as he was suspended in mid-air in one of his classic 'over the cliff' moments, right before he realizes what an awful drop lies below him.
Non Serviam - I will not serve.
Once again the blame is improperly aimed at individuals.
There are 2 major reasons the US is the biggest oil hog on the plane - the Auto Addiction and Wars.
Anericans thought they were voting in 2008 to end the Wars - instead Obama and a segment of Corporate Dems have wasted another $33 Billion in the Afghan fiasco part of the 3.5 Billion gallons of jet fuel wasted by our Wars every single year.
The US uses 2x the energy per capita of Europe - primarily due
to auto addiction. But 59% of Americans say they want more
public transit, trains and connectivity.
It was not ordinary American citizens who were part of the Corporate collusion by GM, Firestone, Chevron etc to buy up and tear up the trolley systems all over the US.
It was Nixon who setup Amtrak in a bid to destroy the passenger train system in the US which was the expected outcome of that move. Instead, incredibly enough, Amtrak with all its deficiencies, poor service, infrequent routes and lack of train coverage continues to increase in ridership every year despite all Republican and Oil/Auto/Airline lobby attempts to kill it.
There is no doubt that Americans would not be thrilled to pay a higher gas tax of a dollar or more.
But IF they knew transit options were coming they would no doubt live with it especially if increased in 10c increments.
Even Red State North Carolina passed extra taxes to pay for a new light rail system championed by a conservative Republican mayor, Pat McCrory.
http://www.grist.org/article/2010-06-25-planning-politics-how-charlottes-mayor-championed-light-rail
Individuals cannot chose to use public transit which does not run or not even exist.
However, they can organize to support it and the gasoline taxes to pay for it.
Public transit is the biggest key besides ending the War machine to stopping oil usage and greenhouse emissions.
Pat "Conflict of interest" McCrory is the republinazi mayor of Charlotte, NC; a city that is a relatively blue island in a very red sea. Residents and visitors to Mecklenburg County / Charlotte pay a wide array of extra taxes and fees. That light rail line you mention is a sorry joke, but it is a start in a city where I used to log over 1500 miles per month to "get around".
Our civilization is built on having an endless supply of cheap oil. The food ,clothing and shelter we all use is based on oil. The world of cheap oil no longer exists so guess where that leaves everybody? We've already gone over the cliff and the reason we hav'nt hit bottom is cause its a long way down.
I wonder: Was Easter Island a microcosm of what we are now up against on a global scale? Were the inhabitants of that once lush, island paradise screaming at their religious leaders (today's greedy, oily oligarchy) that the status quo was ecologically unsustainable? If so, were they then ignored into oblivion? Were they told lies that it was their fault? They were the ones that were having too many babies. Or that they need not worry since the gods would save them in the end?
Very good point, COLLAPSE by Jared Diamond deals with that very subject and is a good read.
"Obama needs to reclaim his moral authority..."
HA! Too late! As we all know very well by now, his "moral authority" was a complete sham. Now, who shall I write in in 2012?
"Now, who shall I write in in 2012?"
Whichever Republican you wish to call Mr. President.
Thanks for repeating the comedy line "Obama needs to reclaim his moral authority..." I got a good laugh again!
Barring any serious alternative to fossil fuels, drilling to the last drop and mining to the last tiny particle of coal and uranium continues.
This whole scenario reminds me of the movie 'On The Beach', where people retreated to Australia to temporarily escape the cloud of radioactivity that slowly drifted south.
In our present case, the earth may be facing a similar situation - as the oceans are gradually killed from the blowout and the dispersant chemicals, people will retreat from the 70% part that are toxic oceans and try to live off the remaining 30% land, but because most people live near the sea, this mass migration will be hard to deal with. People will probably gradually find that life on land is also unavoidably affected by killing all ocean life. There are lots of migratory birds that go south to the gulf each winter. Most will die if they don't find an alternative destination. Birds eat insects. Some insects also migrate thousands of miles.
The death of plankton is a whole study in itself. Eat seafood while you can - it may get very expensive very soon. Along with food in general.
Anybody dreaming of moving to Mars, should that be possible, may be disappointed in temperatures of -110 degrees and hardly any air, rather like that on earth at 19 miles altitude. Compared to Mars, the peak of Mt. Everest is a walk in the park.
Soylent Green, anyone?
Considering what homo sapiens is doing, "sapiens" does not seem to be an appropriate term any longer.
In a slightly different context, J.M. Keynes once said: "In the long run, we are all dead." In all likelihood, by the time global warming is as severe as you say, homo sapiens will be extinct.
It is highly likely that we will be replaced by insects. I believe that they have been around ince the Devonian, so they certainly have been successrul Even considering events such as locust plagues, which are localized, insects live in the environment without totally destroying it.
ShadowDancer, several weeks ago you made a comment about a coming Snake World. I wonder if you could provide a link or recommend a book that discusses this? Thanks, and thanks for your unique views.
The "brink of extinction" arguments, the cry for "a clean energy future" are simply hollow wailing in the wind at this point.
Its time for real studies with real plans using real projections of results. Time for real suggestions rather than rhetoric.
The Global Warming, Climate Change folks have put the former arguments and claims in a ditch. Those that think its just a momentary pause are sadly delusional.
The latter is the only thing that will work.
mightymite -- Certainly, suggestions based on solid studies are good. From the studies I've read, it looks like some pretty radical solutions are the only ones that are "real", based on "real" projections. Of course, the term "solutions" in this case really is about the best ways to deal with a catastrophic situation that came about through people pretending to know what they didn't know at all or letting their investment in a particular world view blind them to salient facts. If we can get over those problems, then you are certainly correct.
I don't see how "Global Warming, Climate Change folks" have put "real" suggestions in a ditch. People are free to study and project and suggest plans, but of course the plans should be based on the realities of climate change. The GW "folks" really aren't the problem here.
I was trying to say that their claims which they obviously "puffed" a bit, the bodging of figures/models and the flat lies some were caught in have put this in the position where no one believes the claims and the GW/CC folks have little credibility left.
There is no hope of any radical solutuions "real or not" being accepted. Time to change tactics. Time to propose things that will help, small, medium or large that are possible to get done rather than the "Oh My God, if we use another teaspoonful of oil the planets doomed" no more drilling, no nuke, no coal idiocy.
How about political reality for a change? Thats my point.
"The GW "folks" really aren't the problem here."
I disagree, it was their absolutism, their insistence on purity of belief, their insults that trashed their agenda. And believe me, its trashed. They have no credibility.
You're confused IMO, mightymite (or is it Thomas?) The concept of out-of-control global warming is widely accepted. (Haven't you been reading CD, following the links, or observing the state of the world?) Your confusion is from conflating GW "folks" with global warming.
Can you imagine a situation where incremental steps would be insufficient, even when people wouldn't "accept" more radical solutions? Certainly you don't think there is some kind of "fairness" principle that will always come to our rescue? Sometimes, civilizations (and species) find themselves up against a wall. It's pretty clear to me that's where we are. It's up to us to find a political solution that takes into account the extreme nature of the situation.
That some people get hysterical, others withdraw or look the other way, some try to look the problem in the face...None of this has any bearing on the facts in the case. It's what you would expect from people.
You give yourself away in talking about a "trashed agenda". The word "agenda" immediately obscures and diverts the discussion from what we should be talking about.
So, who is it that has no credibility and does it matter?
I got rid of my car sometime in the mid 1990s, although I did it for financial rather than environmental reasons. After that I got around by bus and walking. Now retired, I mostly walk.
Are any of you willing to give up your cars so you won't be buying gas made from oil? That's what it's going to take. There is no political solution to this problem.
Check out fixcongressfirst.org/NCtalk
Those of us who live in the country cannot afford the luxury of giving up cars. I live 2.5 miles from the nearest small town and 7 miles from the next larger one. I am not up to a five mile walk to get a quart of milk. An electric car would be fine if I could afford one and if the local dealers could service them.
We can only control our own actions, not those of our cities, states, or federal government. No matter how much we scream for this or scream against that.
I need transportation where there is little public transport available. I'm keeping my older car, never going to buy a new one, until the auto industry makes an affordable electrically powered car. The next one I buy will run on electricity, so that will limit my choices if I do need to replace what I have. Considerably limit them, if it's soon.
IF most of us refused to buy gasoline powered cars, we soon would become a 'segment' of consumers. The auto makers soon would come up with an efficient electric car that costs less than $10,000. Wouldn't that be something?
Would I enjoy driving a nicer, newer, safer gasoline car? Of course, but it's more important to do this one thing for the environment. This one thing would speed up availability of electrically powered vehicles more than anything else!
Maybe people in very rural areas must have a gasoline powered car, but the rest of us can insist on electric cars. Just don't buy a new gasoline powered car, no, not even a hybrid, that's wimping out.
I think that we would be better off making more horses and coaches available in the rurals while getting public transportation, biking, and walking in gear in the suburban and urban areas. That should cover it all on avoiding the drilling altogether.
I'm afraid the MIC will still need its fix, as will the wonderful world of plastics.
The MIC needs to be abolished and I wished I knew how. You got me on the plastics not to mention clothing too. I have to admit guilt on that one despite comfort. :(
There would still be the diesel fuel for larger trucks, and propane, of course, for heating. But if passenger cars and trucks didn't use gasoline, that would help in a big way. And psychologically, it would help, because people would then demand alternative fuels for trucks, too.
Once people got used to streets without the stench and exhaust fumes of fossil fuels, who knows what would happen? Maybe walking and biking would become so pleasant, more people would do it.
I was thinking cargo trains in place of trucks. As for propane, you remind me of natural gas and yes, I feel guilty for my A/C and heater running on that. :(
“many US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judges have extensive and multi-faceted ties to the oil industry"
Which USan judges have which ties to the auto industry? The bankster's casino royale? The healthcare racketeers? The military-destruction complex? The Chinese labor-exploitation racket?
It could be that the judiciary needs an enema like the rest of the elite enterprise.
"Despite the disaster still unfolding in the Gulf, the energy and offshore drilling industries feel the same way about their future."
Leftists take note: The rightwingers are engaged in a battle of ideas with us, in a battle for their survival. They know that their cover is blown today, that everyone understands that the rightwing vision is a huge dead-ender. So they are "hunkering down" for the big fight. Might makes right. They can't win a rational debate so they are trying to steamroll over rationality itself.
Our courts argue that we can't suspend drilling as a safety precaution because jobs depend on them when the drilling (spill) is what has caused jobs to be lost.
The courts are so politically stacked and generally corrupt that they render decisions that defy common sense. Its argument that the moratorium is a form of punishment is a judgment without basis.
All of the judges who ruled against the moratorium either once worked for the oil industry or are invested in the industry. Even Scalia might gag over that.
A moratorium on deep -water off-shore oil drilling?! My, my...how touching. announcing a moratorium, especially for Obama, who gave the green light for BP to do that dangerous, risky job in the first place and ultimately kill the Gulf and destroy the lives, livelihoods and health of thousands, if not millions of people residing in the Gulf area, sounds rather hollow to me, especially because that big oil rig explosion that resulted also killed nearly a dozen oil rig workers and sickened and injured many more.
A permanent ban on all off-shore oil drilling would be the best, but don't count on this Administration to do that.
Saudis Stop New Oil Exploration to Prolong Petroleum Supply for Future Generations: King Abdullah
by Matthew McDermott, New York, NY on 07. 8.10
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/07/
saudis-stop-new-oil-exploration-to-prolong-petroleum-supply-king-abdullah.php
(one line of URL above)
(more links at the URL)
article below:
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For the radar: The Saudi Gazette reports King Abdullah has announced that the nation has stopped oil exploration on new fields to protect the petroleum supply for future generations.
King Abdullah, who expressed hope that oil will last for a long time, said that when recent exploration for underground resources started, he ordered that it be ended because the oil should be left for future generations. The King said once in a meeting of the Cabinet he asked the ministers to repeat a prayer after him "May Allah prolong its life." "What is it?, the ministers replied," the King said.
"It is the oil wealth," he answered them. "Just leave the underground wealth for our sons and their sons," the King said as he continued his response to the ministers.
As JedReport notes, it's not entirely clear whether the King is to be taken literally in his statement, but perhaps the most striking thing about this is that in his words is a recognition that oil production simply just can't go on forever in Saudi Arabia, that oil is a practically finite resource.
The long-standing Saudi line is that there's plenty of oil still in the ground to keep expanding production (despite actual production stats running counter to this), with the not entirely accurately if reassuringly glib maxim "the Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones and the oil age won't end because we run out of oil" often invoked.
I wonder if this change in talking point will be accompanied by a similar change on climate policy away from insisting that the nation be compensated for the feared economic impact from curbing carbon emissions?
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Congress and Obama Propose Spending $450 Billion for New and Wider Freeways across the U.S..
Demand through letters to the editor and Opinion Editorials that Congress stop the allocation of up to $450 billion on new and wider freeways across the US.
Demand they spend $450 billion on new rail, public (which is being cut across the U.S.) and alternative transportation infrastructure instead.
That might be considerd an aikido move but we will not consume and drill less petrol without converting our transportation of everything we consume via a freeway or failing and overburdened rail infrastructure.
LeonVest writes,
``If we are to successfully challenge Big Oil’s 'right to pollute,' Americans will need to stand in solidarity, arm in arm with the indigenous activists who are now, and have long been, standing up to these corporate behemoths in their own homelands. We will need to stand in solidarity with those who have suffered most at the hands of Big Oil, to challenge these companies not only in the Gulf, but everywhere else they are abusing human rights and wreaking their destruction."
Amazing. From a certain "view" this could be "considered" as a call to arms to join, assist, and provide comfort to individuals and organizations our oil-oligarchy controlled government has proscribed in our "Patriot Act."
Many of those individuals and groups who take stands against corporate plunder on their homelands are labeled "terrorists."
To fight for flesh and blood humanity against "legal person" oil oligarchs operating world-wide is by U.S. government fiat, treason.
I have seen this parable in way too many Hollywood movies from the "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" to "Terminator" to "The Matrix" to ... (you get the idea).
Ironies abound...