It’s been four months, a new president is in office and life is returning to normal. Most Poles think it’s time to move the cross away from the palace, others think it should be left where it is. It’s getting controversial. Poland’s constitution separates church and state; those who want to move the cross away from the palace say such a display is inappropriate for a modern secular state. Those who want to keep the cross say Poland is an overwhelmingly Catholic country and the cross represents their interests.

Although I may have an opinion on the issue, it’s not for me to decide. It’s for the Poles to decide.

In the US, our constitution guarantees freedom of religion. A Muslim group, the Cordoba Initiative, wants to build a community center in New York City, two blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center. Some people say this should not be allowed, because the men who attacked the World Trade Center (among other places) were Muslim. This view is clearly anti-constitutional and unAmerican. The people who shout this crap on cable tee vee are either stupid (yes, half-term Governor Sarah Palin, I’m looking at you) or disingenuous (that would be you, Newt).

Some others (the Anti-Defamation League, Catholic Archbishop Timothy Dolan and five-and-a-half term Governor Howard Dean) say there’s no doubt the Cordoba Initiative has the right to build its community center (called Park51), but that it shouldn’t – because of the sensitivity of the location.

Huh? I’m thinking you people will have to go sit with Ms. Palin over in the area reserved for stupid (although not nearly as far in as her seat). By all reports, the area around the WTC site is littered with bars and strip clubs. If the site of the 9-11 attacks is hallowed ground, then are those establishments sacrilege? No one’s calling for their removal. (Come to think of it, the 9-11 hijackers reportedly spent their pre-attack weeks hanging out at strip clubs – not community centers – so maybe I’m onto something here….)

A new Pew poll shows one in five Americans think Barack Obama is a Muslim, which means I know more about Polish politics than many of my fellow citizens (and – gulp – voters) know about their own country. (“You people in the stupid section! Move over! Make room! Lots of room!”)

In the disingenuous section, Newt Gingrich said allowing Park51 to be built is “like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust museum” and that Park51 should be built when churches and synagogues are allowed in Saudi Arabia.

(“Holy Cow! I just realized! That cross in Warsaw! It’s four meters high! Four meters equals 13 feet! Thirteen! Is it the work of Satan?” Sounds stupid, doesn’t it?)

Listen, Newt, if you wanna bring some country down to the level of Saudi Arabia, emigrate. Stop messing with my country. And your Nazi comment is crass beyond belief. If you want to know why you will never hold an elective office again, take a peek in the mirror the next time you brush your teeth.

Park51 is a proposed community center, like a YMCA or a JCC. It’s a place for kids’ art classes and pick-up basketball, book readings and potluck dinners. Community centers, as the name implies, build community, whether urban ones like Park51 or rural ones like Grange halls and 4-H clubs. They give kids a constructive place to spend idle hours and seniors a place to come and not feel so lonely.

Community centers are anti-terrorist. They should be places to bind us together, not tear us apart. We should thank God – five times a day – there are people who still want to build them.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

At the end of March – three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon disaster – Barack Obama told us he wants to expand offshore oil drilling and said with the new rigs oil spills were almost impossible. We know he was as wrong as he could be. Mr. Obama didn’t mean to lie, it’s just that he relied on the idiots of the oil industry for his talking points. (Is “idiots” too harsh? Think Tony Hayward. No, it’s not too harsh.)

At the same time he’s plumping for more offshore drilling, Mr. Obama wants to build more nuclear plants. Guess where he’s getting his information on nukes? Like the oil industry, the nuclear industry is in charge of Mr. Obama’s talking points and they too are idiots who use the president as a ventriloquist’s dummy to lie to the American people.

When the current generation of nuclear power plants began to reach the end of their lifespans, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) began to take them off line. The nuclear industry responded with a lobby campaign, the NRC regulations were altered and now other members of that same generation of nukes – now nearing 40 years old – are being granted 20-year extensions to their operating permits. Sound familiar?

Worse, the Kerry-Lieberman energy bill that is now under Senate consideration would relax standards further and would “streamline” the process for getting new nukes on line. Again, sound familiar, like the rush to get rigs into deep water?

Since the dawn of the nuclear age 60 years ago, this industry has made a mockery of the “free market” its proponents so loudly pretend to support. Nuclear power plants have never been privately insured. No insurance company has ever – and will never – write a policy for a nuke, not at any price. Nuclear waste, which has been piling up for over half a century and will remain radioactively hazardous for the next 250,000 years, is a problem for American taxpayers, not the nuclear industry, because politicians have agreed to take the waste off the industry’s hands. (For comparison, we’ve had written language for 5,000 years.)

Also in the Kerry-Lieberman bill are $54 billion in loan guarantees to build the next generation of nukes, because there is no venture capitalist or investment bank in the world that will invest in a nuclear power plant.

And for good reason. The world’s newest and supposedly advanced nuclear plant, under construction in Finland, is two years away from beginning operations and cost overruns have almost doubled the plant’s costs from $3 billion to $5.7 billion. There’s a reason this happens. It’s because the nuclear industry lies about the cost of building a plant. No one would ever build one if they knew what it would cost, so the industry lies about the cost, wait until everyone is so committed that it’s too late to back out, then starts coming up with “cost overruns.” Ha, ha, ha.

But that could never happen here. That’s Finland, and the nuke is being built by a French company (Areva). What do you expect? Here in the US, we’ll be building state-of-the-art nukes – the AP1000, designed by Westinghouse, not some Frenchman. Except that in February, nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen noticed that the design of the AP1000 will encourage corrosion – and there’s no containment vessel to hold back radioactivity once the corrosion takes it course. Like I wrote, idiots.

So federal government (that is, us, against out will) underwrites the construction costs of the new plants, pays to insure them, delivers a captive customer base to the corporation and then takes the waste away for free. What has any of that got to do with “free enterprise.”? Ironically, the same people who call Mr. Obama “socialist,” are the ones pushing him hardest to do exactly this.

Mr. Obama’s proposed new generation of nuclear power somehow manages to combine the worst aspects of the Wall Street crisis and the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster: huge taxpayer giveaways to the nuclear corporations and self-regulation by greedheads who have no regard for public safety or the environment.

© Mark Floegel 2010

The next day, President Barack Obama announced the formation of a commission to investigate the Deepwater Horizon blowout oil disaster and the safety of offshore drilling. He appointed former Florida Senator Bob Graham (D) and former EPA Administrator William Reilly to head the panel.

Flash forward ten years. It’s 2020. Will Sen. Graham and Mr. Reilly be sitting before a congressional committee, testifying that, six years after their commission completed its work, the federal government still has not acted on the key recommendations of its report? The more immediate concern is: Will the commission even make the right recommendations about America’s energy future?

“Blue ribbon” commissions are not the only things 9-11 and the BP disaster have in common. The 9-11 attacks were indirectly – but profoundly – about oil and America’s energy policy, or lack of one.

As the president took to the airwaves Tuesday, his administration was again releasing a new estimate of how much oil is actually spurting from the seabed in Mississippi Canyon 252. Now we’re told it’s as much as 60,000 barrels a day – 30 times more than BP and the government told us initially.

Speaking from the Oval Office, Mr. Obama was clearly a man on the horns of a dilemma. On one hand, his duty to American citizens and stewardship of our environment point clearly in one direction. On the other hand, any progress is retarded by the overwhelming political power of the oil companies. The POTUS may be the most powerful man in the world, but the world runs on an oil economy and oil logic. Beltway observers ask why Mr. Obama can’t make up his mind, but indecision is not the issue. The issue is that even a president cannot simultaneously satisfy two constituencies. Mr. Obama will have to choose and choose soon.

Which leads to the third similarity between the 9-11 attacks and the BP Gulf of Mexico disaster: in each case the sitting president found himself with significant support from the American public to take bold steps to remedy the situation. George Bush squandered his moment, using the 9-11 tragedy to launch opportunistic wars. What will Obama do with his moment?

So far, the BP Deepwater Disaster commission is off to a poor start. Two of the panel’s seven members — Mr. Reilly and Alaska’s Fran Ulmer — have strong oil industry ties.

Mr. Reilly is on the board of directors at Conoco-Phillips and has been for 12 years, three times as long as his EPA tenure. In an August 2009 sale, Conoco-Phillips finished second — right behind BP — in snapping up deepwater leases in the Gulf of Mexico. Surely, Conoco has an interest in seeing deepwater drilling continue.

Ms. Ulmer, Alaska’s former lieutenant governor and outgoing chancellor of the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA), has a long history of accepting campaign contributions from the oil industry, including contributions from BP going back to her 1990 candidacy for the Alaska House of Representatives. As chancellor of UAA, Ms. Ulmer presided over the stifling of marine conservationist and oil spill expert, Professor Rick Steiner, who was harassed into resigning over his warnings about the environmental hazards of offshore drilling.

As if that doesn’t cast enough doubt on the impartiality and independence of the commission, last Friday Mr. Obama’s energy and climate czar, Carol Browner, told The Hill that she hopes the administration can persuade the yet-to-be-named commissioners to curtail the six-month moratorium on offshore drilling.

As Ms. Browner was busy undermining the commission, Louisiana’s Sen. Mary Landrieu (D), Congress’s top recipient of BP campaign contributions in the 2008 election cycle ($17,000), sent a letter to the White House claiming that the six-month moratorium will mean the loss of 38,000 jobs. Which begs two questions: 1) Did Ms.. Landrieu take into account the effect of Gulf cleanup jobs? And 2) Why not just send the bill to BP?

Across the environmental movement, activists cringe with anticipation that Mr. Obama will use the catastrophe in the gulf to justify more loan guarantees to the nuclear industry. Even though the documented carelessness and incompetence of nuclear engineers rivals their oil industry counterparts, the nuclear crowd doesn’t have an active disaster up and running this week.

President Obama has a unique opportunity to have a “clean slate” discussion with Americans about energy policy. Will he bungle his chance the way Mr. Bush did? If the establishment of commissions is any guide, the outlook isn’t hopeful.

© Mark Floegel. 2010

Margaret is our master gardener, dispensing advice. Last week she helped me prune a young plum tree so it will crown out and have sturdy limbs to support heavy crops of fruit in years to come. She lectured as she cut, telling me that by being selective, the tree would react in certain ways and side growth would be privileged over upward growth.

The world “privilege” stuck in my head. Here we were, Margaret and I, blithely interfering in nature with our bypass shears. The idea was to take certain actions in hope of obtaining particular outcomes.

We all do it, all the time. We choose one thing over another and we change the course of our personal history. Or we refuse to choose and our history is written for us, but it is written whatever we do or fail to do.

The executives at BP privileged profits over stewardship and look where they are now. Their corporation’s stock yesterday stood at half the value it had the day the Deepwater Horizon exploded and the slide continues today. Business pundits are wondering if perhaps the world’s fourth-largest corporation may be broken up and sold for spare parts. What color is your parachute, Tony Hayward?

Barack Obama, like every other US president before him, has privileged fossil fuels over every other form of energy. Tax breaks, incentives, oil depletion allowances, the list goes on forever. Greedy executives like Mr. Hayward have been allowed to regulate themselves and worse, to determine the America’s energy policy.

Mr. Obama, like every president before him (although Jimmy Carter should be recognized – finally – for his straight talk), uses “our dependence on foreign oil” as an excuse for more asinine drilling and less oversight of the drillers.

The United States consumes 25 percent of the world’s oil. The United States has two-three percent of the world’s oil under its territory. We cannot reduce our dependence on foreign oil unless we reduce our dependence on oil. If government-run lotteries are a tax on people too stupid to do simple arithmetic, then “drill, baby, drill” is a slogan for people too stupid to be running for office.

“Do something! Do something! Show some emotion!” the press screams at the president. The hell with emotion. Change our energy policy! Start privileging efficiency, conservation and renewables over fossil fuels and nukes! We’ve already killed the Gulf of Mexico on your watch; do you want to go for the whole planet now? If you can’t act like a president, could you at least try for “adult”?

This week we’ve been told that the siphon BP installed on the blown-out wellhead is working, although the numbers BP puts out keep changing. We do know that to install the siphon, BP had to cut away part of the well’s riser, thus increasing the flow of oil. It’s been reported that the flow of oil may now be as many as 100,000 barrels per day or 42 million gallons per day. That’s four Exxon Valdez spills a day – but BP’s siphon is taking as much 15,000 barrels per day, because that’s all the boat at the surface can hold. (Are there no supertankers available, anywhere in the world, at any price? One would think every oil executive on this soiled planet would have an interest in seeing this tragedy end.)

One of this fiasco’s enduring tragedies will be the height at which the bar is now set for oil spills. As big as 10 Exxon Valdez spills? Ha! That’s nothing! Tony Hayward used to spill more than that from his 10 a.m. teacup.

© Mark Floegel. 2010

a) proof of global warming
b) just deserts for middle-aged idiots who decide to start running again after 30 years
c) all of the above
d) none of the above
e) maybe the above

The correct answer is e) maybe the above. A May heat wave on the Canadian border doesn’t prove global warming any more than a February snowstorm in Washington, DC disproves it. The fact that DC snowstorms are increasingly rare and Vermont heat waves are increasingly frequent, however, reminds us that we burn fossil fuels at our peril.

Down in the Gulf of Mexico, crude oil may have finally stopped gushing from the seabed at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gallons each day. News reports today are cautiously optimistic that the “top kill” attempt has been successful. We all hope so.

I’ve been talking to scientists who are frustrated that they can’t get a fix on the size of the oil spill because the flow of information – unlike the flow of oil – has been quickly and effectively blocked by BP and the federal government.

Still, their frustration is tinged with despair. Even if the spill – whenever it finishes spilling – is at the low end of the range, experts are having a hard time getting their minds around the enormity of the volume of floating oil and the damage it is causing and will continue to cause to the marine ecosystem in the gulf.

Three weeks ago, when I was on the gulf with marine conservationist and oil spill expert Rick Steiner, he told me, “If there’s anything good that comes out of this, maybe it will be a greater awareness of the risks of offshore drilling, the way the Exxon Valdez made us realize we need double-hulled tankers and Chernobyl made us aware of the risks of nuclear energy.”

From my own involvement with this spill, I think none of us will know for some time just how big and devastating this will be, but we’ll be shocked when the full extent is realized.

Monday, seven Greenpeace activists were arrested after boarding an offshore drilling support ship in Louisiana. The vessel was bound for Alaska to support Shell Oil’s planned offshore rig in the Chucki Sea, north of the 49th state. The Greenpeacers used oil from BP’s spill to paint “Arctic next?” on the front of the ship’s bridge. They were arrested and quickly charged with two felonies each.

Note the difference. When an oil company assaults the environment, the government is slow to respond and leaves the oil company in charge. When environmentalists protest the oil company’s crimes, the government’s reaction is swift and merciless.

I’m sure my friends arrested Monday will say it was worth it. President Obama will declare today that Shell’s offshore rig will not be allowed to drill this year. (Note the emphasis on “this year.”) This is a delay, not an outright victory.

I’m eager to hear what Mr. Obama has to say, although I’m not optimistic. Some talkers on the right have tried to brand the BP spill as “Obama’s Katrina.” I disagree. I think it’s “Obama’s 9-11.”

After 9-11, George Bush had the nation’s attention and support. He could have used that support to significantly wean us away from the oil addiction that was a prime – albeit indirect – root of the terrorist attacks. He failed to do that and instead chose to deepen our addiction and plunge us into a foolish war.

Barack Obama has a similar opportunity today. Public disgust with corporate malfeasance is at an all-time high; we may truly appreciate the magnificence of the Gulf of Mexico only as we watch it destroyed. Americans want to do the right thing – it’s the corporations and the politicians they fund that hold us back.

The BP spill is a watershed event – in an ecological sense, in an historical sense – and if Mr. Obama plays his cards right, maybe in a hopeful sense, too.

© Mark Floegel. 2010

Rick’s been helping governments respond to oil spills for the past 30 years (an unusually prescient career choice). A resident of Cordova, AK he found a spill in his front yard in the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.

“Right after the Valdez spill, someone told me, ‘Lawyers still to be born will be litigating this spill.’ I laughed at him, but he was right. It’s been 21 years and the litigation between the federal government and Exxon is still not over.”

The fact that people who lost their livelihoods in the Exxon spill waited 20 years before they saw a nickel of compensation from Exxon is not happy news here, but Rick pulls no punches and gives straight answers. It’s as welcome – and as rare – as a cool breeze in Louisiana.

“The executives at BP must be reading the Exxon spill response playbook because they’re doing exactly what Exxon did,” he said. For those of you without access to the oily inner sancta, the playbook’s rules are these:

1 – Understate the amount of oil spilled.

2 – Understate the environmental damage caused by the oil.

3 – Overstate the effectiveness of your company’s response.

4 – Try to buy off the locals with tiny amounts of money (BP is offering $5,000 each to coastal residents in Mississippi) in exchange for waivers promising not to sue for damages.

5 – Slap gag orders on anyone doing business with the corporation. (Fishermen who want work from BP in the cleanup efforts have to agree in writing not to speak to the media. The gag orders are legally meaningless; it’s the intimidation factor that counts.)

Following the guidance of point three, BP has strung miles of bright orange boom everywhere there’s a tee vee camera. As if booms are some kind of magic wand. Booms are useless unless skimmers pick up the oil they collect and no one has seen any skimmers. Beyond that, the oil from the spill is bubbling up from a mile below the ocean. By the time it gets to the surface, it’s so thoroughly mixed with water it just slips under the booms.

Nonetheless, BP had a couple hundred shrimp boats on the gulf Wednesday, trolling booms back and forth. It’s not an oil spill response, it’s Response Theater. As Rick points out, in the best of circumstances (and we’re very far from that in the gulf) only ten percent of the oil is ever recovered. In the Exxon spill, after $2 billion, three summers with 1,000 boats and 13,000 workers, only five to seven percent of the oil was recovered.

One worry here is that the massive spill – which may spew oil for many weeks to come – will slip around the Florida peninsula and be carried up the east coast by the gulf stream. At the Exxon spill, which entailed a heavier grade of crude in the much more closed Prince William Sound, the oil was carried 800 miles down the Alaskan coast. There are several countervailing currents in the gulf, at all depths and of course, this oil is moving at every depth the gulf has. No one can predict where it will go.

“There’s never been a successful response to a marine oil spill. Ever.” Rick said. “We’re addicted to oil and like any addict, we are taking larger and larger risks to get our fix and the consequences are more and more disastrous.”

So what’s the solution? Break the addiction. We have to stop drilling in the ocean. The results are too catastrophic. Instead of reading from cue cards prepared for him by oil lobbyists, Barack Obama has to shift our government’s energy policy to privilege efficiency and clean renewables over fossil fuels. Not only will that prevent the next marine tragedy, but it’s our only chance of arresting global warming before we burn our species off the planet.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

Now, before the “April Fool” window has closed, we know 5,000 barrels (that’s 210,000 gallons) of oil are leaking into the Gulf of Mexico daily. Eleven people are missing (dead, really) and three critically injured. Now the president can go to another mass funeral (or memorial service if the bodies are never found) without ever admitting that oil – like coal, like nukes – is not the answer to our problem, they ARE our problem.

Mr. Obama’s not stupid, although he’s a fool. He’s foolish to make sweeping announcements about policy while giving citizens assurances neither he nor anyone else can back up. Where would he have gotten the notion that we can safely drill for oil on the continental shelves? From the oil companies. Just as the Wall Street banks and bank-like non-banks tell him they can regulate themselves with no harm to the economy.

But, as Mr. Thurber said, you could look it up. The current oil catastrophe is the work of BP, which once stood for “British Petroleum.” A few years back its CEO, John Browne, changed the name to BP (one of those initial-only names, like UPS or KFC) and adopted the slogan “Beyond Petroleum.” The idea was that BP was going to be a 21st century energy company, bridging from dirty to clean, old to new, etc., etc.

Didn’t last long. The board dumped Mr. Browne and went back to being an old-fashioned oil company. They only vestige of the “Beyond Petroleum” era is the cloying green-and-yellow sunflowerish logo.

In 2005, 15 workers were killed in an explosion at a BP refinery in Texas City, Texas. BP was found to have scrimped on safety spending which would have protected workers. The fourth-largest corporation in the world puts bottom line profits and obscene executive pay above the lives of workers. Sound familiar, Don Blankenship?

And yet, when Mr. Obama trots out before the public to promise offshore drilling will be clean and technically state-of-the-art, these are the people he relies on for data.

In 2006, BP spilled 200,000 gallons of crude oil into the fragile environment of Alaska’s North Slope. Why? BP failed to run proper maintenance on decades-old pipelines. Another such spill occurred in November 2009 (46,000 gallons) and a third a few weeks later. This time the environment and taking care of its own equipment were rated lower than profits and bonuses on the list of BP priorities.

These idiots couldn’t properly handle the grease in a deep fryer and yet they are the same people the President of the United States of America relies on to undergird his energy policy. No wonder he’s picking his political teeth off the floor.

Many of my still-supporting-Obama friends point to some of the many good things the president has done, such as strengthening the EPA’s hand on a host of issues related to toxic chemicals. He has and I’m glad he has, but a) he’s following an administration that was an environmental disaster and b) time is running… no, has run out on global warming and the denizens of the west wing think there’s still time to play politics. I’m still glad I voted for the guy and I wouldn’t want John McCain and Sarah Palin running things, but events are unfolding not as I hoped and more important, not as the country or the planet needs.

It’s about priorities. If you run a multinational oil company, your priorities should be the lives and safety of your employees, the health of the environment in which your corporation conducts business. These come – or should come – ahead of your salary, bonus and perks. I know this is a surprise.

If you are the POTUS, your priority should be the survival of our civilization, since that is the consensus opinion of the scientific community. That means stop coddling the oil and coal industries. Stop spreading notions you know to be lies, like “clean coal” and “safe offshore drilling.”

To be clear: the whole explosion, dead workers, massive oil spill thing is bad, but it won’t bring about the above-noted end of civilization. Priority one is to stop burning fossil fuel.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

A few weeks earlier, the national mall was the setting for EarthTech, a trade fair of environmentally friendly technologies. There were booths for solar and wind power, but most of the promoters hawked nuclear power or plastic or incinerators. Like any trade fair, the only thing that mattered was how much vendors paid for their display areas. Whether or not the display was an unmitigated pack of lies didn’t even enter the conversation. Senator Al Gore was the congressional sponsor.

A bunch of us attended in white lab coats and stood in front of the worst liars in the fair to explain exactly how they were lying. You know, First Amendment stuff. But this is America, the real America, and the people paying the freight control the cops, so we were hauled away in handcuffs, but the tee vee cameras caught it all and we were on the six o’clock news. Like I said, real America.

That was years ago, Earth Day wasn’t even old enough to buy beer. Al Gore’s arc has since risen and fallen. He always talked a good game, but in those eight years when he was close to the seat of power, he never managed to put any of his ideas into practice.

(I type this to the accompaniment of the first roar of the power mowers of summer, wisps of blue smoke from oil burning, two-stroke engines wafting over the neighbors’ fences.)

The other guys, however, the lying polluters of EarthTech, no longer need to hang out on the national mall, where an environmental truth squad from Greenpeace can get their mitts on them. No, the pollution lobby has now set up shop in the Democratic-controlled Congress and White House.

Barack Obama calls for taxpayers to guarantee loans for a new generation of nuclear power plants, despite the fact that we have not – in 60 years – figured out what to do about the waste that will be toxic for the next 2,500 centuries and in denial of the fact that one quarter of our existing nuke plants are leaking radioactive tritium into the environment around them.

Mr. Obama also calls for opening millions of acres of the continental shelf to oil drilling, supposedly to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, but I’ve yet to see a substantive proposal from his administration on conservation and efficiency, which could reduce that dependence more quickly, more cheaply and forever.

Oh, right, “Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.” Remember that quote? It too has a birthday coming up. Nine years ago next week, then-Vice President Dick Cheney said it in a speech, in which he called for a new generation of nukes and opening the continental shelf to drilling. If Mr. Obama, running for the presidency said, “My vision for America’s energy future is essentially the same one Dick Cheney articulated in 2001,” would you have voted for him? Because that’s where we are today.

It occurs to me that, as an environmentalist, I’ve come to feel the same way about Earth Day as devout Christians feel about Christmas. Should I start a “Keep the Earth in Earth Day” campaign? Maybe.

Maybe not. Earth Day, like Christmas or any other commemorative day supposed to impart some sort of value, is meaningless in and of itself if we fail to adopt the designated value in our lives – and policies – throughout the year. And we haven’t.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

No one seems quite sure why the first of April is called “April Fool’s Day.” The first reference to the day is in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” in Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales.” In the story, a fox and rooster trick each other in turn.

So it is April Fool’s Day is an occasion for practical jokes. Some scholars believe the tradition began when the societies shifted the beginning of the calendar year from early spring (around the first of April) to January, leaving only “fools” to honor the older tradition.

However it began, it’s with us still and you may be fooled more than once today. There are several times this week when I had wished I was being fooled, but no, it seems I’m merely dealing with fools.

Yesterday is a good example. Barack Obama announced he is opening 167 million acres of the continental shelf to oil and natural gas drilling. This is something George Bush and Dick Cheney wanted to do, but didn’t have the nerve. I thought 2008 was supposed to be a “change” election. Didn’t know it was going to be change for the worse.

I know, I know, we’re going to hear from the usual pundits that this is the White House outmaneuvering the Republicans on energy issues. But it’s not. It’s caving in to the fossil fuel lobby. The reality is that the US and the rest of the world have to slash our greenhouse gas emissions and you don’t do that by expanding drilling any more than you go on a diet by launching a Twinkie binge. You’re a fool to think otherwise and any pundit that tries to convince you otherwise wants to play you for a fool.

Federal Judge Vaughn Walker is neither a fool nor played for one. He ruled yesterday that neither the Bush nor the Obama administration (what’s that about change again?) are allowed to tap the phones of Americans without warrants.

The Obamanians picked up some sort of virus from the Bushies. The Nixon Virus (“When the president does it, it’s not illegal.”), I think it’s called. I didn’t vote to live in a police state in 2000 and I sure as hell didn’t vote to live in one in 2008. A Justice Department spokesperson said no decision has been made about filing an appeal. A word of advice: Don’t.

Fools closer to home (or not) include the Vermont Energy Partnership, which is taking out full-page newspaper ads this week, chastising the Vermont public for allowing the state Senate to vote to shut the state’s only nuclear plant, Vermont Yankee.

There are multiple forms of foolishness afoot here. First, the partnership tries to fool people into thinking it has something to do with Vermont. True, there are Vermont businesses foolish enough to join this bogus trade association, but most of the money for the partnership – and thus the ads it buys – comes from Entergy Louisiana, the out-of-staters who have yet to realize they’ve been invited to leave.

That invitation is the second form of foolishness. It’s over people! It’s been over for more than a month. The Senate voted 26 to 4 in February to shut the plant on schedule in March 2012 (although the smart money says it will shut in November 2011). Entergy Louisiana and its shill, Governor Jim Douglas (R-Lame Duck) persist in calling the vote meaningless, but if you buy that pap, you’re foolish enough to be interested in some irradiated riverfront property for a vacation home.

Third, of course, is you don’t run those kind of ads the week of April 1. It’s just sticking your head in the sand, leaving 120 pounds of butt hanging out for opportunists like me to kick. It is, however, consistent with Entergy Louisiana’s incompetent bungling of the mechanics of running a nuke plant and its tone-deaf public relations policy. Getting a 20-year license extension for that plant should have been a walk in the park. Instead, the executives at Entergy Louisiana orchestrated their own death march.

And for that, I thank them. No foolin’.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

Surely, there must be one battle the greens have won, one cause so clearly right that by the twenty-first century, people across the globe would agree this piece of the planet is worth protecting. You might think that, but you’d be wrong.

The whales are once again in danger.

After a more than decade-long battle, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) voted in 1986 to end commercial whale hunting. While that was a “win” for the environment (see above caveats), the IWC allows “research” whaling. Japan engages in such “research” whaling, on the order of 1,000 dead whales every year. Odd thing is all that “research,” all those dead whales and no published results from the Japanese “researchers.” Kinda makes you think it’s all bogus. Norway and Iceland engage in commercial whaling, essentially giving the finger to the IWC and the rest of the civilized world. (Those Japanese, so polite, wrap the finger they give us in a faux white lab coat.)

OK, that’s all bad enough, but now Japan – and whatever allies it can muster – are petitioning the IWC, promising to suspend its “research” whaling if the IWC will bless commercial whaling by Japan, Iceland and Norway. The gimmick is that supposedly the three countries will accept low quotas, so that if the IWC lets them all kill whales commercially (in the case of Japan) and under supervision (in the case of Iceland and Norway), then fewer whales will die than are currently dying under a regime of bogus “research” and outlaw whaling.

It’s easy enough to see where all this leads. No one is trying to be subtle here. The idea is to get the IWC to once again condone commercial whaling, then put the crews to the IWC to raise the quotas.

This is just crap, right? There’s no way the nations of the IWC will let these jokers get away with this, right? Not unless they have a heavy-hitter nation making the case for them, right? They do have a heavy-hitter nation on their side – the United States of America.

Earlier this month, Japan, Iceland and Norway presented their proposal at a meeting in Florida, with the support of nations like the US and New Zealand.

It’s worth remembering that a tall, skinny fellow named Barack Obama – back in 2008, when he was asking us all to do him a BIG favor – said, “As president, I will ensure that the U.S. provides leadership in enforcing international wildlife protection agreements, including strengthening the international moratorium on commercial whaling. Allowing Japan to continue commercial whaling is unacceptable.”

Whale advocates of my acquaintance, who know this issue much better than I do, are willing – for now – to cut President Obama some slack on this (great and gentle sea creatures that they are). They say they doubt this is his actual position. They say that the US delegate to the IWC – Monica Medina – has apparently gone off the rails and taken it upon herself to support this despicable position.

So let’s give Mr. Obama the benefit of the doubt and say he’s out of the loop on this whale thing. (He does have a rather full plate.) The final decision on this screwball commercial whaling petition won’t come until the IWC annual meeting in June (the Florida meeting was just a prep). Here’s what you can do about it. Click here, scroll to the bottom of the page and send a message to the president that you do not want a resumption of commercial whaling. You’ll be joining 35,000 of my closest friends who have already gotten the attention of the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality. My friends met with them this morning and they’re wavering. I figure another 35,000 messages will do the trick.

I thank you and the whales thank you.

© Mark Floegel, 2010