A traveling exhibition about the sounds and songs of life
by Randy Rieland.
Nothing like the revelation of precious metals in a far off land to get the hyperbole flowing—and stir up the cynics. And so it goes in the wake of James Risen’s New York Times report that the U.S. has identified nearly a trillion dollars in mineral deposits throughout Afghanistan:
The previously unknown deposits—including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold, and critical industrial metals like lithium—are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.
Risen also quoted a Pentagon memo suggesting that politically unstable, economically-bleak, peace-challenged Afghanistan could one day become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.”
Now that’s a metaphor to chew on.
Recharge the batteries: Visions of a lithium mother lode charged up business writers like Fast Company‘s Kit Eaton, who called the discovery “fabulous” and went on to explain why lithium is a metal we’ve learned to love. Charles Cooper, writing for CBS News, chimed in that the world’s electronics manufacturers were particularly juiced by the news:
Hyperbole aside, there’s a reason for that kind of optimism: In a world where smartphones and mobile computing devices increasingly are the norm, lithium is an indispensable battery technology. Future technology obviously may shift, but right now batteries based on lithium technology are the most popular rechargeable batteries around.
That’s so last spring: It’s probably worth noting at this point that it was barely three months ago (in March), that Lawrence Wright, in his New Yorker article titled “Lithium Dreams,” noted that Bolivia has started calling itself the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.”
And that’s so 1985: Not everyone is titillated. Marc Ambinder, writing for The Atlantic, points out that Afghanistan being pockmarked with mineral deposits is old news—the Soviets knew as far back as 1985 —and suspects that the Pentagon’s revelation has more to do with trying to shed a little sunshine on a country where things aren’t going so well at the moment. Writes Ambinder:
What better way to remind people about the country’s potential bright future—and by people I mean the Chinese, the Russians, the Pakistanis, and the Americans—than by publicizing or re-publicizing valid (but already public) information about the region’s potential wealth?
Dream on: Then there are the skeptics who think that Afghanistan becoming Lithium Land is the longest of long shots. Writing for the Los Angeles Times Paul Richter and Julian Barnes quote a particularly dubious mining official:
“Sudan will host the Winter Olympics before these guys get a trillion dollars out of the ground,” said Luke Popovich of the National Mining Assn., which represents U.S. mining companies.
Ac-cen-tu-ate the negative: And here an especially dyspeptic take from The Economist’s “Democracy in America” blog:
Unfortunately, rather than a highly educated, secular, demographically homogenous monolingual society, Afghanistan is a mostly illiterate, fanatically religious society composed of rival ethnicities. Plus, it’s ruled by a government, or a collection of governing cliques, that already may be the most corrupt on Earth—and that was before they found out there’s a trillion dollars waiting for whoever gets the keys to the Ministry of Mines.
Oh no, not the curse! Haley Cohen, writing for Vanity Fair, raises the specter of the dreaded “resource curse” that has plagued mineral-rich countries such as Nigeria and the Congo. He quotes Michael Klare, author of Resource Wars and Blood and Oil.
When you’re talking about poor countries and you suddenly discover a source of great wealth—could be oil or gold or diamonds—everybody is going to want to get control over that wealth, so immediately there’s a potential for civil conflict. The hope is that the whole country will benefit, but what usually happens is that some gang, or political party, or clique, will monopolize control over that source of wealth and use force to maintain its monopoly at the expense of everyone else.
Thus wrote the rabble: For their part, readers of Risen’s original New York Times story, tended to line up with the skeptics. Here’s a sampling of their comments:
“What Afghanistan needs now is a good Minerals Management Service like we have. Something tells me that we aren’t going to be leaving Afghanistan for a long, long time.”-Jake Linco, Media, Pa.
“God help them. It’s never good for a country to have raw materials the USA wants.”-SKV, New York.
“Yeah, check out the Congo, Nigeria and other ‘resource-rich’ countries to find out what the future holds for a country with negligible social structure.”-Cristo, Berkeley.
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by Tom Philpott.
As of June 9, BP had applied at least 1.1 million gallons of toxic chemical dispersants to address its ongoing oil leak in the Gulf. That’s the most that has been used in one place since 1979, when the Mexican government dropped between 1 million and 2.5 million gallons on a leak off the coast of Vera Cruz, the EPA reports.
As I reported in early May, the dispersant products, branded Corexit 9527A and Corexit 9500A, were made exclusively by a former Exxon subsidiary now owned by a company called Nalco. Exxon researchers had already acknowledged that they were significantly toxic for aquatic life. But just how toxic was mysterious—particularly for humans. The publicly available data sheets for both products revealed that they have the “potential to bioconcentrate,” but added this stunner: “No toxicity studies have been conducted on this product.”
Information about their precise composition was also vague, clouded by a veil of secrecy based on “proprietary” concerns. I found the information scarcity outrageous. A private company fouls a vast public resource and then dumps hundreds of thousands of gallons of a toxic chemical potion into it. Doesn’t the public have the right to know precisely what’s in that potion?
To me, the real culprit in the dispersants story wasn’t BP or Nalco. Those companies are beholden to their shareholders to maximize profit. BP is working frantically to limit its liability from an ecological snafu of nearly bottomless proportions. Keeping as much oil off of shorelines and underwater, where its damage is hard to quantify, serves the company’s economic interests. As for Nalco, its chief interest is to move product. Releasing precise information about its dispersants evidently works against that goal.
The real culprits in the dispersants affair, I argued, were the federal agencies overseeing the spill response: NOAA and EPA. They are duty-bound to protect the public and the Gulf ecosystem. Rather than cowering to the side, fretting about “proprietary” considerations, they should have been demanding Corexit samples and performing or commissioning studies. And if Nalco refused to hand over samples, the federal watchdogs should have bared their teeth and sued.
Even if the companies managed to fight off the challenges in court, they’d be exposing themselves to a potential PR firestorm—and likely be shamed into behaving decently.
After my initial burst of reporting, I spent a week in California at the end of May, got immersed in other things, and lost track of the story. Honestly, I assumed that with increasing media attention, the EPA and NOAA would wrestle control over dispersant use from BP and impose a rational policy.
Memo to self: Don’t be so naive ever again. The Public Radio International show “Living on Earth” reports that Nalco still won’t release Corexit samples to independent researchers. LOE staff talked to no fewer than five university-based scientists who have been denied access to Corexit. These people are trying to answer critical questions: When you combine Corexit with crude oil in a seawater medium, how does the resulting mixture behave? How quickly does it dissipate? How much oxygen does its decomposition tie up, potentially making life inhospitable to marine life? How does the toxicity of the oil/Corexit mixture compare to that of the individual components? And so on.
University of Georgia marine sciences professor Samantha Joye had this to say:
In terms of understanding the impacts of dispersants on microbial activity I and many others are still trying to get samples of the various dispersants that are being used. I’ve been unable to secure any so far.
Added toxicology professor Ron Kendall, who directs the Institute of Environmental and Human Health at Texas Tech University:
We attempted to acquire the Corexit from the manufacturer and basically were given a roadblock and have not been able to obtain it.
Meanwhile, as Nalco stonewalls independent researchers, the EPA is evidently getting quite worried about the toxicity of the dispersants—and BP is brazenly ignoring the agency’s requests on their use.
First, back on May 20, there was this widely reported EPA “directive” for BP to “identify and use a less toxic and more effective dispersant from the list of EPA authorized dispersants.” BP responded like a spoiled teenager shurgging off an empty parental threat. The answer, in a word: no.
And now, according to Brad Johnson of the Wonk Room, BP is brazenly ignoring explicit EPA requests on dispersant use. Johnson points to yet another EPA directive, this one demanding that the company “eliminate the surface application of dispersants” and limit subsea applications to “not more than 15,000 gallons in a single calendar day,” with a goal to reducing daily use to 75 percent of that low rate.
In other words, the EPA is calling for the near elimination of dispersants as a tool for addressing the spill—evidence that the agency is highly skeptical of their benefits. And BP’s response? Wonk Room’s Johnson reports:
A Wonk Room analysis of information released by the oil disaster command center found that the May 26 directive has not been followed—120,000 gallons of dispersant have been used at the surface, total use is only down by 25 percent, and on Sunday, June 6, BP used 33,000 gallons of subsea dispersant, more than twice the allowed amount.
Confronted about the disobedience, Johnson reports, the EPA responded that BP personnel “blamed ‘mechanical difficulties’ but do not expect it to happen again.’”
“Mechanical difficulties”? Sorry, that’s hollow. It might have made sense a week after the “directive.” Two weeks after, not so much.
As Tim Dickinson’s Rolling Stone exposé (summarized here) shows in depressing detail, the Obama administration has proved unable to stand up to the oil industry on matters of substance both before and after the Deepwater blowout. (The administration’s craven acceptance of BP’s policy of passing on clearly false “estimates” of the leak rate are just one example.) In addition to the ConocoPhillips director now co-leading the administration’s investigation of the disaster, the administration last year plucked no fewer than two execs from longtime perches at BP and gave them high positions in the Department of Energy and the Mineral Mining Services.
If Obama wants to credibly declare independence from the industry and show he’s serious about shifting from oil to cleaner sources, wresting control over the dispersants issue from BP would make a good start.
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by David Roberts.
Here’s a visceral way to represent potential energy savings in the built environment:
That’s via the folks at Energy Savvy.
If only the Senate had some sort of legislative strategy that could put this information to use ... oh, wait, it does! Home Star legislation will spur the retrofit of 3.3 million homes, enough to save the energy floating in the Gulf 44 times over, at roughly 1/40 the cost of mopping it up. As we speak, that legislation is languishing in the Senate. If its energy efficiency provisions are improved, the coming Senate energy bill could save even more energy and money. Perhaps senators could spend less time rending garments and encouraging Obama to Act Angry and more time passing the energy solutions sitting in front of them.
———
Here’s Energy Savvy’s explanation of the graphic:
• The energy contained in the biggest oil spill in U.S. history is equal to the energy that just 75,000 homes waste in a single year.
• The estimated cost to clean up the oil spill ($40 B) is many times greater than the cost to retrofit 75,000 houses ($1 B) and save the energy equivalent of the gulf oil spill every year.
• 75,000 houses = mid-sized U.S. city or large suburb of a major city, like Chattanooga, Tenn. or Providence, R.I.
• The oil spill, since it began in April 2010, has leaked between 25 - 50 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. We’re using a conservative estimate of around 30 million gallons for our calculations.
• A typical house wastes 30 percent more energy than an efficient one does. On average, that means that 51 MMBtu’s are being wasted by a typical home every year.
• A typical home energy retrofit costs around $10,000 per house— before any utility or governments energy rebates are applied. A home energy retrofit doesn’t just save energy for a single year—it prevents waste year after year on an ongoing basis once it’s done.
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by David Woolner.
Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0.
In the wake of recent revelations that far more oil is spilling out into the Gulf than was originally estimated, and as it now appears more and more likely that BP will not be able to completely shut off the flow of oil until perhaps as late as August, fears about the economic impact of the disaster have intensified. With roughly a third of the federal waters in the Gulf closed to fishing, the seafood industry has perhaps been the hardest hit by the disaster. But tourist bookings as far away as Florida are down as well, with some hotels reporting a 50 percent cancellation rate.
Then there is the energy industry. In spite of the oil catastrophe, the Obama administration’s decision to halt shallow drilling until new safety regulations are in place and to enforce a minimum six month moratorium on deep water drilling has come under growing criticism — even from some lawmakers — because of its potential impact on jobs. Indeed, in an interview today on PBS’s NewsHour, Senator John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee echoed the concerns of his colleague, Senator Mary Landrieu (D-La.), when he said that he agreed with her assessment that “even a temporary pause” in offshore drilling would “hurt the economy at a time when we’re dealing with 9.7 percent unemployment in this country.”
This notion — that in hard times environmental issues must take a back seat to economic concerns — is a myth that environmentalists have struggled with for decades. What is less well known is that FDR was the one president who did more to face this false dichotomy and in the process develop a whole new approach to human interaction with the environment. It was Roosevelt, after all, who had to deal with the twin crises of the collapse of the U.S. economy and the environmental catastrophe known as the Dust Bowl. And, as a man raised in the pastoral countryside of the Hudson River Valley, who possessed a deep appreciation for the productivity of the land and an equally strong belief — like Thomas Jefferson before him — that democracy had its roots in the fundamental ties between the people and the land, watching the soil of the Midwest blow away in the wind tore at his very being. Indeed, for FDR the collapse of the economy and the environmental degradation of the land in the Midwest and in other parts of the country were intimately linked; so much so that he remained convinced throughout these years that it would be impossible to restore one without restoring the other.
As a consequence, and as the environmental historian, Richard N.L. Andrews, has written, “Roosevelt’s personal vision of integrating economic and environmental restoration” became one of the core principles of the New Deal. “No other President,” he insists, “has focused so personally or effectively on the restoration of environmental damage, nor on the principle that such restoration is integral and beneficial to economic recovery rather than in conflict with economic priorities.”
For many years, of course, the New Deal — with its dam building and emphasis on the use of administrative expertise as opposed to judicial oversight in its approach to the environment — was seen as something of a blank space in the history of modern environmentalism. But in recent years this view has changed dramatically. Having recognized that in a world of limited natural resources human interaction with nature is inevitable, modern environmentalists, like FDR, have come to see the environment not as a realm set apart from humans, but as the field for human action, inextricably linked with the human community, economy, and system of values. For FDR then, restoring the environment and restoring the economy were part of the same process; a process that he began within days of assuming office. One of the hallmarks of this effort was the creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) on March 31, 1933, less than a month after his inauguration. This was followed shortly thereafter by the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which represents the Roosevelt Administration’s first great effort in regional planning. The TVA took the unusual step of combining public power and conservation in an area comprised of nearly 300,000 acres of land in seven states. Its immediate purpose was to control flooding in the vast area of the Tennessee River and its tributaries through the construction of a series of dams and reservoirs; but it also improved river navigation, generated electricity, and sought to restore a vast watershed decimated by excessive timber cutting, irresponsible farming, and largely unregulated coal mining through soil conservation and reforestation. In the process it also provided jobs for thousands of workers, including 6,000 from the CCC alone.
This multipurpose approach to solving both an environmental and economic problem can be seen in the work of the CCC as well. Between 1933 and 1942, when the program ended, the CCC planted over 3 billion trees (including the vast shelterbelt from Texas to the Dakotas that brought the Dust Bowl to an end), constructed roughly 100,000 miles of road, restored 80 million acres of farmland, laid hundreds of miles of telephone lines, created nearly 800 state parks, and restored nearly 4,000 historic buildings. In total, it employed more than three million individuals (who enlisted in the program for a minimum of six months), mostly from blighted urban areas, who were required to send the majority of their pay ($25 out of the $30 they were paid monthly) back home to help support their families. In this way, the program became a means both to restore rural as well as urban America. The CCC built libraries for the camps and offered its workers classes (with a 90 percent enrollment rate), and taught more than 100,000 men how to read and write. It was also perhaps the most popular program of the New Deal (with an over 80 percent approval rating from the American public) and would help inspire later generations to establish such programs as the Peace Corps and Americorp.
Both the TVA (which is still in operation today) and the CCC were federally funded programs established within the first hundred days of the Roosevelt presidency. They were inspired by the belief that in times of environmental and economic crisis, the federal government can and must act aggressively in the public interest. They were also enormously successful in achieving their fundamental aims of helping to restore the social, economic, and environmental well-being of vast regions of the country. As we try to come to terms with this new environmental catastrophe that has unfortunately struck a critical region of the nation, there are certainly lessons that can be drawn from these two extraordinary and unprecedented programs that emerged in the New Deal. Our experience in the Gulf to date has proven that mere government oversight of a largely private sector effort to deal with this disaster will not be enough. Nor should we fall victim to the false view that such a catastrophe is the unfortunate but inevitable consequence of the paramount need for energy and economic development in a time of high unemployment. Franklin Roosevelt once said that those who allow or purposely destroy the natural resources of a region should also be seen as destroyers of “the liberty of the community … destroyers of his neighbor’s happiness [and] prosperity.” British Petroleum has destroyed the liberty of the Gulf Coast community, but to restore this region to its full health the federal government should take a lesson from the New Deal and act much more forcefully in the public interest. The American people understand this. They are ready and eager to do whatever it takes to make this region whole again and in all likelihood would support a comprehensive, multifaceted federally funded effort to clean up the Gulf coast along the lines of the CCC and TVA.
One gets the sense that President Obama knows this, as it was less than a year ago that he reflected on the “large-heartedness” of the American people, of their ability “to stand in other people’s shoes,” of their belief “that in this country, hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play; and an acknowledgment that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise.” For the inhabitants of Gulf Coast there is no question that such a time has arrived. The president should heed his own words and deliver. It times of great crisis the American people expect no less.
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by Brad Johnson.
Cross-posted from the Wonk Room
Center for American Progress senior fellow Van Jones believes that the American public want to be “called to service” by President Barack Obama to respond to the Gulf oil disaster. Appearing on TV One’s Washington Watch with Roland Martin, Van Jones described the challenge the president faces in moving from responding directly to BP’s environmental catastrophe to providing leadership for the nation. Obama will “use his first Oval Office speech Tuesday night to outline a plan to legally compel BP to create an escrow account to compensate businesses and individuals for their losses from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.” More importantly, Jones said, Obama needs to provide clear leadership for the American people:
The country’s frustrated, and the president has not had his megaphone moment. Remember the last president. After 9-11, people were very frustrated. They said, you know, “Where is the president?” et cetera, et cetera. He couldn’t find his voice. And then he’s stumbling at the megaphone moment. And he stood up, and he said, “They’re gonna hear from us,” you know, “soon.” And then the country said, “Okay. He gets it.”
The president has not yet had his megaphone moment. When he has it, things will calm down, but in the meantime, what we wind up doing is distracting ourselves with, “Was he mad enough?” “Is he not mad enough?” “Well, he said ‘ass.’” “Well, he said ‘jackass’ about Kanye. Well, let’s talk about Kanye.”
People actually just want to be called to service: “What are we supposed to do, Mr. President? And we will do it.” That’s what’s missing.
Watch it:
Obama agrees with Van Jones. “In the same way that our view of our vulnerabilities and our foreign policy was shaped profoundly by 9/11,” the president told Politico, “I think this disaster is going to shape how we think about the environment and energy for many years to come.” Van Jones also predicted that “people are going to be shocked” by Obama’s “passion” in his address to the American public tomorrow:
You’re going to see him down, boots on the ground. You’re going to see him speaking more from his heart, and people are going to be shocked when they actually hear how much passion this president has to see a foreign company come over here, corrupt our government, kill innocent workers, slag up the coastline, destroy the ecology and economy in an American region that has been a jewel for us. When you hear his passion, I think people are going to be shocked. And then we’re not going to be talking about the profanity; we’re going to be talking about the profundity—of having a president that cares as much as the president does care.
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by Daniel J. Weiss.
President Barack Obama has made four trips to visit gulf state communities affected by the BP disaster and now plans to give his first-ever Oval Office speech to the nation this Tuesday evening to address the issue. This manmade calamity threatens the nation’s economy, health, and environment. This is also a crucial moment in the BP catastrophe, which threatens to swamp his domestic agenda. But it also provides an opportunity for President Obama to demonstrate leadership by tackling all the aspects of this crisis, including taking charge of the clean up, getting more help from BP, providing long-term public health and economic recovery, and adopting an oil-use and pollution-reduction reform agenda to minimize the likelihood of another catastrophe.
Americans are legitimately frustrated and furious about the oil disaster, which has gone on for 55 days and counting. The public has grave concerns about BP’s inability to stop or slow the gusher of oil contaminating the gulf. Opinion polls also show that respondents have an unfavorable view of the government’s handling of the disaster. This is undoubtedly due to the government’s inability to get BP to staunch the flood of oil, even though BP has far more advanced technology and oil blow-out experience than the federal government.
President Obama must use his speech to make a compelling and passionate case for comprehensive clean-up measures as well as an oil reform program. This is essential to galvanize public demand for immediate steps to reduce damage from the disaster, as well as more active support for longer-term oil use and pollution reductions.
The president should also announce dramatic actions to respond to the oil crisis in the gulf, in the following ways, some of which he has already begun:
Take charge of the clean up:
Put the National Guard—along with other military branches—in charge of cleaning up BP oil and begin planning for a tropical storm response as soon as possible since storm season began June 1 Appoint the remaining commissioners to the Bipartisan National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling Create a comprehensive BP oil disaster information clearinghouse at Gulfrecovery.gov so that all information is in one place rather than dispersed on each separate agency websiteDemand more help from BP:
Demand that BP provide more transparency to their efforts and allow media access to all contaminated areas Stop BP, Transocean, and Halliburton from spending money on their own or American Petroleum Institute lobbyists, ads, or campaign contributions, and instead dedicate all funds to clean up and compensationProvide health and economic aid to people in the gulf region:
Put the government, not BP, in charge of the immediate and long-term public health response Establish a $10 billion escrow account for damages, which is less than half the profits BP earned in the last 15 months Eliminate the oil spill liability cap of $75 million for damages from an oil spill Establish a Gulf Recovery Fund, a nongovernmental, nonprofit corporation designed to oversee long-term economic recovery in the affected statesPrevent future blowouts and disasters:
Immediately adopt the safety recommendations in Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s report to the president Adopt most of the protective safeguards for deepwater rigs required by other nations Create a federal research program to develop more reliable “fail safe” leak prevention hardware and oil containment technologiesReduce oil use and pollution:
Implement fuel economy standards and other measures to produce a 7 million barrel per day reduction in oil use by 2030, with interim reduction targets Establish at least a 45 mile-per-gallon fuel economy standard for cars and light trucks in 2020 and establish the first fuel economy standards for medium- and heavy-duty trucks Power trucks and buses with natural gas by enacting the NAT GAS Act Power cars with electricity by enacting the Electric Vehicle Deployment Act Eliminate taxpayer subsides that benefit big oil companies Invoke the Trade Expansion Act to levy a small fee on imported oil and use that revenue for public transit, high-speed rail, and other clean infrastructure Adopt a shrinking limit on global warming pollution from oil-based transportation fuels, coal-fired power plants, and other very large sourcesThese measures should be promptly adopted by BP, the administration, or Congress. The president may lack authority to enforce some of the measures aimed at BP. These efforts will require presidential “jaw boning” to convince BP to comply, such as when President John F. Kennedy convinced the steel industry to reverse its inflationary price increases.
When President Obama took office, he inherited major problems, including a plunging economy, major industries on the brink of collapse, and two wars. The BP oil disaster 15 months into his term was not of his making, either, but was the result of the Bush-Cheney policies to let big oil police itself. Despite the fact that the BP oil disaster is “Cheney’s Katrina,” President Obama made it clear that he will “ultimately take responsibility for solving this crisis. I’m the president and the buck stops with me.”
Tuesday’s nationwide address provides an opportunity for President Obama to do more than take responsibility. He must firmly put the government—and not BP—in charge of all aspects of clean up and recovery. Many in Congress would prefer that the president deal with immediate aspects of the disaster, but basically continue business as usual. But he should ignore the special interests and Washington conventional wisdom.
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.
An oil reform agenda would put America back in charge of its energy future. President Obama must use his inspirational skills to rally support for a 21st century clean energy agenda. The fate of the gulf—and the rest of the nation—depends on his success.
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by Randy Rieland.
Big Banking, Big Auto, and Big Coal have all been to the woodshed in the last little while. Tomorrow it’s Big Oil’s turn. Capitol Hill Summer Theater kicks off in style when the top execs of the world’s five largest oil companies report for their very own congressional beatdown. Leading the drilling grilling will be Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass); Big Oil’s biggest headache has already accused BP of either lying or incompetence on national TV.
While Markey and company meet Big Oil in Washington, Barack Obama returns to the Gulf for his first overnight visit, and uses his first ever Oval Office address to outline a plan for making BP compensate Gulf businesses and residents for their mounting, spill-related losses.
Pundits say tomorrow’s congressional oil hearing could match the drama of the 2008 performance by those crazy auto CEOs who flew to Washington on their private jets to ask for a public bailout. Oops. Some are predicting a reprise of the 1994 cigarette spectacle when tobacco company execs testified under oath that nicotine is not addictive.
We should be so lucky. Chances are what we’ll get from the Top Dogs of Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, and Conoco Phillips is four carefully-parsed versions of “We’re not BP.” (BP chief Lamar McKay would love to do the same, but that would just be too big a whopper.)
We’re way more safer: One message we’re sure to hear is that the Gulf spill was preventable, if only BP had paid as much attention to safety as the other four oil execs will claim their companies do. But let’s get real: Lise Olsen and Eric Nalder in the Houston Chronicle discuss the hundreds of accidents that have occurred on Gulf of Mexico drilling rigs over the past five years, and how little oil companies were penalized.
It was rare for any oil company to pay penalties for problems found in accidents investigated by the MMS, records show. The agency can charge $35,000 per day per violation. But many proposed violations get reduced or dropped during behind-the-scenes reviews. Records show that most final payments were small and took a year or more to collect.
That damn black gold: It’s also likely that the Big Oil Five will be asked about how all that research into biofuels and alternative energy is going. They’ll trot out numbers and talk about potential, but the bottom line is that like the rest of us, they just can’t quit oil. Here’s a reality check from Deborah Gordon and Daniel Sperling, writing in the Washington Post.
And so oil companies are, quite rationally, investing the equivalent of pennies in biofuels and other alternative energies, compared with dollars in unconventional oil prospects. But while they are behaving logically in economic terms, they aren’t serving the public interest. Drilling in uncharted territory is dangerous, as we have seen, and unconventional oil extraction carries the potential for any number of environmental disasters. The current situation in the gulf, where BP was tapping hot, high-pressure oil almost 3 1/2 miles below the ocean floor, is only a prologue to the saga of how complex and costly our oil habit will become, if left unchecked.
For the past six weeks, it’s been all BP, all the time. As the competition prepares to take a turn in the spotlight, here’s a little preview of what they’ve been up to—in the spirit of fairness.
Let it flow: Chevron got back into the spill business this weekend when an underground pipe near Salt Lake City broke Friday night, sending an estimated 21,000 gallons of oil into a nearby creek and coating almost 300 birds in oil. At the beginning of May, a ruptured ExxonMobil pipeline in Nigeria spilled more than a million gallons of oil into the Niger Delta. Residents say the use of dispersants to break up the spill is making people sick.
Tales from the dark
side: Environmentalists are so exercised about the behavior of Chevron
around the world-including its fight against an oil damage lawsuit in
Ecuador—that they’ve published an alternative annual report, titled “The True Cost of Chevron” [PDF].
Money, money, money: And what would a roundup of Big Oil exploits be without profit figures. Here’s what the Big Five made during the 1st quarter of 2010. Drum roll, please ... ExxonMobil: $6.3 billion; BP: $6 billion; Shell: $4.9 billion; Chevron: $4.5 billion; Conoco Phillips: $2 billion.
The sweet smell of excess.
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Waking America from the BP nightmare
by Agence France-Presse.
GULFPORT, Miss.—U.S. President Barack Obama framed the Gulf of Mexico oil spill as an environmental 9/11 as he began a tour of the region Monday to stem growing political fallout from the catastrophe.
In an interview with the Washington-based news organization Politico, Obama vowed to push for a radical overhaul of U.S. energy policy that would reduce America’s addiction to foreign oil and dangerously deep drilling.
“In the same way that our view of our vulnerabilities and our foreign policy was shaped profoundly by 9/11, I think this disaster is going to shape how we think about the environment and energy for many years to come,” Obama said.
“One of the biggest leadership challenges for me going forward is going to be to make sure that we draw the right lessons from this disaster.”
The comments marked the start of a crucial week for the president as he responds to charges that his leadership has been found wanting in the face of America’s worst environmental disaster.
After visiting Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida for the first time since the disaster began eight weeks ago, the president will seek to regain control of the narrative with his first address to the nation from the Oval Office.
American presidents reserve the formal setting of such prime-time televised addresses for moments of national crises, including wars and disasters.
The Politico interview indicated Obama will use the storied platform on Tuesday evening to implore Congress to pass a major energy and climate bill, showing the tragic events in the Gulf can be a vehicle for positive change.
He pledged to “move forward in a bold way in a direction that finally gives us the kind of future-oriented ... visionary energy policy that we so vitally need and has been absent for so long.”
Obama will then meet BP bosses at the White House on Wednesday in an attempt to win important concessions on setting up an escrow account to pay spill claims and an independent panel to oversee the process.
His administration has launched an aggressive campaign in recent days to show it is in command of the response to the spill, firing off a volley of letters to BP and making a series of stringent demands.
BP met a 48-hour ultimatum Sunday to present a new plan to roughly triple the amount of oil it is capturing from a ruptured Gulf of Mexico well by the end of June to more than 50,000 barrels—2.1 million gallons—a day.
“After being directed by the administration to move more quickly, BP is now stepping up its efforts to contain the leaking oil,” a senior administration official said.
The oil company is currently siphoning up about 15,000 barrels of oil a day to a ship on the surface, about half the amount believed to be streaming into the Gulf.
In its letter, BP outlined plans to reinforce efforts to suck up the oil by bringing a vessel for producing and storing oil from South America, two additional tankers from Europe, and a 3,800-foot, six-inch flexible pipe from Brazil.
The outlines of the plan were produced as Obama departed on his fourth visit and first overnight trip to the Gulf since an April 20 explosion destroyed the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig, killing 11 workers.
Businesses in the Gulf region, ranging from fishing to tourism, are suffering. Some workers are finding temporary employment with BP to help in the clean-up effort, but longer-term prospects for many are bleak.
Obama’s tour includes a roundtable with local residents who fear losing their livelihoods through the disaster, and an overnight stay in Pensacola, Fla. where tar balls have already sullied a popular beach.
BP has failed several times to seal the flow, and a first relief well that could provide a permanent solution is not expected to be ready until the second week of August at the earliest.
BP’s board was meeting Monday to decide whether to suspend its next dividend payment to shareholders, due on July 27, in a bid to quell growing anger in the United States.
The company’s shares plunged more then 10 percent to 351 pence on Monday as investors fretted over the spiralling cost of the crisis and the future of the group’s shareholder dividend, dealers said.
Many Americans accuse the British energy giant of deliberately underestimating the flow rate to try to reduce its liability, which is worked out by the barrel.
Analysts estimate that including the cleanup, compensation claims, government penalties, and a host of civil lawsuits, BP’s total bill from the catastrophe could reach 100 billion dollars.
Related Links:
Oil execs turn against BP in Congress hearing
The BP oil disaster made a major energy bill more likely, but what about a climate bill?
Waking America from the BP nightmare
A sequence of fair use background images arranged for aesthetic and formal reasons, paired with a short story assignment generated through Amazon's Mechanical Turk in response to the image sequence.
-- FROM THE ONLINE SHOWCASE "MADE IN INTERNET" ORGANIZED BY MARCIN RAMOCKI FOR ARTBOOM FESTIVAL 2010by David Roberts.
This morning Sen. Jeff Merkley will introduce “America Over a Barrel: Solving Our Oil Vulnerability” (PDF) [UPDATE: video below], a policy plan devoted to reducing oil use, at an event at the Center for American Progress. I think it could make a big difference in the debate. To understand why, let’s back up and have a look at where things stand now on climate/energy legislation.
Last week I wrote about the top five things to watch as d-day for legislation approaches. Now three of them have happened. The Murkowski resolution was voted down, but by a small enough margin that it didn’t determine things one way or the other. Reid met with the Senate committee chairs, but there were intractable disagreements and no decisions were made. Lugar introduced his bill, and Lindsey Graham jumped behind it, giving the “energy-only” forces a big push. Obama’s still making the right noises about “comprehensive” legislation, but behind the scenes he and Rahm are putting together a back-up energy-only package. And public anger over the spill doesn’t seem to be directing itself toward climate pollution.
Long story short, things are looking extremely grim for a cap on carbon. (The New York Times’ John Broder says: “probably not.”) It’s up to Reid to pull together a bill out of the many proposals now floating around. My guess is, he heard from Baucus and Bingaman last week that a cap-and-trade proposal can’t pass. He’s meeting with the full Dem caucus this week and he’s likely to hear the same thing, at least from the “centrists” whose votes will make the difference. Right now Obama and the Dems badly need to do something to address the oil spill, and they no doubt fear that a carbon cap would just bog the bill down in gridlock. There is, in other words, virtually no significant political force pushing to include a carbon cap. Just, you know, environmentalists. Oh, and the voices of America’s future generations as they cry out in judgment of our cowardice and myopia.
The question is: if Reid reverts to an energy-only bill as expected, where is he going to get his energy ideas?
Right now there are two main contenders: the bill passed through Bingaman’s Energy Committee, last year, ACELA, and Lugar’s new bill. I haven’t seen an apples-to-apples comparison of those bills yet to make a judgment on which is worse, but suffice to say, neither is particularly good. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, neither bill would yield any more renewable energy than business as usual. Their energy efficiency provisions are a pale shadow of what they could be. And they both go criminally easy on oil and coal. If Reid abandoned a cap and then ended up with a weak energy vehicle cobbled together from these two clunkers, it would be a tragedy on top of a tragedy.
That’s why it’s good that Merkley’s putting his ideas on the table. What’s needed right now are strong progressive energy proposals. If Reid’s going to do energy, he might as well do it right.
Merkley’s proposals are all focused on oil, and for now that’s probably the right strategic play. (If there’s anywhere Reid will be feeling bold, it’s on oil.) His plan would radically ramp up electric vehicle deployment, create ambitious 2030 fuel efficiency goals for vehicles and heavy trucks, ramp up production of advanced biofuels, and shift some heavy trucks to natural gas. Those are all, while ambitious, fairly familiar goals. Added on are some more interesting and overdue progressive initiatives: reform land use to serve people rather than cars, shift freight from trucks to rail and ship, and reduce the use of heating oil in homes through efficiency retrofits.
Perhaps most intriguingly, Merkley suggests the creation of a National Council on Energy Security, similar to the National Economic Council, located in the office of the president. The NCES would insure that energy goals don’t get lost from administration to administration. They would monitor progress, determine whether things could be moving faster, and make recommendations to the President and Congress. This, more than anything else, would count as elevating oil reduction to genuine national priority.
Here’s the reductions and where they would come from:
Of course there’s no guarantee Reid will use any of these ideas. But at least some bold ideas on oil are on the table now, something for progressives to rally around.
What I’d really like to see are a similar bill focused on saving electricity (with a tough EERS) and yet another focused on building out renewable energy (with a tough RES). Those are the two other crucial areas of energy policy, and they too are lacking in ambitious proposals. They’ve repeatedly been watered down in exchange for a cap!
It’s too bad Merkley is virtually alone in pushing genuinely progressive energy policy in the Senate. He can’t do all this stuff himself. Wouldn’t it be nice if a few of the body’s elder statesmen, perhaps with more seniority and committee power, backed him up? Wouldn’t it be nice to have more actual Democrats in the Senate? Sigh.
Anyway, if we’re going to abandon climate responsibility for an energy-only cop out—a disastrous decision that nonetheless looks more and more likely—then let’s get serious about energy. Surely we can manage that much.
———
UPDATE: Here’s video of the event at CAP this morning:
Related Links:
More ideas for Harry Reid: on energy efficiency in Senate energy legislation
Oil, jobs, and the environment—a New Deal solution to the spill?
Rumor watch: Obama has a ‘secret’ plan to redirect the Mississippi River
by David Roberts.
Ratatat is two guys in New York City, one who plays guitar, the other a synthesizer-bass-producer polymath. It’s hard to know exactly what to call their stuff. It’s got programmed dance beats like DJ music, but also guitar, strings, keyboards, and songs that actually sound like songs and not endless loops.
One thing Ratatat has done consistently over four records—the latest creatively titled LP4—is keep vocals out. If you ask me, guest vocals are the death of DJ music. I can barely listen to the last few Chemical Brothers albums for that reason. I like beats; I don’t like screamy divas.
Incidentally, Ratatat did release two absolutely epic remix albums, wherein they put the vocals from popular rap tracks over their own production. (I’m not sure if you can legally buy them, but they’re floating around the tubes if you search.) Those are two of my favorite hip-hop albums of all time. But I’m glad they keep their own albums pure.
The lack of vocals, along with the weird psychedelic dance trance thing, does make Ratatat a love it or hate it kind of thing, though. If you like this kick-ass new song, “Drugs,” you’ll like all the rest. If not, well, your booty must be dead on the inside.
Related Links:
Backstreet Boys and KORN boycott BP. Oil problem solved
BP’s bad romance with the Gulf [VIDEO]
Friday music blogging: The New Pornographers
On June 18th at 7pm, artist Nicoline van Harskamp will present for the first time in the U.S. her performance work Expressive Power Series Part 1: Max Bonner on the Phenomenology of Speech at the New Museum, an event part of Rhizome’s New Silent Series. Her practice investigates the political implications of language and speech, and her pieces often take the form of performance. Van Harskamp took some time to answer a few questions regarding her upcoming Expressive Power Series Part 1: Max Bonner on the Phenomenology of Speech.
What of your other projects and/or research may have laid the groundwork for Expressive Power Series Part 1?
The performance takes as its basis the script for Any Other Business, a 6-hour performance that I made last year, set in a conference center in Amsterdam. I wanted to bring out the central thesis of that work, to summarize it down to an hour in a way. So, for Expressive Power Series Part 1, I took four of its most contradictory and most outspoken characters and planted them in a seminar room of an art center. During the 6-hour Any Other Business piece, the characters never get to speak to each other, but are merely juxtaposed. In the new piece, I wanted them to confront each other directly. And when writing their new lines, they started to say things they didn’t say before.
Things that I learned or heard since last year; things that I am working on for new pieces; things that I was thinking about a long time ago and that suddenly seemed relevant again. They ended up summarizing my own thinking at the moment, in a way representing the voices in my own head that argue over topics that are central to my work. Whiff does it from a radicalist point of view; Alexandra from a humanitarian point of view; Mrs. Malik from an academic point of view; and Max, the consultant, from a reformist or (semi-) scientific point of view. In the piece, I am the person handing the microphones to various characters, indicating who I want to hear at what moment.
As a result of that, perhaps, I simultaneously, and to an equal extent, agree and disagree with each of the characters. To the audience, I want them to be equally sympathetic and unsympathetic. It's a bit like a morality play with rather confused personifications. There is no center to their debate; no plot in the script; nobody wins or loses. In a way that's how thought works (for me, at least) and what makes it productive. I hope that I can extend some of this to the audience, too.
Nicoline van Harskamp, Any Other Business (audience) (Photograph by Willem Sluyterman van Loo)Some of your works derive from real historical circumstances or characters, such as Yours In Solidarity which centered on the anarchist Karl Max Kreuger. Are any of the characters in Expressive Power Series Part 1 based on real, historical figures?
For all my scripts I use existing audio or video footage that I find or that I produce, myself. I interview people or set up a debate and then use the transcriptions. Or I ask for the recordings of a meeting I have attended or heard about. I also write myself into the scripts, but never from a blank Word file. Instead, I record occasions where I speak in public, and then transcribe my own words in order to get a more distanced account of my own language. I try to avoid books and theory, instead using YouTubed conferences or published conversations and speeches. I also like autobiographies as they are set in the first person and can be very useful. At the moment, I am using an anarchist archive, with personal correspondence also set in the first person. There is an informal, improvised quality to the language that I use. The personalities of speakers come through their statements. An unfinished sentence, for example, can be very telling and productive for a script.
But I never represent a single person directly. I do not make re-enactments of existing moments of the distant or recent past. The characters I create are always collages of lots of different people; their lines made up of lots of different voices. The material is so heavily edited, sometimes with three people in one sentence, that it would be hard to quote anyone directly and I doubt that anyone would recognize my source material.
But since you're asking: in Expressive Power Series Part 1, as I said before, I have gone a bit wild on the source material. I have recycled almost everything I have used in the past, and added new things to it. The script has traces of Emma Goldman, Peter Gelderloos, Gayatri Spivak, Marshall Rosenberg, Mikhail Bakhtin, Grinder and Bandler, Michel Foucault, Margaret Thatcher, Hannah Arendt and a very large number of lesser known individuals.
Nicoline van Harskamp, The Power of Listening (stage) (Video Still)With Max Bonner's presentation of Personal Dynamics, it seems like part of the Expressive Power Series Part 1 performance will have a corporate workshop element, one that might be not only directed at the fellow actors but the audience as well. What role will the audience play in this performance?
The pieces don't take place in a theatrical setting, but in contexts appropriate to the subject matter: a conference centre, a seminar room, a classroom. They are places where people normally sit and listen and that have of course some theatrical aspect to them already. But I never try to trick people into thinking that the situation is real. I want the impact of the work to go beyond that sense of confusion. The works are announced as 'a scripted debate', 'a scripted conference', and so on. So really, the ideal audience for me is one that simply attends the performance as if it were attending a seminar or a talk.
In many of my works I plant actors in the audience for theatrical, conceptual and perhaps even dialectical reasons. They interfere with the 'performance' on stage in a very precisely timed and fully scripted way. The actors sometimes complain that I don't allow for any improvisation at all, but creating an impromptu situation that still makes sense in terms of content, takes a lot attention to detail. So the performances are very controlled, much more than you'd think when you see them.
Paradoxically, the more effective the pieces are, the more likely it is that actual audience members take them for participatory works. There's been a lot of 'audience contributions' over time, so by now I built an exit strategy in each piece. That is, I appoint one character to bring the interruption to a hold and give a cue to the others where to continue in the script. At the premiere in Rotterdam, we certainly needed that strategy, as we had an angry walk-out situation. But at that same premiere there were people who, despite knowing me or my work, couldn't help themselves whispering encouraging words to characters having a hard time. It's a real achievement of the actors that they managed to make people suspend their disbelief for the duration of the performance. I hope they'll do that again in New York!
You've already staged Expressive Power Series Part 1 at the Witte de With in Rotterdam this May, and after the June 18th event at the New Museum, the performance will take place again at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in August. You use different cast members in each performance, correct? Does this change or modify the bounds of the performance at all? If so, is that the intent?
The heart of this and all the other performances is the script. A good script can and should be played over and over again, in different versions and interpretations. I've heard actors say that in theater, a piece starts, not ends, with its first performance. That's quite different from an average art production, where you open a show with a work that is finished and done. I would say that the medium of performance has an element of both worlds. The script and concept is unchangeable, but the execution is open to changes. Performance has an element of repetition in it, and restaging it in different contexts is one of its greatest potentials.
Expressive Power Series Part 1 is the first time I work with (partly) different casts for the same piece. Two of the four Dutch cast (native English speakers based in Amsterdam) will be in New York, the other two are local New York actors. Although any skilled and well-cast actor can play this piece, I would never say that actors are interchangeable. Their input makes or breaks the work, I am very well aware. So I think that in New York we might end up with a slightly different piece than in Rotterdam. I am very excited to see what happens.
