The insufficient, obvious and necessary moratorium on new drilling in the Gulf is the one instance where official action has been changed because of protest. Did they see the light and decide to make a better moratorium? No, they cancelled the moratorium all together.
I want to be shocked but it's too late for that. Oil vampires used the plight of unemployed oil workers to demand that they be allowed to continue sucking the life out of our earth for their short term gain. They say it is important to keep on the oil economy because we depend on it. Yes, a third of Louisiana workers are directly tied to oil. So that makes it all the more important that we get on with the business of change, especially since this non-renewable death spiral must end soon in any case. Our economic lives are chained to an industry that destroys our physical lives. So we need to kill the industry, not ourselves.
First step, seize BP. To fight this common sense response BP points to the plight of pensioners and others who depend on BP stocks to support their retirement funds. First of all, the stock market does not exist to serve the needy, it exists to serve the greedy. They drag our beloved widows and orphans into the fight on their side. But I look for the swindlers who sold us this load a junk in the first place. We want pensioners to live in dignity, we never said they must use oil money to do it. A pension is a promise. If some manager has made the mistake of tying my grandmother's survival to that of BP then that manager should apologize and fix his mistake, not drag us all into a poisoned future.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Sunday, June 20, 2010
New Orleans weather
When it's 98 degrees and 70% humidity, what's the difference between your insides and outside?
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Moratorium resisters
The Obama administration has put in place a very limited moratorium on new permits for deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. 33 out of the thousands of offshore rigs are affected. Even this timid and wholly inadequate action is met with howls of protest from the oil industry and it's allies. Like an abused spouse, some people get beaten, poisoned, exploited and left for dead and still they beg their tormentor not to leave.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
the President speaks
I want to believe all the good things I hear and yet I can't un-know what I know. Here I quote the President from his speech last night:
"But make no mistake: we will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long it takes. We will make BP pay for the damage their company has caused. And we will do whatever’s necessary to help the Gulf Coast and its people recover from this tragedy."
That sounds just like Bush after Katrina. And just like back then, people on the front lines know there are things that can and should be done and aren't and we smell a money-grubbing rat. President Obama gives us the reassuring words that he has sent the smartest guys in the world to work out a solution. It was the smartest guys who made this mess in the first place, just like Vietnam, collateralized debt obligations, Enron, . . .
He also said: "From the very beginning of this crisis, the federal government has been in charge of the largest environmental cleanup effort in our nation’s history – an effort led by Admiral Thad Allen, who has almost forty years of experience responding to disasters." And I cringe. He knows as well as anybody that from the very beginning BP has been in charge. The EPA ordered BP to stop using Corexit dispersant. BP said "no." Thad Allan is a fine human being, but he's essentially retired. What will be the consequence if he screws up? Admiral Allan has acknowledged that BP is making the decisions, on the theory that only they have the experience to deal with the situation. Only the fox understands how vulnerable the chickens are.
And don't tell me about our Nobel Prize winning Secretary of Energy. The President more than any of us should know that some people get that prize without earning it.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Famous Potatoes
Louisiana may have to look for a new slogan. Sportsman's Paradise refers to the abundant fishing and hunting provided for in the Gulf coast wetlands. This is a vast, varied and abundant area and it may well recover from this oil + dispersant disaster sooner than I think. As it stands we are flooding paradise with poison and creating hell on earth.
It's all about the fish eggs. Nature is not always efficient. Fish don't make babies one at a time. They put out millions of eggs and squirt loads of sperm all over the area and leave, confident that the next generation will be. And it works. Most of this rich biomass gets eaten by something else, and even most of the hatchlings get gobbled up too. The strategy is to start out with so many that enough survive to do it all over again. And everybody else gets fed in the meantime. In the case of the Gulf of Mexico, this includes just about every duck from Argentina to Alaska. It became known as the Sportsman's Paradise because people like to come here and shoot stuff. Some of these shooters have been alcoholic yahoos, but John James Audubon lived here for years and did his most important work here, while shooting tens of thousands of birds.
This scheme has worked pretty well for millions of years. Now we're going to see how much poison the fish nursery can tolerate.
Monday, June 14, 2010
The Taking Boy
I always hated this book, The Giving Tree. Look at the cover picture. Is that a young Tony Hayward catching the apple? Is it you? Is it me? We are encouraged to take and take from our loving mother nature. And what's to stop us? The tree will truly keep giving and giving until we kill it. And then we will sit on it's corpse and wonder what went wrong.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
They don't want to stop the oil
In the most deeply broken part of my heart I believe that BP and it's fellows don't want to stop the oil that is flowing from their blown out well at all. They want to capture and recover oil, not plug the leak. Until now I have held that idea close for fear of sounding like a total nut job. It turns out that I'm not the one who is sick. The sick ones are in charge.
I'm relying on the words of a really well scrubbed white guy who is an Iraq war veteran and Navy submarine officer, Christopher J. Brownfield. He is quoted in a New York Times Magazine piece by Deborah Solomon: (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/magazine/13fob-q4-t.html?ref=todayspaper)
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I’m sure you’re aware that the energy secretary, Steven Chu, appears to be opposed to the idea of blowing up the well to bring it under control.
He seems to oppose using nuclear weapons. The approach I favor is a conventional demolition, not nuclear. Any combination of explosives that could be used to break the well and bury it under a lot of rock could be effective.
Why hasn’t that been done?
I’m very skeptical about why we haven’t done it. I think the reason is that when the oil companies are in charge of bringing the solutions to the table, they are going to advocate solutions that allow them to continue recovering the oil.
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For a while I allowed expert opinion to dismiss the idea because such an explosion could create more leak sites and multiply the problem. This lie is easy to see through. We all know that the rig floated nearly a mile from the Gulf floor but that's when the drilling started. The drill hole is less than 20 inches wide and close to four miles long. No explosion we are capable of creating could blow a four mile hole in the bottom of the Gulf. A moderately massive explosion of the type that our military is so fond could easily create a lovely plug.
Another story that I've been carrying around for a while is at least as sad. The rig didn't have to collapse like it did. If the rig had been allowed to burn to the water line it never would have collapsed the riser pipe. In this scenario the disaster would at least have been located at sea level. Instead they poured tons and tons of water on the uncontrollable fire (water on an oil fire?) in what looks like an attempt to save the equipment. Certainly some rescue firefighting was urgently needed, but any talk of this crushing weight of water to save lives is another BP lie.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Catastrophizing
And what about when it really is a catastrophe? Smart people warn against going overboard with worst case scenarios, and yet right now dire consequences are well within the realm of possibility. In fact, widespread disaster becomes a probable outcome except for the fact of our ability to change our ways. So I hold out hope that we can dial back from oil disaster like we have (so far) with DDT and the atom bomb. This change will need to come from the margin. Leaders, scientists and smart people defend mass death as progress and the idea that we should save the world comes from wierdos with picket signs - The End is Near!
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
When Corporations Ruled the Earth
I wanted to have this catchy title and simply post a big picture of the poison spewing from the Gulf floor. When my blogging skills improve I'll be able to do that. In the meantime, here's a good link:
Pushed to the Margins
Here's a Washington Post article that moved me.
Apathy is Mental Illness
Suffering comes in to our lives. All lives. Then comes power to resist. Leaving aside the question of who wins, the act of resistance is health. If we don't resist we die, even as we survive in quiet desperation. If we do resist we die anyhow. In the meantime we resist and live.
Monday, June 7, 2010
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