The Earth’s head has got to be spinning. Humans are filling its seas with oil, chemicals, waste and massive islands of pollution, the process of mining natural gas is poisoning our ground water, rainforests and old growth trees are being razed at a dizzying speed, the ozone layer is being destroyed by a never ending spewing of CO².

The Earth has gotta be thinking about humanity, “Man, what total assholes!”

Perhaps we’ve been looking at the state of our environment in the totally wrong way.  We look at the damage done by the acquisition and usage of fossil fuels and conclude that what we need to do to solve this problem is seek renewable and less polluting sources of energy. Blocking the way for this though are the people who have profited from and been bought off by those who have profited from the plundering of the Earth.

Oil was around for millions of years, it’s existence  never harmed the Earth before. Oil, coal, natural gas, etc. are not the cause of our problems, it is the people mentioned above and their companies that are. We need two things, we need to move to non-polluting renewable fuels and we need to get these enemies of doing so out of the way.

So, my proposal is that we re-engineer the ethanol process so that we can use those humans who stand in the way of progress as the organic material from which ethanol is derived. We can call it, Soylent Green Power! Or maybe just People Power!

Think of how much energy could be converted from the average, obese pro-Republican! All those dimpled calories just bursting to get out! And those slimy oil company and Wall Street execs would be an energy bonanza! We could simultaneously solve the energy, corporate and population-related issues that are endangering the planet and if anyone complains, just ask them if they liked “The Matrix” because it’s kind of like that.

Want a Tiger in your tank? Let’s add celebrities who cheat on their wives to the list! And we could give the Tea Partiers an immediate way to shrink government, turn them from obnoxiously rude into valuable crude which would reduce the population in their communities and thus reduce the number of US Representatives there! It’s a win-win!

People could list on their Driver’s Licenses whether they wanted to donate their organs or the amount of fuel they’re converted into. Sorry Dr. Kervorkian but euthanasia could be conveniently performed at your local BP station, mourners attending a wake could receive an oil change and tune up with each service, driving away with a remembrance of their loved one every time they stepped on the gas.

Gas bags like Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh could power fleets of buses in major cities for years. Take that socialism! That would be 100% American made fuel!

All of these enemies of progress and a life sustaining Earth could simply be told straight up, “Ask not what biofuels can do for you but what you can do for biofuels.”

We are stardust, we are golden

we are billion year old carbon

and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden

- Jonie Mitchell, “Woodstock”

Ferrets are more determined than they are bright. Case in point being my own pet ferret, Rosie. Rosie explores nooks and crannies with the unrestrained zeal of a fanatic. Wikipedia tells me that ferrets have been domesticated (they are the domesticated version of the polecat) since perhaps the time of Socrates and Buddha, and all that breeding – for going down holes, for ferreting out pest rodents – has resulted in a lovable freak of nature that behaves nearly suicidally in its compulsion to know, KNOW!, what’s down that hole, or in that crevice! Even if that hole leads to a drop off of ten or more feet (that’s like a twenty story building to a ferret), and a fatal fall, the only thing that will stop a ferret is the loving, exasperated hand of its owner. We can’t understand ferrets in this regard; it’s something they “just gotta”.

Or perhaps we can understand them, and all too well at that. My thoughts are now linked with those of so many others as we contemplate the unspeakable tragedy that is unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. As the oil spews out from a mile below, it is staggering to consider how technology has been so horrifyingly misapplied in this instance. Explorers were able, through sophisticated devices, to discover that there is a vast reservoir of oil out there beyond sight of land. Engineers developed machinery that can dig through solid rock, another mile below the ocean floor, in order to get at that reservoir. Because we “just gotta” have that oil! Cruelly ironic that we have developed astounding technology in order to drill through bedrock, but have not developed applications to produce or harvest energy that doesn’t send the environment, our one and only home planet, down a tailspin of degradation. Humans, like ferrets, are more determined than they are bright.

Lemmings don’t really commit mass suicide. It turns out that that is a myth. The whole myth developed like a meme in reaction to some wildlife footage shot in the mid 1950s, and televised frequently thereafter, for a Disney-produced wildlife documentary. Multiple generations watched in horror, on their upholstered couches (and I was among them) as a mass desperation forced the pathetic critters to fling themselves out over a cliff, into the cold, cruel sea, where they swam a futile swim to exhaustion and a watery death. This was a culling process of nature, we were taught to believe; that as their population exploded beyond a certain point, instinct forced them into behavior that they would never otherwise consider, as if a switch had been thrown by Mother Nature. The footage itself, and how it was presented, was hokum. First of all, the “documentary” aspect of the scene that fused itself in our brains has been challenged. The animals we saw were herded, it is now alleged. The rush hour subway density of lemmings was staged in order to heighten their panic. Lemmings do behave radically when their population exceeds a certain quotient. They do fan out in all directions in search of new habitat. They do, if they encounter a body of water, jump in, in order to explore the land, and its food potential, on the other side. But lemmings are very good swimmers. More often that not, as in WAY more often than not, the majority of them reach the other side. Therefore, the fact that they were transported to an inhospitable coast by filmmakers is all the more ghastly. Those critters thought they had a good chance of crossing over, because in a natural situation, they would have. Alas, this all too convenient, and frequently used, metaphor for our own existential situation is forced and inaccurate. We do not have allies among our fellow animals (or at least if we do, it is not the misunderstood lemming) in plunging carelessly toward our own demise. We as a mammalian species are alone in engaging in obviously suicidal behavior, with the concomitant collateral side effect of taking billions of other life forms with us.

And there can be no mistake, this IS the direction we are heading. One of Einstein’s most famous quotes is that problems cannot be solved at the level of consciousness at which they were created, and yet many hasten to assure us that technology, for all the devastation it has wrought since the Industrial Revolution, is nevertheless the solution to the ills we face today. Apparently, according to this way of thinking, it is now incumbent upon our technology to transform itself into Superman, and rescue us from the death trap its Lex Luthor alter ego has placed us in. Uh….right.

Technology is not the answer. Nor is it the problem, per se, so much as it is a symptom. There is a sickness affecting humanity that threatens our very survival as a species. We have lost touch with our center, our very DNA, and are behaving as if we are not part of this earth any more. We base our way of life on a system that will stop working in less time than the duration between now and Shakespeare. It is utter madness, but we go about our lives as if it will all work out somehow. We are the true “lemmings”, and our divorce from our naturalness will not, and cannot possibly be, solved by forcing ourselves even deeper into the ouroboros that is the left hemisphere of our brain, there to extract ever newer technologies to serve as antidotes to the technologies that are being run with such destructive consequences in our modern civilization.

Our survival as a species has nothing to do with technological geekery or, as some technophiles have suggested, “heading out to the stars”. Imagine the audacity! We trash life on this planet, but hey, it’s okay, so long as we learn to cultivate our own moon, or the moons of Jupiter or wherever. The very fact that some would consider this to be a solution is indicative itself that something is really wrong with our current mindset. A species, a contributing member of the biosphere and completely dependent on it, deluding itself that it can pick up and move elsewhere if need be. The Sufis advise us to “be in the world but not of it”. Sound advice when its meaning relates to an individual striving for peace of mind. But for the human race as a collective, the admonition should be, “Be in the world and don’t forget for a moment that YOU ARE OF IT!” Ours has been a history of pulling ourselves out of the real Matrix, the impeccable miracle that is our planet’s propensity to, generously, host ecosystems based on the simplest and most brilliant of exchanges – oxygen for carbon dioxide, food for fertilizer, death for life – and placing ourselves in an unreal Matrix that weakens us fundamentally and threatens us existentially. And we must learn how to stop.

Surely Tokyo, where I live, is one of the most wasteful cities on the entire planet. The foods that are thrown away each day, the electricity used in the neon light signs and giant televisions advertising bubblegum pop music in front of the major train stations; the air conditioners blasting out from four million domiciles in the summer, raising the temperature two degrees (Celsius) higher than outside the city; the appliances and computers and cellphones that are pitched and replaced rather than repaired, etc.; taken together this would easily provide enough food and energy and sundries to supply a city of a million or more people each day. And yet, a mere hundred and fifty odd years ago, Tokyo, or as it was then called, Edo, was a very different place altogether. It was, as has been suggested in a book by novelist/historian Eisuke Ishikawa titled “The Edo Period had a Recycling Society”, the most environmentally efficient city on the face of the earth. The Japanese of Old Edo were not self consciously preserving their environment so much as they were subconsciously aware of themselves as part of the environment. Perhaps nothing illustrates this better than the commercial use of “night soil”, a lovely euphemism for human excrement, as a fertilizer. If you were to go back to Edo and stop by a roadside teahouse, you might meet a man who would proudly tell you, “I sell shit”. And why not be proud? While Europeans were risking plague at every turn, throwing their raw sewage out onto the street, the Japanese were living healthily and sanitarily, giving their produce back to the earth, so that it could continue to yield its produce for their use. This is the way of things, it is what Nature teaches us, and yet it is something that we have forgotten. Instead, we eat chemically fertilized foods, laced with pesticides and denuded of nutrients, and dump (literally) that into our water supply, of all places! We have night soil for brains, it seems!

We have to, metaphorically if not literally, return to the wilds and become creatures of the forest again. In a forest, absolutely nothing is wasted. Not air, not sunlight, not a drop of rain or sweat, not a carcass or a pellet of shit. A forest can run, continually rejuvenating itself, for millennia, once a system is set in place. In a place called Gaviotas, in Colombia, a group of scientists and environmental engineers figured out a way to put a rainforest back where the desert had encroached, and not by simply planting trees. They built it up from the ground floor, beginning with the small plants that would have originally grown there, and moving forward incrementally. Almost miraculously, the birds began to appear as if from nowhere. And the lizards, and the rodents. Over time, the forest was back, and all its creatures were working in harmony. Gaia knew what to do, and just needed a nudge.

I am not idealizing forest life as if it is some sort of trans-species hippiefest waiting to welcome us back. In any given clump of dirt in a forest that you may happen to pick up with your bare hand, an atrocity is occuring. The little things of this planet dispense with each other in ways so gruesome and cruel that they would blush the faces of the most depraved Medieval torturer. It can easily be surmised that the very terrors of the natural world have impacted our psychology and seeded our destructiveness. We needed to learn to use our brains for protection, for offense and defense. We would not have survived had we not learned to attack, fight for our very lives, take without asking. It’s part of who we are and it was bequeathed to us by Gaia. We are her legacy. Nevertheless, that is not an excuse to stay on our present course as it leads down a road toward extinction. We can use our minds to imagine, and create, a new Eden. Our children can be the butterflies and birds that spread the seeds and nectar, through their vigor and curiosity. Our senior citizens can be the massive sycamores that hold the very life of the forest in their hearts and minds. Every one of us must discover our place in this new “human forest” before we can reintegrate ourselves with the broader ecosystem both on our terms and its. Because what we are really wasting more than anything is our minds, and what we are destroying is our humanness. We have to remember what that means first, to be human. If we want to be sane again.

It has been hailed as America’s most sensible solution for breaking our dependency on foreign oil and reducing the potential environmental destruction oil drilling can cause, such as the ongoing catastrophe in the gulf.

It has been marketed and promoted by such trustworthy sources as T. Boone Pickens, oil industy megabillionaire and former financier of the fraudulent Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

Natural gas will save America. And hey, it’s natural!

Of course, so is benzine and many other cancer-causing chemicals which are now polluting our nation’s water supply like an epidemic because of the process used to get natural gas out of the ground.

The lie is that natural gas is better for the environment than oil. The truth is that while the exhaust from vehicles and generators that use processed natural gas is less polluting than oil, extracting natural gas from the Earth is a horribly destructive process to our environment.

The trade off is, our drinkable water for fuel. Does this make any sense?

It is in fact a kind of shell game, all that is promoted to the public is the final product, cleaner burning fuel. What is hidden is that the destruction to the environment to get that fuel.

There is a remarkable documentary now airing on HBO titled “Gasland” that keenly exposes this deceit and the fraud of “natural” gas.  Here is the trailer for this eye opening film:

What is at the root of the catastrophe that is natural gas production is the method of extraction that is called Hydraulic Fracturing (referred to as “Frac” or “Fracking”).  In essence, it consists of high pressure drilling of holes which create many fractures in the Earth’s crust then forcing huge amounts water bearing over 596 toxic chemicals in to free the trapped natural gas and force it to the surface.

What this is accomplishing is destroying ground water, rivers and lakes across America. If it continues at the current pace, we may have plenty of cleaner burning fuel for our cars and reduce some of our dependency on foreign oil but we may instead become dependent on importing our drinking water from foreign countries. And there is no alternative to pursue for our reliance on water.

The process of mining and refining natural gas actually produces an enormous amount of hydrocarbons and toxic chemicals into the atmosphere.

In Gasland, filmmaker Josh Fox documents how severely polluted the water table is becoming. In the trailer above, you will witness one of many cases presented in the film of people lighting their tap water on fire.  River water bubbles with natural gas and lights on fire. Water wells at people’s homes have exploded. People who have lived on ground water have become ill and have died. Many now have to cart in huge amounts of water on a weekly basis to fill plastic cisterns on their property so they can have water to drink, do laundry and water plants. Animals and vegetation have become poisoned and killed. Cattle, chickens, etc. drinking contaminated water enter the nation’s food supply.

A few pieces of information from Gasland that are interesting:

• The 2005 Energy Policy Act (nicknamed “The Haliburton Loophole”), drafted via Dick Cheney and his Energy Task Force that included the CEOs of most major oil and gas corporations in the U.S., exempted oil and gas companies from The Safe Water Drinking Act, The Clean Air Act and The Clean Water Act. They are permitted by law to put any chemicals they unilaterally choose to use, no matter how toxic or cancer causing, into the Earth and water that people drink and bathe in. The passage of this bill unleashed a stampede of companies to drill and the frenzy continues today.

• Despite the conclusion in 2004 by the EPA that Hydraulic Fracturing was causing water contamination, the industry-stocked panel that the Bush Admin put in place rejected the report, simultaneously acknowledging that this process was putting toxic, cancer-causing chemicals into water but declaring that there was no reason to investigate and it wasn’t a risk. Five of the seven members on Bush’s panels appeared to have had conflicts of interest due to their involvement in the oil and gas industries and would appear to benefit from the EPA not pursuing this matter.

• Each well, from drilling to the first flooding with Frac water (water that is contaminated with hundreds of toxic chemicals), requires 1,150 truck trips, often to distant, remote areas.  Out of all of the 400 to 600 tankers of Frac water that is injected in the drill holes, only about half of that amount comes back up and is removed…to open pits that allow for the Frac water to seep into the ground and some even have evaporation sprayers that spray Frac water up to evaporate into the air we breathe.  More problematic, the refining process for natural gas evaporates unwanted Frac moisture out of the gas and also releases it into the atmosphere. Ozone and pollutants in the air around such communities where such facilities are located are elevated and in some cases, far above EPA acceptable levels.

• There are approximately 450,000 natural gas wells around the U.S. at this time. For the Frac process, each well initially requires between 1 million and 7 million gallons of water. Wells are re-Fracked up to 18 times, each time another 1 million to 7 million gallons of water are used. The math looks like this, 450,000 wells times 18 times 1-7 million gallons is in the ballpark of 40 trillion gallons of water…all of it polluted with the 596 chemicals and undrinkable in the future (how long can this be sustained without severely and permanently depleting our nation’s potable water supply?).

• The Natural Gas industry is in the process of drilling and pursuing hundreds of thousands of more Frac wells across the country. The northern portion of the watershed area that supplies New York and the Delaware river basin, the largest unfiltered water supply in the world which supplies 15.6 million people with water (in NY, DE, PA and NJ),  is slated for natural gas drilling.  Around 50,000 gas wells are expected to be drilled in this area if drilling is not prevented (no NG wells have yet been drilled).

As with the Gulf state Governors who howl about the moritorium on deep sea oil drilling because of how it impacts the short term economy, this small minded ignorance of killing the golden goose to get its golden eggs today is reflective of the battle over a transition to clean energy.

The only way to make a transition is to reduce one element while increasing others. The problem here is that many states and corporations make a lot of money off of fossil fuels and will fight a real transition with everything they’ve got. Bobby Jindal, Mary Landrieu, Haley Barbour and other oil-company-owned pols in the Gulf will mindlessly campaign for more oil drilling even if it destroys their fishing industry and their wetlands…which will make another hurricane’s destruction of New Orleans more likely.  So, in order to save the Gulf, we must make destroying it more likely.

And the Natural Gas industry is smiling glibly at offering natural gas as a transitional fuel to get us to renewable energy but the more money they make and the bigger portion of the energy marketplace they hold is only a testament to the battle they will mount against ever moving off of natural gas to renewable energy.

The industry push for natural gas is the equivilent of a crack dealer offering their drug to help you get off of that nasty meth. It is not an answer, it is more quicksand for any pursuit of renewable and nonpolluting fuels. Unfortunately, many progressives (including me) and Dem politicians all the way up to Pres. Obama have been convinced along the way by the propaganda of natural gas and have supported it in the past.

As it was a wake up call for me, I hope policy makers and the President see “Gasland” and recognize that the terribly polluting process of obtaining natural gas is not outweighed by its cleaner burning properties and conversion should not proceed any further. At some point, there must be a somewhat bumpy change of course offroad from the Fossil Fuels Highway to the Renewable Fuels Highway. There will always be those that protest at the loss of jobs and business that fossil fuels “fuels” but that loss must occur at some time if we are to end our dependency on it.

Progress is painful but it is necessary. Avoiding pain in the short term at the cost of sacrificing necessary progress in the long term is short sighted and in the big picture, self-destructive.

After all, what jobs will left in the oil and natural gas industries anyway if there’s not enough water left for Americans to drink?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

President Obama is addressing the nation tonight from the Oval Office at 5:00 pm PDT, 8:00 pm EDT.

We will be adding the live video to this post as soon as the address begins, you can watch it here and comment in real time below.

Pres. Obama’s speech is expected to address the BP oil spill and moving forward with a national energy policy.

Hope to see you then!

As an intrepid blogger, I try to seek the truth wherever it is. Using a valuable contact of mine (a deity who shall remain unnamed at this time but has been known to share his blog here occasionally), I sought to arrange an interview with the very personification of all that is evil but unfortunately, Rupert Murdoch wouldn’t return my calls.

So, I had to settle for Satan.

Satan and I met at a Starbucks in Venice, California, he had an iced mocha frappacino which unfortunately evaporated as he carried it to the table, I had an iced black tea which Satan kept “mistakenly” sipping and singing the lip of the cup.

Here is an excerpt from our conversation:

ADLIB: Satan, thanks so much for taking the time to do this interview, I know you’ve got a lot going on right now.

SATAN: Actually, it’s kind of a slow season for me so I’ve been catching up on all of the episodes of Lost that I missed. Who woulda thought they were dead? Duh?

ADLIB: Hmm…we’ve got this ongoing economic crisis, the BP Oil spill destroying the gulf, Israel’s attack on the floatilla, North Korea threatening war, Iran pursuing nuclear weapons, climate-change-caused severe weather killing more people each year and I don’t know where to begin with Lindsey Lohan and it’s a slow season for you?

SATAN: Actually it’s been slow since George W. Bush was elected, I mean, what do I have left to do? Personally, I enjoy driving countries into unnecessary wars, destroying the rights of free people, undermining the pillars of the world economy and causing disasters that devastate the ocean, land and air…but I don’t want to look like a copycat. Good thing I’m not in a union or there would be serious trouble, seriously, you guys have totally infringed on my job description.

ADLIB: So you’re saying that The Prince of Darkness has basically lost his job too and has joined the ranks of the unemployed?

SATAN: The down side is that it never felt like work to me, you know? The up side is, I forgot how much I enjoy Oprah.

ADLIB: What this means then is that human beings are now fully responsible for the worst evils that they face.

SATAN: Well, no one forces you to eat at Applebee’s, right? Heh! Though…that’s not a bad idea to explore…

ADLIB: Just to be clear then, you had nothing to do with the BP oil spill?

SATAN: That all depends on what the definition of “having nothing to do with something” means. I will say that indirectly I have made my contributions, instilling greed in the corporate world and apathy in the public when it comes to fossil fuels. I didn’t cause the spill, I just freed people at oil companies from conscience, they did all the rest…as I knew they would. Actually, if you don’t mind, I’d like to sing a little song about all of this.

ADLIB: I’d rather you didn’t, could we just continue our discussion?

SATAN: Right, that’s why I’m Satan, I like doing what other people want…

(At this point, there was a bright flash and when I could focus, I saw Satan was now standing in the middle of the Starbucks wearing a traditional Swiss dress with his horns in a Swiss braid. He smiled sarcastically, music swelled up from nowhere and he began to sing and prance around the Starbucks)

SATAN: (sings) Oil drops on wetlands and tarballs on beaches!
Bright shiny oil plumes and lame Hayward speeches!
Brown oily pelicans can’t use their wings,
these are a few of my favorite things!

Cream colored oceans and crisp jelly fishes!
Top Hats and and Top Kills and stunts that are wishes!
Wild geese can’t fly with the gunk on their wings,
these are a few of my favorite things!

Folks in white space suits with oil spots and splashes!
Thick tar that stays on my nose and eyelashes.
All the destruction that oil drilling brings,
these are a few of my favorite things!

When the well blows
When the Feds sting
When I’m feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I just feel…so bad!!!

(I can’t recount all that accompanied this musical number but there was a chorus of dancing gay Republicans, oil company executives in a Rockette’s style kick line and mock broken oil wells spewing rhythmically like dancing fountains. A bright flash and suddenly Satan was back at our table, sipping the last of my black iced tea.)

SATAN: You should see the whole show, I get to play a Nazi too, it’s a funny in-joke, you know?

ADLIB: I…I’m naturally surprised, I didn’t know you liked to sing and dance. I always thought of Satan as, well, angry.

SATAN: You haven’t seen me before my first cup of coffee in the morning! (laughter) Seriously, ask anyone in the entertainment business, they’ll tell you who’s running things.

ADLIB: I was wondering–

(Satan’s cell phone beeps)

SATAN: Hold on…damn, I’ve got to get going now, I’m late for a FreedomWorks teleconference with Tea Party candidates. Sorry! Thanks for the iced tea! And remember, it’s always darkest before the dispersant! Hah!

A bright flash and a puff of smoke and he was gone. Then the Starbucks cashier came over and said Satan took a scone on his way out and said I’d pay. And folks wonder where corporate culture comes from.

Operation Sunburst-Electrify the Debate!

The Problem is OIL.

The current messy predicament had its beginning in the 1940′s when Standard Oil, GM and Firestone got rid of mass transit. In similar fashion, Chevron bought the patent to the NiMH battery from GM in 2000, and only allowed it to be used in cars that got 100% of their energy at the gas pump.

Oil company propaganda says there’s no market for electric cars, but the Nissan leaf is already sold out of the 19,000 Leafs it will manufacture for 2011. No more orders taken!

But- this is the best shot we’ll ever have to change things.

The true cost of oil is war, asthma, environmental destruction, lost tourism and global climate change. No amount of money makes up for that. There is only one solution, and the oil companies fear it- Solar Panels on our rooftops and Electric Cars to drive.

1. Nickel-Metal Hydride is the only proven EV (Electric Vehicle) battery; after 100K or 200K miles NiMH can be remelted down into new batteries without new mining.

2. Instead of “research”, we need to start making and improving plug-in cars right now, not waiting for the perfect that never comes. Lowering cost is the name of the game.

3. Solar power and plug-in cars is the only sustainable way to power individual autos.

4. Running an EV 1000 miles per month takes only 250 kilo-Watt-hours of electric, about $25 worth; about what two old refrigerators cost and about a third of the average home usage.

5. It would take only a tenth of the average home roof — 6 square yards — to make 250 kWh per month, enough electric energy to run a plug-in car 1000 miles per month.

6. Because solar power and plug-in cars would cut oil profits, Big Oil has strangled and delayed this simple alternative to oil and coal.

7. No matter how many nuke or coal plants we build, it won’t replace one drop of oil unless there are plug-in cars to use the electric.

8. America’s largest open-pit coal mine is a witches cauldron of toxic waste and caustic destruction; but if the ground were left alone, and covered with solar panels, we’d get more electric energy from the same space (28,000 acres) than from the coal.

9. Instead of coal mines, or oil rigs, the same workers could be manufacturing and installing solar panels and building and recycling electric plug-in cars and reforming their batteries.

10. Buying oil from people who hate us gives them our money and leaves only air and ground pollution, asthma and smog.

The alternative to oil-fired cars and permanent lung damage is solar and plug-in cars.

Joey Racano

“Reports on the demise of the Electric Car have been greatly exaggerated”

But in the face of an actual spill, BP is much less confident. “This scares everybody: the fact that we can’t make this well stop flowing, the fact that we haven’t succeeded so far,” BP CEO Doug Suttles said. “Many of the things we’re ­trying have been done on the surface before, but have never been tried at 5,000 ft.”

They’ve never been tried at 5,000 feet. Drilling for oil this deeply under the ocean is a relatively new enterprise for our species. Oil has been drilled offshore in shallow water for more than a century. But deepwater drilling is much more expensive than shallow-water drilling. For a long time drilling in deep water wasn’t tried, because it would have cost more to extract a barrel of oil than a barrel of oil was worth on world markets. It took the spikes in oil prices in recent years to make deepwater drilling profitable.

Politicians and oil executives assured us that offshore oil drilling was safe. Those tree huggers who worry about environmental disasters are nuts, they said. Yes, there have been oil rig disasters in the past, but (big wink) we know what we’re doing now. Trust us.

The laws of physics work differently nearly a mile underwater than they do on land, or shallow water, however. By now, it is obvious BP is still trying to invent a procedure that might stop the oil leak, maybe, if we’re lucky. No one appears to have been ready for the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Really, this “trust us” business is getting old. How many times have we been told to “trust” some new thing, and then when the dangers surface we find out the “trusted” ones hadn’t told us the whole truth?

In the mid-20^th century we humans went into overdrive digging asbestos out of the earth to use in countless structures and products. There is asbestos in navy ships, asbestos in our homes and schools, asbestos in old car parts, asbestos in landfills. And eventually, years after medical science had determined asbestos exposure causes terrible disease, industry executives and politicians reluctantly agreed to shut down asbestos production, or at least most of it. And now the cost of asbestos abatement and mesothelioma treatment is an ongoing problem for individuals, taxpayers, and businesses.

And do we want to talk about Vioxx? Tanning beds? And now there are questions being asked about Bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical found in just about every plastic bottle you’ve ever touched. It may be dangerous, it may not. Opinions vary. Just note that the same political and business leaders who deny BPA could be dangerous are the same ones who like to yell “drill, baby, drill.”

Barbara O’ Brien

June 2, 2010

As part of this “jerk’s knee jerk” reaction, a disaster caused by the action or inaction of Bush is applied. “This looks like Obama’s WMD’s in Iraq!”, “Will this be Obama’s, ‘Heckuva job, Brownie’?”, “This is Obama’s Harriet Myers!”,  etc.

Jon Stewart did  a great piece on this, showing a montage of such BS spewing from those slappingly snide mouths of RW pundits. As Stewart pointed out, isn’t it interesting that  Fox and the RW  aggressively defended and promoted Bush for eight years while he destroyed our country and economy…but now that common sense among the majority of Americans prevails that Fox, the RW and Bush were wrong, constantly making comparisons between Obama and Bush is now their tool of choice to denigrate Obama.

Consider this for a moment, Fox and Repubs are presenting their president who they supported religiously as the high watermark (sorry New Orleans!) of failure. To be bad as a president is to be like Bush, they are saying. So vote out the Dems and Obama because they’re too much like us and replace them with us, the genuine article when it comes to failure?

Huh? Are the majority of Americans buying this or seeing right through it, as the admission it is of Fox’s and Repub’s own failure and deceit?

Now, however, comes a tough one. As much as I find these comparisons to Bush ridiculous, along with the accurate self-confessions by the GOP and Fox that they are what’s worst for this country…Obama’s handling of the oil spill does raise concerns and is leaving him open to claims of Katrina-like inaction, claims that could indeed stick…and might need a dispersant to break them up.

First, Obama is not Bush. Bush is white and can’t properly pronounce “nuclear”. Obama is half white and half black (defined in the Cracker Dictionary as “black”) and understands the science that makes the word “nuclear” apply to something.

So, putting any direct comparison aside, the performance of the Obama Admin on the oil spill crisis at the very least, does not come off very pro-active. BP, a corporation, continues to take the lead on all efforts to stop this disaster from growing even larger and they apparently are being allowed to mislead and censor the news and coverage about it (journalists have been prevented from taking video and seeing what’s going on with their own eyes). In fact, in preparation for their latest attempt to “top kill” the well, they are shutting off the camera showing the leak. Why? How does the public benefit from allowing them to mislead the public? Why are they given the power by our government to make such a decision? Sadly, all the interviews I’ve seen with Obama Admin officials have been touting the great working relationship they have with BP and how BP is working diligently.

It does not seem appropriate that a corporation should be in charge of a national disaster but in fact, BP is our de facto leader on this crisis. This seems a bit similar to the financial crisis, when those who caused the mess were put in charge of stopping it and cleaning it up.

The problem is that BP, as a corporation, has a primary duty to its shareholders, not the citizens of this nation. Yesterday it was reported that BP is refusing to reduce the amount of toxic dispersal chemicals they are pouring into the gulf. So, if the chemicals they are using lessen the financial impact on BP in terms of financial damages and clean up but greatly increase the death of sea life and shoots up cancer rates for those in the vicinity or those consuming gulf seafood anywhere in the country, that’s just fine with them (proving a link would be very difficult…who has ever been sued for all the mercury that’s now in fish?).

Another issue, there may be many innovative ideas on how to stop this oil but BP would likely not be interested in any that would end the spill but shut down the well for good. They need the well preserved to make back the billions and more than it is going to cost them. So, it seems clear as a non-Gulf part of the ocean that BP could be prolonging this spill because all options that shut it down for good would be unacceptable to them.

On the other hand, the government does not have the same priority, their primary duty is to protect citizens. Accordingly, it seems to make more sense for The Obama Admin to take over ALL operations in closing this well, they need to order BP to take action as directed. Let’s face it, BP not only deceived the government in assuring that such a disaster is not likely to ever happen, their pathetic efforts to stop it only confirm that they have not wasted any time or research into stopping such a catastrophe. So if they are no better prepared than the government, let the government be the organizer and the clearing house for ideas on how to stop this with zero regard for whether is allows BP to continue to profit off of this well in the future.

Obama should appoint a  Crisis Czar to head up efforts, someone with a solid scientific background that would be appropriate for this situation.

There is a concern though about why our good friend Rahm and others in the admin might advise Obama not to do so, not to take action. As long as Obama and the government present BP as the one in charge, they are supposedly off the hook. The moment they appoint a czar or declare that they are taking over the decision making from BP, they “own” stopping this disaster…and could be harmed politically if they aren’t swiftly successful.

I am not thrilled about providing any ammo to the Dem purists out there who look for any excuse to attack Obama alongside Baggers and the rest of the RW but it is a legit possibility that the spill could end up continuing longer because of the concern that Obama and the Dems could be “tarred” by taking charge. Even though this cynical assessment could be very correct, it should not take precedence over halting the destruction underway.

Again, there is no evidence that the Obama Admin is deferring to BP for political reasons, right or wrong, they may indeed feel that BP is in a far more experienced position to address this than government could be. Still, a month goes by with no progress. The Obama admin along with BP are saying that this could continue for two or three months until relief wells are drilled.  As for the next attempt to cork the well, according to the AP:

BP’s next effort to stop the gushing oil will, perhaps Wednesday, is to involve a procedure called a “top kill,” in which heavy mud and cement are to be shot into the well to plug it up. The procedure has never been tried a mile beneath the sea, and company executives estimate its chances of success at 60 to 70 percent.

Who knows, maybe this will work, I hope it does. If it doesn’t, how long will BP be permitted to be in control of a national catastrophe in this country?

And when are they up for re-election?

President Obama has opened up oil drilling 50 miles off the coast on much of the Eastern seaboard and 125 miles off the coast of Eastern Gulf of Mexico. While he shut down most drilling in Southern Alaska and has added drilling North of Alaska.

Open ocean drilling is not my first choice but the president faces a huge dilemma in how to finance new alternative energy spending. He’s already increased spending for renewable energy research with the stimulus and in the budget but that is mostly deficit spending. Thanks to the sudden interest of the left and right to have things paid for Obama has to come up with revenue for any new spending.

President Obama wanted that revenue to come from cap and trade but now that the right and left have demonized cap and trade even though it’s a progressive idea his hands are tied. The right always hated cap and trade by calling it a tax and now the left has demonized it because investors are part of the process. Not to mention that average Americans have cooled on worrying about climate change somewhat because with our short attention span society a couple of cooler years means the threat of climate change is not real to many Americans.

So what is a president to do when he needs revenue to develop alternate energy to make us energy independent?

Being the ultimate pragmatist he is Obama chose getting revenue through new open ocean oil drilling leases and possibly oil royalties. It’s not the best choice and would not be my choice but if the president wants to invest in renewable energy for energy independence and not increase the deficit it’s the only viable choice. My choice for the record would be just to deficit spend because it will pay off in the long run.

We also have to realize how we got here because we are way behind in alternate energy research because we’ve had no real energy policy since President Carter tried to implement one. We fooled ourselves with cheap fossil fuels and need decades of research and implementation to ween ourselves off of them. I know many progressive including many folks here just want to turn the page and go to alternative energies now without any transition period. The problem is the technology is simply not there yet and will not be there for decades.

Also for all the liars out there like HuffPo the president’s position on offshore drilling evolved during the election. I never had any delusions that Obama was not a politician. He modified his opinion on offshore drilling because it was popular but he also never forgets his grand strategy that included three basic pillars of his vision including; healthcare reform, energy independence and education reform.

Obama says would consider limited offshore drilling (from August 1st, 2008)

Obama dropped his blanket opposition to any expansion of offshore drilling and signaled support for a bipartisan compromise in Congress aimed at breaking a deadlock on energy that includes limited drilling.

“My interest is in making sure we’ve got the kind of comprehensive energy policy that can bring down gas prices,” Obama said in an interview with The Palm Beach Post during a tour of Florida.

“If, in order to get that passed, we have to compromise in terms of a careful, well thought-out drilling strategy that was carefully circumscribed to avoid significant environmental damage — I don’t want to be so rigid that we can’t get something done,” Obama told the newspaper.