A traveling exhibition about the sounds and songs of life
by Todd Woody.
“Honey, could you run down to the store and pick up some milk, tofu, and one of those new Think City electric cars?”
That’s a request you could be hearing soon in Switzerland (in French, German, Italian, or Romansh, of course) now that Norwegian electric automaker Think has struck a deal with Swiss retailer Migros to market the City.
Sort of a cooperatively owned Costco, Migros is Switzerland’s largest supermarket chain and operates more than 600 stores across the country. In a deal announced Wednesday, Migros will sell the battery-powered Think urban runabout through a new division called M-Way.
“We have the key central retail locations all over Switzerland and beyond, now we want to use these bases to spread the news and sales of electric vehicles such as the Think City,” Herbert Bolliger, President of the Federation of Migros Cooperatives, said in a statement.
The announcement caught my attention because it’s a reminder that, one, not all green tech innovation is destined to happen here in California, and two, business model innovation will be just as important as technology itself in transforming electric cars from a niche to a knockout.
From its reincarnation a few years ago under the leadership of then-chief executive Jan Olaf-Willums, Think sought not to sell so much a car as mobility. Internet-enabled and connected to your mobile phone and the power grid, the plastic-bodied City was designed to plug into the transportation and electric power networks rather than be just another isolated hunk of metal rolling down the road.
You might buy the City but lease its battery or drive one when needed through a car-sharing service like Zipcar. Or, now, you might buy one from your neighborhood grocery store.
James Andrews, a Think spokesman, told me that sales of the City will begin this summer at Migros supermarkets. M-Way will initially set up retail outlets at Migros stores in urban areas.
It’s a smart strategy to expose consumers to electric cars. After all, how often do you casually stroll through car dealerships, which, in the United States at least, tend to be isolated in “auto rows” off the beaten path? Now consider how often you pop down to Whole Foods or Safeway for random groceries. You’re probably likely to check out the City or another electric car if you pass it on the way to the wine aisle. Maybe you’ll even take one for a test drive around the block.
M-Way already has sold a fleet of 60 City cars to Alpmobil, an eco-tourism company that will provide them for the use of its guests at a resort in the Swiss Alps.
Back in the 1990s, Think leased a previous version of the City to San Francisco Bay Area residents as part of a pilot project that let them plug the cars in to charge at train stations. Among the Think’s early adopters was a guy named Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google.
San Francisco is likely to be among the first U.S. cities to receive shipments of the latest City when Think begins selling the car in America later this year. Who knows? You might even be able to buy one at the farmer’s market someday.
Related Links:
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Energy politics in the Senate: why Merkley’s oil plan matters
Tiny desert town goes solar in a big way
by Tom Philpott.
Like recycling, listening to NPR, and caring about the World Cup, everyday cooking has become a de rigeur activity for those with certain class and cultural aspirations.
And that’s as it should be. We need more home cooks. If diversified, human-scale, community-directed farms are going to thrive, then a much broader swath of the population has to know how to turn raw ingredients into dinner—and do it regularly.
But home cooking has been in decline for at least a couple of generations. For most young to middle-aged adults, childhood food memories center on takeout, heat-and-serve microwave fare, and perhaps the occasional fancy meals for birthdays and holidays.
If you’re an adult who didn’t learn the basics of everyday cooking at the parental knee, how to do it at this late date? One way—the path I took—is through cookbooks. Until pretty recently, the most interesting cookbooks that emerged from publishing houses involved what might be called “weekend” or “special occasion” meals: they had you scrambling for rarified ingredients and, quite often, spending hours constructing a single dish.
As a way to learn to cook, it was lots of fun, but also ad hoc and time-devouring. What about people who want to gain kitchen chops, but aren’t willing to spend most of their free time frying each ingredient individually for a classic Mexican mole, fixing a broken béarnaise, or tackling the vast pile of dirty pots and pans that such projects create? What about people who just want to put a nice dinner on the table after working all day Tuesday, with ingredients they picked up at the farmers market Saturday?
Unshackled from the magazine grind, Middleton has delivered a terrific cookbook, particularly for those in the steep part of cooking’s endless learning curve.
At least since World War II, there has never been a shortage of cookbooks promising “quick & easy” recipes, many of them with the word “microwave” in the title. But these books were mainly about minimizing cooking—throwing together various convenience foods for a fast meal. Starting about a decade ago, there have emerged excellent, rigorous cookbooks focusing on everyday fare for the casual cook.
Deborah Madison, with her Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, and Mark Bittman, with his Minimalist books and his How to Cook Everything magnum opus, are the beacons of this new wave of home cooking: time-conscious, technique-oriented, and green-minded (meat, when it isn’t dispensed with altogether, plays a supporting role to dishes centered on fresh produce and whole grains).
But even if Madison and Bittman dominate this section of the cookbook shelf, I’ll still be making room for Suzie Middleton’s new book, Fast, Fresh, & Green. For years, Middleton served as the editor of the excellent Fine Cooking magazine, which deftly combines high-ambition, “master”-level recipes with everyday food. Unshackled from the magazine grind, Middleton has delivered a terrific cookbook, particularly for those in the steep part of cooking’s endless learning curve.
Experienced cooks might be put off by the book’s stated premise. Explaining her method, Middleton writes: “So, my weeknight vegetable improvisation goes like this: 1) I pick my cooking method. 2) I pick my vegetables. 3) I pick my flavorings. 4) I start chopping.”
I can’t imagine thinking like that. I start with what’s on hand or ready in the garden. If I’m shopping for produce, I buy what looks most appealing—and then I start thinking about cooking methods and flavor palates. I suspect most experienced, seasonal-minded cooks think in similar ways.
But you know what? Experienced cooks should forget the book’s premise and just dig into the recipes. Got a bunch of asparagus on hand? Consult the index and alight upon “Quick-braised Asparagus with Dijon, White Wine, and Fresh Thyme Pan Sauce.” I tried it a few weeks ago, and the result was pretty terrific: rustic, pungent, and bright all at once. And even if you don’t have all the ingredients on hand, the technique—brown the asparagus in butter, and then braise it lightly in a flavorful liquid—is inspiring. It broke me out of the asparagus rut in which I’ve languished for oh, 10 years now, in which I either roast or steam it, serving it with aioli. Many other such fresh ideas abound in the book.
Where I think it will really gain traction is among new cooks. Its chapters are based not on ingredients or courses, but rather on techniques: “quick-roasting,” “quick-braising,” “hands-on sauteing,” “walk-away sauteing,” and so on. Each of the nine chapters that form the meat of the book contains a brisk explanation explaining how the technique works, followed by a “foundation recipe” for putting into action. Then come a dozen or so variations on the main theme, all unfussy and manageable for an evening in the middle of a busy week.
Any aspiring cook would be well advised to work through the “foundation recipes” chapter by chapter. In contrast to the exacting doyennes under whose cookbook tutelage I labored under in the ‘90s—I’m thinking of you Marcella Hazen, Diana Kennedy, and Paula Wolfert, my heroes—Middleton’s voice is gentle, encouraging, and geared to making cooks feel empowered to improvise.
That’s critical. I doubt if many people can sustain a run of casual everyday cooking without feeling good about improvising. Only on so many Tuesdays will hardworking people consent to slogging through a recipe to get dinner on the table. After a certain point, weighed down by exhaustion from the day’s labor and the prospect of dirty dishes to come, you either gain the ability to size up a set of ingredients and think through their pathway to a meal—or you revert to takeout and heat-and-serve.
With her new book, Middleton has emerged as an appealing shepherd, capable of guiding people from the ruins of bad convenience fare to the splendor of confident, quotidian cooking. And she has more than a few tricks to teach us old kitchen dogs, too.
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Katie Paterson is an artist whose work spans installation, sculpture, transmission, and sound. Her work presents the viewer with a deeper sense of the passage of time and the evolution of nature and the cosmos. Technology often factors into this line in her practice, where it is used to bring about an awareness of its own restrictions as well as our limited ability to sense and experience natural cycles and movement. She is currently showing History of Darkness in the group exhibition “Cage Mix” at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, up until September 19, 2010. Her series "Every Night About This Time" also opens this weekend at the Whitstable Biennale.
Katie Paterson, History of Darkness, 2010For Performa this past Fall, you transmitted darkness from 13.2 billion years ago for one minute on the television station MNN in Ancient Darkness TV. Now you're building an archive of images of ancient darkness in History of Darkness. I'm wondering if you can discuss this new project, and where it's taken you so far.
History of Darkness is an archive of darkness from throughout the universe, and it is showing in BALTIC, UK. It’s a slide archive and will eventually contain hundreds upon thousands of images of darkness from different times/places in the history of the universe, spanning billions of years. Each image (all entirely black or almost black) handwritten with its unique distance from earth in light years. It will be an open-ended and life-long project, added to and extended over time. There is never a way to represent, see or know all the darkness in the universe, so it's a kind of infinite journey, and a futile one, to try to capture it on a human scale, and make it an entity. The images are uprooted - they refer to places/times/spaces that could be anything and anywhere, with no definite beginning or end.
Katie Paterson, History of Darkness, 2010In your work, it seems you use newer technologies, such as television transmission or telephones (as in Vatnajökull (the sound of)), which often obscure distance and the elapse of time, in order to reverse this effect. By orchestrating encounters with, say, the sound of a prehistoric glacier or images that are 13.2 billion years old, it seems you bring the viewer into greater awareness of the expanse of both distance and time. Is this an attempt to recognize a deep time?
I find it astonishing that through telescopes, people can look directly into the universe to a time where the earth didn’t even exist. That every time we look into the sky we are looking into the past (the light from the sun and the moon are reaching us from a few minutes ago) - in fact there is never a way to see what is going on around us in the universe right now this moment. I’ve recently returned from the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii, where I was working with Caltech astronomers studying the ‘Cosmic dawn’, looking directly at galaxies 12 billion years back in time. With remarkable techniques astronomers are looking to almost 5% after the Big Bang. I was very fortunate to be able to actually witness this directly – such distant galaxies like tiny jewels on the screen. This is certainly a ‘deep time,’ an incomprehensible beyond, but it was right there in front of us on the screen. That really got me. How do we conceive of a time before the earth existed? And whilst these early pristine stars may seem remote from human experience, we are related in the most intimate way - every atom on Earth was synthesized by stars, they are what we’ve emerged from.
Katie Paterson, Vatnajökull (the sound of), 2007/8You've worked with a number of scientists in the past, in order to do research and collect data for your projects. How do you initiate these conversations? Do you find that scientists are generally receptive to your ideas? What has this process been like?
I’ve been really fortunate to work with scientists who have been so receptive to my ideas. Sometimes I’ve been directed to a particular person, but most of the time I’ve sent an email out of the blue and hoped for the best. The relationships built up are as important to me as the work taking place – and much of the work comes about from many conversations. Conversations about everything from the quality of moonlight, figuring out how to harness lightning, send silence into space, and isotope a grain of sand. Lately, staying up til 6am with eminent astronomers at base station, bombarding them with strange questions...learning about lyman alpha lines, the early universe pictured as distant fog and candle light, expanding dusty space and the possible end of the universe.
Katie Paterson, Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, Solheimajökull 2007Sound and music have had a prominent place in number of your works - from records made of ice (Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, Solheimajökull) to the “Earth-Moon-Earth” series where you translate musical compositions, such as Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, into Morse code in order to transmit and reflect this information off the moon. Why do you think there is this attention to sound and music in your work? Do you think audio strikes a different register with your audience? How so?
Sound is a fragment amongst many materials that coexist together, like a wave being part of the sea. In "Earth-Moon-Earth" a playing piano can be heard, and the grainy sound of Morse code reflected to earth, together with a silent image of lost notes floating in space. At the same time, a glacier melting is listened to over a telephone. Often prominent is the unseen - withholding the visual can sometimes create stronger, more present imagery. Sound is also present in ‘soundless pieces’, my map of all the dead stars might bring to mind the sound of 27,000 stars exploding; silence beamed though space might invoke a whole array of sounds it collected on its journey. For Whitstable Biennale I’m creating a series of thirteen works, which appear and disappear throughout the festival, just as quarks and other phenomena in the universe appear visible at one moment and disappear the next. Some are happening in Whitstable, and others elsewhere, such as Alaska. I think the series has a musical sense to it - I see it as a fragmented orchestra, a constellation of works, an endless score. A record player will spin in synchronization with the earth’s rotation, a black firework will be set off under dark skies, an atomic-sized grain of sand will be buried inside the Sahara desert. The imagination plays a key role in everything.
by Grist.
Grist gives you the full text from Obama’s Oval Office address which took place yesterday night.
On the immediate crisis:
Already, this oil spill is the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced. And unlike an earthquake or a hurricane, it’s not a single event that does its damage in a matter of minutes or days. The millions of gallons of oil that have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico are more like an epidemic, one that we will be fighting for months and even years.
But make no mistake: We will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long as it takes. We will make BP pay for the damage their company has caused. And we will do whatever’s necessary to help the Gulf Coast and its people recover from this tragedy.
Tonight I’d like to lay out for you what our battle plan is going forward: what we’re doing to clean up the oil, what we’re doing to help our neighbors in the Gulf, and what we’re doing to make sure that a catastrophe like this never happens again.
First, the cleanup. From the very beginning of this crisis, the federal government has been in charge of the largest environmental cleanup effort in our nation’s history—an effort led by Admiral Thad Allen, who has almost 40 years of experience responding to disasters. We now have nearly 30,000 personnel who are working across four states to contain and clean up the oil. Thousands of ships and other vessels are responding in the Gulf. And I’ve authorized the deployment of over 17,000 National Guard members along the coast. These servicemen and women are ready to help stop the oil from coming ashore, they’re ready to help clean the beaches, train response workers, or even help with processing claims—and I urge the governors in the affected states to activate these troops as soon as possible.
Because of our efforts, millions of gallons of oil have already been removed from the water through burning, skimming, and other collection methods. Over five and a half million feet of boom has been laid across the water to block and absorb the approaching oil. We’ve approved the construction of new barrier islands in Louisiana to try to stop the oil before it reaches the shore, and we’re working with Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida to implement creative approaches to their unique coastlines.
On making sure it never happens again:
A few months ago, I approved a proposal to consider new, limited offshore drilling under the assurance that it would be absolutely safe—that the proper technology would be in place and the necessary precautions would be taken.
That obviously was not the case in the Deepwater Horizon rig, and I want to know why. The American people deserve to know why. The families I met with last week who lost their loved ones in the explosion —these families deserve to know why. And so I’ve established a National Commission to understand the causes of this disaster and offer recommendations on what additional safety and environmental standards we need to put in place. Already, I’ve issued a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling. I know this creates difficulty for the people who work on these rigs, but for the sake of their safety, and for the sake of the entire region, we need to know the facts before we allow deepwater drilling to continue. And while I urge the Commission to complete its work as quickly as possible, I expect them to do that work thoroughly and impartially.
One place we’ve already begun to take action is at the agency in charge of regulating drilling and issuing permits, known as the Minerals Management Service. Over the last decade, this agency has become emblematic of a failed philosophy that views all regulation with hostility—a philosophy that says corporations should be allowed to play by their own rules and police themselves. At this agency, industry insiders were put in charge of industry oversight. Oil companies showered regulators with gifts and favors, and were essentially allowed to conduct their own safety inspections and write their own regulations.
When Ken Salazar became my Secretary of the Interior, one of his very first acts was to clean up the worst of the corruption at this agency. But it’s now clear that the problem there ran much deeper, and the pace of reform was just too slow. And so Secretary Salazar and I are bringing in new leadership at the agency—Michael Bromwich, who was a tough federal prosecutor and Inspector General. And his charge over the next few months is to build an organization that acts as the oil industry’s watchdog—not its partner.
On turning from our reliance on fossil fuels to a clean energy future:
For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered. For decades, we’ve talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels. And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires. Time and again, the path forward has been blocked—not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor.
The consequences of our inaction are now in plain sight. Countries like China are investing in clean energy jobs and industries that should be right here in America. Each day, we send nearly $1 billion of our wealth to foreign countries for their oil. And today, as we look to the Gulf, we see an entire way of life being threatened by a menacing cloud of black crude.
We cannot consign our children to this future. The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now. Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash America’s innovation and seize control of our own destiny.
This is not some distant vision for America. The transition away from fossil fuels is going to take some time, but over the last year and a half, we’ve already taken unprecedented action to jumpstart the clean energy industry. As we speak, old factories are reopening to produce wind turbines, people are going back to work installing energy-efficient windows, and small businesses are making solar panels. Consumers are buying more efficient cars and trucks, and families are making their homes more energy-efficient. Scientists and researchers are discovering clean energy technologies that someday will lead to entire new industries.
Each of us has a part to play in a new future that will benefit all of us. As we recover from this recession, the transition to clean energy has the potential to grow our economy and create millions of jobs —but only if we accelerate that transition. Only if we seize the moment. And only if we rally together and act as one nation—workers and entrepreneurs; scientists and citizens; the public and private sectors.
When I was a candidate for this office, I laid out a set of principles that would move our country towards energy independence. Last year, the House of Representatives acted on these principles by passing a strong and comprehensive energy and climate bill—a bill that finally makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America’s businesses.
Now, there are costs associated with this transition. And there are some who believe that we can’t afford those costs right now. I say we can’t afford not to change how we produce and use energy—because the long-term costs to our economy, our national security, and our environment are far greater.
So I’m happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party —as long they seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels. Some have suggested raising efficiency standards in our buildings like we did in our cars and trucks. Some believe we should set standards to ensure that more of our electricity comes from wind and solar power. Others wonder why the energy industry only spends a fraction of what the high-tech industry does on research and development—and want to rapidly boost our investments in such research and development.
All of these approaches have merit, and deserve a fair hearing in the months ahead. But the one approach I will not accept is inaction. The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is somehow too big and too difficult to meet. You know, the same thing was said about our ability to produce enough planes and tanks in World War II. The same thing was said about our ability to harness the science and technology to land a man safely on the surface of the moon. And yet, time and again, we have refused to settle for the paltry limits of conventional wisdom. Instead, what has defined us as a nation since our founding is the capacity to shape our destiny—our determination to fight for the America we want for our children. Even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don’t yet know precisely how we’re going to get there. We know we’ll get there.
It’s a faith in the future that sustains us as a people. It is that same faith that sustains our neighbors in the Gulf right now.
Related Links:
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by David Roberts.
The pursuit of U.S. legislation to address the threat of climate change has been going on for more than 20 years. It has pit entrenched industries against scientists and campaigners, political appointees against agency staff, American diplomats against UN officials, propagandists against journalists, red states against blue states, and John McCain 2010 against John McCain 2008. Drama abounds, and if you believe the latest in climate science, the stakes are very near existential.
So you’d think journalists would take some interest in it. But while the shelves are littered with books about climate science and policy, there’s been virtually no serious journalistic effort to write an insider political history, like Haynes Johnson and David Broder did for the 1994 Clinton healthcare imbroglio with The System, or more recently John Heilemann & Mark Halperin did for the 2008 campaign with Game Change.
The reason why is not terribly difficult to understand. It haunts Eric Pooley’s fantastic new book The Climate War like the Ghost of Christmas Future. To wit: it’s a story with no ending. There is no bill, no cap-and-trade system. The idea hasn’t been decisively defeated, but it hasn’t passed; it just keeps climbing up the hill like Sisyphus.
From the Bali climate talks in 2007 to the introduction of the Kerry-Lieberman bill in 2010, The Climate War goes behind the scenes with a key set of players as they hustle, argue, cajole, dodge, bribe, and stumble their way toward political action. Despite the lack of resolution, Pooley manages to pull the events and personalities involved into a narrative that’s not only readable but positively gripping. Momentum rarely sags; even the occasional, unavoidable detours into policy wonkery are crisp and lucid. It’s a feat of storytelling alchemy, a page-turner, and for anyone interested in the quest for an energy transformation, a must-read.
The story derives some of its power from its clear arc: the long slog of the Bush administration gives way to Democratic majorities and a transformative president. But that arc extended rather longer than Pooley had anticipated, and at a certain point he had to stop writing. “Frankly,” Pooley told me, “the hope was that we’d be publishing into a live debate about a live bill that had a shot. It’s just that the Senate still isn’t cooperating.”
To read the book at this particular moment in time—just as the quest it chronicles is poised either to culminate in victory or flop in the dirt—is a peculiar and somewhat unsettling experience. It’s as though the book itself is one of those optical illusions that hasn’t quite resolved yet. Is it two old women or a vase? Is it a story of perseverance rewarded or futility unacknowledged?
The ultimate resolution matters. If there’s one critique of the book to be made, it’s that it spends so much time with insiders, devotes so much space to their perspectives, it ends up obscuring the fact that there’s a decent-sized wing of the environmental movement that thinks the insiders have been completely off track for years now. In the telling, setbacks are treated as exogenous or unpredictable—they happen despite valiant and right-thinking efforts. But the left wing of the movement would say that they are the inevitable results of a strategy founded on negotiating everything away in pursuit of polluter support.
If the climate bill fails this year, will it prove that Pooley followed the wrong people executing the wrong strategy?
He doesn’t buy it. “I wanted to write a book about what was actually happening,” he says. “This is what was happening. EDF, NRDC, and USCAP were at the center of this debate, so they’re at the center of the book. I think I picked the right people.” He doesn’t hide the fact that he’s broadly ideologically sympathetic with inside players like Fred Krupp, and doesn’t buy the notion that their lack of success so far is damning to their strategy: “If somebody comes up with a Plan B that makes sense, I’ll be happy to embrace it. In the meantime, I don’t see a better option than [cap-and-trade], either as policy or as politics. ...
There are some fake Plan Bs out there that say, “lets’s not bother doing the difficult work of emission reduction, we’ll just spend a lot of money on clean energy R&D and everything will be fine.” But I think we need a cap and a price on carbon. ... Maybe one beneficent administration pays that money and the next one comes along and pulls the rug out from under it. We need a market.
The fact is, Pooley says, modern American lawmaking just ain’t pretty:
This is how the system works. A lot of the deals that were cut in Waxman-Markey had some legitimacy. They were attempts to cushion coal-intensive states and industries from the effect of this legislation. But when you get to Colin Peterson, it’s just naked buying off of interests. [Rick] Boucher made no bones about the fact that even though he seems to understand the science, he wasn’t going to do anything that endangered coal. If he had to choose between the climate and the coal industry, he’d choose the coal industry. That’s the playing field.
On that playing field there will be no culminating battles or final surrender. The only thing to do is keep fighting. ““What I really respect about the climate campaigners,” Pooley says, “is they don’t recalibrate themselves based on every shift in the winds. They just keep getting out there and doing it. They keep trying.”
As Pooley sees it, the bill has gotten as far as it can on its own. Getting it over the final hump will involve Obama taking a more active role toward Congress, which he and his advisers have been loathe do do. (See this excerpt from The Climate War, wherein Rahm Emanual advises Obama against getting too involved in an issue with little political upside.) “Obama’s hands-off approach didn’t destroy things on the House side because Waxman and Pelosi were so good at it,” he says, “but the Senate needed adult supervision in the worst way, and Obama hasn’t provided it.”
He calls Reid’s recent attempt to bump immigration back onto this year’s agenda “incredibly lame” and agrees with Lindsey Graham’s analysis of the situation: Dem leadership wasn’t serious about getting a bill. “Everyone had a reason to fake it except Graham,” he says.
But “we make a mistake focusing too much on the Senate right now,” Pooley insists. “It’s up to the White House. Without presidential leadership, it’s just not going to happen. Is the president going to step up or not?”
Indeed. Sounds like a good subject for a postcript.
Related Links:
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What’s up with Murkowski and Graham? Formerly climate-conscious GOP senators flail around
by David Roberts.
Reaction to Obama’s Tuesday evening speech was swift and brutal. “JUNK SHOT,” blared Huffington Post’s homepage. “What was the point?” asked Jason Linkins. “What a terrible speech,” said Kevin Drum.
Having gone back and watched it a second time, I think these reactions may be a touch overwrought. Whenever Obama speaks, there’s always some set of politically engaged people who emerge disappointed that he was low-key and restrained when they wanted something grand and cathartic. That’s just the kind of politician he is.
Still, I can’t argue too much: Obama has never seemed less in command, less confident, less the master of his moment.
There is one bit of the speech the significance of which is being overlooked. It comes in the part on clean energy policy, which many commenters dismissed as palaver. “Cheap platitudes,” sniffed Josh Green. Clive Crook dismissed it as “lame, formulaic, [and] campaign-style.” “Little better than inaction,” concluded Ben Adler. “Basically,” said Jon Chait, “he’s saying he just wants some kind of bill.” Drum snarks, “This gives pabulum a bad name. ... He didn’t say a single word about what he himself wanted.”
But that’s not quite right. Obama didn’t mention a cap on carbon, but he did mention a few specific things, and what he chose to mention has significance.
Accept, for the sake of argument, that the prospect of a cap or price on carbon is dead this year and there’s nothing Obama can do to revive it—or at least that Obama and Rahm believe as much. (Or assume, as Marc Ambinder claims, that Obama’s strategy is to lay low, wait, and add a carbon price in conference.)
What, then, should he ask of a bill? What are the top energy, as opposed to climate, priorities? As it happens, most of the energy options on the table are mediocre-to-terrible (mainly Bingaman’s bill and Lugar’s bill). That side of the bill badly needs strengthening in three key areas if it’s to be a substantial step forward:
It needs tougher, more ambitious energy efficiency provisions, particularly focused on the built environment. More efficiency would yield more jobs, lower household costs, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. It needs a stronger renewable energy standard, one that spurs more renewable energy deployment than business-as-usual (unlike Bingaman’s meager [PDF] 15 percent by 2021) and is focused on renewable energy rather than clean coal and nuclear (unlike Lugar’s “clean energy standard”). Finally, it needs to invest a hell of a lot more money into clean energy R&D.So what three policies did Obama choose to call out individually?
Some have suggested raising efficiency standards in our buildings like we did in our cars and trucks. Some believe we should set standards to ensure that more of our electricity comes from wind and solar power. Others wonder why the energy industry only spends a fraction of what the high-tech industry does on research and development—and want to rapidly boost our investments in such research and development.
I could be reading too much into this—“some believe” and “others wonder” aren’t exactly cris de coeur—but these words were chosen carefully. Normally Obama’s energy pitch includes ritual nods to “clean coal,” nuclear power, and domestic drilling. None of those made an appearance last night; it was only energy efficiency and renewable energy. That strikes me as a deliberate (and welcome) message to the Senate about what Obama wants on the energy side of a bill.
That’s hardly enough to salvage the speech, of course. But it’s not nothing.
Related Links:
The unfinished tale of climate legislation: Eric Pooley’s The Climate War
BP relief ship struck by lightning, bum luck
Oil execs turn against BP in Congress hearing
by Ashley Braun.
There have been many, many striking things about the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico: the carelessness of BP CEO Tony Hayward’s comments, the ridiculousness of BP’s spill-response plan, the scope and scale of the spill itself, the list of failed attempts to plug the leak whose names sound like they were made up by a seven year-old.
And now, perhaps most striking (ahem) of all, comes news that the only functioning, albeit imperfect, solution for containing the runaway oil—the ship siphoning off about 15,000 barrels a day—was hit by lightning and set ablaze on Tuesday morning. How’s that for a sign that BP just can’t win?
Thankfully, the fire was small and quickly snuffed out. But considering other recent lightning bolt targets—a 62-foot-tall Jesus statue in Ohio was another fiery casualty—should we give some credence to speculations that the oil spill actually heralds the apocalypse?
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Obama Signals Need for New Energy Agenda
A mildly contrarian take on Obama’s Oval Office speech
Oil execs turn against BP in Congress hearing
by Jonathan Hiskes.
The planet’s most powerful oil executives found their well-tailored behinds planted in the Congressional hot seat today, as the House Energy and Commerce Committee grilled the chiefs of ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, Shell, and, of course, BP America about the Gulf oil spill and drilling safety.
Recaps of the hearing are all over by now, so here are just the highlights. And by “highlights” I mean examples of corporate irresponsibility and political ineptitude. Here we go!
Throwing BP under the bus. As expected, the four executives whose companies aren’t currently fouling the Gulf of Mexico (at least not on BP’s scale) were quick to turn on the beleaguered BP, saying their drilling practices are far safer.
“It is not a well that we would have drilled with that mechanical set-up,” Marvin Odum, president of Royal Dutch Shell’s U.S. operations, said of BP’s Deepwater Horizon site.
“Practices we would not have put in place were employed here,” said Chevron CEO John Watson.
“A number of design standards that I would consider to be the industry norm were not followed,” said ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson.
Filter out the polite corporate-speak and those are some harsh words for their fellow company. This isn’t the united front Big Oil usually presents.
Walruses, walruses, walruses. But as Henry Waxman (D-Ca.), committee chairman and lead smackdown-giver, notes, the five companies had spill response plans nearly identical to BP’s. They used some of the same words, including absurdities about walruses, sea lions, and sea otters in the Gulf (probably cut-and-pasted from an Arctic response plan), and the phone number for a long-dead expert. The companies apparently all bought emergency plans from the same third-party vendor and signed off on them without any scrutiny.
“ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Shell are as unprepared as BP,” said Waxman.
“The only technology you seem to be relying on is the Xerox machine,” added Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.).
Rep. Bart Stupak noted that Exxon’s disaster response plan has 9 pages on oil removal and 40 pages on dealing with media. Ouch.
Freedom from oil? Impossible. Surprising absolutely no one, the execs dismissed the idea that America can do anything about its dependence on fossil fuels. “We’re going to need oil for decades to come ... it will be decades that we’re using oil and gas,” Shell’s Odum said.
(Luckily, he’s wrong—we’ve got lots of good options for kicking the offshore oil habit.)
Inhofe: Whatever we do, we must not address the underlying problem. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), the Senate’s lead purveyor of climate nonsense, was most concerned that the nation’s Gulf spill response not connect the fossil-fuel disaster to the climate challenge.
“This is remarkable: here we have the most significant environmental disaster in our nation’s history, and the President decides now is the time for cap-and-trade, a massive new energy tax,” Inhofe said in a floor speech Tuesday.
How forcefully will Obama make that connection? We’ll find out soon in his Oval Office address.
Related Links:
Daily terror: We’re learning nothing from Gulf spill
PR lessons from a 1960 oil trade group [VIDEO]
EPA: Without American Power Act, one percent chance of avoiding catastrophe
by Breaking Through Concrete team.
We drive south down Route 61 (aka The Blues Highway) in Mississippi, finding Dorothy and Owen Gradey-Scarbrough after church and Sunday Supper.
Dorothy and Owen stay beside Country Road 32, a half-mile and one left turn out of downtown Shelby. They live in a simple one-story ranch house with similar homes on either side. Yellow-green coco grass covers the front yards, with the greater landscape a mono-color green of soybean or corn. This is the Mississippi Delta, home of the Harvard of high-tech agriculture research stations (the USDA’s Delta States Research Center in Leland/Stoneville), and to the highest rates of diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease in the nation.
Dorothy believes one of the solutions to these communities’ health issues lies in the backyards and side-yards and churchyards. Behind the Gradey-Scarbrough’s house lies part farm, part folk-art installation. On one acre, Owen and Dorothy raise rabbits (in cages suspended over a compost pile), chickens, and a few goats that climb up and down the upturned baptismal tub that welcomed both Dorothy and Owen into the church as infants.
Peaches, plums, apples, and pear trees offer occasional shade and their trunks support a series of life-size hip-hop celebrities (50 Cent, Beyonce, Eminem) on wood paintings salvaged from a shuttered juke joint. There are rows of okra, butter beans, squash, cucumber, spinach, watermelon, grapes, lavender, lemon balm, oregano, basil, sage.
And, of course, tomatoes.
“Back in the day, you could find tomatoes out there in the cotton fields,” Owen says. “You just go pick you a tomato, brush it off, and eat it right there. We used to pick okra in the middle of the cotton field. They’d just grow wild. Now they’re spraying this stuff and killing it out. I used to like walking through those fields.”
Dorothy and Owen, like most Delta residents over the age of 50, grew up on sharecropper farms. They chopped rows of cotton for 12 hours a day and made $3 to $12 for the work. The families never got ahead. That’s just how it worked until they started leaving for city jobs in the north.
“There was no option but to work in the fields,” Dorothy says. “That’s why a lot of people left the south—to get away from the fields.”
“To get away from this,” Owen holds out the hoe he’s been leaning on. “I did. Moved to New York and didn’t come back ‘til I met this lady.”
Dorothy has been backyard gardening for almost 20 years. What began as a gift of chickens from Heifer International to Dorothy and Shelby has become the next satellite demonstration garden for a national movement aimed at teaching individuals about backyard and community gardening. In a town as small as Shelby, people notice and people listen to someone as strong, proud, and rooted as Dorothy, especially when she speaks through the 10 churches in town. But even the churches hesitated back in the mid ‘90s.
“The churches weren’t ready [for farming/gardening],” she says. “Our minister said, ‘Isn’t that what we’re getting away from?’ I said, ‘We’ve already gotten away from it.’ It’s been a lost art. I tell them now it has nothing to do with sharecropping. It’s for you. It can save you money and can make you money when you sell at market. This isn’t working in the fields. This is bettering your family and your health. People are getting into it.”
And Dorothy’s ripples reach outside of Shelby. Will Allen of Milwaukee’s Growing Power organization, a national leader in the urban farm movement (see Grist’s coverage), has christened Dorothy and her MEGA operation (Mississippians Engaging in Greener Agriculture) as its first Regional Outreach Training Center in the country.
We meet Richard Coleman, the county supervisor, at his ranch house in town. The family crowd is just leaving from their Sunday supper—a big one since there was a birthday.
Richard shows us his plot out back, about 120 feet by 50 feet and full of okra, squash, butter beans, peas, tomatoes.
“I just sit indoors in an office,” he says. “I didn’t know what sweat was. So it’s a twofold thing for me—it provides vegetables for my family and a pastime for me. I’ve already lost ten pounds this season. And you have to travel to Cleveland south or Clarksdale north to get what you need and that gets expensive, just with gas bills. It’s no comparison to get it right here.”
About 20 yards away, a smaller plot of the same produce thrives in a small square amid the coco grass. A dozen kids stay cool in a large inflatable pool nearby. Sean Jefferson walks over.
Sean’s 32 years old and lives in the trailer next to Richard’s home. He works at Nature’s Catch, a bass-raising plant in Clarksdale, 20 miles north. His wife and four kids stay in the trailer with his mom and stepdad.
“My grandfather used to raise food,” he tells us. “I was about 11 or 12 when I had my first garden. I try to grow one every year. I usually just shovel it out but this year I tilled it. It cost me about $7 or $8 for seeds plus one bag of fertilizer. I grew it all from seed except for the tomato plants—bought those at a nursery.”
He tends to it every day. Comes home after work and chops a little bit, does it all by himself.
We visit a few other gardens. Louise, Dorothy’s sister, shares a long row with two other gardeners. She describes some of the local lingo: “choppin’” means weeding down the rows with the hoe. “Rippin’ and runnin’” means staying busy and getting things done. Nearby we see the Shiloh Baptist Church’s garden, where members of the church work a rotational schedule to grow produce that’s available for pick-up from the church fridge.
And our final stop takes us to Cornelius Toole’s rambling property down in Mound Bayou, five miles south of Shelby. It’s like the backyard, down-home version of Stoneville’s Big Ag experimental research station.
Maybe an answer to the Delta’s and the nation’s food deserts lies somewhere here among Toole’s mad-farmer-scientist laboratory of tilapia tanks, hand-built backyard irrigation pipes, chicken coops, greenhouses, and one huge, faded-green John Deere sinking into the weeds.
Related Links:
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by Joseph Romm.
When life gives you lemons … add some lemon dispersant and they’ll disappear from sight. Okay, wrong metaphor.
Obama has suggested many times that he aspires to be a transformational leader like President Reagan, the “great communicator.” Tonight, we may well find out whether Obama is a Reagan or a Carter. Does Obama understand that his first term will be defined by how he deals with the oil spill — and the looming threat of $4 gasoline as he runs for re-election (see “Peak oil production coming sooner than expected“)? Indeed, those two factors may determine whether or not he has a second term.
Future generation will judge his presidency as a success or failure solely on the basis of whether he spares them the multiple catastrophes that are likely if we stay anywhere near our current path of unrestricted unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions. Our children and grandchildren will hardly care about health care reform or the deficit or Afghanistan if the nation and the world are on an inexorable march to 9°F warming, 4 to 6 feet of sea level rise, rampant superstorms, widespread DustBowlif-ication, and hot, acidified oceans with ever-expanding dead zones — aka Hell and High Water.
Reagan had this favorite joke about an irrepressibly optimistic boy who, when shown a pile of horse manure, starts digging through it excitedly. When the puzzled adult says, “What do you think you’re doing?” the boy replied beaming, “With all this manure, there must be a pony in here somewhere!” CBS actually quotes Ed Meese saying this:
“Reagan told the joke so often,” Meese said, chuckling, “that it got to be kind of a joke with the rest of us. Whenever something would go wrong, somebody on the staff would be sure to say, ‘There must be a pony in here somewhere.’”
Well, with all the friggin’ oil and dispersant mucking up the Gulf Coast now, there must be one hell of a pony in here. And maybe there is.
The conventional wisdom inside the D.C. beltway before the spill was that there was no possibility of passing a climate bill. And that pretty much meant there was no possibility of passing an energy bill, as I discussed back in February.
But now the uber-insiders at the Politico report today, “Gulf fuels new energy-bill push”:
Joel Benenson, a pollster for the Democratic National Committee and Obama’s presidential campaign, argues in a new briefing for top Capitol Hill officials that a comprehensive energy bill “could give Democrats a potent weapon to wield against Republicans in the fall.”
“The oil spill is intensifying the public’s desire for clean energy investments and increased regulation on corporate polluters,” Benenson writes in the briefing, which he prepared on behalf of the League of Conservation Voters.
“In the aftermath of the spill, people firmly believe Congress needs to do more than just make BP pay. Even when pressed with opposition messaging that now is not the time for some ‘job killing energy tax,’ people coalesce around comprehensive clean energy reform. Consequently, support for a comprehensive energy bill is very high. With the right messaging, that support holds strong in the face of harsh opposition attacks.”
Obama must pass serious and comprehensive energy and climate bill to be a successful president. It’s that simple.
The widely read Marc Ambinder writes today:
If the Center for American Progress really is pulling the strings on the President’s energy policy, then POTUS will Go Medium Big: check out this memo from Dan Weiss, CAP’s director of climate strategy:
President Obama must use this moment to rally Americans to support a sweeping oil reform agenda that permanently changes the way big oil does business. This means building public demand for standards and investments that deeply cut the $1 billion per day spent on foreign oil, ending tax loopholes for big oil companies, and beginning to crack down on global warming pollution.
If “Go Big” means a strong push for carbon pricing, then this would be the middle ground — a speech that focuses on the oil industry, pollution reduction (including renewable standards and CAFE standard enhancement), lots of money for relief and reconstruction, and an assumption of responsibility for the clean-up.
Not quite. My colleague Dan Weiss isn’t pushing for a middle ground. He explicitly calls for Obama to Go Big and insist on the American Power Act:
Adopt a shrinking limit on global warming pollution from oil-based transportation fuels, coal-fired power plants, and other very large sources.I can assure Ambinder that CAP ain’t pulling the strings on the President’s energy policy, since we’ve been urging Obama (along with many, many others) to do a full-court press on a strong Senate climate and clean energy jobs bill for over a year now, to no avail.
If one agrees that Obama must pass serious and comprehensive energy and climate bill to be a successful president, then the time is now. As Greg Sargent who blogs at WashPost’s The Plum Line writes:
“If not now, when? If not us, who?”
Obama employed that line to great effect in the home stretch of the health-care debate, using it to prick the historical consciences of Dem lawmakers who were skittish about supporting reform. The confluence of historical circumstances could make it an even more effective argument to push the Senate to act on comprehensive climate change legislation.
The new Pew poll shows as clearly as you could want how fertile conditions are for this argument. While it does find strong support for expanded offshore drilling, it also finds that 87 percent of Americans favor energy legislation that would force utilities to produce more from renewable energy sources. And it finds that fully two-thirds, 66 percent, support limits on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions….
If the Gulf crisis isn’t enough to prompt action by Congress, what would be enough?
… the conditions for passing climate change legislation, as difficult as it looks, are as good in Congress as they may be for a long time to come….
If not now, when?
Ironically, that was the same exact irrefutable argument Lindsey Graham articulated before he started making Paula Abdul sound “coherent.”
For instance, here is how Graham ended his remarks to Business Advocacy Day for Jobs, Climate & New Energy Leadership in D.C. in early February:
The world is moving, pollution is growing, we’ve got a chance to get ahead and lead. If we wait too long and if we try to take half measures as the preferred route on all these hard problems they just get worse.
My challenge to you and to myself is to not let this moment pass. This is the best opportunity I’ve seen in my political lifetime for a Republican and Democrat to do something bold and meaningful.
Why did I get involved in this? I ask myself that a lot. I saw an opportunity. I’ve become convinced that carbon pollution is a bad thing, not a good thing, and it can be dealt with, and we can create jobs.
This is the time, this is the Congress, and this is the moment. So if we retreat and try to just go to the energy only approach which will never yield the legislative results that I want on energy independence, then we just made the problem worse.
What Congress is going to come up here and do all these hard things?
Who are these people in the future? Because we constantly count on them.
I don’t know who they are. I’ve yet to find them.
So I guess it falls to me and you.
So let’s do it.
Well, Graham appears to have lamely abandoned his own challenge, embracing the too-little, too-late Lugar bill.
But if Graham and a few other GOPers can rally around Lugar, then Obama certainly has a legitimate shot at getting 60 votes for Lugar plus some sort of a shrinking carbon cap through the Senate, even if it requires strengthening the bill in conference and having it pass both houses in the lame-duck session after the election.
Yes, the extra-constitutional 60 vote “requirement” in the Senate can potentially do in even the greatest of leaders in our current political climate. So as I wrote back in January:
Ultimately, the President is going to have to do exactly what he did in Copenhagen if he wants a bill — negotiate directly with leaders and iron out a deal with specific language.
This speech tonight will set the tone for the tough messaging and personal lobbying that is to come. After 100,000,000 gallons of oil and 1,000,000 gallons of dispersants dumped in our Gulf, I want to see the damn pony!
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BP relief ship struck by lightning, bum luck
Oil execs turn against BP in Congress hearing
by Rep. Ed Markey.
57 days ago, in the dead of night, the worst environmental nightmare in U.S. history began.
The spill cam, requested by Congress, has brought the horror into homes across the country, as we watch tens of thousands of barrels of oil billowing into the Gulf every day.
For years, the oil industry swore this could never happen. We were told that technology had advanced, that offshore drilling was safe.
BP said they didn’t think the rig would sink. It did.
They said they could handle an Exxon Valdez-sized spill every day. They couldn’t.
BP said the spill was 1,000 barrels per day. It wasn’t. And they knew it.
Now the other big oil companies, testifying in Congress today, contend that this was an isolated incident. They say a similar disaster could never happen to them.
And yet it is this kind of Blind Faith—which is ironically the name of an actual rig in the Gulf—that has led to this kind of disaster.
In preparation for this hearing, Congress reviewed the oil spill safety response plans for all the top five oil companies.
What we found was that Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell, and BP have response plans that are virtually identical. The plans cite identical response capabilities and tout identical ineffective equipment. In some cases, they use the exact same words and made the exact same assurances.
The covers of the five response plans are different colors, but the content is 90 percent identical.
Like BP, three other companies include references to protecting walruses, which have not called the Gulf of Mexico home for 3 million years.
Two other plans are such dead ringers for BP’s that they list a phone number for the same expert—a man who has been dead since 2005.
The American people deserve oil safety plans that are ironclad and not boilerplate.
We now know the oil industry, and the government agency tasked with regulating them, determined that there was a zero chance that this kind of undersea disaster could ever happen.
When you believe that there is zero chance of a disaster happening, you do zero disaster planning. And the oil industry has invested nearly zero time and money into developing safety and response efforts.
The oil companies amassed nearly $289 billion dollars in profits over the last three years. They spent $39 billion to explore for new oil and gas.
Yet the average investment in research and development for safety, accident prevention, and spill response was a paltry $20 million per year, less than one-tenth of one percent of their profits.
The oil companies may think its fine to produce carbon copies of their safety plans, but the American people expect and deserve more. It is time to expect more from the oil industry. And that needs to start today.
First, Congress must ensure that there is unlimited liability for oil spills by oil companies. While we try to cap this well, we must lift the cap on oil industry liability.
Second, Congress must also enact wide-ranging safety reforms for offshore drilling. If oil companies are going to pursue ultra-deep drilling, we must ensure that it is ultra-safe and that companies can respond ultra-fast.
Third, the free ride is over. Oil companies need to pay their fair share to drill on public land. Right now every single one of the companies here today and dozens of others are drilling for free in the Gulf of Mexico on leases that will cost American taxpayers more than $50 billion dollars in lost royalties.
Fourth, we must ensure that new technologies are developed for capping wells, boosting safety and cleaning up spills. I will soon introduce the Oil SOS Act to go along with the SURF fund to ensure that we have 21st century technologies in place for 21st century drilling risks.
And finally, America must move to a safer clean energy future so that we don’t have to rely as much on oil to power our cars and our economy. The House has acted, passing the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy & Security Act. Every day we delay action, China moves ahead in wind technology. The Germans create more solar jobs. Worst of all, American consumers send half a billion dollars a day to OPEC and countries that wish us harm.
In overwhelming numbers, the American people are ready to start working our way to a clean energy future. They want to wake up from BP’s oil spill nightmare to a future powered by clean, safe energy solutions.
Related Links:
Daily terror: We’re learning nothing from Gulf spill
PR lessons from a 1960 oil trade group [VIDEO]
BP oil exec says fish are getting rich [VIDEO] [HILARIOUS]
by Grist.
Fresh from his fourth—and first overnight—trip to the Gulf, President Barack Obama delivered his first ever Oval Office address to the nation on Tuesday night. The president spoke about a new head for the hapless Minerals Management Service, a Gulf restoration fund, and the need to escape our fossil fuel present and embrace a renewable energy future.
Throughout the president’s speech and the ensuing Q&A period with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, our intrepid commentariat (David Roberts, Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones, Sierra Club Executive Director Mike Brune, and Josh Freed, director of the Clean Energy Program at Third Way) chatted with nearly 500 readers. If you missed the live chat, you can still read the transctript. If you were there, re-live the magic!
<a href=“http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php/option=com_mobile/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=20bb955db4” mce_href=“http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php/option=com_mobile/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=20bb955db4” >Live Commentary from Grist’s David Roberts on Obama’s First Oval Office Address</a>
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by Tom Philpott.
Maryn McKenna is arguably the premier U.S. public health journalist. Not many on the beat can boast a bio like this:
Maryn McKenna’s newsroom nickname is Scary Disease Girl, and she earned it. She has reported from inside a field hospital in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, a village on Thailand’s west coast that was erased by the Indian Ocean tsunami, a CDC team investigating the anthrax-letter attacks on Capitol Hill, a graveyard within the Arctic Circle that held victims of the 1918 flu, a malaria hospital in Malawi, and a polio-eradication team in India. She helped uncover the first cases of Gulf War Syndrome and trigger the first Congressional hearings on the illness, and her stories on a small Midwestern town’s cancer clusters helped residents win a nuclear-harm lawsuit against the U.S. government.
(“Scary Disease Girl”? I wonder what they call me at Grist HQ…)
In recent years, McKenna has turned her attention to MRSA, the antibiotic-resistant staph strain that kills 19,000 Americans every year—more than AIDS. As readers of my Meat Wagon series of posts know all too well, MRSA has a major food angle: Today, as much as 70 percent of antibiotics consumed in the United States go into concentrated-animal feedlot operations, or CAFOs, and these vast, factory-scale animal farms have been shown to harbor a novel MRSA strain.
In this edition of Victual Reality, the podcast about food politics, Maryn and I discussed her new book, Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA.
(The podcast is a production of Edible Radio; it and other interesting food-politics podcasts can be downloaded here.)
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by Janet Redman.
Tonight, President Obama addresses the nation to talk about how his administration will hold BP accountable for the damages incurred by what has become the worst oil spill in U.S. history, and how he plans to reregulate the oil industry. The American public will be looking for bold action.
Obama has a golden opportunity to show the growing ranks of disappointed progressives and moderates that his administration is about changing politics as usual—if he and his advisors have the political courage to seize the moment. Obama must harness the public outrage at BP and momentum toward economic revitalization to make concrete steps toward U.S. leadership in the global transition away from dirty fuel to clean, renewable energy.
In less than two weeks, leaders from the 20 wealthiest countries (the G20) will meet in Toronto to discuss global economic recovery and closely related matters such as climate change. Outstanding on their agenda—as proposed by Obama last September—is the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies.
Worldwide, developed countries spend up to $100 billion a year making oil, coal, and gas cheaper for energy companies through tax breaks, subsidized loans, price controls, and other giveaways. Estimates of federal handouts to the U.S. oil industry range as high as $39 billion a year.
The idea behind fossil fuel subsidies is to keep the cost of producing energy low so that company profits are high enough to incentivize continued production. That might have made sense when oil, coal, and gas were the only feasible sources of power to run the American economy. You could have even argued for oil company handouts or when the price of a barrel of oil was only $18—as it was in 1995 when Congress established a royalty waiver program for deepwater drilling. But today the price of oil is more than $70 a barrel. BP just posted a $6.1 billion profit in the first quarter. And scientists, governments, and schoolchildren around the world understand that burning fossil fuels is putting the future at risk from climate change. Enough is enough.
Obama should return to his commitment tonight, outlining not only how to regulate the out of control oil industry, but how to shift the tens of billions of taxpayer dollars going to dirty energy each year into safer, cleaner, and more secure energy sources in the U.S. and abroad.
But he’s got to get the cuts right. The OECD—a group of 31 industrialized countries—has its eye on consumer subsidies in the developing world. Eliminating tax exemptions that make energy accessible in impoverished countries and communities should be off the table until government handouts to oil, coal, and gas companies raking in billions have ended.
And we should make sure that these incentives go to the right place—to deployment of proven technologies like wind and solar, research and development of innovative ideas, and to small and medium sized energy companies that can help decentralize and localize the energy sector, making energy companies accountable to the communities in which they operate.
In his speech to an anxious country, Obama should lay out how federal support for a vibrant clean energy economy will usher in a new era of environmental and economic security.
Getting the right laws on the books, and then enforcing them, is clearly critical to avoiding another environmental and economic disaster like BP’s Deepwater Horizon explosion. No question. But until we collectively kick our oil addiction—and dependence on other dirty energy like coal, gas, and nuclear power—we can expect to continue reading headlines like “Deadly Coal Mining Disaster in West Virginia,” “Radioactive Waste from Nation’s Oldest Nuclear Power Plant Reaches Aquifer in New Jersey,” and “Massive Oil Slick Hits Battered Gulf Coast.” Obama can help us start tonight.
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by Agence France-Presse.
PENSACOLA, Fla.—President Barack Obama will seek to project a commanding aura and a way out of the U.S. oil disaster, marking an “inflection” point in the crisis with his debut Oval Office address on Tuesday.
Two months into America’s worst environmental catastrophe, Obama must show he now is in full control of a situation threatening grave damage to the ecosystem and economy of the Gulf Coast, as well as his own political prospects.
The prime-time speech at 8:00 pm is the key plank of a carefully choreographed week in which Obama has toured three states badly hit by the disaster, and will hold top BP executives to account in the White House.
Seeking to blunt lingering criticisms that he was slow and ineffective early in the unfolding disaster, Obama will fly to the White House following oil disaster briefings in Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.
Before heading to Washington, Obama on Tuesday inspected the dazzling white sands of Pensacola Beach, which is in the path of the oil spill.
His motorcade drove past onlookers summing up a broad range of opinion on his spill performance.
One man held up a sign reading “Enough photo-ops.” Another sign read “Save our Beach” while another one read “Thanks for your support Mr. President.”
A senior U.S. official billed the speech as coming at an “inflection point” in the crisis unleashed by the oil slick spewing out of a well which ruptured when the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in April, killing 11 workers.
Obama will lay out how to deal with oil that is already clogging the waters off the southern U.S. coast and has cut a swathe through bird and marine life, and suggest how to “ultimately restore” Gulf beaches, fishing grounds, and wetlands.
The official said Obama would also outline financial efforts to “help and protect those suffering economically as a result of this disaster, particularly in the claims process.”
The White House has been pushing BP to set up an independently monitored multi-billion dollar escrow account to quickly process claims by people whose livelihoods have been badly hit by the spill.
Obama said Monday he hopes to reach a deal on the fund before huddling with top BP executives in the White House on Wednesday.
After dwelling on immediate challenges thrown up by the disaster, Obama will also venture into more difficult political territory—the regulation of the oil industry and the reformulation of U.S. energy policy.
“He will outline the changes he believes are necessary to ensure that a disaster such as this never happens again,” the official said. “He will talk about what our fundamental energy approach must be going forward to reduce our dependence on oil and fossil fuels.”
It remains unclear, however, if Obama will succeed in injecting new momentum behind a climate bill which is stalled in the Senate and opposed by Republicans and some Democrats.
The Senate minority Republican leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday fired an early warning shot to Obama before the speech.
“If early reports are true, the president will use his remarks not as an occasion to unite the nation in a common effort to solve the immediate problem, but to make his case for a new national energy tax commonly known as cap-and-trade.”
The oil spill has already become a defining feature of an administration which is itself no stranger to deep crises, having taken office with the U.S. economy in the deepest finacial hole for generations.
So far, Obama’s nationwide political approval ratings do not appear to have been badly impacted by the oil spill—sitting at around or just below 50 percent—where they have been for months.
But a new poll released Tuesday pointed to political problems for Obama’s Democratic Party in mid-term elections in November.
The survey for National Public Radio showed that Obama’s approval ratings were much lower in competitive districts in the congressional elections than they were nationally.
Fifty-four percent of likely battleground voters disapproved of Obama’s performance compared to 40 percent who approved, according to the survey.
Related Links:
A mildly contrarian take on Obama’s Oval Office speech
BP relief ship struck by lightning, bum luck
Oil execs turn against BP in Congress hearing
