Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 1238

What could possibly go wrong?

Tom Tomorrow's terrific cartoon in Salon is subtitled, "It's called the Doomsday Bomb and it's perfectly safe. Trust us."

Related Post:

Is BP the Goldman Sachs of Big Oil? CEO Hayward says to fellow executives: "What the hell did we do to deserve this?" Let's see: How about a spotty safety record, insistence on voluntary 'trust me' self-regulation, a drilling plan that ignored key risks, and failure to use best shut-off technology to save a few bucks?BP calls blowout disaster...

No, the BP oil disaster is not "Worse Than Katrina" - In Katrina, "at least 1,836 people lost their lives.... Total damage was $81 billion."

I get it.  Progressives are angry with Obama for many grievances, some of which are genuine, such as his inane seeming embrace of offshore drilling (though, ironically, he actually closed off most of the coastal US to offshore drilling).

Now I've been as outspoken as anyone on the devastation — human and environmental — that the BP oil disaster is going to cause (see "The human dimensions of oil spills" and "The BP oil disaster is a health disaster, too" and "BP's dispersants are toxic — but...

Grade Obama's performance on the BP oil disaster

So how is the president doing on

Actually responding to the disaster,
Appearing to respond to the disaster, and
Messaging on the disaster?

Grade on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 1 being the worst).  Feel free to provide a score on how hard this is going to hit his Presidency.  My scores below.

NYT columnist Frank Rich opines:

FOR Barack Obama's knee-jerk foes, of course it was his Katrina. But for the rest of us, there's the nagging fear that the largest oil spill in our history could yet prove...

What will it take to end our oil addiction?

Energy economics expert Craig Severance has written a sequel to " Peak oil production coming sooner than expected."

It's time we moved on to something else, or this is going to kill us.

Not only are world oil supplies running out, but what oil is still left is proving very dirty to obtain.  We need to kick our oil addiction now if we expect to preserve any hopes of economic prosperity, or unspoiled habitats.



"This is What the End of the Oil Age Looks Like."

We have the Deepwater Horizon...

Best BP Oil Disaster cartoon so far?

From the masters at the New Yorker:

That BP oil spill cartoon really works at many levels.  See also "Luckovich cartoon: Wasting away in Petroville."

Women's role in the clean energy economy

Women across the nation are preparing to play an integral role in the green economy, and the United States will need their help if we're going to pull ourselves out of the recession and compete in the new economy on a global scale.  CAP's Jorge Madrid has the story in this repost.

It's true that men have been hit the hardest in the recession as far an unemployment numbers go, but we will need to seize the opportunity to diversify the future workforce in a way that will incorporate all...

Breaking: Top Kill fails to stop BP oil disaster

Three attempts to pump mud and 16 tries to stuff solid material into a breached Gulf of Mexico oil well failed to stop the flow, top BP executives said Saturday, and engineers and executives with the oil giant have decided to "move on to the next option."

Here's what next, via CNN:

That option: Place a custom-built cap known as the "lower marine riser package" over the leak, BP chief operation officer Doug Suttles said. BP crews were already at work Saturday to ready the materials for that...

Big Oil's Fairy Tale

I have a new Salon piece, which they headlined,"Obama's daughter asked the wrong question:  There's not much that Obama himself can do to 'plug the hole.' But he could be honest about why the spill happened."

I'll file this under humor, since I don't have a special category for tragedy:

When I was shaving this morning, my daughter came up to me and asked, "Daddy, when is President Obama going to develop a coherent narrative for his administration?" OK, maybe not. She's only 3, and her typical q...

University petitions court to quash Cuccinelli subpoena of climate scientist Michael Mann's papers

The University of Virginia has petitioned a state court to "set aside" Attorney General Cuccinelli's not-so-civil Civil Investigative Demand that it turn over a mass of former UVa Prof. Michael Mann's documents and e-mail correspondence with 39 other scientists. The university's action shows some backbone and exemplifies the pushback we should see in responding to political witch hunts aimed at the science community. The petition defends academic freedom and indicates how Cuccinelli's...

Obama: BP's interests may not be aligned with the public interest

At Thursday's press conference on the BP oil disaster, reporters discussed several of the issues raised by the Center for American Progress in "Calling the Shots in the Gulf." The president was pressed on the relationship between the federal government and BP, and whether whether this criminally negligent foreign oil company can be trusted to manage so much of the response. Wonk Room's Brad Johnson has the story in this repost.

NBC's Chuck Todd asked why the president does not follow...