11/08/2010

Ask a Stupid Question

The presidential commission on the BP oil spill seems to be fulfilling the task of all such blue-ribbon commissions: ask the wrong questions, draw the wrong conclusions.

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.”
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By floegel | Posted in Asides, Energy | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)
11/04/2010

Now Lie In It

I’m so glad the election is over; I can only imagine how bad it must have been for people who have tee vee. There were surprises, but every permutation of the race was called by some pundit or other – it’s a variation on the hundred monkeys theory and not that far off, either. (You can take that any way you see fit.)

“The people have blah blah blah, we now roll up our blah blah and get down to the hard task of blah.” It’s worse that the damn post-game sports interviews. I expect nothing, literally. Now that the Republicans have one house of Congress and the Democrats coming late (as always) to the new political climate, the government will freeze up and things will just get worse by inertia for the next two years. (Cheery, huh?)

I feel some bizarre obligation to fill up this space once a week so let’s look at what this might mean for some familiar figures:

Barack Obama. “There is no doubt that people’s No. 1 concern is the economy,” he said. “What they were expressing great frustration about is that we haven’t made enough progress on the economy.” Oh, right. It’s the economy, stupid. Clinton, circa 1992. Those who fail to learn the lessons…. This is election was tough for President Obama, governor, not so much for Candidate Obama, 2012. Now he’ll have something to push back against and in two years HE can be the one running against Washington. Again. (He also said he takes “direct responsibility” for Democrats’ losses Tuesday. It was refreshing to hear someone in the beltway associate himself with the “R” word.)
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)
10/28/2010

The Lunatic Fringe

Do you remember the incident, two years ago, as the presidential election campaign was winding down, an old lady at John McCain rally got a hold of the microphone and said she didn’t trust Barack Obama because “he’s an Arab.”

Senator McCain pulled the mike away from her and said, “No, ma’am, he’s a decent family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.”

We all shook our heads and clucked our tongues that things could have come to such a sorry pass. Mr. McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin, however, had crossed and recrossed the country, implying Mr. Obama was a friend of terrorists and extremists, so we weren’t shocked when the crazy old lady came to roost at the McCain rally.

Two years, later Sen. McCain, while he never found his way back to the straight talk that once endeared him to many, at least managed to knock off the campaign-style attacks, something Ms. Palin is incapable of doing or perhaps even understanding. Now, sane people are the ones having the microphones snatched away by crazies. What was the lunatic fringe two years ago is now dead center of the Republican Party platform and because that party brooks no dissent, everyone has to go along and say, “Yeah… sure, that stuff’s OK by me.” (This includes Karl Rove, who got smacked down by the thought police for calling Christine O’Donnell “nutty.”)
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By floegel | Posted in Civil Liberty, Commentary, Electoral Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)
10/21/2010

Low Incidence, High Consequence

To date, NASA has launched 132 space shuttle missions. Two – Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 – were catastrophic failures, killing all the astronauts onboard each shuttle. Low incidence, high consequence; it doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, it’s bad.

So it is with deepwater and/or high pressure oil drilling. Most of the time, it goes well, or well enough to prevent catastrophe, but when things go wrong, as they did on April 20, then 11 men lose their lives and an ecosystem and an economy it supports will never be the same.

“We’ve learned our lesson. We’re going to redouble our efforts to make sure this never happens again.” I could attribute that quote to either BP (or any of its sister oil companies) or the federal government (regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans are holding down the White House and Congress). It’s a choral number.

A few weeks ago, as I was floating around the Gulf of Mexico with marine conservationist Rick Steiner, he told me this story: “The newspaper stories about the Macondo well say the guys drilling it were calling it ‘The Well from Hell’ because of all the gas kicks. You can tell when you’re drilling if the well is going to give you trouble. There’s another well in the gulf, called Blackbeard that ExxonMobil was drilling a few years ago. Even though their tests indicated that there’s a huge amount of oil in the field, the drilling was going so badly that the engineers told Exxon, ‘This is just too dangerous. We can’t control this.’”
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Oceans, Oil | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)
10/14/2010

Broken in Two

I attended the Gulf Gathering at Weeks Bay, Alabama last week. It was a conference of grassroots groups from the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, coming together to try and figure how to put their region together again after the BP oil disaster.

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.”
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Energy, Global Warming | Tagged , , | Comments (0)
10/07/2010

Cleanup Theater

BILOXI, MS – I’m back in the Gulf of Mexico, nearly six months after BP’s Macondo well blew out and spewed 4 million barrels of oil into one of the northern hemisphere’s most fragile and fecund ecosystems.

The government and BP will both tell you things are going great. They want this to be over. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says most of the oil is gone. They know this because they’re towing sorbent booms across the surface of the gulf, taking samples from the water column, testing for oil’s signature flourescence.

Problem with all that is that it seeks oil where oil is not. Much of it is off the surface and out of the water column. It’s degraded enough that it no longer flouresces (if one can use such a word). I think NOAA, certainly the scientists there, knows this. But the federal government would like this to be over.

(As the media reported Wednesday, in the early days of this disaster the White House deliberately ordered NOAA to withhold worst case estimates – which proved to be accurate – of the flow of oil into the gulf and for weeks kept promoting more optimistic – and incorrect – estimates. Change you can believe in.)
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Energy, Oil | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (1)
09/30/2010

A Pointless Waste of Time

The old canards just wear new clothes.

“Sure, I have a tee vee, but I don’t watch it much. Public television, educational shows, really.” (Translation: “American Idol, The Biggest Loser, Glee, The Office, for starters.”)

“The cell phone – God, I hate it. But it’s good to have in case of emergencies.” (“I’ve never had an emergency involving the cell phone, unless you count that accident I almost caused when I was talking to my sister while I was driving.”)

“It’s almost noon and I haven’t showered yet. It’s not easy being a new parent.”
(“This is, however, my fourth facebook post of the day.”)

So many (most?) of our “labor-saving devices” don’t save labor. They merely dissolve our minds and divide our time into small segments that disappear before we know it. It’s the M&M theory. (Not you, Marshall.)
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Tagged | Comments (0)