That’s a half million dollars Americans had to give the government whether they wanted to or not (or at least working and middle class Americans, rich folks seem to have an “or not” clause in the tax code).  That’s the reason for all the indignation.  I think of myself as a cheerful taxpayer; I’m happy to chip in for all those things that we need to share in common.  My own vacations are pretty modest and I don’t want to be forced to send the people who work for me to resorts I can’t afford to visit myself.

At the same time, I don’t need to see a bunch of hearings with Congressmen (who are themselves overpaid and coddled) bloviating at GSA bureaucrats.  That doesn’t make me feel better.  Getting the money back, that’s what’ll make me feel better.  Accountability. Take the top ten people at GSA and charge them $523,000, divide it up however you like.

Can’t do it?  Why not?  You’re Congress or the White House or both.  Write a regulation, put it in the civil service manual, take ‘em to court.  Spending another two million on hearings so politicians with bad comb-overs can posture about excess spending doesn’t help at all.

If Barack Obama or Mitt Romney want a plank to run on, accountability is a good place to start.  Hey, Secret Service agents and Special Forces personnel – you wanna party with whores in Colombia?  You now owe the American people your plane fare, food and lodging expenses and any other additional costs to replace your sorry asses on the mission you just bungled so horribly.  Oh, and please pay your prostitute.  And you’re fired.  What is this “allowed to retire” crap, anyhow?  Allowed to retire on a government pension and then go work for corporate America at twice the salary (and twice the whores) as before?  That’s not accountability we can believe in.

(Let me just say as an aside that I have dealt with the Secret Service, both uniform and plain clothes, active duty and retired and I can say without fear of contradiction that it is entirely in character for them to be the kind of guys to a) solicit prostitutes for sex, b) take them back to a hotel riddled with – d’oh! -security cameras and c) try to cheap out on the price the next morning.  Clint Eastwood, these guys ain’t.)

But I digress. The point is accountability and it should cover the federal (and state and local) government like the dew on a spring morning.  In Afghanistan, we’re apologizing (again) because our troops took frat house photos with body parts.  This after we apologized for burning Korans and that followed the apology for videos of troops pissing on dead people.  Combine stuff like that with kicking in doors in the middle of the night and somehow people will just not want you in their country.

Two years ago tomorrow, the biggest oil spill in US history erupted in the Gulf of Mexico, just weeks after President Obama gave a speech saying those things don’t happen anymore.  Yesterday, that same president’s blue-ribbon commission on the spill blasted Congress for failing to pass laws that might prevent a repeat, while at the same time the administration has granted permission for another giant oil company to drill in the Arctic Ocean, where the Coast Guard says it has no way of responding to, much less cleaning, an oil spill.

This is all from one week.  Four serious incidents, all stemming from the fact that our federal government consistently fails to hold anyone accountable.  No wonder we’re frustrated.

© Mark Floegel, 2012

My math was not wrong.  I wrote that commentary the first week of October 1999.  What was faulty was my memory or my credulity.  Have I really been writing these damned things since there were fewer than six billion people?  Guess so.  (Hello, new readers!)

I did a bit of surfing on the subject and found this BBC site that lets one evaluate world population in personal terms.  It claims I was the 3,086,987,341st person on Earth when I was born (extrapolate yourself to find out when) and the 76,783,189,538th person alive on Earth since history began (I’m guessing the BBC starts history with the emergence of writing, around 5,000 years ago).

(Note this: when I wrote in 1999, projections were that we would have 12 billion people on Earth by 2050.  The BBC piece predicts 10 billion by 2083, so the growth curve seems to be flattening out.  Or we just can’t agree on our predictions.)

Clicking through the site reveals Qatar is the fastest-growing nation, adding 514 per day and Moldova is the fastest shrinking, losing 106 people per day.  While both numbers reflect respective birth/death rates, they are turbocharged by immigration.

Moldova, with a population of three million, is already a contender for World’s Worst Nation.  Crime-ridden, corrupt and unstable, it is best known these days for sending young women into the global sex trade.  Before world population reaches eight billion, Moldova will inevitably undergo a momentous change.  Not likely to be a change for the better, but how much worse can things get?  Maybe a rich guy will just buy the whole country.

Qatar, however, is an oil-rich Gulf state with a population of about 850,000, but a citizen population of 300,000.  Watch this trend.  Global migration, spurred not only by an another billion people here or there, but economic dislocation and changing climates will not only push people from the Moldovas to the Qatars, but we’ll increasingly see the establishment of legally-separated castes.  If you listen to the Republican presidential debates, you can hear the seeds being planted in North American soil.  I don’t expect to see the bloom this election cycle, but I’ll be surprised if I don’t see it in the 2016 cycle.

As we approach seven billion, there is the usual overpopulation hand wringing.  I see the merit in it; it’s hard for seven billion people to live lightly on the Earth.  As I wrote in an even earlier commentary, “The most burning population question we face today is not the rate at which world population is growing, but the speed with which a small percentage of that population is consuming the earth’s resources.”

The important number here is zero.  Not zero population growth (worthy goal that it is) but zero sum.  In a world of finite resources, every gain for one person is a loss for someone else.  Manish Bapna of the World Resources Institute makes the case better than I can.

It’s bad enough when the resources the first world claims are about energy and wealth, but that’s not the story any more.  Now we’re down to food and water and thus we’ll see Moldovas collapsing, Qatars getting feudal and both trends spreading.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

An example: Texas is still in the worst single-year drought in its history and the hottest summer in Texas history just ended (at least in terms of the calendar).  Wildfires destroyed an area of Texas as large as the state of Connecticut, another all-time worst.

On August 13th, in the midst of this, Texas’s Republican Governor Rick Perry declared himself a candidate for president.  He thinks – or at least says he thinks – global warming is a hoax invented by scientists as a way to get research grants.  He has not indicated whether he thinks these scientists are setting his state on fire.

Mr. Perry may be one reason Texas’s wildfires are bigger than everyone else’s.  (Texans like to boast about the size of things.)  This spring – long after the drought began – he cut 72 percent of the budget for firefighting equipment for volunteer fire departments

Salon quoted state Sen. Mario Gallegos, a Democrat and former firefighter: “Volunteer fire departments are the backbone of fire protection in this state, and they need heavy equipment and other resources to do their job.”  On the other hand, Mr. Perry did ask Texans to pray for rain in April.  God apparently said no.

The business of cutting nearly three-quarters of funds for volunteer fire companies caught my eye for another reason.  In the recent dump of State Department documents by Wikileaks, was a 2003 memo on US-Canada pipelines.  One section said: “Pipeline firms say they maintain close relationships with landowners, municipalities, and volunteer fire departments along their routes in order to enhance both monitoring of the pipeline, and emergency response. Company employees help to train local firefighters, and these two groups in combination are the ‘first responders’ to pipeline emergencies.”

Last month, that same State Department concluded the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry highly corrosive tar sands oil from Canada to Texas, is unlikely to have an adverse environmental impact.  Look again, at the paragraphs above.  Volunteer firefighters are the “first responders” to pipeline emergencies.  Friend of oil companies Rick Perry cut the budget for volunteer firefighters by 72 percent and the State Department whistles past the graveyard of “adverse environmental impact.”

In Wednesday’s New York Times, Terry Cunha, a spokesperson for TransCanada (which proposes the Keystone pipeline) says Keystone will be the safest pipeline in North America.  Words are easy and talk is cheap when it’s all just talk.  Mr. Cunha should speak to BP Vice President David Rainey, who told the US Senate in November 2009 the “best available and up-to-date scientific information” supports offshore oil drilling and that such drilling is “safe and protective of the environment.”  Mr. Rainey’s eaten those words a dozen times over since the disastrous Deepwater Horizon blowout less than six months after his testimony.

Talk is cheap for corporate spokespeople, consequences for real people are not.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

I’m typing this from a place freshly ravaged by Tropical Storm Irene.  “Tropical” and “Vermont” don’t belong in the same sentence, but there they are.  Helicopters buzz overhead as they leave to drop supplies in stranded communities.  This is the second hundred-year flood we’ve had this in the last four months and yet it is not these events so recently past that prompt my dire prediction.  It’s what two events of the past week bode for the future.

Friday, the State Department ruled that the 1,700 mile long Keystone XL pipeline – which, if allowed to proceed, will carry tar sands crude to refineries in Texas – will have minor environmental impact.  Experts disagree.  James Hansen, the NASA scientist and leading expert in global warming says that should the pipeline be built, there will be no way to reverse catastrophic global warming.  One would think that’s a significant environmental impact, but the oil companies want it and what the oil companies want….

If you haven’t already learned about the tar sands, extracting oil from them requires massive abuse of forests, clean water and energy, so the tar sands as a whole is a global warming machine gone berserk.  If oil is an addiction, the tar sands are the dirty needle we heedlessly plunge into our arm.

Thousands of people – citizens – have protested in front of the White House, hundreds have been arrested.  Barack Obama likely believes environmentalists have no choice but to vote for him next year, thus revealing himself to be another calculating politician, who’d rather retire in glory as a two-term president than actually accomplish anything of value in either of his terms of office.  In the addiction analogy, he’s the clueless enabler.

Yesterday, ExxonMobil and Russia – two of the planet’s evil entities – announced an agreement that will open the Russia arctic to oil exploration by Exxon.  Exxon – with help from us – has already gone a long way toward “opening” the arctic.  Global warming has meant the retreat of polar sea ice to the point that the Ruxxons can drill for more oil, to melt more ice, drill for more oil, etc., etc.

Exxon maneuvers at its peril, as Russia is famous for shafting its partners after it’s gotten what it wants.  Maybe Rex Tillerson will end up in a cell next to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch and oil billionaire.  Might be a pleasant meditation for a holiday weekend.

Researching something else last night, I came across an article describing the dumping of nuclear waste and over a dozen vessel-sized reactors in the western Kara Sea – where Exxon just won the right to explore.  The currents in the Kara carry water from west to east; that is, from the radioactive taint all across the rest of the local ocean.  Can’t beat those Soviet smarts.

If the tar sands are the dirty needle of oil addiction, then Tillerson and Vlad Putin are the thuggish pushers who will take our money, beat us senseless and leave us for dead.

Cold turkey is starting to look good.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

Spring snow is not unusual around here, but tonight’s will probably carry radiation. It’s been dry since the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. Tests taken by the Vermont Health Department have shown radioactive iodine, presumably from Fukushima is showing up in the state. There’s no safe level of radiation, but what we’re getting in Vermont is no cause for panic.

Now that precipitation is on the way, however, it might be a good time to take a holiday from milk. Not easy to contemplate in a diary state, where small farmers have enough to contend with, but milk drinking was the primary route for radioactive material into people’s bodies after Chernobyl in 1986. Radiation was detected in Washington State milk earlier this week.

Again, it’s not life-threatening, but precaution, a concept that escapes federal agencies – whether the issue is genetically-modified food, toxic pollutants, nuclear devices or climate change – is a good thing. “An abundance of caution.” The phrase looks so old fashioned.

Monday past was the 32nd anniversary of the partial reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island; last Thursday was the 22nd anniversary of the Exxon Valdez spill. The first anniversary of the BP blowout is three weeks from tomorrow and the 25 anniversary of Chernobyl is four days after that. (It’s a busy time for me at work right now.)

A week ago, we learned General Electric, which designed the reactors at Fukushima (and 23 just like them in the US), pays no taxes, despite profits in the billions of dollars, while shipping jobs overseas.

As I mentioned then, America’s nuclear regulators knew in 1972 that the design of the GE reactor’s cooling system was flawed, but kept their mouths shut for fear it would lead to the end of nuclear energy. Four of the six troubled reactors at Fukushima Daiichi are the flawed GE design and were built AFTER the regulator’s memo was written.

Precaution, as I said, is notably absent from our government’s thoughts, even when lives are on the line. OK, so you’re a regulator who wants to cook the books on behalf of the industry you’re supposed to regulate. Could GE quietly be told to stop selling flawed reactors? Could the purchasers of said flawed reactors be quietly told to beef up the power supply for the cooling systems?

Will anyone ever be called to account for this? Doubt it. If you think your government is honest and acting in your best interest, act accordingly. If you think your government is dishonest and not acting in your best interest, act accordingly.

Those people in the tea party are not entirely off base. They’re right to be angry (and scared). I think they’re angry at some of the right people (and some of the wrong people). I think their prescriptions for change are misguided, deliberately misguided by the people on whom they rely for information.

Seismologists say as a result of the March 11 earthquake, the world is spinning faster, by 1.8 microseconds per day. It feels like we’re spinning faster than that.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

I’m in the latter group. In Vermont, we’ve been trying for years – and we’re close to success – to shut the Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor in Vernon, in the southeast corner of the state, where Vermont joins New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

It’s a General Electric boiling water reactor with a Mark I (GE BWR Mk I) containment system, the same design as the reactors falling apart at Fukushima Daiichi. No one’s expecting a 9.0 earthquake or tsunami in southeast Vermont, but we don’t need either.

Entergy, the Louisiana-based conglomerate is mismanaging the plant into the ground. The series of Homer Simpsonesque mishaps would be funny if they didn’t involve serious threats to human health and the environment – collapsed cooling tower, fires, lost fuel rods. For over a year, radioactive material has been leaking into the groundwater from underground pipes that Entergy’s managers swore under oath did not exist.

In 1972, the year Vermont Yankee commenced nuclear fission, an official at the Atomic Energy Commission (forerunner of today’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission) warned the design of the GE BWR Mk I was badly flawed and failure of its cooling system could lead to catastrophe, as we’re seeing in Japan.

Why would General Electric design such a shoddy reactor? Because they were cheaper and easier to build than if they’d designed a decent machine. Good idea guys, let’s cut corners with nuclear devices. Okay, but once the defects were acknowledged we count on our government “watchdogs” to shut the damn things down, for safety’s sake, right? No, can’t do that, as another official noted at the time, because it “could well be the end of nuclear power.”

Last week, as the reactors at Fukushima were blazing out of control, the NRC granted Vermont Yankee a 20-year extension on its license. Since 2006, the NRC has allowed Yankee to operate at 120 percent of its design capacity. Yes, this 40-year-old reactor with the well-know catastrophic design flaws managed by a company so maintenance-negligent that pieces of the facility just fall over.

You think your government is acting in your best interests? No way. The NRC does what the nuclear industry demands – your life and your kids’ lives don’t even enter the thought process. Why should the NRC be any different that the FDA, OHSA or EPA?

Happily, when Entergy bought the plant in 2002, it signed a memorandum of understanding with the state that gave the state’s legislative and executive branches the authority to issue – or withhold – a certificate of public good. In lay terms, Vermont is the only state that can shut down a nuke. The state senate voted overwhelmingly last year to close the dump and our new governor ran on a “shut it down” platform.

Entergy has more or less announced its intention to sue Vermont, even though it signed an agreement giving the state authority over Yankee. (“When we say ‘legally binding,’ we mean for you, not fur us!”) They’ll claim only the NRC can deny a permit to a nuke and a state cannot pre-empt the feds. My prediction: Entergy will win the pre-emption argument, but Vermont will win the case, on grounds that Vermont Yankee has polluted our groundwater and the state has a right to protect its natural resources, which fall outside the NRC’s purview.

If I’m honest (and selfish), I’ll admit Vermont Yankee could melt down and it would have little effect on me. The border that circles us both is political, not ecological. Wind and water currents would carry radiation to the east and south. I live to the north and west. On the other hand, two GE BWR Mk Is – Nine Mile Point One and James Fitzpatrick in Oswego, New York are upwind of my house. Where are you, Andrew Cuomo?

© Mark Floegel, 2011

The venom I received from the bees last week was not, in the longer view, as effective as I’d hoped it would be. This comports with what Bill Mraz (he’s highly esteemed in the beekeeping community) told me a few weeks ago – bee venom is more potent in some seasons than others and winter is an “other” season.

We came down on USAirways and I was again astounded at how wooden-headed airline policies can be. Our first flight was late and some dozen of us missed the connection because waiting another minute for us would have meant missing an “on-time departure.” The plane got its “on-time departure,” but the passengers didn’t. I guess we don’t count in the statistics. I don’t want to sound too grumpy. At least no guitars were broken.

In other travel-related news, Rolling Stone is reporting Congressional representatives and senators visiting Afghanistan were subjected to “psychological operations” techniques at the order of Lt. General William Caldwell, supposedly to convince the legislators to increase budgets for the Afghanistan war or – more likely – to plump Gen. Caldwell’s career. (Underlings called it “Operation Fourth Star.”)

If true (I’ve no reason to believe it’s not), then Army regulations and perhaps laws were violated. The lieutenant colonel who blew the whistle was – of course – harassed by the Army for trying to do the right thing. Hey, Republican “budget hawks”! Guess which wasteful, stupid enormous part of the budget actually does need cutting?

On the topic of GOP “budget hawks,” (are these great segues or what?), Forbes reports that “fiscally minded” would-be union-busting Governor Scott Walker buried deep in his budget a secret provision to allow the state to turn over management of state heating, cooling and power plants to private contractors on a no-bid basis. Yeah, no-bids are famous for saving money. Collective bargaining, competitive bidding – seems Scott Walker’s against anything with the initials C.B. Too bad, Charlie Brown. And guess which right-wing billionaire brothers from Kansas who underwrote Mr. Walker’s campaign own three companies that stand to benefit from the no-bid contracts? If you guessed David and Charles Koch – you’re right!

Rumors that Gov. Walker has also proposed changing the name of the state to WisKochsin are untrue as of this writing. But stay tuned.

Back up in still-buried-in-snow-and-ice Vermont, I’m going to miss a debate between two pro-nuclear engineers tonight at the University of Vermont. On the face of it, doesn’t sound like much of a debate, but one of the engineers – Arnie Gundersen – is opposed to operating nuclear reactors in an unsafe and irresponsible manner. The other – Howard Shaffer – seems to believe the nuclear industry should be given anything it wants, even if it, as Vermont Yankee’s owner Entergy Louisiana as amply demonstrated, behaves in an incompetent and dishonest manner.

According to some fine reporting by Green Mountain Daily, it seems the pro-stupid-nuclear camp can’t even stage an honest debate, even when the Vermont taxpayers subsidize it. Oh well, Arnie will still win. He has the overwhelming advantage of truth and common sense on his side.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

From there he became something of a prophet. He doesn’t claim any extraordinary powers to predict the future, but says his cold-eyed reading of available facts gives him insight into events he says are inevitable. A documentary about him, “Collapse,” was released in 2009.

Mr. Ruppert has been in the doom and gloom business for a long time now and given what’s happened in the past decade, any such merchant is going to look pretty smart. Just about any unhappy event, from terrorist attack to economic bust to environmental disaster has occurred. (All we seem to be missing is a lightning fast pandemic that kills a few million people – or at least turns them into zombies.)

So Mr. Ruppert brought his traveling lecture to town last spring. I missed the performance, but caught the newspaper article about it. (I’d link to it, but the Burlington Free Press is extraordinarily stingy with their online archives.) During his visit, Mr. Ruppert made five very specific predictions, which he said would be fulfilled by the end of 2010.

In my own act of prescience, I knew I’d be writing a post today, so I wrote Mr. Ruppert’s predictions down on today’s page of my desk calendar. Before I get to them, let me say it can’t be easy being Michael Ruppert. Like any entrepreneur who’s found a bit of success, your customer base will forget about you if you don’t bring new products to the marketplace and they’ll expect each successive product to be more “gee whiz” than the last. Steve Jobs is an example of someone who surfs that particular wave well.

First Prediction: By 31 December, the Dow Jones Industrial Average will be between 4,000-5,000. Mr. Ruppert was wrong. The DJIA opened today at 11,575, so he’s off by a minimum of 6,575 points, barring some wild trading in the next 30 hours.

Second Prediction: Many banks will fail. This is a bit squishy, since I don’t know who defines “many.” But let’s leave the definition to the Washington Post, which Tuesday reported that 2010 saw the highest number of bank failures since 1992. That’s good enough for me. Mr. Ruppert was right. (At this point you might be noticing Mr. Ruppert made five predictions, making a tie unlikely.)

Third Prediction: Oil will cost over $200 per barrel. Well, the price of oil has been rising quickly of late, but at $91 a barrel this morning, Mr. Ruppert is wrong. (The average price of a gallon on gas, BTW, is $3.05, up 44.5 cents from this week last year.)

Fourth Prediction: Gold will cost over $2,000 per ounce. Again, Mr. Ruppert has the trend right, but the prediction is wrong. Gold this morning is selling for $1,410 an ounce. Silver’s at $30.73 an ounce. These are close to record highs. Copper is going for $4.36 a pound, which is huge, so if you’re going to be away from home over the New Year’s holiday, ask the neighbors to keep an eye on your plumbing.

Fifth Prediction: The US and Iran will be at war. Well really, how would we know? I don’t think we’ve had a Constitutionally-declared war since WWII. Korea was a “police action” that is still formally unresolved, Vietnam was not a declared war nor were either of our two Iraqi escapades nor our-near decade in Afghanistan. Seymour Hersh has claimed for some time that US special forces are active in Iran and with all the nuclear stuff going on, who knows?

Bottom line: Times are tough, but they could be tougher. If you look for misery, you’re likely to find it. In the year ahead, I (susceptible to gloom merchant disease) will do my best to appreciate the good things while I can.

Happy New Year.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

The commission’s general counsel, Fred Bartlit, burst across the media Monday with his claim that he could find no cost cutting leading to the April 20 blowout and the subsequent weeks of oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from a mile beneath the ocean’s surface.

“I’ve been on a lot of rigs,” the Washington Post quoted Mr. Bartlit as saying “and I don’t believe people sit there and say, ‘This is really dangerous, but the guys in London will make more money.’ We don’t see a concrete situation where people made a trade-off of safety for dollars.”

He’s right, no one says, “The guys in London will make more money.” If they’re working on the rig floor, they say, “I’d better get this done cheap. If I don’t the boss will fire me and find someone who will.” If they’re a bit higher up the chain of command, they say, “My bonus and promotion depend on my bringing this project in under budget.”

No one wants to die on a rig or cause the death of others, but many of the automatic alarms and shut-off devices on Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon were shut down. If they had not been, 11 men who are dead might be alive today and the gulf might have been spared a supreme injury.

If cement contractor Halliburton had not been trying to cut corners, why did it authorize the use of cement known to be faulty to (unsuccessfully) seal the well?

If BP was not trying to drill on the cheap, then why – as marine conservationist Rick Steiner points out – did BP use a long string casing in the lower 1,200 feet instead of a casing liner? BP emails obtained by Congress say the decision was made to save time – three days time. Everyone – even Fred Bartlit – agrees, time is money and saving three days with a less substantial long string casing meant saving four and half million dollars.

For goodness sake, if cutting corners in a reckless attempt to send more money to the bottom line – if the managers and engineers on the Deepwater Horizon were doing their level best, to hell with what it costs – if that was NOT the reason for the blowout, then the alternative explanation is even more ominous.

If everyone is doing the very best they can do and no expense is spared and we still have a blowout and oil spill of this magnitude, then the only answer is: shut down offshore drilling, deepwater and shallow. Shut down onshore drilling, too because we are clearly operating beyond our capacity to control our technology.

There are a number of reasons why a guy who sits where I do might want to shut down drilling. (Global warming comes immediately to mind.) But it is precisely BP’s corporate policy of rewarding managers for keeping the costs down that killed 11 men in April and killed 15 men at BP’s Texas City refinery in 2005.

Unless and until that mentality changes, there will be more blasts, more spills and more deaths.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

This being the gulf, implications from the other recent disaster – Hurricane Katrina – were never far away. A young man from St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana with the St. Bernard accent (it sounds more like Brooklyn or Baltimore than Louisiana) said, “I was only 20 when Katrina hit. Sure, I lost things, but I’m at an age when I don’t have much to lose. Still, it breaks your life in two. There was before Katrina and after Katrina… and now this.”

“And now this” is the spoiled coastline, the wounded fisheries, the environment that will never be the same. Rick Steiner, the marine conservationist who delivered the keynote address at the conference said, “The Gulf of Mexico will never be the same. That’s not to say it won’t recover, in some ways. That’s not to say it won’t thrive again, somehow. But the Gulf of Mexico will never return to the state it was before the spill.”

He should know. Professor Steiner lived on the shore of Prince William Sound in Alaska when the Exxon Valdez ran afoul (to put it mildly) of Bligh Reef in 1989. He’s been studying the effects on the sound ever since.

Maybe one can read into Prof. Steiner’s words that everything will soon be all right. Not the same, but all right enough that the fishermen can go back to work and the tourists can come back and not work. But of the 30 most affected species in Prince William Sound, 20 have not yet recovered from the Exxon spill, even 21 years later. Many never will. The last of their kind are living out “functional extinction.” Members of their populations are still living, but their numbers are so reduced that the population as a whole is doomed to die out soon. Now there are species in the Gulf that are functionally extinct. We’re just not sure which ones, yet. Those lives are not spilt in two, only ended.

The White House wants you to think it’s all OK. It canceled the deepwater drilling moratorium Tuesday, saying it’s now safe to go back and drill, baby, drill. This decision has nothing to do with the environmental health of the Gulf and everything to do with politics. It’s worth noting that the decision comes a week after the Graham-Reilly Oil Spill Commission blasted the White House for forcing overly optimistic spill scenarios on government scientists last spring. More significantly, it comes three weeks to the day before voters go to the polls for the mid-term elections and Barack Obama is eager to kiss the feet of tea-party right-wingers. Feet that will kick him in the teeth anyhow.

Two stories this week, one in the New Yorker, the other in the Washington Post, make clear just what a political football oil drilling, global warming and environmental issues in general are in Washington, if there had ever been any doubts.

All this opening of the outer continental shelf was supposed to be part of a “grand bargain” in which the White House and the Democrats give on oil drilling, loan guarantees for new nuclear plants and EPA regulation of carbon dioxide as a pollutant. In return, the Republicans were to give on carbon caps and funding for renewable energy sources like solar and wind.

What happened? For some reason that begs understanding, the BP oil disaster, made passage of a “clean energy” bill an impossibility in Washington. It was as if a terrorist attack made it impossible to appropriate more funding for police. The deal fell apart, but because the White House had surrendered its negotiating points in advance, the Republicans and corporations got everything they wanted, the White House and the Democrats got nothing. Yay! We’re moving faster than ever toward frying our civilization off the face of the globe while proven solutions will remain unused. Smooth move, Barry.

It might all be just another case of Democratic incompetence, but the wager in this game that is not a game is our collective future. Barack Ozymandias.

It’s not just lives that can be broken in two by the bungling of so-called leaders. Presidencies can be broken in two. So can society. So can the climate.

© Mark Floegel, 2010