I'm not sure how this slipped under the radar, but on Tuesday, the Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound cleared its final hurdle -- the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) approved a Construction and Operations Plan (COP) submitted by Cape Wind Associates back in October of 2010.
What is all means:
The project consists of 130, 3.6 megawatt wind turbine generators covering approximately 25 square miles in federal waters offshore Massachusetts with the maximum capacity to produce about 468 megawatts. The average expected production from the wind facility could provide about 75 percent of the electricity demand for Cape Cod and the Islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. At average expected production, Cape Wind could produce enough energy to power more than 200,000 homes in Massachusetts.
If I knew he was going to do something like this, I would have supported Gov. Schwarzenegger a long time ago:
Yesterday, outgoing California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed Senate Bill 1449 —which reduces adult marijuana possession charges from a criminal misdemeanor to a civil infraction...
...Senate Bill 1449 amends the California Health and Safety Code so that the adult possession of up to 28.5 grams of marijuana is classified as an infraction, punishable by no more than a $100 fine — no court appearance, no court costs, and no criminal record.Passage of this bill will save the state millions of dollars in court costs by keeping minor marijuana offenders out of court.
The number of misdemeanor pot arrests has surged in recent years, reaching 61,388 in 2008.
Fiscally responsible, libertarian in nature, socially evolved...bravo, Governator!
And especially for calling out the oil companies trying to gut our new environmental laws by throwing major dollars at a dastardly proposition on the ballot in November:
I wonder what will be next for Arnold after his term ends this year. A position in the Obama Administration?
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.
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.
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.
The problem with the April 20 spill is that it isn't really a spill: It‘s a gush, like an underwater oil volcano. A hot column of oil and gas is spurting into freezing, black waters nearly a mile down, where the pressure nears a ton per inch, impossible for divers to endure. Experts call it a continuous, round-the-clock calamity, unlike a leaking tanker, which might empty in hours or days.
"Everything about it is unprecedented," said geochemist Christopher Reddy, an oil-spill expert and head of the Coastal Ocean Institute at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. "All our knowledge is based on a one-shot event…. With this, we don't know when it's going to stop."
Accidents have occurred before in which oil has gushed from damaged wells, he said. But he knew of none in water so deep.
...
To BP falls the daunting task of trying to stop the gush before it becomes the most damaging spill in American history. If the flow is not stopped, it will exhaust the natural reservoir of oil beneath the sea floor, experts say. Many months, at least, could pass.
Imagine months, even a year of oil bleeding into the Gulf of Mexico, poisoning the Gulf, the land around it, leaking into the Atlantic and poisoning the East Coast, creeping up while commercial fishing disappears and all the animals up the food chain start dying as well.
We've ripped a hole in Mother Earth and now she's bleeding out.
El Presidente Bush is not quite finished ruining America -- he's making some final, hard-to-revoke moves on the way out the door. Like undermining worker safety -- and more:
Public health officials and labor unions said the rule would delay needed protections for workers, resulting in additional deaths and illnesses.
With the economy tumbling and American troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Bush has promised to cooperate with Mr. Obama to make the transition “as smooth as possible.” But that has not stopped his administration from trying, in its final days, to cement in place a diverse array of new regulations.
The Labor Department proposal is one of about 20 highly contentious rules the Bush administration is planning to issue in its final weeks. The rules deal with issues as diverse as abortion, auto safety and the environment. One rule would make it easier to build power plants near national parks and wilderness areas. Another would reduce the role of federal wildlife scientists in deciding whether dams, highways and other projects pose a threat to endangered species.
He's putting his stamp on the further destruction of our planet's ecosystem with some final nails in the "old growth" coffin. And he's got rightwingers like the always wrong William Kristol calling for Bush to pardon all torturers and wiretappers in his administration. From masterminds down to thugs. And give them medals.
Yep, it's important to remember, when we're all feeling better about our government later in the new year, that El Presidente and Grand Vizier Cheney have done very, very bad things without respite, and that their "gifts" will keep on giving, which is to say, hurting. I don't expect they will be the last bad men we see in government, but they surely set a low standard.
In fact, all this torching on the way out reminds me of another bad man who left a wake of disaster when he was forced from a particular position.
Well, you can't say that Mister Bush has been completely ineffective as acting President. He's put arch-conservatives Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court. If the Democrats ever needed another campaign issue to insure their majority rule for the next 25 years, the newly reactionary U.S. Supreme Court majority just handed it to them with a series of end-of-term rulings that give the phrase "judicial activism" a new home -- the Federalist Society, a.k.a. the Washingtonian Republican rightwing.
How much must former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor rue her vote installing Mister Bush in office over 2000 popular vote winner and probable Florida recount winner Al Gore? All her good work come undone, she chose to serve on the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Commission only to have that effort tossed back in her face like mud. And now the man that replaced her has joined the four other rightwing reactionaries to give us resegregation, corporate smear ads, limits to student free speech outside school grounds, license for developers to ignore the Endangered Species Act, and protection for Bush/Cheney-style faith-based graft using our tax dollars.
Justice Stephen Breyer made his point aloud, in this case after a reported shouting match with Chief Justice Roberts over the affirmative action case and what it means to be an American, to the Court in session (via Jeffrey Toobin at CNN):
Justice Breyer used a phrase, "Never in the historyof the court have so few done so much so quickly." And he was talking about Chief Justice Roberts and Justice [Samuel] Alito making this court a far more conservative institution in just one year. And at that phrase, "And never have so few done so much so quickly," both Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts looked over at Breyer and went, whoa, that's pretty personal by the standards of the Supreme Court.
I look forward this Supreme Court's first opportunity to rule on a woman's right to choose what to do with her own body when she finds herself pregnant.
