Unhappy Anniversary

What do we have in the Gulf of Mexico one year after the hugest oil spill in memory, courtesy of BP et al?

That tragedy is the ill and declining health of the Gulf of Mexico, including the enormous dead zone off the mouth of the Mississippi and the alarmingly rapid disappearance of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands, roughly 2,000 square miles smaller than they were 80 years ago. Few here would take issue with the commission’s question, but the answer to it is far from resolved.

Eclipsed by the spill’s uncertain environmental impact is the other fallout: the vast sums in penalties and fines BP will have to pay to the federal government. In addition to criminal fines and restitution, BP is facing civil liabilities that fall roughly into two categories: Clean Water Act penalties and claims from the Natural Resource Damage Assessment process, whereby state and federal agencies tally the damage caused by the spill and put a price tag on it. This could add up to billions, perhaps tens of billions, of dollars.

It doesn't seem like a year -- mainly because of the time it took to cap the gusher. But it seems that there's something worse happening to our oceans, of which the spill is but one contributor:

That CO2, of course, leads to global warming and climate change, as well as what’s called ocean acidification, which might be thought of as oceanic global warming and is a greater catastrophe than any spill to date. The oceans absorb about 30 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, creating carbonic acid. Since the start of the industrial revolution we’ve added about 500 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide to the oceans, which are 30 percent more acidic than they were a couple of hundred years ago.

This acidification makes it difficult for calcifying organisms — coral, snails and oysters and other mollusks, and more — to build shells and skeletons sturdy enough for them to survive. Many of these are on the bottom of the food chain and, as they begin to die off (we’ve already seen massive oyster declines on the Pacific coast), the effects trickle up. Acidification has already wreaked havoc on coral reefs, on which about 25 percent of all marine life depends. By the end of this century, Safina says, the ocean will begin dissolving coral reefs — unless we make a big change in our fossil-fuel use.

If acidification endangers marine life leisurely, fishing does it quickly. Around 70 percent of global fish stocks are fully or overfished, and 30 percent have collapsed, which means they produce less than 10 percent of their original capacity. Commercial fish catch has declined by 500,000 tons per year since 1988, not for lack of effort, money or technology — in fact because of those factors — but for lack of fish. The danger becomes dual, says Danson: “If you’re overfishing at the top of the food chain, and acidifying the ocean at the bottom, you’re creating a squeeze that could conceivably collapse the whole system.”

Why does it feel that Cormac McCarthy was all too prescient?

More Spread

Tarballs have reached the shores of Texas. BP oil has seeped into New Orleans' Lake Pontchartrain. Unmitigated, growing, (human) life-threatening disaster with an exponentially growing dead zone.

Scientists want to take measurements but aren't get the money or access they need from BP or our government. My theory is that it is all much, much worse than anyone is saying, even the harshest projections. We're seeing rapid demolition of nature in the Amazon, the Polar Ice Caps, our oceans. We are literally choking ourselves to death with civilization. It's a viral that denudes the earth in search of comfort, speed, pleasure, self.

Yep, the President needs to do more, like letting the scientists in, like maybe going military on BP. Rather than closing the hole, BP is being allowed to harvest whatever oil they can. It's all about their investment.

And while I want Obama to do more, let's not forget who's protecting BP in the Senate:



Unleash the subpoenas. Because even the recovery effort is a lie.

Saved by the Barton

I first discovered Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) when he appeared on The Daily Show during the Bush-Cheney Administration and had brought a pair of Texas cowboy boots for Jon Stewart's young child. Then Barton revealed that the shoes had "GOP" embroidered on them, like some sort of good ol' boy joke. You knew at that moment that Stewart would never give them to his kid. With that gloaty touch Barton revealed himself as the opposite of a generous spirit. As he continued to reveal in his thought-free, party-line conversation with Stewart, he's what my father used to call a horse's ass.
Today Barton did the unthinkable. A day after President Barak Obama's masterstroke of getting Gulf-killer BP to commit to a $20 billion fund as a start to cover people who are losing their livelihoods due to BP's criminal negligence, Barton apologized to the CEO of BP!



Yep, venal Republicans like Boss Limbaugh, Michelle Bachmann and Haley Barbour are taking the stance that the $20B is a "shakedown." They want to see "due process" -- this from a party that has been complaining that the President hasn't acted fast enough on the Gulf!

The only response now is incredulity and even the GOP leadership felt it today, reportedly threatening Barton with the loss of his top seat on the Energy committee if he did not apologize to the American people, first orally and later in writing. Yep, he had a worse day that BP CEO Tony Hayward -- who managed, as so many bad guys have lately, to say nothing substantive when called in front of Congress.

Both Hayward and the Democrats, especially President Obama, owe Barton a debt of gratitude. He made everybody else look good -- in the eyes of our every-so-easily distracted media. And have given great a hammer to use against the GOP in November.

In fact, although his speech may have taken up too much media time in negative analysis, our President is, as Andrew Sullivan puts it, "getting shit done." Those on the Left who are complaining, despairing and generally once again building their circular firing squad would do well to read Sullivan's piece and take note.

New President

I didn't watch the President's speech last night all the way through so I can't pass judgment, but the part I saw was not inspiring and the reaction, particularly on the Left, has been negative. I believe, and certainly hope, that we are experiencing the lowest point in the Obama Presidency. He's got an unwinnable hole in the Gulf and an unwinnable war in Afghanistan. North Korea is a powderkeg, Israel/Palestine is a powderkeg, Iran is a powderkeg, our economy is still fragile and misshapen.

None of these problems is of his doing, but he needs to get all magical on those first two. It's not fair, but life's not fair and we're starving for the paradigm change we voted for when we voted him into office. For Afghanistan, it'll mean withdrawal starting right after the Iraq withdrawal, stuff he can do that the unified Republican obstructionist block in the Senate can't impede or poison.

For the Gulf he should channel Rachel Maddow.

Best political speech of the year thus far.

On the Gulf

I don't have much comment on the President's speech except that he's right to use it to start shifting the discourse, a discourse that has long ago shifted for those who care about the environment but is coming late or maybe never to those who don't question the destruction of our planet through the pillaging of its very finite fossil fuels.

On this other hand, this moving piece by David Kurtz in Talking Points Memo lays bare the reality about the Gulf of Mexico, that it's been under assault and ruination long before this endless nightmare spill:

The Gulf is not a pristine environment. If your only exposure to the Gulf has been on the beaches of Florida, you might convince yourself that the Gulf is a deep blue aquatic wilderness. But as you travel west, the beaches give way to the marshes of the Mississippi delta, which are crisscrossed by oil and gas pipelines, manmade canals, and flood control levees. Further west, in Texas, the beaches reemerge, but shipping canals, giant refineries, and petrochemical factories persist. Over the horizon, in the Gulf itself, thousands of oil and gas wells pump night and day.
...
The Deepwater Horizon disaster is as organic a product of human processes in the Gulf as Hurricane Katrina was a product of natural processes. Shipping, flood control, and natural resource extraction have taken a nearly century-long toll on the coast. The Gulf has been abused, exploited, fouled and taken for granted for so long and with such consistency that the shock and horror over this one incident becomes in its own way a salve for our consciences.

Can our Earth ever be made right?

While we're still on it?

Cat Got Your Oil?

Yep, British Petroleum has been behaving badly -- perhaps criminally -- for years:

The confidential inquiries, which have not previously been made public, focused on a rash of problems at BP's Alaska oil-drilling unit that undermined the company’s publicly proclaimed commitment to safe operations. They described instances in which management flouted safety by neglecting aging equipment, pressured or harassed employees not to report problems, and cut short or delayed inspections in order to reduce production costs. Executives were not held accountable for the failures, and some were promoted despite them.

Similar themes about BP operations elsewhere were sounded in interviews with former employees, in lawsuits and little-noticed state inquiries, and in e-mails obtained by ProPublica. Taken together, these documents portray a company that systemically ignored its own safety policies across its North American operations - from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico to California and Texas.

Or, as performed by cats:



Bad kitty! Time to lift your liability cap.

Varietals

Varieties of scum:

The Rogue Gambler

The Father's Daughter

The Denial Party

Teachable Moment

More like this, please:

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

We're in a rare seismic moment where something so horrific is happening that there's no way to hide the reality. Time for a major change, including manufacturing and behavior. Are we citizens first or are we consumers first? Is there a common good where we must come together to preserve this world for our children, or do we just grab whatever we can, build whatever security we can, and have our families hole up until the earth falls off its axis and mass suicide becomes the only logical alternative?

One thing I've read recently is how bad we are at imagining and preparing for the low-likelihood, high impact events, like the mortgage meltdown and deep-water oil exploration disaster. I feel like we were better at it in the middle of the 20th Century, but somehow we've grown so over reliant on technology, easy credit, comfort and Hollywood special effects that we're no longer preparing for the worst.

This is essentially a conservative argument in the classic sense rather than the mutated version of today. Conservatism shouldn't be "Drill, baby, drill," like some entitled moron, but conserve, baby, conserve. Conserve investments, conserve the planet, prepare for the seven lean years instead of, as Bush/Cheney did, spent everything saved during the seven fat years (when Clinton/Gore ran up a surplus).

While there's spending now to shore up our nation's populace during this horrific period of unemployment, caused by the policies of the previous eight years as well as practices begun under the Clinton Administration all the way back to the wildly irresponsible Reagan deregulation of the financial markets, in some sense President Obama is the last best hope for a conservative future, small "c." His handling of his personal life -- steadfast in marriage, writes his own books, self-made man, concern for community going back to his early organizer days -- is exemplary from a conservative viewpoints.

Moreso than, say, a GOP gubernatorial candidate in South Carolina.

Still Leaking

Here's some latest news on the British Petroleum crime against our oceans: the Feds are looking at a criminal probe:

A team of top federal prosecutors and investigators has taken the first steps toward a formal criminal investigation into oil giant BP's actions before and after the drilling rig disaster off Louisiana.

The investigators, who have been quietly gathering evidence in Louisiana over the last three weeks, are focusing on whether BP skirted federal safety regulations and misled the U.S. government by saying it could quickly clean up an environmental accident.

The team has met with U.S. attorneys and state officials in the Gulf Coast region and has sent letters to executives of BP and Transocean Ltd., the drilling rig owner, warning them against destroying documents or other internal records.

Ideally Halliburton gets indicted as well, and maybe we finally learn what the hell kind of deal President Cheney cut the oil industry in the early days of that disastrous administration.

Finally, some protesting of BP and a call for a boycott:



The President visited the Gulf today and reiterated some of what he said yesterday. This guy is clearly smarter and more engaged than his predecessor but it still staggers me what he's got to know or learn very quickly in order to be the expert we've come to expect, as well as the father/fixer figure we expect all of our Presidents to be. I trust he has a better chance than most to gain some level of competence talking about the issue at hand, but holy cow, how in control can you ever feel in a situation like this? Nightmare disaster in extremely deep water, with monstrous machines being used for giant-sized remote surgery...it makes assassinating a Taliban leader seem easy.

The result of this whole situation, besides the permanent damage to the Gulf and surrounding ecosystem, must be some sort of raised consciousness, both about the value of big government (regulation, enforcement, solutions in reserve) and, most importantly, alternative energy. Per Eugene Robinson:

Obama has rethought his enthusiasm for offshore drilling. Now he, and the rest of us, should rethink the larger issue -- the trade-off between economic development and environmental protection. In the long run, our natural resources are all we've got. Defending them must be a higher priority than our recent presidents, including Obama, have made it.

Energy policy is one of Obama's priorities. He talks about "clean coal," which I believe to be an oxymoron, and favors technologies -- such as carbon capture and sequestration -- that are new and untested. The environmental risks must be a central and paramount concern, not a mere afterthought. Let's preclude the next Deepwater Horizon right now.

It's a moral imperative -- borne of the threat to the survival of the species.

Ours.

The Hugest Bummer

Thanks to enough blame to go around and go way back and, what's not hard to predict will be proven in court before this all ends, criminal negligence we're in the worst man-made ecological crisis since Chernobyl. The making of portions of the earth uninhabitable, more like our long ago poisoned and dried up neighbors in this solar system. More like entropy.

Nature organizes. Man attempts to impose will on nature, nature all too often disorganizes. It's ultimately all about our appetites for creature comforts and layers of security in an often hostile world.

I'm willing to give President Obama a chance to prove he's got a handle on this nightmare, or putting one into place. He's earned my trust thus far making strategic decision of value when being handed huge fountains of dute. He spoke today and is taking the type of responsibility Bush and his cronies couldn't muster. The responsibility we all have to start taking as well if we want to have a planetary future:



And he's got to be busy with this huge pile of dute suddenly flowing from succession-wracked North Korea, while relaunching out strategy for managing threats with Secretary of State Clinton.

Let's hope daddy can plug the hole: