What we can't seem to accept is that the oil is leaking and we can't stop it. This doesn't fit the modern narrative in which we can fix anything if we get organized and throw enough money at it. An earthquake devastates Haiti? The world rushes to its aid. A tsunami wreaks havoc? Emergency teams descend. Swine flu? We get inoculated. The economy collapses? Bail it out.
This pattern has become embedded in cable news. First, the story is "Breaking News." Then it's assigned a catch-phrase, a graphic, maybe even its own theme song. Then comes an airplane crash, a hurricane or forest fire to change the subject. We mourn, we repair, we prevent, we blame, we pass laws, we raise standards, we know the drill.
But the oil keeps leaking. We learn it will leak for weeks, a month, two months, four months. It is leaking 10,000 barrels a day, 20,000, 40,000, 60,000. British Petroleum lowers a pipe to drain oil from the leak. Some oil does drain, but the latest news suggests the pipe may have "exacerbated" the situation. "Exacerbated" means "made it worse." Corporate spokesmen love Latinate words that make them sound as if they know what they're talking about.
I have no idea what to do about the Spill. Do you? Does anybody? We keep hearing that an enormous explosion could shift so much of the ocean floor that the leak would be plugged. That sounds like the system we used as kids to contain garden hose floods in a sandbox.
I follow the news, and a sense of frustration and futility grows. The Spill has become the subject of political debate. The Right, which makes a specialty of saying "we told you so!," says "We told you so!" The Left, which has the same specialty, says the same thing. Both Right and Left specifically did not tell us so. The Greens told us so. The Right is generally hostile to Greens, the Left not so much, but Greens belong to neither party, and believe they are speaking for everyone.The fact is, we need oil. The world is running out. It costs us our treasure to buy it from the Middle East. So we drill off our shores and spend our treasure instead with multinational corporations.Why isn't that our oil? Much of the Middle East dislikes us. Corporations are worse. They don't care. Most modern corporations are managed with three goals in mind: Profits, dividends, and executive bonuses.
No modern American president can afford to halt offshore drilling. We liberals mocked Sarah Palin's "drill, baby, drill!" because she wanted to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. If there's anything liberals love more than Sarah Palin does, it's wildlife. Obama called for restraints on offshore drilling, but we see no sign of him doing that. Can he? The globe's oil resources are finite, but much more finite is the U.S. ability to increase its debt.
There's obviously only one remedy: An energy revolution. We must reduce consumption and develop clean energy alternatives. We try to avoid this overwhelming fact. By "we," I don't mean North America, but most of the world, specifically including China and India. In America, we can't even spend money on new energy without lobbyists making sure the money is spent with the right people in the right ways. The ethanol bubble is an example of that. We need to grow more corn no more than we need to burn more oil.Obama is under relentless attack now from the Right. That's a great help. I have been arguing in his defense, asking, please, what can he do to "handle" the crisis? We are told he hasn't seemed "concerned" enough. He flies to the Gulf states for his fourth trip and is attacked for having a goddamn ice cream cone. He expresses concern. He says he's mad. He gives a speech from the Oval Office in which he comes up with no answers because there are none. "This is Obama's Katrina," shouts the Right, forgetting that they said Bush did a good job with Katrina.
The difference is, Bush could have done more with Katrina, but I don't see what Obama can do with the Spill. He's instructed: "Take personal command!" Should the President be our go-to guy on oil spills? "Express more emotion!" What is he, a head of state like the Queen, delegated to going places and looking concerned? He can try to pass some energy legislation, but both parties are in the pockets of Big Oil. Those few legislators who work for meaningful federal solutions are pilloried as "socialists." God help us if we should attempt to slow the eagerness of corporations to consume us.And the oil keeps leaking. I fantasize that we will finally be reduced to trying that big explosion. What if the explosion disrupts a nearby oil rig? What if it opens a second reservoir? What, for that matter, if we don't do that, but there happens to be a coincidental explosion on another rig?
A great wound has been caused to our planet. The ecology of an invaluable region has been grievously attacked. Even state governors who are hostile to the Greens express themselves concerned, if not with marine life or birds or plants, with the "impact on tourism."
We humans as a species developed on a vast savannah without the ability to run and fight as well as the other beasts we found there. But we could think. In doing so, we built civilizations, spread to all the continents, and prospered. For energy we used fire and water. Then steam. Coal replaced wood and peat. We had a decent global civilization going before we started drilling for oil big-time. We had cities, transportation, education, religion, culture, entertainment, economies. Some people fared better, some worse, but it is always so.Oil is a convenient fuel for things we have come to believe we need. Automobiles. Airplanes. Air conditioning. Electricity is useful for such matters as lighting, television, the internet and traffic signals, but although I am no engineer I suspect we could produce a great deal of our electricity from alternative sources. Why doesn't every house have solar panels? Why doesn't mine? If we had no oil and were "thrown back to the Middle Ages" would that mark our end as a species, or rather just a transition back to an earlier state?
Here's what I think right now. The President and Congress should declare an energy emergency. Some of you are old enough to recall the great oil shortage of 1973, when the OPEC countries shut us off. The national speed limit was reduced to 55 mph. Daylight savings time continued year-around. In Chicago's Loop, the skyscrapers no longer burned their lights all night long. At the Sun-Times, every other light was turned off. Automobiles grew so much smaller that many young people today can hardly believe the size of, say, a 1969 Cadillac.
That was long ago. Modern housing uses track lighting to beam spotlights into every nook and cranny. Kitchen appliances do everything that was once done by hand. I don't even want to know how much energy an electric dishwasher consumes. For the first 35 years of my life I washed the dishes by hand, and didn't feel particularly inconvenienced. People used to use clothes lines. I know it sounds incredible. My dad had a mantra: Turn out the lights when you leave the room! Now you drive down a street and see whole houses illuminated, room after room.Obama could ask us to turn out our lights. He could move up a deadline for mandating hybrid and electric automobiles. He could impose restrictions on needless public lighting. He could make a real effort to improve rail transportation. He could pour money into alternative energy. We could learn to open the damn windows when it's a mild day outside. All of this would only be the beginning. Big changes are coming, sooner than we want. They have nothing to do with Republicans or Democrats. They have to do with learning to live without greed--in our personal lives, in our corporations, in our government.
I mentioned I've started a program of reading books again. I just finished that novel by Dickens. Good to the last word. It takes place just as the railroad was being introduced. The characters walk around London, or sometimes use carriages. Rooms are heated individually. Nobody thinks about these hardships; they're more concerned with their own happiness or sadness.To get away from the internet, I find it works to physically leave the room with the computer in it and sit in another room. Last night, finishing Dombey and Son, I settled into a nice chair and turned on the floor lamp. I turned off no less than six lights that were embedded in the ceiling. I began to read, and it felt good. I realized I was seated in a warm cone of light just exactly right for my purposes. I remembered such a reading space from my childhood, when I sank into my dad's big old chair and started on some Edgar Allan Poe horror stories. They were better without a lot of light.
Roger~
I have been a fan of yours (and Gene Siskel's) for years. It was only lately that I came to find you on Twitter. Ironically, your relatively recent inability to speak has increased the volume of your voice (outside of the film industry).
I just wanted to thank you for your recent writing. Your comments on racism, on Twitter, and now on The Spill (perfect use of capitalization, by the way) have been spot on in every way.
Your tweets comprise about 80% of my Twitter feed. I hope it stays that way.
By the way "Veni, vidi, vici" was perfect.
Best,
~Pete
Economist Dean Baker points out that an economic downturn is actually the best time to push a clean energy agenda: http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/its-cheapest-to-push-clean-energy-in-a-downturn/
Well said Roger. I only fear that nothing will be done due to big oil wanting to continue to rake in the profits while the American population and the world's environment goes down the drain. Not many are willing to sacrifice for anyone else anymore.
Roger--Just curious about why you took down the Saul Alinsky post.
Ebert: It wasn't an entry, only a TwitterPage, and is still linked in the right-hand column.
The whole thing makes my heart hurt so much. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
You're right about many of these things, Roger. But how could there be an oil shortage when we can't contain this leak? Is it because all those gallons would only provide enough energy for a short time? I don't know; my Google searches haven't come up with any information on the matter. (Or maybe I'm not looking hard enough.) What are your thoughts on this?
Ebert: It's not how much oil we use (much, much more than that) but how muc damage even that causes.
Readers:
A software glitch has been repaired, and the previous entry, about Twitter, is receiving comments again.
I promise.
R.
I believe people can cut their gasoline consumption by 50% annually. By driving half as much, by ride-sharing to/from work, riding the bus 1-2 times a week, working from home 1 day a week and walking.
I've been living that life. Not by choice - I have retinitis Pigmentosa and surrendered my driver's license 13 years ago. I walk 6 miles 5 days a week. It's my exercise. While I walk, I shop. I work from home. I used to ride the bus but have not ridden the bus for months. I have ridden with other people a handful of times. I don't even use air-conditioning. Factoring in my other consumables, I'm likely living on 1 gallon of gas/month, give or take.
I told people to do this when gas was $4/gallon in California. I think some did. My Girlfriend rode the bus for a month. People should do that now that gas is $2/gallon. Have they forgotten how expensive $2/gallon is?
And now everybody feels powerless in the shadow of the great BP Oil spill. But if enough people cut personal gas consumption by half, how much does that translate for the country, 10%? 20%?
We don't need laws passed, or permission. The Right can continue their shrill siren call from within the confines of their derrieres. Politicians can continue to hurrump and hump. None of that impedes our ability to cut petroleum consumption by 50%.
What are we waiting for?
Great read. We do need an energy emergency declared.
As much as I want that hole plugged, we need to change our attitude toward energy while the would is still bleeding. Otherwise, we'll just go back to the same way we were/are - living in denial until all the oil runs out.
Great post. It also strikes me as to why developers do not plan cities as NY, Boston and others were built. . . you do not need cars. You can walk most anywhere for your daily needs or use public transportation.
Most cities, such as LA, Houston, Dallas and pretty much everywhere else were built upon the dependency of private transportation. You can drop me off in NYC, and I don't need a car. Do the same thing in Houston, and I'm stranded.
On top of that, they build malls and restaurants and other office complexes with distances between each other that require the use of fuel consuming vehicles. This is excessive.
Not only we need regulation, we need smarter developers.
I think the problem is that we as Americans--and perhaps citizens in other countries, as well--believe that everything that can be broken, can be fixed, so we continue to break things. We break and we break and we break, and then when we break something that can't be fixed, we don't admit the truth. Instead, we feel that someone just isn't trying hard enough to find a solution.
Certain things have no solution. Certain things cannot be controlled. Certain things should not be tampered with.
I read the article you tweeted about futurists claiming all of these benefits that technology will give us in the not-too-distant future ( http://www.observer.com/2010/culture/ray-fright-techno-dazzled-times-airs-futurist-fluff. Assuming, for a moment, that it's not all nonsense, why isn't anyone wondering if it might not be a better idea to stop increasing our life spans, even to the point of immortality, and start improving them? Gadgets do many things that humans used to do, and yet, rather than give us more free time to enjoy other pursuits, they have taken more of our time away from others. And is all technology an improvement? I still prefer reading actual books to reading blogs online, will never get a Kindle, and think that some silent films look better than modern 3D films.
In the West, we have this idea of good versus evil. In the East, the concept is one of balancing opposing forces: yin and yang. I think, for the sake of ourselves, we need to learn to balance our quest for new technology with what is already here, much like the Eastern concept of balancing yin and yang. After all, I used a clothesline the entire time I was in Japan, and never wished for a dryer.
Except when it rained.
Great post, Roger! How do you address a problem for which there's no solution? The Big Men Up Top have spent the past four years trying to keep us from drifting into a depression. Will we have the courage to tighten our belts and live below our means before the economy comes tumbling down all at once?
You're right: the BP oil spill is symbolic--it's the moment where the world whould realize that alternative energy is a NEED, not an elusive ideal.
One problem with the media-driven approach to problem solving is that it's based on ratings and attention, not on actual problem solving. All the crises you mention above -- Haiti, Katrina, even Iraq and Afghanistan -- are still in effect. They just aren't being discussed any longer, because the news cycle has rolled right on past them.
Can the media and the government, working together, head off this problem with public initiatives and regulations? I hope so, because I fear that individual citizens won't make an effort to solve these problems until their own lives are adversely affected, and that might not happen until the infrastructure has already collapsed. How much this observation is foresight and how much is mere existential dread... that's for history to demonstrate.
That's one of the reasons I loved Chris Smith's Collapse... it made these global problems feel more urgent to me, a middle-class white American.
Maybe after all these years of polluting the entire planet, Mother Nature is finally THROWING UP at us in disgust. Besides the oozing underwater oil gash, we have another oil-based, lessor-talked-about tragedy unfolding simultaneously in the Pacific Ocean called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It covers MORE AREA than the oil spill in the Gulf and also affects our food supply by killing and polluting all matter of sea life.
Perhaps the good thing about this BP (Best Polluter!) oil spill, is this singular event may finally be the TIPPING POINT. Maybe we'll all now GET SERIOUS about living within our collective means, GET SERIOUS about reducing our dependence on oil--both gasoline and plastic products--and GET SERIOUS about developing a healthy concern for the environment.
I've been a fan of your blog for quite some time and this is my first comment. I work for an environmental nonprofit, which focuses primarily on funding clean energy resources and fresh water solutions. Needless to say, I agree 100% with your post. I recently created a bumper sticker (for my own amusement, not for work purposes) that says "This car causes oil spills. And so does yours." We all support companies like BP everday with our habits (driving, flying, using electricty etc.), just think what a powerful message we could send if we cut those habits down considerably. Be the change that you want to see in the world.
Cheers to you, Roger. Well said.
Melinda
"Big changes are coming, sooner than we want." I don't doubt it, but for a lot of us (especially younger readers) we can't even imagine how our lives are going to change. I grew up under the impression that solar panels and recycling bins were for weird hippies and now I use an electric lawnmower, have a compost pile and meticulously sort the garbage. We need to tone down our excessiveness, but not many people will go quietly. So many people can't part with a hairdryer for two days, let alone the dishwasher. As we wait for these big changes, we need to brace ourselves for the backlash. People are gonna snap like rubber bands.
Thank you so much for this. My favorite saw is "you either ride the donkey, or the donkey rides you." We can either choose to rearrange our energy consumption, neighborhoods, technologies etc., or wait until the universe does it for us.
BP has known from the beginning, as any offshore drilling company would know, that the only way to stop this leak is to drill a relief well to reduce the pressure and cap it. But that won't be until August (at the earliest), and so they must appear as if they are doing something and in their last attempt, seem to have made the situation worse. All in the name of PR.
Thank you, Mr. Ebert for saying what so many are thinking in such a well presented way (and with far less swearing than I'd have used). This entire situation has just grown more and more frustrating and heartbreaking as it's gone on.
This is my first time reading anything of yours outside of the Entertainment Section of the local paper (apart from your book 'Your Movie Sucks' which I enjoyed both as a movie lover and a reader), and I will be looking forward to reading more of your journal in the future.
Best wishes.
-ZS
I thought I'd toss out an exchange from the Abrams STAR TREK film:
McCoy: My God, man, you could at least *act* like it was a hard decision...
Spock: I intend to assist in the effort to reestablish communication with Starfleet. However, if crew morale is better served by my roaming the halls weeping, I will gladly defer to your medical expertise. Excuse me.
To another point: Isn't it rich how we were hoping to transition to electric cars to avoid dependence on fuel from one nation controlled by a repressive regime, only to learn that another country controlled by a repressive regime is sitting on a "gold mine" of a metal (lithium) that has been instrumental in making such cars practical?
The problem with what you've written is that you write that you can't see what more the President "can do with the spill" then proceed to explain exactly what more he could do!
I am not qualified to address what could be done to stop the leak itself. (though many experts are practically begging BP and the feds to bring in supertankers to clean up the mess while a permanent solution is effected - why has that been ignored?)
But make no mistake: this is an environmental Pearl Harbor. As you yourself write, the President should be publicly treating it as such. Some anger in the face of that reality - "a date that will live in infamy" or "I hear you, the whole world hears you" - is exactly what a President SHOULD do to energize and focus a nation, and prepare it for the tough decisions that it must understand and support.
If both parties are in the pockets of big oil, then all the more reason for Obama to reach beyond them and directly to the American people, to use his bully pulpit to get folks mad as hell, not just at BP but at those who would keep us from achieving a permanent solution.
You more than anyone know the power of words and emotion to sway a population. The President knows it - it's how he got elected. Now he must take the plunge - much like his hero, President Lincoln - and risk his presidency by offering up anger WITH a bold program that contains long-term solutions. He must take the lead... and call out those who are standing in the way.
I'd rather see a one-term president who sought to harness the power of the people to save a people, then a two-termer who worries only about poll numbers and backroom negotiations.
God help us if he doesn't at least try.
Actually, Roger, the way most people wash dishes, it's more energy efficient to use a dishwasher, if you only wash full loads and turn heated drying off.
Drying clothes on a clothesline is, however, a great energy saver, except perhaps here in the Northwest in the winter (or spring and fall most years).
I used to live in Louisiana, spent the best years of my childhood there - this disaster is like a knife in my belly. I don't want to look, but I must.
What can Obama do? As far as stopping the spill, you're right - he can do nothing. The screams from the Right for him to 'do something' would be hilarious if it weren't so gut-wrenching.
But for the country - he could do a lot. A rational Energy Policy is vital at this point, before we all drown in our own mess.
I discovered the other day that the amount being spent worldwide on research into fusion power - the magic bullet of energy generation - is $1 billion. (That's not much by the way.) The reckoning is that commercial fusion power is 20 years away from the start of serious funding. Regrettably though, major corporations find it cheaper to pay lobbyists than to fund innovation on the level we require if we're to see out the century in one piece.
The Manhattan Project is an interesting parallel. We tend to visualise it as a lab full of propellor heads with German accents, but in truth it was the largest industrial facility in the United States - a concerted scientific effort unparalleled in history. Just to make a bloody bomb.
We, the world, need a green Manhattan Project right now. And that means telling vested commercial interests to get onboard or get out of the way, mostly by use of the single most unfashionable political instrument we have - government.
It will certainly happen one day, but I suspect it will happen in Asia.
This won't be popular, but I don't care anymore. I'm jaded to all sides. Republicans just jump on any chance to attack democrats. If there weren't a leak, they'd condemn "big government" interfering with business and the free market. Politicians in general are just after more votes and more power. Any genuine interest in improving people's lives goes out the window once they take office.
I'm in my twenties and find myself amused by campus activists at my, or any, university. People who claim to have the answers yet have no life experience to back any of it up. But they are absolutely certain they are right and everyone else is wrong.
And the people who do screw things up on a large scale have the means and the power to prevent anyone from stopping them.
So, I just don't care anymore. And this won't be a popular attitude either, but once oil is so rare that the cost of production is so high that it cuts into profits, there will be aggressive research in alternatives to oil. Once money is at stake, people are highly motivated. Just look at people who kill for a $50 000 life insurance policy.
Ed Brayton (Dispatches From the Culture Wars) tweeted this article this morning: The Ethanol Trap
http://www.slate.com/id/2256461/
"And that's where the corn-ethanol mess becomes truly outrageous and depressing. The United States now has about 250 million motor vehicles. Of that number, only about 7.5 million are designed to burn gasoline containing more than 10 percent ethanol. And there is evidence that even 10 percent ethanol may be too much for the other 242.5 million. Last year, Toyota recalled more than 200,000 Lexus vehicles because of internal component corrosion that was caused by ethanol-blended fuel.
"In addition to problems with their cars, consumers may soon find that more ethanol in their gasoline will result in the fouling of smaller engines. The Outdoor Power Equipment Institute, which represents companies that make lawnmowers, snowblowers, chainsaws, and the like, opposes the bailout of the ethanol industry. It says that increasing the amount of ethanol in gasoline "could damage millions of forestry, lawn and garden, and other small engine products currently housed in consumers' garages."
Exactly! Why isn't every new home built required to have solar panels and those type of hot water heaters that only heat the water as it is being used? Why don't we go back to making durable goods made out of metal that were repaired instead of being tossed out for the next best thing in three months? We are too "throw away" happy. Remember when appliances were made of metal and lasted for decades instead of just a year?
We are all waiting for the well to be stopped. It reminds me of my grandmother watching for the river to crest and waiting for the inevitable sewer backup when she lived in that little house in the dip.
A runaway gusher is not really a spill. What remains after it stops will be the spill. It tears at my heart to think about this long term.
Yes, this is the time for an energy revolution. There are no easy answers. I suspect some people are up to the challenge though. Job creation will come with development of alternative ways of providing energy.
We are hooked on cheap everything in this country. Ultimately that means that we consider life to be cheap and the environment even cheaper. We live our beliefs. Vonnegut proposed an epitaph for the planet "We could have saved it but we were too cheap." I'm almost glad he is already gone so that he doesn't have to bear witness to this latest episode of human folly.
Americans individually use something like 32 times more energy than someone in a developing country. That came from a Jared Diamond lecture I attended in Lexington. We have enormous appetites.
People keep comparing the oil spill to Hurricane Katrina, but it's the wrong comparison. The oil spill is President Obama's Iranian hostage crisis, something he is powerless to stop and something that will cast a shadow over the remainder of his term in office, whether that be two more years or six more years.
I lost respect for his leadership of this crisis, because he has shown a complete inability to lead and his reaction has confirmed a disturbing trend since he look office: when we need a commander-in-chief, we get a blamer-in-chief. It's not a constructive form of leadership, because it lowers the president to the level of the angry mob.
Yes, BP cheaped out in ways that cost eleven men their lives and potentially destroyed an entire ecosystem. If BP's standards and practices were marketedly different than the industry on average, I would share in the outrage. But no, the truth is that BP was just the unlucky oil giant that has a SNAFU of epic proportions happen to their well. It could just as easily have been an Exxon well or a Chevron well or a ConocoPhillips well. And because it's a British company, BP doesn't have the lobbying arm in place to shield it like like Exxon did after the Valdez disaster. Do you think if it were an American company that had caused this disaster, we'd be seeing the soundbyte-distilled outrage on Capitol Hill?
What would leadership have looked like to me? Within days of the disaster, the president should have addressed the nation. He should have explained that the federal government does not have the expertise or equipment to tackle the problem, but he would provide BP with the full support of the federal government for navigating the logistical and regulatory hurdles to come. He should have been straight with us and told us that while the government hoped to have the leak sealed as soon as possible, there was a significant likelihood that the leak wouldn't be completely sealed until the relief wells come online in August. He should have fired the head of the Minerals Management Service as soon as the agency's incompetence came to light, instead of several weeks later, and he should have launched a non-partisan commission headed by a respected figure from each side of the aisle to investigate the regulatory failures and lax oversight that allowed this to happen. Finally, he should have been down in gulf from week 1; only by meeting with the stakeholders in the crisis directly could he get an adequate understanding of the needs of state and local interests impacted by the disaster.
Getting BP to commit to a minimum $20 billion relief fund with an independent administrator today was an important step toward insuring that BP doesn't worm its way out of its financial obligations by tying things up forever in litigation like Exxon did. Any law to coerce BP to pay for the damage would have run afoul of the consitution's prohibition on ex post facto laws and bills of attainder, since Congress foolishly capped liability for such disasters at $75 million 20 years ago.
On the other hand, forcing BP to forgo dividends for the remainder of 2010 was a cruel political stunt that will harm poor and middle class British pensioners, who rely on BP for £1 of every £7 of dividend income. BP's profits are so obscene that the company could have absorbed the full cost of the cleanup and liability without ever touching its dividend payments.
Much like BP, President Obama's public image on this issue is already shot to hell. The well's going to leak until August and there's not a damn thing anybody can do about it. The real test will be what he does once the immediate crisis is over. Will see the push for regulatory reform and oversight that we were supposed to get for the financial industry? Or will the oil industry emerge unscathed much like the big banks have, free to go back to business as usual?
The problem with getting an alternative fuel source into use is that everyone wants or expects a direct replacement for oil. Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet.
Terrific piece! Thank you for introducing a little sanity into the incomprehensible. Wish I could call it a comfort, but the whole situation is just too horrific for a quick, easy balm.
Roger - thank you again for sharing your thoughts with us. I haven't felt as connected to anyone writing about this until your column. You get it, you really do.
The only word that even comes close to expressing my thoughts on this disaster is "anguish". Pure, stop-in-my-tracks anguish over what we have lost, the horrible suffering and loss of life, the damage that cannot be repaired, the arrogant bastards who caused this who will be able to have nice lives in their beautiful clean mansions and though they may be inconvenienced financially they will not be beggared and jailed as they so richly deserve to be.
But finally, ultimately, what tears me up inside is my utter powerlessness, and the powerlessness of everyone (including the most powerful leader in the world), to do anything substantial to stop this evil gusher. The pundits shriek. I guess it's kind of understandable, I sure feel like shrieking these days. Maybe screaming and railing at Obama is Olberman's way of coping. Doesn't solve anything, it even helps the people who (if given power) would make it far more likely for this to happen. Even if I got my dearest wish (short of turning back time and keeping this from happening) of having every BP executive and project boss, MMS flack, and GOP cat's paw be keelhauled for eternity through the sludge they unleashed, it wouldn't do a damn thing. And that's what gives me the cold sweats at night, waking up after dreaming that I'm choking and drowning in oil.
Thanks for listening. Hugs and best wishes to my fellow mourners.
This is sort of off topic, but I was having an argument with a friend the other day. He loves powerful cars, and he was mentioning something about the satisfying sound of a car's engine. I told him that in 100 years, nobody will want a car that makes noise. He refused to believe that was possible. I heard somewhere that hybrid cars are partly less attractive to buy because they are so quiet. And yet, if you were brought up around quiet cars, and then you saw one with an internal combustion engine that makes noise, you would probably think that the car is broken.
Changing the way we do things, and becoming more energy efficient isn't just about restraint and forgoing some unnecessary luxuries, like turning off the lights. It's also about replacing the things we are used to.
The point I'm trying to make is, in order to make progress, we will need to change the way we look at things, since even the changes with more positive than negative effects are met with resistance. People are used to seeing things work a certain way, and are skeptical of change.
Ebert: We have a hybrid. It takes some getting used to because there is no noise when the engine starts. Pickup, passing speeds, etc., are terrific. Mileage much better.
Just watched Chris Smith's "Collapse" last night (which I balanced out with "Invictus" to maintain emotional equilibrium), and this latest entry made an interesting coda.
Horrible as the "leak" is, I think we required something like this. There's no way we'll change our behavior without a disaster, a real punch in the national face. Now if only gas would hit five or six dollars a gallon, maybe we'll all cry uncle. I'll suffer too (I ain't rich), but it would be worth it if we turn the corner on energy.
I am glad Obama is confronting the oil executives.
What do you think Nixon would have done? I am asking, because the EPA was established under him and he was intelligent and not as patronizing as a certain president who served from 1980-1989 and helped bring in the current era of Conservatism, eventually alientating even Pat Buchanan.
Hi Roger,
Along with the long lines at the pumps during the early 1970's, I was also thinking about a speech President Carter gave over 30 years ago about the energy crisis. Here's a link to the YouTube video where he talks about what America needs to do to reduce our dependence on foreign oil (and oil in general), beginning at around 2:25. It's a shame we didn't listen to or follow through on Carter's ideas and initiatives then.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aOMNgxRF2M&feature=related
What to do, you ask? I guess the first thing to do is stop and think. --I know YOU did that, the thinking is right here on the page, but let's all stop and think.
I'm going to try to come up with 17 ideas, just to have a starting place. Ideas will not be judged. I'll just note the first 17 that bubble up.
1. More comprehensive energy-consumption-tracking telemetry. Your morning e-mail would include a report on how many gallons of gas you burned, how many KWH your home burned, how much natural gas, etc. Price tag on the bottom. (Note: many people lose weight simply by keeping a daily log of what they eat.)
2. Stop rewarding frequent flyer miles and stop giving mileage tax allowances. Start rewarding energy-saving workaraounds like teleconferences, telecommutes, etc.
3. Buy green, and buy green stocks. Dump oil stocks.
4. Promote bicycle and pedestrian travel. Quell four-wheeled tyranny.
5. Skew grant money toward the green till it hurts.
6. Have all the big cities compete in energy-reduction competitions. Start small, with a 24-hour timeline and a million-dollars prize to the general fund of the winning city. If it works, do it more and with smaller municipalities.
7. Pay the Energy Secretary on a commission basis.
8. Create pilgrimage routes crisscrossing the country, friendly to foot and vehicular traffic of golfcart-footprint or lighter. Free water, rest facilities and sleeping-bag space for them as wants it.
9. Raise the driver's license minimum age to 25.
10. Tax credits for Segways and greener.
11. Tie vehicle tax accurately to its gas consumption.
12. Deconcentrate business hours, reducing rush-hour waste.
13. Make a new Nobel Prize category: The Nobel Green Prize.
14. Give tax credits to people who lose weight. The more they walk, the less they ride. Tax obesity. The more they eat, the more heat it takes to cook the extra food.
15. Get Congressfolk to teleconference their normal sessions. Not only will this burn less gas, it will be safer, and will set a good example.
17. Let There Be Wirelessness. Tens of millions of high-speed modems are consuming electricity.
--That's all I got right now. I hope there are one or two ideas in there that may actually help...
Dear Roger;
Your post here had more specifics in it than President Obama's address.
Ronald Reagan's rollback of the energy savings programs of the Carter era was the crime of the second half of the 20th century.
Clinton wasn't in office for one month before he met with the Detroit automakers. They sold him on freezing the CAFE Standards. We would have doubled our MPG by now.
Both sides sold us out and now Obama can't tell it to us straight or get an energy bill through the Senate.
You and I will be alright Roger but my unborn grandchildren are going to have it pretty rough. We all better all start thinking of them.
Thank you! Finally someone with ideas that make sense. We have become so used to having so much that we cannot live without everything. Please, let's take this as a lesson to stop polluting our oceans, our land, our air, our drinking water. Right on, Roger!
The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around.
-Gaylord Nelson
I think that it is very likely that we will find just how true this quote is in the gulf coast. I am an emotional, sentimentalist environmentalist at heart. But I always make sure that I have a firm economic and concrete leg to stand on in my arguments. The UN did a report some years back which included a section on "Ecosystem Services" in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. What functioning ecosystems do for us in terms of concrete, measurable impact from water and air purification to food production is staggering.
What bothers me most is that people who destroy ecosystems rarely have to pay the economic costs of doing so. When mangrove swamps are destroyed for shrimp farms it drastically decreases the ability of said wetland to absorb storm surge, but shrimp farms are not held liable for this, nor do the heads of the corporations that run them live in the areas that suffer. But projects such as these are held up by local governments in the name of job creation and economic growth when the ultimate effect is just the opposite.
I wonder what will happen to the ecosystem services of the Gulf Coast, notwithstanding loss of tourism, increased hospitalization rates, and a lower general quality of life.
Jimmy Carter warned us, and had the right idea, more than 30 years ago.
But he was mocked and ridiculed. And the 'before-its-time" solar panels he installed on the White House roof in the SEVENTIES were laughingly removed by Ronald Reagan.
Roger,
I would love to see this article published in the Op Ed pages of both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Please consider this. I truly believe more people need to hear and think seriously about what you have said.
Thank you!
FWIW, the most recent numbers on US petroleum usage
from the US Energy Information Administration is 19,498,000 barrels/day so the spill, estimated at 60,000 barrels a day, is equal to about 0.3% of our
daily consumption.
Wow, really well said. I'm looking at this situation every day, and thinking "this is it - this is the end of (whatever form of) civilization we know. Not exactly "The Road Warrior", but I agree - a grievous wound has been caused to our planet, and as has been said before:
"Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves." (~Chief Seattle, 1855.)
We have done this to ourselves. What happens next is anyone's guess. My guess is it ain't gonna be pretty.
(FYI, we never use the dishwasher and we've got clothes lines inside for year round use. I don't think it helps much, but I don't really know. I also have a 60 MILE commute, not on public transport routes.)
Thanks for being you, and for being outspoken and honest. Not enough of that these days, or so it seems.
Longtime fan...
- Neil A
You give a concise lesson about how to view this situation. It is indeed a fine mess. Blaming, analyzing, talking, reviewing, researching, more talking. And still the oil pumps into the Gulf. Time is of the essence here; why is it taking so long for authorities to come up with a plan to solve this problem?
Does nyone have a way to forward Roger's words to congress? They should be so thoughtful about a solution to this problem. Mr. Ebert, have you considered running for public office? You'd be at the very least more effective than these knuckleheads in Washington, who seem to neither speak nor think efficiently. One wonders if our leaders even care about the consequences.
Roger,
Given your article, I'm curious your thoughts on the legal battle over the documentary "Crude" and the extra footage Chevron is attempting to obtain from the filmmaker. Have you seen any parts of it yet? Simply from the descriptions, it sounds like we do things as bad as the gulf spill (though not on the same scale) every year around the world.
http://www.documentary.org/content/crude-filmmaker-granted-stay-footage-subpoena
I despair as it's extremely difficult to make all the needed changes, but I'm trying to do my part. I started a new job and will bike to work as much as possible, my wife and I own one hybrid already and plan to make our next vehicle electric (I'm through with the internal combustion engine), and while we do have a good sized house, I'm planning to get solar panels all over the roof next year.
Oh, and the hard part about some of the appliances like electric dishwashers is that out here in the West, water is scarce, and running the dishwasher uses a fraction of washing them yourself. So which devil do we choose?
The federal government should nationalize BP's American operations and deal with the spill then. We hear that BP has all of the resources the government lacks, so why don't we take these resources from the thugs that started this thing? When BP put that funnel thing on, the pipe that "exacerbated" the problem, what was really going on? They plan on selling the "product" that they manage to salvage from the spill. So BP saves some product, and the spill is worse. Great. There may not be total solutions, but acting as a "partner" with BP is not the answer. How often do you hire the person that just ripped you off to rig a new security system?
It's nice to finally see someone look at a problem and admit that it might not be solvable. Reality is not a high school math test: there is not necessarily a neat answer to every problem.
The real problem, deeper than our use of one type of energy versus another, is that our standard of living is intimately associated with the use of energy. The higher our standard of living is, the more energy we're using.
We may think the problem goes away when that energy is being consumed somewhere else in the world (eg- China, where our manufacturing plants are now), but from a global environmental perspective, it does not. The problem remains: we want vast amounts of work to be done on our behalf, mostly by machines, to increase our standard of living.
It's hard to escape this ruthless equation: to increase our standard of living, we want more and better products to be made available to each of us. In order to manufacture these products, energy must be consumed. As our standard of living increases, our energy consumption per capita increases.
The apparent solution is vast amounts of energy production with EXTREMELY small environmental footprint, but that is hard to envisage, for many reasons (not least of which is the fact that all known means of energy production have a considerable environmental footprint). However, if we did find a solution, it would be a delaying action at best: we would simply expand our hunger until we exceeded our limits again.
This is the root cause of our problem: our tendency to expand our hunger until it overwhelms any technological solution. The global human population has exploded from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 7 billion today, because we figured out how to greatly increase crop yields in the 20th century. Instead of solving starvation forever, this agricultural innovation simply delayed it. Our population expanded until our hunger could once again threaten the limits of the food supply. This is part of the nature of humanity: we grow until we exceed our limits. Technology can expand those limits, but we will simply grow until we reach them again.
That's why, in the end, technological solutions alone will never work. We need to learn how to voluntarily limit the growth of our needs. We have to limit population growth, and our own desire for more work to be done on our behalf by machines.
An oil shortage is hilariously mythic; it's been propagated by people more powerful than you and I, Roger. It won't be long before we ARE limited to hybrid/electric cars, soon government interventionism will--again--bring us to our knees and infiltrate the proceeding generation with a bent narrative.
All for the greater good; that's all *G*overnment brings us.
a pro athlete is accused of sexual assault. they settle out of court, and his jersey is eventually the biggest seller again. an actor cheats on his wife, tabloid headlines, custody battle, and eventually he's back on jay leno. a teen star abuses drugs, disappears, makes a sympathetic comeback, and is eventually everybody's darling again.
i don't know about this one. i'd guess the full effects won't be seen for a generation. it's not going away anytime soon - but maybe that's will be good thing, making sure we don't forget, albeit with incalculable and irreversible damage. status quo better turn into status quit.
Greetings.
The bird covered in oil reminds me of expressionistic paintings. Now it's realistic.
There won't be an energy revolution until we've completely exhausted our current fuels and are about to tumble into anarchy and oblivion. That's how humans operate, for whatever reason.
The Dutch offered use of skimmers to clean the spill after the 3rd day in--the White House turned them down.
Obama didn't speak to the head of BP until today, 58 days in?
Obama has relentlessly demonized BP, yet is solely dependent on their ability to plug the 'damn' hole. Destroy the one you depend on...
Obama, and his administration only see this catastrophe as an ideal opportunity to push through radical energy reform. Never let a good crisis go to waste?
Obama deserves criticism because of his slow response, and lack of initiative + leadership regarding the oil spill. It is understood that he cannot personally plug the hole. But during this crisis, he has exhibited very little leadership. But I guess this is what happens when a community organizer (with absolutely no previous leadership experience) gets elected as President...too bad 'blaming George Bush' can't plug holes.
Ebert: Were you by any chance watching Sarah Palin on O'Reilly this evening? It seems she was mistaken as usual:
http://j.mp/bF5lPI
The whole thing is indeed very frustrating to watch day after day. The futility of seeing teams of people cleaning small patches of beaches while seeing images of that underwater gusher of oil is very disheartening. All that comes to mind is that phrase "They can put a man on the moon, but..."
Roger,
I'm ready.
I've been renting a small apartment with my wife for years. I've been riding the bus to work for those same years. I've been the subject of mockery and scorn for not getting over my head in a house I don't need, a car I don't need, a life I don't need.
If anything, I want to roll back even more. It's just not worth it, living so big. Not for us. Not for anyone.
On your comment on dishwashers, it is actually generally more efficient to use a dishwasher than hand washing as long as you do things like turn off the heated dry and only run it once it's full. Unless you are pretty miserly with your water when hand washing, you will use less water (and energy for heating it) with the dishwasher. Sometimes the way you did it as a kid isn't the best :)
Otherwise I think you are right. For real energy efficiency, sacrifices need to be made and we've become lazy and stubborn. Honestly I doubt even a crisis like this will change people's minds. I think we'll have to run out of oil before any serious action is taken if that is how it goes down it won't be pretty.
Profits, dividends, and executive bonuses.
No, no, no. It’s executive bonuses, exclusively. The other two are only important to the extent in which they increase executive bonuses.
There is a pattern and it has nothing to do with who is President. We have something catastrophic happen, then we wildly over-react, and then we gradually forget that it ever happened—until it happens again. We seem to have lost our way as a country, and it looks doubtful we will ever find our way back. Where is the sense of duty in the positions of congressional and corporate power that we have entrusted the future of our nation? I see one of the finest Presidents this country has ever produced. The Right and the cable “news” media see only reasons to scowl. We no longer rally behind our leaders—not that we have recently had leaders that merited it so much. But now we do. And we are not supporting their heroic efforts.
I am disgusted by the lack of respect shown this administration. Our Secretary of State is relentlessly working on our behalf, and we don’t appreciate it. She looks tired and haggard for good reasons. She is contending with unspeakable hazards. We are on the brink of several global conflicts, even graver than the ones we already have. And all of them are potentially—probably—nuclear.
I blame this oil catastrophy squarely on the shoulders of the executives and engineers. An engineer has a duty to consider worse case scenarious and how they can be delt with before they occur. This comes with the job. Knowledge, skill, responsibilty, and gravitous. Four traits that we all could benefit from. Add vigilance and foresight, and you have a complete system for averting the next avoidable disaster.
Roger,
That video you posted about the small house reminded me of this other incredible living space: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg9qnWg9kak
It's an apartment in Hong Kong that is only 330 square feet that transforms into 24 different rooms (including a screening room). Simply by sliding walls.
Also, check out this video from TED where a man makes the argument that the future of cars is indeed batteries - swappable batteries. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcoJt2KLC9k You would simply stop off at a "battery" station, drop your depleted battery off, and insert a fully charged one the station has stocked. Your depleted battery then gets recharged and picked up by the next car. This is already happening in a number of countries.
It gives me hope for the future.
Obama can't plug the leak. But if he were so inclined, he and his administration could put together a step-by-step plan to get the country completely off oil and fossil fuels within a brief period of time (it's possible) and demand that the rest of the world follow suit. And he could campaign like hell to get it done, putting everything on the line, including (gasp!) his chances at a second term.
There are lots of ideas out there, most of them quite workable at relatively low cost. Popular Science, for instance, has been putting wind turbines on its cover off and on for the past 30 years. Inventors have now come up with solar cells printed on light, flexible material that are five times as efficient as the previous generation of cells. Even nuclear power has enormous potential and is much safer than we're led to believe.
But, as you say, where the heck is all this stuff? Well, we have all sorts of excuses, don't we? It's not politically possible. It's not economically feasible. We might upset the Tea Partiers. Whatever.
But the one key thing lacking is an FDR-like person in the one office in the one country that can make a big enough difference to rock the fossil-fuel-doomed world off its axis and point us to a sustainable future. Judging from his utterly spineless Oval Office address last night, I'd say that Obama is not, and cannot be, that person.
Thanks for a great blog. I agree totally on all points. It's very upsetting to see the wildlife, marshes, and people who are being threatened by the oil spill. There really is no end in sight. I have to turn away when I see the oil-laden birds. Our country has never seen any problem of this magnitude and I don't know how the Right can expect one man, the President, to know what to do off the top of his head. It will take some great minds and a lot of luck to fix this problem. The best we can do is set up new regulations about drilling and become less personally dependent on oil, as you said. I, for one, am already starting to make my alterations in lifestyle. My next car will be a hybrid and I do turn off my computer each time I walk away.
It was a pleasure reading this blog. You inspire me every day on Twitter. (Lily2000)
Human ingenuity's relationship with humanity's energy consumption has historically been symbiotic: we progressed from manpower to wind power, then from wind to water, etc.; we consumed enough energy to progress to a new method of energy consumption, never endangering our ability to consume, endangering ourselves, or endangering our planet. But with oil and its ilk, we've become increasingly parasitic: we're consuming exponentially faster than we're progressing towards a new method of consumption.
We need to develop renewable energy, of course, but there's a problem: we need the technology made possible by modern civilization in order to develop renewable energy, which means we need to maintain our civilization's modern ability to function; i.e., we need old energy [oil, coal, etc.] in order to power our development of new energy. Unfortunately, this means that there cannot be a clean transition to renewable energy: the ability to consume old energy energy will have to be maintained for the indefinite future, which means developing economies and countries will build themselves on old energy.
Which brings us to an unpleasant reality: either we will fail in developing new energy before our ability to do so is depleted; or, we will develop new energy that obsoletes the ability for old energy-based economies and countries to develop and progress to the level of their more advanced counterparts. Pragmatically, realistically, rationally, the best option is to develop new energy, no matter the collateral damage; it's an undesirable option, but the alternative is economic and technological oblivion on a global scale.
This "triage" will happen; it's been postponed, but it's inevitable--necessity is the mother invention, and the survival instinct is the trump-all necessity. The disparity between wealthy and poor nations will exponentially increase when we reach the renewable energy watershed, which will further destabilize the already-unstable. But with each passing decade, our trepidation incurs more future collateral damage when the aforesaid energy watershed occurs. We have a few decades left before that collateral damage becomes insurmountable; lesser nations should start drawing straws, I guess.
BP is fixing the problem by drilling relief wells to cap the leak. The problem is it will take several months but it's the only surefire way. That’s the cold hard facts. I'm sure Obama was told this at the very beginning of this disaster it was the only realistic fix. Now that we are all aware of the risk are we still willing to take it?
Roger, if you think old cars were huge go to a car cruise and you will see how small the old cars are compared to the new. It's amazing how close we use to sit to each other.
Ebert: Yeah, but that was with three people across. I had a '57 Golden Hawk. A "sports car" that was larger that today's "full size" models.
Hello Mr. Ebert,
Most large companies, and many industries as a whole (Banking, I'm looking at you) have little or no discernible humility. I don't refer to the ability to say "I'm sorry", but more of the attitude that reminds people that simply being the best at your profession doesn't stop you from royally screwing up.
BP has some of the best engineers in the world working for them. Being the best is not enough. Humility stops people from saying "If it worked this time, it works every time" and "Trust me, I'm an expert" because those answers mean that whatever concern was brought up, legitimate or not, the answer came from someone who didn't care enough to explain why.
This spill is a reminder of why people should care. For the near future, the oil industry will be on it's toes like a Russian ballerina. It'll be decades before the majority of American energy production comes from renewable resources. But it will happen. Oil companies are in the best position to invigorate the green economy movement because with their resources they can afford the huge R&D costs that come with making technologies like bio-fuels and solar power cost-effective. This spill had better be enough to give BP and the rest of the country the motivation to move that development along, and the humility to plan for failure. In the meantime, turning off the lights sounds like good plan.
"Obama is under relentless attack now from the Right. That's a great help. I have been arguing in his defense, asking, please, what can he do to "handle" the crisis? We are told he hasn't seemed "concerned" enough. He flies to the Gulf states for his fourth trip and is attacked for having a goddamn ice cream cone. He expresses concern. "
Wonderfully ironic you should state this - Lincoln, when the Civil War was just breaking out, called a cabinet meeting. His staff came in expecting all solemnity and seriousness only to find the President sitting at his desk, reading and laughing. He commenced to read aloud from his copy of Artemis Ward and, sensing the disdain of his cabinet, put down his book and said "Gentlemen, if I did not laugh, I think that I should die."
An interesting enough parallel.
This relentless attack on Obama is the same crap endured by Bush. Bush smirks, Bush chews with his mouth open, Bush didn't personally commandeer a chopper and pull people off the roofs of New Orleans. Bush hates black people . What if I made the absurd comment Obama hates cajun white people?? Chaney has a weather machine and he conjured up a cat 5 hurricane and aimed it at New Orleans...blah blah. Where were you then?? Hypocrite.
RE: corporations...which one ? Apple ? Microsoft? Why don't you lefties put down your pens, berets and cinnamon chai teas and start your own corporations that pays everyone 50 bucks/hr and 3 months of paid vacation??
Roger,
I only take issue with you seeming to think that what makes YOU happy will make the rest of US happy. People like their cars. We should not take that away from them. As a matter of fact, some people even like their SUV's. So let's put our brains together and give them a GREEN SUV. I would suggest you check out the film "Fuel" by Josh Tickell, who argues that it will not be a "silver bullet" approach to replace oil, but rather a "green barrel" with the combination of solar, wind, bio-diesel, ect. And Josh's attitude is that going green is in YOUR best interests, not just his. We must look at it through that lens if we are to make changes around this planet.
That being said, I agree completely that we need to get the hell off of oil, not just foreign oil, but all of it, and now. Not tomorrow, not after breakfast, NOW. It is finite and it will run out one day, perhaps in our lifetime, and when that happens, well, I'd rather put a bullet in my brain than live in "The Road Warrior."
All the best,
Jordan
Ebert: A green SUV. How abut the Ford Escape? Actually, there are several.
My devilish self does have an immediate proposition for Obama regarding the oil spill: temporarily nationalize BP's assets and federalize the oil clean up.
I won't credit this idea as original (this rose from a discussion I had with my older brother regarding the issue), but he and I believe that this travesty is too great of a screw up to even be forgiven. Accident, technical difficulties, faulty engineering – I don't care what the cause was, I only care about what's being done right now. And hell if it's getting any better.
Marine fauna and flora are dying, the ecology is going to drastically change – this is certain, and it is definitely not a natural process. My only idea is to completely block the oil pipe any way possible (similar to how doctors stop bleeding by applying pressure to the broken artery, vein, or capillary vessel) – even if it means totally removing the pipe and shutting down the drilling site completely. Once the oil stops pouring into the ocean, post facto clean up will be much more efficient and hopefully by then, we can all agree upon what is the most beneficial way to help the environment recover. Who knows – marine scientists may likely need to take samples of the affected species (birds, mammals, seaweed, coral, etc) in hopes of conservation after this mess is over, and hopefully release them back into the wild eventually.
Regarding alternative energy: I think one of the biggest problems regarding the conversion to alternative energy is the current lack of economic incentive (this shouldn't ever be the case, but unfortunately it's how the world works these days). Additionally, one of the most misunderstood forms of alternative energy is nuclear energy; in fact, the last time I checked the website for the US Department of Energy (circa July/August 2009), nuclear energy wasn't even on the list.
I mention nuclear energy because I am actually very familiar with a good number of nuclear engineers (at least 10 people who I can think of immediately) who are extremely environmentally conscious and trying to do great service to the public. From what I've learned, the facilities are heavily regulated and carefully overseen, and the electrical power generated is immense; I don't completely understand the technical aspects (only basic ideas about radiation, fission, fusion, fuel cycle, and quantum physics) but I can assure you that nuclear energy is one of the most underrepresented alternative energy sources possible, not to say one of the most poorly communicated, journaled or documented about.
The problem is bridging the gap between public understanding and nuclear experts: a history of lacking communication combined with the atrocities in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and facility disasters (i.e. Chernobyl) have only widened this gap, resulting in distrust from the public and an unwillingness from the experts to clearly explain themselves. Additionally, since corporations also have a hand in nuclear energy, there is the constraint as to how able their workers (public relations/representatives, nuclear engineers, technicians, etc) can openly talk about the facts regarding the subject matter. It's a long history of government involvement, public outrage at the effects, corporate control, lacking communication skills (and in some cases, an unwillingness to even try) of nuclear experts, and the tendency of public radicalism to distrust expertise regardless of facts and statistics.
Nuclear energy, while able to produce incredible amounts of energy, is not perfect. Researchers are still trying to find way sot safely deposit nuclear waste that will be effective in the long term, and even that looks murky as far as most can see; even more pressing is the possibilities of nuclear weaponry, a wholly legitimate concern that is still a topic of hot political debate. However, I firmly believe that nuclear energy has the potential, and partnered with other alternative energy (solar, wind, hydro, etc.) at their respective greatest efficiency an energy revolution is very, very possible. What needs to happen now is an open table discussion and communication between alternative energy experts on the actual efficiency of each type of energy generator and how each type can safely and efficiently done – politics and ignorance aside, assuming.
As humans, we cannot forget that we too are a species, and that it is impossible to ensure our survival if we deplete our resources anymore than we have already. It's an interest that concerns everyone regardless of country, politics, history, culture, or religious belief, and to lose sight of this fact puts a nail in the coffin of our sentient significance. And it can begin now, with government forcing BP to take full responsibility and allocating all resources possible to stop more oil from spilling in the ocean; with people throwing away their politics and personal vendettas aside with a universal focus on ensuring our own survival in the long term; and most of all, to concentrate on creating avenues of sustainable progress and recovery over needless exploitation and waste for short-sighted desires like money and material consumption.
"They have to do with learning to live without greed--"
Now that would be quite a breakthrough.
Hi. An interesting point about the Green Party.
I am sure I am not the only adult who stills washes dishes by hand, and air-dries clothes. (My dryer broke, haven’t fixed it yet.). The other day my microwave oven gave out. Maybe I won’t replace it. Of course, I spend a lot of time on a really big computer.
So sad about the gulf.
I'm not in the oil business, but I've made a lot computational computer models to study mechanical engineering problems, and from what BP must know about the local geology, I don't see it as hard problem to model various kinds (sizes, locations) of explosions on a powerful computer and see what the effect on the leak would be.
So yes, I think this is a problem that could be solved by throwing more money at it. Most of that money would be in the form of lost oil revenues that BP is getting from the hole as we speak, and the sunk cost (literally) of digging a well five miles below sea level. In other words, most of what BP has done so far seems to have been done in hopes of rescuing the well, not shutting it down permanently.
The larger part of your theme is okay with me. I've never owned a car. When I worked for GE in Schenectady, I walked a mile or so to and from work each day - good for me and good for the environment.
The problem is, President Carter said much the same things over 30 years ago, and to this day a lot of people who remember it consider him a naive wimp for it. More recently, one of the talking points against Kerry in the 2004 eelction campaign was that he once was in favor of an increased gas tax. Imagine if we had had Carter's gas tax in place all this time and had spent the money developing alternate energy sources.
I would like to see a shift from drilling for natural petroleum to manufacturing it. Imagine a world in which petroleum manufacturing plants, coupled with nuclear reactors to act as an energy source, can be placed anywhere we find convenient. It would save us the cost and trouble of transforming our infrastructure from simple and reliable gasoline engines to high-tech electric. Best of all, manufactured petroleum doesn't pollute, because it lacks the impurities of natural petroleum; and it doesn't contribute to global warming because its manufacture removes as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as is released by its burning.
Finally, as natural petroleum runs out, the United States could become the source of energy for the world. Look how much treasure has flowed into the Middle East as a result of their petroleum reserves, and imagine that money coming in instead of going out.
Why isn't this being talked about?
It's been five years since Katrina and things seemed to be picking back up and getting back on track.
Then this happens.
This sickens me to no end. I'm numb now. I can't watch any more of the killing of the marshes and the wildlife, the killing of a culture, the killing of two industries...
Politics is killing this effort. And not just your "regular" politics but your "company" politics. Company politics got us in this mess, anyway. There is so much bickering and political infighting that all efforts seem to be perpetually locked. Reminds me of the Katrina response. But, then again, this is worse than Katrina.
I don't think we'll ever see alternative energy. The oil companies have the politicians in their pockets. Money talks.
Our beaches were never the best beaches along the Gulf Coast. We have Grand Isle and we used to have Hollybeach before Rita washed it away. But, I'll never forget that time in high school when we went to LUMCOM near Port Fourchon for a weekend adventure. We went along the beaches and gathered water samples and brought it back to the lab to see the microsopic life contained within. That night, we relaxed and had a crab boil with crabs caught that day right off the dock. Memories my children will likely never create for themselves...
I hate to think what the future holds in all of this. It is likely that the oil will infiltrate further inland into the bayous and rivers, causing even more damage that would take decades to fix.
Gosh, I just want all of this to be over...
James Carville pretty much hit the nail on the head here: http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/06/in_louisiana_its_one_damned_th.html
BTW, President Obama, seek out a snocone next time you're here. They are quite colorful and provide more relief from the oppressive heat...
As for how we can be running out of oil when we can't contain this leak, 5 seconds of google searching found this. Figures are for 2007, probably not off greatly for right now.
Put simply, at the very highest estimate, the Spill so far is less than 1/10 of 1% of what the US uses every day. Since April 20, maybe equivalent to what Rhode Island consumed in the last 24 hours.
As for the Alaska Arctic Refuge that Palin wanted to drill in, according to the US Geological Survey it most likely contained the amount of oil that the US consumes in 6 months. There is a small chance that it could be more, a very slim chance of maybe 5-10 times more. Of course there is also a slim chance that it is much less. The report used to be on their website, but I haven't looked for it in years.
I don't know what Obama can do, but then again I'm not the president. He is the president and it's his job to deal with the big problems and disasters (both natural and not) that effect the country. He has a responsibility to correct this or at least attempt something. So far, he hasn't done much. No one has really done much. BP - well into the spill - tried "top kill" and it was a failure. Even the media coverage has been incredibly muted compared to past events, such as Haiti, Katrina and even the Fort Hood terrorist.
I don't drive.
I don't own a car.
I walk or take public transportation.
I don't have a dish washer.
I turn off my PC when I'm not using it.
I think twice before I buy something.
I recycle glass jars and cardboard etc.
I reuse plastic containers.
I reuse zip-lock freezer bags if they still lock.
I hand-wash small items of clothing and let dry.
I dumpster dive, garage sales, etc.
I buy second-hand, not just new.
I only keep a light on if I'm in that room.
I grow things.
I don't litter.
I ask friends "can you use this?" before I toss something out.
I do all that because I'd rather be part of the solution than the problem. And because I want to leave a better impression of myself behind, than a pile of garbage and waste. Even if no one down here sees me doing it.
For the Universe knows and just like Santa, the unseen forces know who's been naughty and who's been nice. My faults and failings may hang me yet, but I'd like to think I'm smart enough to know better than to sh*t where I eat.
Ebert: You are the soul of sanity.
There's a book by Jared Diamond called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In it, he discusses Easter Island, and how the society living there failed due to massive deforestation and abuse of the island's fairly scarce resources. The question one of his students asked pertains: "What do you think was going through their heads as they were cutting down the last tree on the island?"
Maybe they were thinking there were more trees hidden somewhere they could cut down.
In any case, I'm not eager to see how the story of oil as used in modern society ends.
BTW, I'm curious. Are you still an Obama supporter? At the moment, most liberals I know outside of the party fanatics are abandoning him left and right. Not for his response to The Spill, naturally, but for his shameless extension of Bush's human rights abuses in violation of everything he ever said on the campaign trail. Glenn Greenwald is the most vocal and convincing (http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald), but as he mentions in his most recent column, Jon Stewart and the head of the ACLU have also come out swinging.
The only way the right can justify the "Obama's Katrina" arguments is by pointing out that this country continues to turn away the aid that has been offered by several of the northern European countries that are familiar with deep sea oil drilling. I know that we have some sort of ordinance against such aid but I can't understand how any such legislature would be paramount in the case of a disaster of the magnitude of this.
Roger,
Thanks for this article. It has been the first reasonable evaluation of the Oil Spill Crisis that I have heard.
You get the feeling that things can't get much worse, and then they do.
Hi Roger.
we know the drill
Was that a pun? :)
Seriously, the spill is a heartbreaking catastrophe.
I'm watching CNN tonight as I surf, and they have a picture-in-picture shot of the underwater cam on the gusher. It makes your heart race to watch the feed from that camera. It's a powerless feeling, made mind-reeling knowing that you're watching thousands of gallons of oil gushing right before your eyes. I can't even compehend that amount that is spilling every day, day in and day out.
I have no idea what to do about the Spill. Do you? Does anybody?
Well, "the Spill" really has four separate components. Four separate problems.
1) is the leak itself. An accident. Seemingly unstoppable despite everything tried so far.
Here's an idea: there are more experts in the world than just BP and the Government. What if President Obama put reward out on the leak's head. Call in the CEO's of every major oil company in the world. "Give me a proposal on how you would stop this thing withing two weeks, by tomorrow". Put a hefty reward on the winning proposal. Whoever has the resources and can stop it gets $1 Billion, or whatever. Have the best oil well experts in the country examine the proposals immediately. Then, take control of the sites and give the winning bidder a shot at plugging the leak.
2) is the containment of the oil plumes from hitting the beaches.
This was entirely too slow and botched. Not just from the ridiculously low estimates of the gusher that seem to escalate every single day. But from the lack of emergency action to cut through the red tape and contain the oil out in the gulf.
The Governor of Louisiana was screaming from the outset for permission to build sand berms out away from the shore to protect his marshes. Permission was delayed by environmental impact study red tape. This is ridiculous. Millions of gallons of spilled oil represents a much more significant risk to the environment than the berms - on it's face. Why the long delay in permission? It's because the federal government is too big and too bureaucratic to be effective in a natural disaster on this scale. (As with Katrina).
3) is the cleanup.
Again, botched. Too little, too late to save the Gulf.
4) is the review of safety of other wells in the Gulf. Are they safe? Can this happen again?
The Obama Administration owns the Interior Department and the MMS a year and a half in. Fire people there, starting with the Secretary of the Interior. Call in all oil companies and make them defend their oil spill plans again.
"The Spill" is not over, in any of the four components. Before declaring an energy emergency, finish this emergency. Stop the leak. Contain the plumes. Clean the beaches and marshes. Examine the safety of other rigs. All hands on deck.
There are a lot of actions that a chief executive could be taking. Escalate this to the emergency level that it is. Assign a Cabinet level official as on-scene incident commander, not just a Coast Guard Admiral (who is doing a helluva job), as a start. Send a Cabinet officer to the Gulf for the duration, with the authority to cut red tape in support of the Governors.
It is all so disheartening.
Ebert: I'd be in favor of such steps.
"An earthquake devastates Haiti? The world rushes to its aid."
With all due respect, Haiti is *still* devastated.
I love your blog, Roger. Live long and prosper.
Chris Edmonds
Portland, OR
Ebert: Sort of my point...
Hi Roger, fantastic article.
There is real frustration in your writing. I to feel frustrated. When will a President of the USA stand up and tell the people what the reality is. When will President Obama use the words peak oil. It seems to me the US has become so fixated on freedom and democracy that having a President communicate realities that require people to change their behaviour is just not the way to keep popular and elected.
I sense that the brilliant Syriana will become even more prescient after the leak is patched.
But I think the most horrifying statistic I heard was on CNN about a week and a half ago. When an expert was asked how much oil was leaked in the 40 odd days since it began, the expert said that the amount of oil that had leaked in the 40-something day period, probably millions and millions of gallons, was equal to one day worth of oil consumption in the US. ONE DAY. What is it going to take for the world to get off oil?
Hey Roger,
here's your constellation's response to this whole mess:http://media.photobucket.com/image/constellation%20roger%20ebert/Texas_with_a_Dollarsign/constellation_ebert.jpg?o=1
Ebert: Leads to a bad page.
Arizona's having a hot summer. Bringing up the Weather widget on my Mac mini, I see a forecast of six days of sunny weather. The lowest of the highs is at 100. It's going to be hell getting around in cars without air conditioning.
In other words, why the heck haven't we started harvesting solar energy here? A local energy company advertised their greener energy, a while ago. I don't recall seeing it lately, and I'm sure my family didn't switch. Why can't they just switch to a majority of solar farms?
Cars. Why can't we figure out how to get reliable, cheap cars on electricity or solar energy? Does oil and ethanol really have such a grip on us that we can't find any other solution?
The oil spill is quickly becoming a tragedy. One could hope that even the right could see that just about any off-shore drilling could easily become another Deepwater, another Exxon-Valdez. But will they? I'm not hopeful.
I actually think that this terrible disaster could be just the thing we need to find the will and resolve to "sell sacrifice" again and come up with new ways to power our cars and homes.
It takes a groundbreaking event to change conventional thinking, and this might be it.
The best-case-scenario here: this depressing disaster is "the spill to end all spills."
The spill makes me so sad.
All I can say is I wish they would listen to you. Any sensible person is like a Cassandra now, shouting into the wind.
Yes, humans lived well before oil. I don't know how things would shift. I want to say 'look at Ancient Greece' but of course they had slavery then. Alas, we have slavery now, in places or virtual slavery.
This way of life can't last. That can happen the easy way or the hard way. I want it to be the easy way, for my child's sake and for all the children that are being born right now.
Ever since the Spill first happened, it's been reminding me of two lines from that last chilling paragraph from The Road:
"Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again."
Nature may be resilient, but it's difficult to see how some areas are going to come back from all this damage.
(To read a displaced pelican's tweets about BP, check out http://twitter.com/durdyburd.)
I encourage all of you to watch this. We are headed for very different times.
Ebert: Here it is: Chris Smith's "Collapse"
http://www.letmewatchthis.com/watch-23285-Collapse
This was a very good piece Roger. Your proposal on how we can get out of this crisis was very thoughtful and logical. I wish the powers that be for once, would think without dollar signs and politics. That goes for government bureaucrats, lobbyists and corporate lackeys. Corporations, are a huge part of the problem today. Their dedication to the almighty dollar is just sickening. After watching Michael Moore's "Capitalism" for example, I was in a fury. But I digress..
I am dumbfounded that with all the brilliant people on this planet, that nobody can figure out how to stop this leak. It amazes me daily. I was impressed though, with the introduction of Kevin Costner and his brother's oil separating machines. That was a plot development I did not see coming. I have a higher level of respect for Mr. Costner now. I just wish these machines could solve the problem, but with the amount of oil spewing out on the daily basis and the amount these machines can handle, it is almost a lost cause. It is very disheartening.
And we are all left here, feeling helpless. I believe as you do, that an energy revolution is a must at this point. The woman featured in the video you linked is on the right track. Her house is probably just the right size for most single people. Much like a small NYC apartment I would imagine. We all definitely need to start thinking in smaller terms regarding the "things" we buy and finding those ways to consume less energy.
When I was a kid I would always complain about being bored; this in the presence of mountains of action figures, a TV, video games, board games, sketching pads, etc. My father would routinely say the following: "I don't want to hear it. Read a book." He was right, as you are. We as a society need to step away from our screens and pick up the written word. And not on a Kindle or IPAD. I do not understand the appeal of reading from a screen anyway. Hurts my eyes. Give me an actual, tangible book, thank you. In fact, I am going to get off this computer now and get lost in this book "Shantaram" I have been reading on and off for several years.
Roger, with a tip o the hat to Randy Newman's classic novelty song ''Short People'', this came up on my mental radar today:
http://zippy1300.blogspot.com/2010/06/bp-chairman-talks-about-small-people.html
''Small people'' got no reason
''Small people'' got no reason
''Small people'' got no reason
To want big answers from Carl-Henree
Or even small answers from big Bee-Pee
They got small hands
Small eyes
They walk around
Tellin' small kinds of lies
They got small noses
And small small teeth
They wear oil-stained shoes
On their oil-soaked feet
Well, I don't want no ''Small people''
Don't want no ''Small people''
Don't want no ''Small people''
`Round here on my drillin' rig
''Small people'' got nobody
''Small people'' got nobody
''Small people'' got nobody
to hear their pleas at BP - (please!)
They got little small legs
That stand so low
On the oil-soaked beach
Oh what they don't know!
They got small minds
That go ''BP BP BP''
They got small voices
Goin' 'BP BP BP''
They got small oily fingers
And small oily minds
They're gonna get you every time
Well, I don't want no small people
Don't want no ''Small people''
Don't want no ''Small people''
'Round here on my drillin' rig....
And Roger, one final note: before I croak:
we must tigthen the noose around coal and oil completely today, and stop all oil and coal use today, so that there might be a tomorrow. Otherwise, there won't be a human species on this Earth in 500 years. We have only 30 more generations to fix our minds right. I fear the worst, thus my vision of "polar cities" to save survivors in the future, 30 generations down "The Road." Not now. Now, life is wonder full! (http://pcillu101.blogspot.com)
I loved this blog and the thoughtful comments. You Americans have many thinkers who have written about the conundrums of your approaches to energy. I'm rather keen on the advice to eat what your grandmother ate (Michael Pollan?). In my case, it's all there in the 1939 edition of Food and Cookery (The Housewife's Guide), compiled by the Home Economics Officers of the division of Agricultural Education and Extension and printed in the Union of South Africa by the Government Printer, Pretoria. She bought another copy of this book for my mother, who got married in 1940, so that was our family cookbook.
Biltong, rusks, mebos, bobotie anyone?
Ebert: I can't get me enough of 'em.
I don't understand why BP doesn't control the oil locally. Create a version of a condom over the blowout preventer with a semipermeable synthetic material which allows seawater to pass through, but not oil. Do away with the bullshit dispersant, allow the oil to rise to the surface in the contained area, then work like hell with hay, peat moss, and absorbent material to soak up the oil. Using weights to ground the fabric and buoys attached to ships to prevent the fabric "condom" from collapsing, this idea is practical and workable.
I fear that that what BP isn't telling us is that any cap or pressure increase within the well-bore would lead to an epidemic of leaks on the ocean floor, because the impermeable layer which held the oil at bay is now eroded and shattered. The earth is bleeding.
Ebert: There's a video online now showing oil leaking from cracks in the ocean floors some distance from the well.
In the last 100 years America has emitted over 300 billion tonnes of C02. In comparison India has emitted just 25 bn tonnes and China under 90 bn tonnes. This is despite each country having a population 3 times that of the US.
Is it fair to ask these developing countries to cut emissions? Its asking them to stop growing - as emissions are a prerequisite to development, especially with the current cost of green tech.
I believe the countries who have prospered by polluting all these years should pay a tax for their emissions - a tax that can fund green tech.
Outstanding article. Thanks for the articulate writeup.
I think Obama has been handling it better than most president. Today, he actually went after the cause for horrible corporate behavior: He took the Stockholders dividends away. Most CEOs and Companies manta's has been: "Are we maximizing the profits for the stockholders?" No other President would have dared to do this.
This disaster happened because of corner cutting and outright lies to the Government. As well as the government being lax in its watch dog role.
This disaster should proves that businesses interest is not doing the right thing: But doing the profitable thing. Government intervention is needed.
I hadn't read your posts in a long time.
Thanks for writing this, I'm amazed at how we've come from the context you mention in the Dickens novel (by the way... which one is it?). And how Americans have come from your childhood context.
In favor of your argument, we still wash dishes by hand and use a clothesline in my house (most Guatemalan families do so), and we don't feel burdened at all. Would it be too much to ask that everyone gets rid of their damn headphones?
Ebert: It was "Dombey and Son," but it could have been many others.
Yeah, we hung up the laundry in the basement in the winter.
Mr. Ebert, what was your impression of "Who Killed the Electric Car?" I mean, we HAD alternative means of fueling our cars, and the oil companies (linked to the motor companies) recalled them and said "No, screw the environment, you all need oil!" Who's to stop this from happening again? I just hope "Who Killed the Solar Powered Houses?" or "Who Killed the Hydrogen Fuel Cell?" won't be the names of future documentaries...
Ebert: That was a strong doc in 2006 and so, so relevant now.
The human species is a child, and I don't mean that in a demeaning way, but in a tragic way.
Through the eras philosophers have repeated "doom" because they recognized underlying problems with the human mind. Mostly that we're not very far removed from the animal mind. And, indecently, there has been a trend of persecuting, to various degrees, these progressive people.
Right now we're at a road block, a sort of "all or nothing scenario." I have this feeling that there is a lot of work being done to quell a fear that's bubbling up everywhere.
It's like we are now living in a world out of focus, with darting eyes trying to grasp anything that makes sense. But the problem is that the whole world is out of focus.
Some people realize that it a collective inner blur which extrapolates into a world as jacked up as ours. That is, they realize how irrational humans inherently are.
You can go on to study rationality, to render a crisper inner map and territory -- it is the single best thing a human can do. Roger and readers, please check out the Less Wrong sequences (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences) and the Less Wrong community blog (http://lesswrong.com/). This is the only place I've been able to find solace in the human species. And by doing so, you'll find yourself at the highest philosophic peak ever formed.
Steven Seagal predicted this crap years ago with 'On dangerous ground'. You and Siskel panned him because, oh, it was the 90's and he wasn't Al Gore to say certain things and, yes, his movie was ridiculous despite being HILARIOUSLY ridiculous and having the heart in its right place. You ridicule Seagal because he's too lowbrow, ignore late Godard because he's too highbrow, and call the original 'Karate kid' one of the best movies of its year even if it has that narcissistic monster Larusso at its center (take a second look at it, Mr. Ebert; you will change your mind, the same you did with 'The graduate'). Let's not forget 'The human centipede' defeated your reviewing skills. A little humility goes a long way. The Larusso cult MUST be stopped. Recant, Mr. Ebert.
For Pete's sake, rewrite the first paragraph of your post. You can throw money at Haiti to repair the damages, but you can't resurrect the dead with money. IT CAN'T BE FIXED. Thousands of dead are worse than an oil spill, even if they weren't innocent, proud, white flag-waving Americans. Paraphrase it. You intended irony, yet failed to go the whole length. I have succeded with saying 'white flag-waving Americans'. See? It's easy.
El Presidente Obama clearly validated Seagal's timeless message with his "kick BP's ass" quote. 'Pierrot le fou' looks better now than it ever did in '65. At least you finally included 'Come and see' in your Great Movies list. And I prefer 'Pierre' to 'Moby Dick'. Screw Fl..
So, please, somebody post Seagal's eco-rant. It might be preachy, but only AFTER he blowed up a frickin' refinery and single-handedly saved Alaskan nature. He's a prophet.
Ebert: "Pierre" is eerily modern. And the French film inspired by it is just plain weird.
It always seemed to me that there needs to be an actual effort made to build an alternate energy infrastructure, that industry if left to its own devices would act too slowly. Would we have put a man on the moon if government hadn't declared it, then followed through with as much money and manpower as it took to stay the course? No; private industry is still struggling 40 years later just to exit the atmosphere on its own.
Likewise, we need a visionary president to fearlessly and publicly back a comprehensive alternative energy plan, and then to name and shame anyone in Congress or industry who tries to stop it.
For starters, whether Detroit objects or not there must be an absolute cut-off date for building new cars with only gasoline-powered internal combustion engines. All cars after that date must be hybrids, fully-electric, or other alternative technologies. And then there should be a second cut-off date to kill gasoline engines in cars entirely--no more gas hybrids after that date, just electrics, ethanols, and whatever others become feasible.
Second, the corn subsidy must end and free trade in cane sugar and derived products must be allowed. Not only is the corn subsidy bad for the development of a "real" ethanol industry, it's bad for health. High fructose corn syrup is in everything because it's artificially cheaper than regular sugar, and it's becoming increasingly obvious that HFC is playing a role in the obesity epidemic. The corn subsidy also leads to corn being fed to cows, which isn't good for them, for our meat, and especially for the environment since we have methane-flatulating cows which have to be fed large quantities of antibiotics to counter the unhealthful effects of corn feeding--and those antibiotics breed drug-resistant bacteria and enter our meat supply and environment. The corn subsidy also goes mostly to big industrial farms, not small farmers--it's bad for everyone and good for almost no one but large corporations.
Moreover, all new homes over a certain square footage should be required to have solar panels, a wind turbine, or other alternative energy production means built in. Start with the mansions and McMansions, and stagger it so that every few years the square-footage ceilings are dropped. That way the technology can be increasingly mass-produced and come down in price, until eventually all new homes have green energy production built in.
As for existing homes, there should be a tax rebate covering 100% of the cost of installing solar panels and related equipment for the middle classes, and a "prebate" covering 100% of the cost upfront for those of lower income. That may seem like exorbitant spending, but again it could be staggered over a decade by either square footage or income or some other way the GAO can come up with--and I guarantee it would come out to a lot less than, say, TARP or other government boondoggles. And talk about stimulating the economy--we'd be instantly employing everyone from home contractors who install equipment to scientists who improve its efficiency to industrial factory workers who build it.
Pushing consumer adoption of alternative energy will in turn make the technology cheaper and more feasible for industrial power generation since it'll be in mass production. Solar and wind farms will suddenly be less expensive and risky investments. And alternative power generation must include the new breeds of nuclear reactor being safely used all over Europe.
I am no environmentalist or green. I tend to disbelieve that very much of the global warming we're now experiencing is really anthropogenic--when we look at 100,000-year timescales instead of
National security, for one: depending on foreign oil isn't good for us, and it could kneecap us again at any time just as it did under OPEC in the 70s--and it's insane and dangerous to fund fundamentalist Islamic terrorists with our oil money if we can find another path.
Technological and scientific industrial advancement is another reason to support this sort of plan: what better "jobs program" could there be than to foster new advanced technologies to keep America competitive on the world stage?
Finally, many experts say we reached "peak oil" long ago; whether we have or not, we're already competing over limited oil production with China, India, and others, and oil is just going to get more expensive and harder to justify burning. After all, we use oil for everything from plastics to lubricants to--well, lots of stuff it would be hard to live a modern life without. Should we really be burning it all up and right quickly if we don't have to?
I can think of many more good reasons the government should be leading us down the path of green energy, and anyone honest can too. You don't have to be an environmentalist or a liberal to realize that the green energy revolution will be the biggest thing since the WPA projects of the 30s gave us abundant electricity (dams) and transcontinental highways. Or at least the biggest thing since the moon landing. And those are the sorts of things it takes government to accomplish, because private industry is too short-sighted to champion them.
While I agree with essentially all of your points, I must urge you caution in being credulous regarding Michael Ruppert. He is neither an economist nor a geologist, but instead rather a sordid character whose book "Crossing the Rubicon" argued that 9/11 was a plot hatched by Dick Cheney as part of a plan to grab all the world's oil supplies before unleashing biological weapons to kill most of the world's population. Which, so far as I know (I've been studying in London, so maybe i missed it) hasn't happened. His views should be interpreted with rather a portion of salt.
For instance, on peak oil: the metaphor of collapse is misleading. We won't ever run out of oil, it will only continue to get more and more expensive indefinitely as the supply decreases. We won't descend into Mad Max-style anarchy overnight, instead progressive sections of the population will be pushed into poverty as they can't afford petroleum or goods made with petroleum, and will lose their jobs as companies find they can't afford to make things using petroleum. And it won't be linear, and it won't be sudden, or probably soon. Consider that aside from the enormous 2003-2008 price rise (which was general to lots of commodities) there has been no general rise in oil prices over time, despite a constant rise in demand. I don't at all mean to disagree with your argument, I just think it's important that we grasp what the alternative will actually look like, and not base our opposition to the status quo on the unsupported theories of a fairly peculiar figure. Instead I think we should base it on pretty much exactly what your post says.
I remember what Jack Donaghy said to Liz Lemon in one episode of "30 Rock"....
"Lemon, let me tell you a little story. It was 1994, and I was ice climbing when I fell into a crevasse and hurt my leg. There was only one way out, so fighting every natural instinct I have, I did the thing I hated the most. I climbed down into the darkness. And when I came back to camp, I went to the person who cut my line and said, "Connie Chung, you saved my life."
Our turn is coming and it's the matter of "Changed or Collpased". We really have to be changed even if we don't want to.
P.S.
1. What do you think will happend to CDs and DVDs? I think I will miss them.
2. Marie Haws, you're exemplary. There are five or six things I'm not doing yet, and I will try.
Unfortunately we rely on oil for more than energy. Modern agriculture is dependent on the fertilizers and pesticides the petrochemical industry provides. We will be unable to produce enough food to feed ourselves without it. Living without oil is not just a return to Dickensian standards of living, it also implies a more Dickensian population size and a Malthusian world.
I remain horrified by the observation that every initial estimate BP provided about the size of the leak was incorrect, but we must all now take at face value BP's estimates of when the leak will be fixed - August. This is the mother of all oil leaks, and part of me wonders whether BP remains in denial about the size of the problem. Quoting Vladimir Kutcherov, Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and the Russian State University of Oil and Gas:
"What BP drilled into was what we call a ‘migration channel,’ a deep fault on which hydrocarbons generated in the depth of our planet migrate to the crust and are accumulated in rocks, something like Ghawar in Saudi Arabia. In my view the heads of BP reacted with panic at the scale of the oil spewing out of the well. What is inexplicable at this point is why they are trying one thing, failing, then trying a second, failing, then a third. Given the scale of the disaster they should try every conceivable option, even if it is ten, all at once in the hope that one will work. Otherwise, this oil source could spew oil for years given the volumes that have come to the surface already."
Like everyone here I'm hopeful that the leak will be definitively fixed come August - sooner would be nice - but real life doesn't always stick to the script.
"There's obviously only one remedy: An energy revolution. We must reduce consumption and develop clean energy alternatives."
This problem was solved decades ago. Thorium is safe, efficient and clean (it produces less waste than uranium and has a shorter half-life, and I think it's also more recyclable). It's more abundant than uranium and harder to weaponize. The problem with wind and solar power is that they are not efficient enough for large scale use. People just like them because they "feel" environmentally friendly.
"We try to avoid this overwhelming fact. By "we," I don't mean North America, but most of the world, specifically including China and India."
India is actually investing in thorium power plants. They are already running one and will be building several more.
"I don't even want to know how much energy an electric dishwasher consumes."
A dishwasher is more efficient than washing dishes by hand.
Ah, yes. Only a Progressive would think the Carter Administration was the good ol' days.
But good on you about your hybrid, Ebert, though I'll believe you're serious about saving the environment when you use it to drive your and your wife (and whoever else goes along with you on that annual trip) to Cannes to, what, write movie reviews?
The Gulf oil spill will end, the mess will be cleaned up, the environment will recover and you'll continue to wring your hands about evil corporations and conservatives while finding no fault, no fault whatsoever, with your beloved Obama.
Ebert: Just a hint on cleaning up the mess, please. Obama could use it.
Roger lives in a four story house. Roger flies all over the world to go to film festivals. His carbon footprint is larger than most Americans yet he has the gall to lecture? That is rich.
Ebert: Yes, and I included myself in the lecture.
When I lived down south, two of my favorite things were to visit (the old, unflooded) New Orleans and to go swimming in the Gulf of Mexico...what a bummer of a decade. What childhood memory will be savaged next?
I wonder if you've read this Guardian article about the oil spills in Nigeria:
"In fact, more oil is spilled from the delta's network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP's Deepwater Horizon rig last month."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shell
I can't even express how hopeless this makes me feel.
The choice of seeking replacement energy sources or not, now, is the choice between, 40 years from now, when I will be an old man, looking around and saying: "This is better" vs. "How did we come to this?"
I have read that a field of solar panels, using today's technology, roughly the size of New Mexico, if in a highly saturated area such as North Africa or Arabia, would power the world. The problem isn't getting the electricity. the problem is transporting and storing it. We need to build better, smaller, lighter batteries.
And we need to say goodbye to air travel. Because batteries won't fly a jumbo jet.
After watching this thing bleed for some weeks now, it's begun to evoke a visceral feeling that America has been punched square in the gut with a big metal pipe.
Some of the antics remain all too predictable: news reports largely fake; reporters merely take news releases from the gov't and BP and rewrite them, faked facts and all.
At the first news of it, an American engineer friend wrote whomever he could, suggesting they "pinch the pipe." A difficult but quite feasible operation. I'm sure he wasn't the only one who made the suggestion. No such thing was done for quite awhile -- the recent attempt to cut the broken pipe and "cap" it.
This and other sheepish news reports gave some of us the impression that BP was dragging its feet looking for ways to get the American taxpayer to foot the bill for the disaster. Bet that's true. The "solutions" applied so far have been so obviously silly to anyone who knows about such stuff, it's probably been a smokescreen while ways to profit from the disaster as it is have been quietly negotiated.
A couple weeks ago, while we were being fed what "they" can get away with, I got an e-mail from a British career engineer saying the gusher was about 200,000 barrels a day and it was coming from more places than one one. (I got the latter bit of info from more places than one. I've learned not to sneer at "tinfoil hat" hat news over the years. Those who still do need their heads examined.)
This engineer said that a single quart of motor oil renders 250,000 gallons of water uninhabitable to marine life. It's probable that the BP disaster has been rendering one quadrillion gallons of water a week uninhabitable to marine life. That won't rinse out very soon. It'll head up the Gulf Stream and create great problems for more than just the UK.
Last Christmas I learned that the biggest deposit of natural gas so far has been sounded out between Lakes Erie and Ontario and down as far as Philadelphia; there's enough there to last "way past our great grandchildren." If I could learn this sitting in a bar with accountants from big energy firms, I don't doubt there's been a good deal of haggling about it among Big Oil, BP included. They're all run by generations-old cliques who think they're smart enough to "run the world." They produce grotesqueries like Paris Hilton.
According to a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court some years ago, the primary responsibility of a corporation is to make profits for its stockholders. This holds precedence over whether a few million customers get sick or killed by their shenanigans. That needs to be figured into the equation of what's going on here. There are far more disasters we're not reading about, and more waiting in the wings, Nuclear power being chiefest among them.
My sis-in-law is a smart lady. A PhD in Education, responsible for lots of teachers. Just as an aside, she says that "No Child Left Behind," which is still in place, is killing the creativity of education everywhere. It's created enormous problems. I replied I knew several very bright teachers who quit rather than have to deal with that Bush era profit-scheme (the Bushies, as usual, made out like bandits from lousy "educational consulting firms" that would, very predictably, have to come in and vacuum up even local taxpayer monies to "fix" it. If the Obama administration hasn't, "caught on" to this, it's because they don't mean to).
Sis-in-law and I also talked about this Oil Disaster. The brightest thing she could think of is that maybe we'll be caught up in disasters so clearly of our own making, we won't have time to incite any of these wars that have been in high-profit planning for decades now -- a rape of Iran being just one. The current administration can not be said to be doing anything but continuing to set a gullible, rigid-minded public up for another "war on evil." (And that's another reason I think our own Bill Hays is just a paid government worm, oozing out phony "anti-muslim" sentiment here so methodically.)
Let's see if this Big Stomache Ache does anything toward that. The news-digesting public appears to have little concept that the fantasies they're swallowing are as big a part of the profitable problems being created for them, and are wasting what energies they may have for solutions in a lot of quasi-political squabbling, like fat guys sitting around arguing about their god damned favorite sports teams.
Seems like Dem presidents spend most of their presidency cleaning up the mess left by the Repubs & get knocked severely for it.
"Feds and BP spilled oil on purpose: U.S. candidate"
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Feds+spilled+purpose+candidate/3162201/story.html#ixzz0r36pD7JH
"Republican congressional candidate William 'Bill' Randall is suggesting that the Obama administration and BP conspired to intentionally spill oil in the Gulf, resulting in 11 deaths and the worst environmental disaster in the nation's history.
"Randall, who has aligned himself with the tea party movement, readily acknowledges that he has no evidence that what he says is true. But that is not stopping him from making the claim as he campaigns in the June 22 GOP runoff to face incumbent Democratic Rep. Brad Miller on the November ballot."
Conspiracy theories. Gotta love 'em. (Saw the link on skepchick.)
Your comments about this disaster resonated a bit more with me after I read
this recent article about ocean explorer Robert Ballard, the man who found the Titanic. He's in the Black Sea exploring Roman shipwrecks that haven't been seen by anyone since they sank thousands of years ago. The Black Sea has no oxygen at it's lower depths, so wooden items, such as ancient ships, have survived nearly intact since the day they sank.
He doesn't comment about the Spill, but he does talk about how precious our oceans are, how they're the last unexplored frontier on this planet and that there's so much still to discover. Just made me a bit mad that we can't seem to do anything to protect the oceans from our own recklessness.
I mean, how much are we losing, whether it's medical advances found in the wide variety of life down there, the historical wealth waiting to be re-discovered in the shipwrecks still unexplored or being able to unravel the mystery of how life on this planet may have begun, when we screw up like this?
Here's my question: The federal government owns about half of Nevada and about a third of Arizona. It's a lot of dead desert land leftover from the nuclear testing days. Why isn't every square inch of that land covered with solar panels, soaking up the desert sun? I have to believe a solar farm like that could provide a hell of a lot of energy for the western U.S.
I thank you for sharing your thoughts about the Spill and its ramifications. I appreciate your insight and passion.
Also, I thank you for showing what I'd call citizenship, in the best sense -- getting involved in responding to an urgent national/regional threat, rather than sitting around and waiting for someone else to do it (or worse, for it to just go away).
I have read that many Americans think of themselves as consumers primarily, rather than citizens. I can see how that has developed, given our economic, industrial/technological, and political history. Let's hope that people will wake up and see this point as the time to claim their citizenship, not only in the US, but as world citizens, and be not merely consumers, but intelligent stewards of this planet.
I am posting a link to this on my FB page. God Bless!
There's an argument for buying a good quality used car over a hybrid because of the energy used in building the new car. Environmental footprint is less with the used car. Yes, the earth is bleeding. We can just stand back and watch. It struck me as odd, that President Obama spoke of a 20 billion dollar fund to care for the money lost by local residents due to this disaster. What of a fund to care for the wildlife? For the ocean? The talk of using an explosive device to fix this scares the bejesus out of me. My finacee pointed out this: http://www.ifitwasmyhome.com/. I live in New Brunswick, Canada and it covers the whole damned province. Wouldn't care so much about lobster then, would I? This is not an American problem. It's an international one. BP should be shoved out of the way, so the countries can handle it. I need a stiff drink. Single malt, please.
BP pays its taxes in Britain, but actually changed its name from British Petroleum to just BP years ago. About 40% of the shares are British owned. But about 40% of the shares are American owned. The rig was run by an American company. The well was drilled and capped by an American company. Transocean is one of them and does anyone remember a little company called Haliburton? I think there are a few Republicans who know them well.
The whole oil industry is all about greed, but we all need the product they sell. So until we have sensible alternatives we need to stiffle the lobbyists and get these sheisters under a bit more regulatory control, no?
Roger: I remember flying into Phoenix a few years ago, looking down at the vast tracts of desert, and wondering "Why no solar panels?" It seems an obvious choice for a city where every enclosed inch is air-conditioned: significant space available on non-arable land, abundant sunshine, etc. Why wouldn't you do this?
Some of this desert may be fragile, or house certain species deemed endangered or protected, but surely a reasonable trade-off can be found? It's not all Edenic biosphere, is it? Can't common sense prevail here? Maybe put 'em on the roofs?
There's a similar question quickly coming to the fore: personal transport. With the Chevy Volt, the Fisker Karma, the Tesla Roadster, the THINK City, and other electrified vehicles, Americans will soon be able to choose a common sense alternative to fossil fuels. Between BEVs (Battery Electric Vehicles), PHEVs (Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles, and HEVs (Hybrid Electric Vehicles), there is a coming range of choices for consumers to begin weaning themselves off of oil.
I have had the privilege of riding in a Tesla Roadster, and of driving an BMW Mini-e. The ride in the Tesla was breathtaking: heart-stopping acceleration, smooth handling, ultra-quiet ride. The Mini was FUN! Strong acceleration, and handling like a kid's go-kart. I defy anyone to drive this car and not smile.
I described the Tesla ride to a friend, and cited the preliminary specs: top speeds approaching that of internal combustion supercars (now capped out at around 160 MPH, I believe), 2 cents per mile energy cost, 250-mile range.
The response was "But what if I want to drive more than 250 miles?"
90% of Americans drive less than 100 miles per day. But that question ("Range Anxiety") continues to plague this nascent industry. And that may be where government can help, at least to alleviate some of the concern surrounding electrified vehicles. Infrastructure, tax incentives, and other methodologies could speed adoption.
Much like the solar panels in Phoenix, this seems to be a fairly common sense solution. While the Return on Investment requires a bit of delayed gratification, the ultimate end seems to more than justify it.
Setting aside global warming, or climate change, or The Spill, isn't this just common sense? Why continue to buy oil from hostile regimes, or source from locations where accidents can have catastrophic long-term effects?
Peter King, Sports Illustrated's senior football writer, in a recent column mentioned he would not buy gas at a BP station. He stated that while he realizes the station owner is not responsible for the spill, he doesn't want his money going to BP.
While understandable, this is probably a bit misguided. If not BP, this could have as easily been Shell, Marathon, or another mega-Corp.
Isn't the better solution to begin to end this oil dependence? Perhaps by beginning with my car?
And by the way, neither electic vehicles nor hybrids are new technology. In 1899 and 1900, EVs outsold all other cars. It was only when the price of gasoline plunged that the internal combustion engine became the dominant technology. Prior to that, it was deemed too noisy, too rough, and too stinky to be a mode of transport for the ladies and gentlemen of the time.
I'd challenge readers of this blog to seek out a ride/drive in one of the Ford hybrids, or the Fisker/Tesla/BMW/THINK EVs. Discerning readers may reach the same conclusion as their great-grandparents.
And by the way, I am politically idependent, fiscally conservative, and pretty much a regular guy. I'm not shilling for anyone, but feel there's a compelling case to be made for electrification of transport.
Mr Ebert,
I was enjoying your read, although some of your points were easily debatable, until I came across this analysis:
"The difference is, Bush could have done more with Katrina, but I don't see what Obama can do with the Spill"
I realize this is your blog and you are allowed to make an accusation and use it as a prop to support your point of view; however you failed to provide any information on what else Bush could have done that would have reduced the impact of a hurricane as devastating as Katrina. Perhaps he should have jumped in the empty buses that stood idle in New Orleans after Nagen forbade city citizens from boarding? I could agree with that. However, I don't agree with you that Obama has limited powers in reducing the impact of this spill. Louisiana governor B. Jindall requested on May 11th for permits to plant inflatable and sand barriers off the LA shores to block oil from seeping toward the coastline. However, Obama and his Administration said that "the impact of these barriers on the environment have yet to be determined and therefore will need to be examined further by our team of researchers". I find it fascinating that oil trumps sand barriers in terms of environmental friendliness- according to Obama and his Administration (permits were finally granted on June 2nd). It should also be noted that the Dutch, Norway and the Brits all offered mitigation equipment immediately after the spill - but were all denied as not to shame this Administration's handling of the spill.
Perhaps you should review all of the facts before writing a persuasive blog which isn't all that convincing when you know the whole story.
Ebert: As it turns out, sand barriers would have made the situation worse. There's a link to that in this thread. Search "sand barriers" in the blog's right corner search box.
I learned from The Rachel Maddow show last night that there are some very good reasons why there was a delay in building the sand berms along the Louisiana coast - they probably won't work and they are likely to make the situation worse.
1) They take months to build and use resources that may be better spent elsewhere.
2) If they build a gapless wall of sand it will inhibit the tides from moving in and out, which will surely destroy the ecosystem of the areas they are meant to protect.
3) If they build them with gaps that allow tidal movement, the oil will still come through and possibly be directed further inland.
4) They will begin to erode the moment they are built, and won't last through a hurricanes.
5) Dredging up the sand will lead to further coastal erosion and may tear apart gas and oil piplines under the sea.
Has "Berm Baby Berm" replaced Drill Baby Drill as the right wing's emotionally potent oversimplification du jour? As Menken said, "For every human problem, there is a neat, simple solution and it is always wrong."
Thought you might appreciate - EDF made a video using "Over the Rainbow" from Glee over scenes from the oil spill. It's really powerful, moving stuff: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jPjJPVdR4g
Thanks, and keep up the good work! I've been a fan of your movie reviews for many years, and I'm really loving your online work.
First, and more trivially, about dishwashers: labour-saving devices are sometimes also energy-saving devices. I once read about a study that so long as the "dry" cycle wasn't used, running a full dishwasher used either less or about the same energy as cleaning the dishes by hand (because less hot water was used).
Second, "the buck stops [t]here". Pres. Obama has duties and responsibilities to the United States and he is rightly, and fairly, judged for how he and his administration react to dangers of national import.
I think he's made significant mistakes including letting BP decide on its own what to try for too long (their primary interest at least in the early stages was in recovering a usable well, NOT in stopping the leak in a way that might destroy its usability) and focusing on setting blame and setting up a fund for damages before the leak is even stopped - putting the cart before the horse, wasting time better spent on dealing with the spill first.
I love the lady's tiny house, and there are tons of improvements to be made on the local level, but we're going to need huge policy shifts from national governments. It's baffling that this gets turned into a partisan issue. Regardless of your political party, we all live on the same finite planet. The division is between looking at reality and making changes, and living in a delusion that things will be the way we want them. Before long, the latter position will simply be impossible to maintain.
In Pres. Obama's speech the other night, he joined the list of presidents going back to Nixon who declared the need for an energy revolution. But as far as I know, he's the first to make it clear that the problem is depending on fossil fuels at all, not just "foreign oil". He's got an opportunity here to rise to greatness, if he forgets about political capital, forgets about being reelected, and does what's needed.
Roger, I've no doubt you read some of the same science fiction near-future stories I did in the 1960s and '70s, by writers like Harry Harrison, John Brunner and others, about overpopulation, environmental degradation and the collapse of outmoded systems. Nobody in power paid any attention, and now it seems we've got three or four different sci-fi dystopias competing to become our reality.
Roger,
I share your frustrations with the current mindset of the world in general, and the American people in particular. It seems as though it has become an insult, and political suicide for that matter, to suggest any sacrifice, no matter how small.
Any attempt to cut any program by any amount is met with protests in the street. The suggestion to raise taxes even by the smallest percentage results in political rebellion (or, in the TEA Party's case, rebellion even without the increase).
Even in my own family I find that I have to follow my wife and children through the house carefully monitoring their consumption and reminding them to turn off lights. Why not use the single light over the sink rather than the 7 recessed lights over the kitchen? Do you really need to turn on the hallway dome light (which has 4 candle bulbs inside of it) just to make your way from one room to another? Is it really necessary to turn the light on in the washroom when the setting sun is still streaming through the windows?
If I can't even convince my own wife, who like me grew up without air conditioning and somehow survived 95 degree summer nights, that we don't need to flip the central air on when it's only 72 degrees outside...what hope do I have for my neighbors?
Dear Roger;
Much of Marie Haws' list is just good old Yankee thriftiness. Folks around here can squeeze a dollar until the eagle screams.
Roger, I am a little flummoxed by your calling of India to be more responsible along with other nations. One of the commentator above listed things she does to save power and you said she was a soul of sanity. Well, in India that is a normal practice. Nobody told us to switch off lights when we don't need it, we just do it. Less than 5% of population use washing machines for clothes. I have never ever seen a dishwasher being sold here. I earn 1000$ per month ( an above average middle class salary ) and I don't have an air conditioning at my home yet. 99% Indians use fans. ( if you know what they mean ) and finally, majority of Indians still travel in buses and trains. buying a car, for that matter a 2 wheeler is a not easy for majority of Indians. Asking a guy, who works his ass off for his family and who wants them to have little pleasures of life like a scooter ride, to control his consumption of oil is really hypocritical coming from the land of limousines. know what, probably the scooter guy uses a gallon or two for the whole month anyway.
This trend of Americans suddenly calling China and India for being responsible for their problems is rather incredulous. George Bush jr. said food prices are going up because Indians are eating healthier food and now Indians are responsible for power problems too...
If I hadn't known you better, I would have taken strong offense to your words. But, I guess the blame game played by yours presidents( yes, Obama too ) and your media seems to have worked even on saner minds like yours.
Siva.
Hyderabad, India
Ebert: Goodness, I was not criticizing India. I was looking ahead to the increased energy consumption that is your future and the globe's. America is a shameless energy hog and I'm the first to say so.
Marie Haws,
You can actually buy a dishwasher if you want!
I've read some books that suggest that most modern dishwashers use LESS water and heat than ordinary hand-washing (unless you're washing your dishes in a thin pool of cold water drawn from a well). Look for the energy star certified ones --you usually don't have to do much or any pre-rinsing for most of the newer brands, they handle food particles very well (check the manual of course). That's just what I've read, so might be worth looking into.
Congrats on your other bullet points. I don't drive or own a car either. I take the train and bus the 30 miles from Long Beach to Century City every workday. That makes me more likely to be a victim of the next major terrorist attack or something, but at least I get lots of reading done.
LA Times ran a pretty funny article recently about the train I take every morning and evening. I have met every one of these individuals except for the guy who removes his glass eyes for money.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jun/09/local/la-me-blue-line-20100609
What the Gulf spill gives us is a graphic example of information management (or, if you like, spin) gone terribly wrong. It isn't just private enterprise, but governments, and heck even ordinary people, when caught by some crisis of their own creation, who will artfully minimize the severity of a situation ("That credit card bill will ONLY cost $100 a month, hon."), hold back bad details ("I won't tell her I just bought the entire Criterion Collection last Tuesday") and generally put a positive spin on even the most blatantly awful circumstances ("I know we'll have to move to pay off our credit card debt, but just think, you always complain about how hard it is to clean up this big house.")
In BP's case, it was obviously thought that they'd just plug the leak early on, so underestimating the flow of the leak was just the sort of lie you'd tell when you figured you'd never get caught. As the situation got worse, it moved into irrelevancies like "We've had worse oil spills in the Gulf" and "Did you know the Gulf leaks oil naturally, so what we're doing is no worse than natural geological processes do." You see what I mean. Big disaster, little disaster, they all follow certain rules, because people, whether individuals or large groups, are usually more interested in saving facing and minimizing their responsibility than they are in accurately detailing what's going on.
Frankly, I think BP's woes in this matter are possibly the best argument I've seen yet for honesty as the best policy. If BP had been fully honest from the very beginning that the well head was leaking 20,000 to 40,000 barrels a day, had admitted there were oil plumes, and not tried to BS their way out of it, had said "We're going to try capping, but to be honest, the only solution we can foresee solving the problem is new wells", then there would have been a helluva lot of anger, but the feeling that everyone from Obama down to the poor bastard whose fishing boat is idle during the peak season that BP is trying to pull the wool over their eyes wouldn't be there. There would be anger, but clarity.
But Obama and the Government have their share of the blame as well. While I can't blame Obama for what is clearly a very cozy relationship between government regulators and oil companies (I'm sure that's been going on for decades), he too has invoked rhetoric that suggests there is some magical fix out there that if only BP wasn't a big evil foreign corporation, would have plugged the leak already (and if someone wants to blame the Brits, there are a bunch of folks in Bhopal, India who have a thing or two to say about American corporate responsibility).
The real test of a leader isn't public displays of anger or delivery of positive, comforting messages, but when a leader tells his people cold, hard facts without sugarcoating. I think back to Churchill's stirring speeches during WWII that lifted spirits even as they made everyone fully aware of the dark days ahead as the perfect example of giving people hope while keeping their feet firmly planted on the ground.
Roger, why not encourage the public at large to pursue this revolution individually, at the grassroots level, rather than wait for the Messiah to fix everything with more massive spending?
You say the "Right" has an unfair expectation of Obama's ability to handle this sort of crisis (I believe the Left is making those same claims, though). But then you lay out a blueprint for him to almost single-handedly enforce an "energy revolution" through dictatorial decrees.
True change comes at the grassroots level. As long as people are willing to tweet about the need for environmental action while riding private airplanes, we are going to get nowhere.
Maybe we could get your sycophantic readers to harvest the oil, they obviously have a lot of natural sucking power.
Ebert: Oddly enough, they disagree with me a whole lot of the time, and are not shy to say so. Knowing many of them by name, I'm surprised that this subject seems to have united most of them.
Here are the choice words that Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) had for BP CEO Tony Hayward today:
"I'm ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday” … "I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown, in this case a $20 billion shakedown." … "I apologize. I do not want to live in a country where any time a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong, is subject to some sort of political pressure that is, again, in my words, amounts to a shakedown. So I apologize."
If anything, Joe Barton gets points for honesty. He knows who butters his bread.
There is something frightening about a GOP that criticizes Obama for "apologizing" to foreign countries, while they can't stop falling over themselves to apologize to BP.
This is corporatocracy in action.
Maybe Obama can put on a wetsuit and plug the hole with Sarah Palin's massive ego or NJ governor Chris Christie??
I just received my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, and have a few thoughts on the matter. We absolutely need an energy revolution, but unfortunately we don't really have a good replacement for oil at the moment.
Solar and wind energy are important, but they can only be supplemental to other energy sources due to their dependence on natural phenomenon that are, by their very nature, intermittent. There have been discussions about using large batteries, and it is being tried in a few areas, but batteries have a whole host of problems themselves, such as limited lifespan. These technologies are certainly important, and can help reduce our dependence on oil, but they can not eliminate it by themselves.
Increased use of nuclear power is another option. Of all the technologies we have at current, I think that nuclear is our best option. The plants are very safe (at least modern American, British, and French designs are, Soviet designs not so much), and in fact nuclear power in non-Soviet countries has the best safety rating of any source of power except solar (even wind energy has seen it's fair share of deaths due to accidents). Even still, it's certainly not ideal.
What we need is an altogether new type of energy source, something that hasn't been invented yet. Increased energy efficiency, use of current alternative energy sources, etc are really just stop-gap measures. They cannot solve our problems by themselves. We need something that hasn't been invented yet. Researchers are working on it, but it's going to take a very long time.
Your automatic dishwasher comment got me thinking--and I apologize beforehand if a previous commenter has aready pointed this out: Automatic dishwashers are overall more eco-friendly than hand washing. One could consider the energy/materials cost of making and disposing of dishwashers, but I have a feeling that the mechanical, electrical, and computer ages we've passed through in the last 200 years have positioned us well to use that know-how to live more efficiently without having to live more "simply"; that is, we don't need to go back to 1800 to solve our energy/resource problems. Sure, we had to make a whole lot of pollution to get here, but if we're smart (and yes, I'm made uneasy when I consider how big an "if" that is), we'll be able to retool to accommodate both present preferred standards of living (as far as overall comfort and health are concerned) and the need to protect the environment.
But again, we have to get smart, right now as we stand on the cusp, no more b-llsh-tting around; let's hammer those techno-swords into--well, you can pick a better analogy. But let us go the way of the automatic dishwasher, which, according to a study done at the University of Bonn (discussed here: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/08/dishwasher_vs_h.php), "uses only half the energy and one-sixth of the water, less soap too."
p.s. And let's not make this a political issue; jeez, even my father-in-law--who thinks Glen and Bill and Hannity and Rush got it all scoped out--has been griping for years we need to go back to 55 MPH. One small step for a man ...
Another way we could conserve energy would be for big office buildings to stop running the air conditioning and open some windows. I live in MN, so we get only a few precious months of nice weather, but the minute the temprature gets above 50 degrees or so, our company turns on the ac. It is literally so cold in our building some days that my hands and lips turn blue and I have to wear a sweater in the middle of July. What about the days when people opened a window, and while you were working you could hear birds singing or voices in the street? I would put up with being a little hot on warm days to save energy. Companies could also relax dress policies in the summer, and plant green roofs to keep buildings cooler.
Ebert: It is a law of American society that heating and air conditioning bear no relationship to the actual weather outside, or the comfort of those within.
Those wonderful folks at BP are also shutting down their Maryland solar panel production plant & shipping those jobs off to guess where?
China of course!
http://tinyurl.com/yfwvzec
[Washington Post]
When the President gave his Oval Office speech, I was severely disappointed, for a multitude of reasons. The biggest is that I wanted him to give us a real goal. I wanted him to have a plan. He pushed a little about the need for a new energy economy, but he could have come down on it so much more strongly. He could have told the Senate to get off their collective butts. He could have committed to truly getting us out of this recession by making the necessary government expenditures (hello, Keynesian economics) and aiming it all at building the new infrasturcture and researching the necessary technology to get us out of burning fossil fuels. But he didn't.
Plane flights and dishwashers and cars are all symbols of how this disaster came to be. But I think perhaps the greater culprit is our insistence that fueling our cars or powering our dishwashers has to be cheap - and our structure as a society that means so many people could not in fact survive if prices were not so artificially deflated.
One of the sources of the awful "drill, baby, drill" chant in 2008 was that gas prices were hitting $4, and that was enough to throw a lot of people into a frenzy. I find the shortsightedness infuriating; we're running through a limited resource as quickly as we drill for it because we want to burn it at a prodigious rate, and cheaply. The thing is, oil is used for so many things in our everyday lives, much of it to better purpose than running our cars. Oil is an amazing and versatile - but extremely limited - natural resource that could be used to the benefit of humanity in general, and it is a crime that we are wasting it by burning it.
Also, as a visual aide to kind of help with the understanding of *why* we can't get the well properly capped:
http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/infographic-tallest-mountain-to-deepest-ocean-trench-0249/
This gives you an idea of just how deep in the ocean we're talking.
For all my disappointment with Obama's speech, some of the Republican responses to it have left me speechless, really. The "plugging the well needs to be our priority" thing is just rich. As if we're not doing everything we can. The thing is a freaking MILE under the ocean floor. Maybe that sort of depth is difficult to comprehend, but the way some people are going on, you'd think that the well's still gushing because we just haven't been trying hard enough.
Thank you, Roger, for another thoughtful, level-headed post about current events. I'm so tired of all the hyperbole thrown around for the sole purpose of increasing reader/viewership.
Jesse M's post hit the nail on the head. Afghanistan, what's that? Oh look! Miley Cyrus is acting slutty!
Jesse M wrote, "I fear that individual citizens won't make an effort to solve these problems until their own lives are adversely affected." Absolutely. I read an interesting article in Slate (http://www.slate.com/id/2126981/) about what it would take for people to cut back on their gasoline usage. Basically, about $5 a gallon for 5 years, more or less.
Meanwhile, our political process has turned into a parody of the Hatfields and McCoys. Surely we can all agree that undermining the Other Party is a far bigger priority than the economy, or pollution, or terrorism! What kind of crisis will it take to get people to realize we're all on the same team? Soviet nukes? Another 9/11? I shudder to imagine.
In the meantime, while our elected officials are busy pointing fingers, we'll just run out of oil altogether and the problem will solve itself. So no worries! Just kick back and relax. And buy a horse.
You realize, of course, 90 percent of your readers have no clue what the name of your post alludes to, much less who Laurel and Hardy are. I found that out during "Borat" when i was the only one in the theatre laughing at his producer, dressed like Oliver Hardy, wailing "Here's another fine mess you've gotten me into!" Everyone else laughed when they thought he was dressed like Hitler.
Ebert: 90% of people in general, okay. But not my readers!
I have a friend who won't take the bus because "only poor people take the bus." The argument that my father used to take the bus to work because it's more sensible than driving to and parking in downtown Los Angeles makes no dent. (Nor does the one that he is a poor person.) In fact, I have several friends who respond to the concept of taking the bus with astonishment and horror, whereas I was delighted with the fact that there were student bus passes when I still lived and was a student in Los Angeles County which let you take the bus wherever it ran--we went down to the beach sometimes.
I do own a car, though I don't drive much. I dislike grocery shopping on the bus; it's impractical. However, my boyfriend and I mostly get by on the bus or on foot. I am constantly turning off lights behind people--the wastefulness my friends show that way drives me crazy. Yes, I have a dishwasher; no, I couldn't live without it. (The efficiency thereof has been pointed out several times.) Given my physical health problems, I can't stand at a sink long enough to wash dishes, and given my bipolar disorder, I'm not reliable enough to wash dishes as we use them. I don't hang up laundry, because I live in an apartment and don't have that option. Also, I live in a rain forest, which suits my temperament much better than the desert I used to live in. However, we don't turn on heaters unless it's well below freezing, which is very rare here.
But all these smug personal stories of savings count for naught. After all, that food I buy at the store still comes from far away and is, frequently, grown inefficiently. When I eat beef, it isn't grass-fed--which is better for the animal and the environment. And even leaving that aside, my personal savings are a drop in the bucket and offset by the profligacy of spending from even just a couple of my friends. We need a cultural change.
The fact is, we in this country believe that we have a right to have or do whatever we want, and anything which stops us is Unwarranted Governmental Intrusion, and when you point out that there are lots of laws everyone agrees on which prevent your total freedom, you get told that those don't count. However, as Dorothy L. Sayers points out, some consideration for others is necessary in communal life, and it's all communal life on this planet. We all have to make at least minor sacrifices, and we don't think we should have to. And this attitude is, alas, not unique to American culture. We'll have to use our exported culture to demonstrate responsibility--but we'll have to accept responsibility first.
Ebert: You ask me, you're ahead of the curve.
About touting Thorium over Uranium for the so far unsolved problem of radioactive waste. The following is from my brother, who developed the silicon encasement for low level radioactive waste dumps, and whose warning that the high-level radioactive waste dumps in the Arctic Circle, dumped largely by GE over the decades, will poison the entire North American water table once they start leaking, so far falls on snoozing, deafened ears:
"Thorium," 90 Th 232, is a thermal fissile fuel like Uranium 92 U 235. It's named for Thor - the god of thunder. The most common form of Uranium is 92 U 238, a fast fuel, meaning that the process functions on absorption of neutrons of greater than thermal (average) energy. 90 Th 232 is a thermal fuel and still being used for fuel. There's little difference in the process other than 90 Th 232 is less common in use even though there are claims of large deposits in NH and other places. The energy yield of 92 U 238 is less than 235 and the reactor design is more complicated - that's the reason to go to such lengths to refine it into the 235 form.
Uranium was discovered only in 1941. The facilities to produce and refine it are still being used today. As you recall, the first uses of Uranium weren't peaceful and all facilities relating to fissile material still belong to the government.
So as to the wonderful wonderful wonderfulness of the new miracle nuclear energy cure "Thorium," bullshit from the first letter to the final period.
What we have already is going to blow up in people's faces one day -- assuredly from the simple increase of indisposable radioactive waste, or not improbably from the extremely dangerous wobbly conditions of nuclear facilities as they presently are. For just one item, both the San Francisco Bay and the Liverpool, England, harbor, have rusting, corroding barrels full of radioactive waste. There are many, many such items, including unpublicized troubles in nuclear facilities. So wake the hell up and don't let your minds be shepherded into more of this disaster by virtue of other disasters, real or imagined.
Neither wind nor solar power need to be "large scale." That's a ridiculous corporate-megalopoly requirement. There are individuals living comfortably that way, and have been for quite some time.
The decentralization of monstrous corporations and of energy sources is not only desirable from very many standpoints, but inevitable if only through more huge disasters caused by mass ignorance, gullibility, arrogance, greed, political foolishness, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
(Sorry to be off point)
A beautifully poetic ending to this piece, Roger. And a good point as well.
I know your penchant for seat placement in a theater, but do you often find your environment an important factor when consuming a book or a film? I couldn't imagine watching something like The Sixth Sense in a bright room, midday. Or reading Poe, for that matter.
Those two beg for the mysteries of night.
I'm curious where we would have been had President Carter won a second term. He pushed for alternative energy development as a result of the oil crisis of the 70s, reducing our oil consumption and funding solar and wind energy development. He even went so far as to install solar-powered hot water heaters on the White House roof. In a country with few exports or manufacturing anymore, alternative energy could have been a boon for us, exporting it to other countries as well as our own. It might have even stopped an international conflict or two.
Of course, as soon as Reagan won the election, the water heaters came down, the alternative energy programs were scrapped, oil consumption (and consumption in general) went back up, leaving a graveyard of solar arrays in the Nevada desert like a broken promise to our future. Now we're lagging behind countries like Spain and Germany when it comes to alternative energy development, we're paying them to develop those same solar arrays in Nevada, and our planet can thank us for 30 years' of increased pollution.
I fear we as Americans need a constant reminder like the one presented in the Gulf, because we have oh so short attention spans when it comes to our discomfort, and seldom are we faced with the consequences of our actions. The crisis of the 70s is already forgotten, Iraq and Afghanistan hardly register on our collective radar, even though people suffer and die there every day. Buying cheap consumer products manufactured by exploited third-world labor with abysmal worker and environmental protections is even more conceptual than reality. Out of sight, out of mind.
Here we have a direct example of the consequences of our actions, it's directly affecting us, so there is no denying the price of our oil addiction. The question becomes, what will we do about it? Will we finally wake up to and cast away the burden of selfishness, pursue sustainability over ease, or will we change the channel and find another distraction until sweet oblivion offers us no choices at all?
If you want to see something really sad, look at the beginning of last night’s Daily Show where Jon Stewart plays a montage of every President since Nixon giving an almost identical call for a serious attempt to reduce oil dependency. They all look like they really mean it and hope that they can actually get it done.
I drive less, do my own dishes and all of that, but I can’t heat my house half as much. Right now I can’t even afford to convert to gas, and anyway, those who’ve who’s actually done the math say that if everyone in the country converted, the gas would run out faster than the oil.
Nuclear power should be a big part of the solution, If only we could trust that a normal temporary political shift wouldn’t lead to it being as poorly regulated as drilling rigs were for the last few years. But we can’t.
I think it’s time to try the big explosion, It seems like the oil is far enough beneath the sea floor that it should be possible to close the well without risk of releasing the oil all at once. I suspect hat BP lied about this at the beginning when they still had fantasies of turning this around in time to make money off of this well, and they are afraid to admit the lie at this late date.
The modern narrative is a fairy-tale that looks increasingly like it will have a very unpleasant ending. The oil gush — I can't bring myself to call it a leak or a spill — is a vicious wound whose total effects on planetary life we can't begin to imagine. It has many causes, the chief one being human over-dependence on oil. That means virtually all of us bear some responsibility, both to grieve for the damage being done and to set things straight in whatever ways we can.
For all our advancement in certain areas, people are still motivated largely by fear, pain, lust, habit, loneliness, anger, spite, confusion, and the need for basic human comforts such as warmth, sustenance and companionship. That we're in control — of ourselves or the planet — is in the main an elaborate private and collective delusion. There are exceptions, of course, and they give me hope. It might not sound like it, but I'm more optimistic every day. Just not about the myth of human progress.
More than 40 years ago, Theodore Roszak wrote:
"It was not foreseen even by gifted social critics that the impersonal, large-scale social processes to which technological progress gives rise — in economics, in politics, in education, in every aspect of life — generate their own characteristic problems. When the general public finds itself enmeshed in a gargantuan industrial apparatus which it admires to the point of idolization and yet cannot comprehend, it must of necessity defer to those who are experts or to those who own the experts; only they appear to know how the great cornucopia can be kept brimming over with the good things of life."
I want the President to succeed, I really do. However, he missed an opportunity to lay out a daring plan to change the future. He even referenced Kennedy's to the moon speech but did not really give a similar battle cry for us to rally around. It just wasn't quite what I and many others was hoping for.
I can compromise a lot of things. I can live without light or a dryer (I already lack a dishwasher). All I need are two outlets: one for my air conditioner, and the other for my laptop. As a compromise, I'm willing to forgo (or at least greatly reduce) heating during the winter, because I like the cold and abhor the heat.
Or maybe I could buy some carbon offsets. Or they could make laptops equipped with solar panels that would charge batteries when the computer isn't in use and extend battery life when it is. Heck, they've been making solar calculators for ages. Solar laptops seem fairly sensible.
Otherwise, I'm glad you said what I've been feeling but I thought I was ignorant for feeling: that is, if the Wyle E. Coyote-level ideas that have been devised for stopping the leak ("leak" sounds so small, like a dripping faucet -- how about "epic spewage") are the best we can come up with, is there anything we can do but watch in horror? And is there anything Obama can about the spewage itself that would be more than symbolic? "I'm so mad I could ... give a televised speech about how mad I am!"
And, though perhaps this too would be largely symbolic, I'm completely open to draconian punishments for BP. It should be cut into free ukulele picks for the poor. Or maybe we could liquidate the company's assets to pay for universal health care or public education (there's a hiring freeze for teachers here in New York they could help with). It boggles my mind that they've been doing PR damage control when the whole problem is how they can't control their own damage. Some businesses in this country were considered too big too fail. Can't we consider some companies too scummy to succeed? Automatic game over. No mas. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred (million) dollars. The cataclysmic rape of an ecosystem seems like it should be a deal-breaker for a business, doesn't it?
Ebert: Gee, you would certainly think so.
"Most modern corporations are managed with three goals in mind: Profits, dividends, and executive bonuses."
Not necessarily in that order.
This is our artists' response to the disaster in the gulf. Please view and share. 800 hits so far.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X16h2cywhZI
Green energy!? Turn off the lights!? Public transportation!? Conservation!? Are you NUTS!? ARE YOU A FASCIST, COMMUNIST, LENNONIST, SOCIALIST DICTATOR? WHAT ABOUT MY FREEEEEEEDOMS, HUH? YOU WANNA CONSERVE THOSE, TOO!?
Ahem...
...great article, Roger. I really hope America can rally behind this, but we all remember how America reacted when Carter told us to put a sweater on and turn down the thermostat.
Hopefully this spill provides some new precedence as to why Jimmy may have said that.
I hope you get this tomorrow. Happy birthday.
"Obama is under relentless attack now from the Right. That's a great help. I have been arguing in his defense, asking, please, what can he do to "handle" the crisis? We are told he hasn't seemed "concerned" enough. He flies to the Gulf states for his fourth trip and is attacked for having a goddamn ice cream cone. He expresses concern. "
I don't find him at fault for this situation (why would I?) but his ambivalence is something that troubles me. He's too calm, too cool, too collected, and its just irritating. There's no demand for action. Just shy little hints, as though all his confidence vanished.
He's rendering himself irrelevant as a president, and I think thats where the Bush-Katrina connections come into play. Can more things be done to stop the spill? Probably not, but just as more could have been done for New Orleans, more can be done for the Gulf cleanup. Visiting doesn't do much, and addressing a problem in generalities is not the same as fixing it.
Just my two cents, I love ya Roger, but I disagree on this one.
My only question which may change a lot of the narrative is this: Where was the BP Deepwater oil headed to? Was it designated for USA consumption? Or was it headed to the open market and most likely sold to China? I have a feeling we are exploiting our precious resources for simple greed and profit rather than the noble cause that America needs this energy in these dire times.
I wasn't sure which thread to put this on but this one seems as good as any.
It's kind of amusing that the major criticism directed at President Obama from both sides is that he isn't angry enough.
It made me think of a line from an old poem.
"If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you..."
*italics mine*
That's from Kipling.
I wonder if Glenn Beck knows that one...
You mentioned the oil crisis of '73. We've known for a long time that we need to get off oil, but here we are, completely dependent. This issue, more than any other in my lifetime, proves that Democrats and Republicans have failed. It's disheartening to know that our leaders have let things get out of control so they can line their pockets or secure reelection.
I have a feeling the powers that be would rather make deals with those who have oil (i.e. doing things as usual) than try to charge the reform in the business, energy, political, and social sectors, and usher in a transition phase. That's too scary for them. There are thousands working (and who have been working for years) on solutions, on ways to make this bearable, if at least, doable and they don't want to listen. Like children without empathy they gather the sands about all for themselves and forget:
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
If greater Chicagoland would stay the hell out of Walworth County,WI for one summer and just stay home,the amount of money saved on gasoline would be enough to solve the health care crisis.
Wow, you rack up comments fast.
I'm prompted to pass on a link as you've hit on some similar points in your article, above.
The link is to the blog site of Jeff Rubin, former chief economist with the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, who is spending a lot of time now talking about the economics of gradual oil depletion and the more difficult and expensive means of oil extraction.
Warning if you read Rubin. Informative but depressing. Everything is about to change.
http://www.jeffrubinssmallerworld.com/blog/
Hi Roger.
In the movie, The Corporation, they describe business practices of taking and taking resources from the environment as a man jumping off a cliff in a homemade plane. As long as he's in the air, he stupidly thinks he's flying. But, his plane isn't built correctly and he's actually crashing to the ground. An apt metaphor for the overuse, and eventual end of our natural resources. As long as we have the cheap gas, we think everything is ok, and it isn't until the ground rushes up to meet us do we think there might be a problem.
Also, please look at this delightful story-
http://www.camajorityreport.com/index.php?module=articles&func=display&aid=4377&ptid=9
Apparently Big Oil is now spending millions to lobby against my state's clean air regulations. Lesson learned? If you don't like the rules of the game, pay someone to change the rules.
Thank you for going easy on the pictures of the wildlife Roger. As I scrolled down to read I became more and more fearful of what the next one would show. I still remember vividly seeing my first photo of a bird soaked in oil on the beach. I was a teenager and my parents (like almost everyone I knew) subscribed to LIFE magazine and the poor bird was right on the cover. This had to be the late sixties. I cried and cried and prayed that this would never happen again. I'm glad that they are making hybrids, but silent cars are a terrible mistake. I don't know how many times I've avoided an accident with some idiot riding in my blind spot by hearing the car I couldn't see. Surely the cars can be made a little noisier? I remember Jimmy Carter as president scolding us all, and seeing a lot less Christmas lights for a few years. I could be doing more. I'm saving up for a motorless or muscle lawnmower and I don't have air conditioning. There are a few weeks in summer when my friends don't feel like coming over, then they complain in winter when I keep the house too cool. But it is easy for me to talk, I'm healthy and I live in a stone house in the north east USA with plenty of shade trees, so it is like natural air conditioning. I like it and I feel lucky. The summers just seem more real to me. I can taste the summer. I did spend one summer in Homestead, Florida in a sunny apartment with just one electric fan. It took some getting used to but it was doable. Thank you for your insights Roger and have a happy birthday tomorrow!
What needed to be done from the get-go:
1. Clarify the lines of responsibility--I would see it as BP responsible for plugging the hole, the feds responsible for containing the spread of oil at sea, and the states responsible for protection efforts in the immediate areas of their coasts.
2. Put together a team of real experts to come up with a solution. Not a bunch of college professors--this is a real problem, not a theoretical one, and it therefore demands practical, not theoretical conclusions. Include the present day equivalents of Boots and Coots and Red Adair, people from companies like Petrobras that have done much deep water exploration, and regulators and government administrators from countries around the North Sea and New Zealand and Brasil, who are ahead of us on these issues.
3. Expedite getting into place all of the protective resources that we can find. I've heard (unconfirmed, but reliable) reports that, 3 days in, we turned down an offer by the Dutch for a significant amount of cleanup equipment, supposedly enough to handle 2000 tons a day. The supposed reason was that using it would violate the Jones Act, but it seems to me that (1) a declaration of emergency would trump Jones Act, or (2) it could be done under the auspices of NATO, which is a treaty, and treaties trump not only statutes but also the constitution. The Germans have a class of navy ships (Bottesand) designed specifically to deal with this problem; at least one of them could have been summoned. I've heard that there are a number of booms currently sitting in a warehouse in Maine; why are they not on hand? We have a class of coast guard cutters that have the capability to suck up oil spills. One or two have been ordered to the area; I believe there are 12 in the class; where are the rest?
4. Direct all regulatory agencies to move in expedited mode in resolving any regulatory issues relating to the cleanup. The Jones Act issues should have been resolved so that the Dutch resources could have been on hand at least a month ago. The proposal by Bobby Jindal to build protective berms should have been fast-tracked; I've heard (again unconfirmed) that the delays have been to accomodate the wishes of union workers, who insisted on blocking non-union workers from participating in the project, even though union shops lacked sufficient resources to get the job done.
5. Privately call upon the Sean Penns and Angelina Jolies of the world to put the kind of personal efforts behind this cleanup that they put behind the Katrina aftermath.
6. Long-range, make it a first priority to have on hand and ready to go on a moments notice, the kinds of resources that other countries have to deal with these problems, the kinds of resources that were recommended as early as 1993 or 1994,
and the kinds of equipment and facilities that have been suggested by industry people. Included is coming up with a way to shut down a future well like this, although our immediate efforts in this area are probably better placed ensuring that exisitng rules are stringently enforced, and enacting such additional rules as have stood the test of time elsewhere, to prevent recurrences. We could take either the German approach of having the government procure and maintain the capability, paid for by a tax on oil, or the Norwegian approach of requiring an industry consortium to purchase and maintain and regularly test the facilities and equipment.
One possible explanation that I find very troubling is that a number of environmentalists seem to me to be far more interested in using this incident as the poster child to stop future offshore driling, than they are in actually protecting the immediately threatened environment. I belong to several environmental special interest groups, becuase I support many of their goals. Since this began, I have received numerous appeals for donations from many of them. None of the appeals have mentioned funds to go to Louisiana and clean up. All of them say, "this is our greatest opportunity to end offshore drilling, so give money to support out lobbying efforts." Given that environmental activists hold great power in this administration, it is very easy to see them thinking that they should let this get out of hand in order to use it for political gain later. I wish I didn't feel that way, but it's a bit difficult to put a different spin on the facts available to me. If you are aware of facts supporting a different conclusion, I'd like for you to share them, because I would really like to be able to reach a different conclusion.
Maybe no one can 'plug the hole', but we could try to contain the oil, recapture the oil, burn it off, etc --and protect wildlife areas on the coast. A little common sense organization from the White House would be helpful.
One thing Obama could do easily would be allow foreign ships to come in and help.
All this about 'he can't suck up the spill' just distracts from discussion of the practical things he COULD do.
Btw I did agree with the big point in his speech: we've got to get into green energy instead of oil.
164+ Comments and not ONE "If you build it they will come" joke?! Must I do everything around here?
Actually Obama could have prevented the spill, by telling the regulators he hired to stop giving BP waivers on safety checks.
Ebert: He personally held the job interviews in the Oval Office. Nothing happened in the years before his election to contribute to the tragedy in any way.
What is Obama supposed to give us hope about? None of us can do anything about the oil spill.*
What we can do something about, many of us, is continuing to develop our own green energy projects. So that was a worthwhile use of his bandwidth.
*Well, some people at the coast could do some cleanup and containment, if Obama would make BP let us in, release some booms from warehouses, little things like that.
Ebert: You are the soul of sanity.
I try. :)
I also don't earn enough (never have) to afford a more selfish-minded existence, Roger. That's also a factor in how one lives. If you don't have to stop and think about how you're going to pay for something, it's easier to grow-up thinking there's no need to. And in my opinion, the American dream has been partly to blame. For it's about reaching a level of wealth wherein you don't have to ask "how much?"
It's a dream of excess. Not good stewardship.
Canadians do litter, it's not like we're saints. I think in my case, maybe it's also a byproduct of living on the west-coast? As we tend to be exposed more to the Green message:
David Suzki Foundation
All I know, is that if I can re-use something, I will. It's cleaner, smarter and cheaper.
And then when I die, the unseen forces will reward me with a really cool afterlife custom-tailored to my exacting specifications.
Smile.
And if you just die and that's it, I won't be around to nurse the disappointment. :)
But this way, I'm hedging my bets, you see?
We are not going to end, or even significantly reduce, our dependence on oil any time soon. Selling green energy as a replacement for oil is simply an outright lie--and putting our trust in such lies is why we've made no real progress on the energy front, despite spending trillions over the last 35 years. I'm not opposing green energy--anything but, as I think we need to be moving in that direction many, many times faster than we are. But green energy has its limits and we need to recognize them in order to be sensible--and one of those limits is that green energy sources are very poor substitutes for the energy applications where we use oil.
Given that reality, and the accompanying realities that (1) you have to produce oil and gas where they are, instead of where you want them to be, and (2) where they are is to a great extent offshore or in other environmentally sensitive areas, then adequate environmental precautions are essential. BP clearly did not take adequate precautions. I would imagine this to be an extreme case, and I would certainly expect other operators to be making extra certain to do things by the numbers in the aftermath. But we also need to be better prepared to deal with errors. This is the kind of thing that should have been on hand--and could have, 20 years ago.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/...il-cleaner
At a few hundred million dollars, when oil companies are spending upwards of $100 million per well, this would have been relatively cheap insurance.
Good evening all,
I have a picture of me, and my platoon in the first Gulf war, standing in front of burning oilfields. Behind us was a sign that said 'Route One, Highway to hell.' This past few weeks I've reflected on that picture and the 'hell' it contained, and watching Congress try to get answers from BP Plc.
I remember the black skies at noon, and the air choked with smoke and the scents of death and oil. Ironically, we had to use fuel to burn excrement, which did nothing to add to the bitterness of the air. I remember all to well the mess, created by wanton destruction of the oil wells by the order of Saddam Husein.
Deep in my soul, I had hoped never to see such things, anywhere. Among other painful scenes, I wish I could erase those images from my mind. I especially hoped to never see anything similar here at home, in the USA.
It's now nearly some twenty years past those days, and I've witnessed on television other tragedies 'live.' 9-11, I watched with others, a different painful vision, of terror on our lands, and the resulting conflicts.
Forgive me, if I sound callous towards Saddam Hussein's death, but it gave me a sense of certainty that there was justice somewhere in the world.
In these past days, I've been trying to help keep the pressure on BP Plc, along with others on Twitter. I've tried to come up with ways to help plug the leak, using what small skills I have... only to learn that the leak itself may be the only thing keeping the well from self destructing. That the leak is keeping the hydrostatic pressure of the oil from tearing a path up to the surface.
So now I'm watching with others, a race against time, in which we all are the losers if BP Plc fails to shut down the well; or worse if the well ruptures completely thousands of feet below the Bop. The truly terrifying part of either scenarios, is that I know that BP Plc is inept.
Inept, unsafe, irresponsible, and unwilling to man-up and come clean with us all. That they are defended by boot-lickers, one of which I am ashamed of lives in Texas; only makes that dread certainty of failure only more painfully apparent. So in horror I am watching this train-wreck slowly unfold, and I pray that my worst relived horrors of the first Gulf War never come to be seen in this land.
As I turn my thoughts back to Saddam's mess, and his eventual execution, I wonder how long it will take for justice to come around again. I fear also that it will be a long time coming, especially when representatives of BP Plc, has the gall to say, "I can not answer that question." Time and time again.
Or when a person who is supposed to represent Texas and the USA condones, while in the pocket of BP Plc, those who follows this: "I can cannot say," corporate attitude with their greedy hands outstretched.
I can only say it irks me to no end that greed overwhelms rational behavior, and I hope that justice will prevail. That somehow a small miracle occurs and the well is contained. That in the end we all come out of this experience intact and moving forwards. That our children's children, and beyond have a future.
To those of Britain, I ask that you do not think ill of our outrage with BP Plc. Rather that you, yourselves grow outraged by BP Plc's behavior. For this is not 'just' an American Tragedy but the Worlds. That our oceans and seas connect with those around your home and that our wounds caused by BP Plc, or your wounds as well.
We as people of the Earth, can not surrender to inhospitably or nationalism in these critical times. Our children, and your children, can not afford that luxury.
Forgive me if I give offense in wanting to see justice done.
D. Miller
Veteran, Texan, American and most importantly; a father.
Sadly alternative energy sources have their drawbacks as well. Solar panels are toxic to make, hydropower destroy river ecosystems, wind turbines are inconsistent and don't provide enough energy for mass consumption, ethanol on a large scale can create food shortages, natural gas is extremely plentiful but the new process called "fraking" to extract it might be extremely toxic, nuclear power creates nuclear waste, coal is extremely dirty, hydrogen can't be transported with the current infrastructure, and I probably missed other types of alternative energy but they have their own drawbacks as well.
Also of the top ten countries that we import Oil from only 3 heavily dislike the US.
1. Canada
2. Saudi Arabia
3. Mexico
4. Venezuela
5. Nigeria
6. Angola
7. Iraq
8. Algeria
9. Ecuador
10. Kuwait
For the past year or so I have been working on my first feature length film, a documentary on the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant where I live on Long Island, New York. It is quite possibly one of the biggest domestic policy blunders in United States history. Nobody involved seemed to have walked away from this incident untainted.
I thought It was just going to be a ten minute audio over video presentation on YouTube, but then my journalist friend just started getting interview after interview. Now I am struggling to keep the film under 100 minutes in length. When we began we were hoping that this would give some insight regarding the various economic, ecological, and environmental crises that we face today. It ended up challenging our attitude towards our respective professions, and our trust in democracy itself.
It is a little amateurish, it is my first feature after all. I consider it a student film. I would be honored if you were willing to review it when it is done.
In the end, the irony is that the CEO who managed to get the taxpayers of New York to bailout his companies multi-billion dollar boondoggle is one of the more sympathetic characters in this story:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5W_vtgdRfk
Hi Roger,
Sorry - this is off topic, is cancer related - not savvy about the best way to reach you. Need to know: did you use alcohol based mouthwash frequently, daily?, etc. over a long period of time? I understand it's supposed to cause mouth cancer but my boyfriend uses it daily - we're wondering if you used it. Apart from all that, I love you! :o)
Ebert: Speaking of the years before my surgery, I used Tom's of Maine mouthwashes. Since then, Biotene. I don't think alcohol is good for the mouth lining. I'm no expert, of course.
Hi Roger.
I had several conversations with co-workers today about the Gulf Gusher situation. It was easily the topic on everyone's mind.
Powerlessness is the consensus thought. No one knows what to do, really, although we throw out ideas. (Nuking the hole being a common thought.) And everyone is heartbroken about it. How much more gusher-cam can we watch without it eroding our psyche? How many more oily animal pics. Heartbreaking.
I have a question for the commenters about the $20B escrow fund announced yesterday. It's clearly a win for the Obama administration to be doing something. And, clearly the Gulf folks would like to have $20B over having nothing. But...
What do the lawyers on the thread think about the fund? Is it an extra-legal action (without being court-ordered or a law passed)? Is it better than BP-claims paying out? Is it prone to government mismanagement and/or corruption as many government funds are? Where did the $20B number come from, given that the emergency is still in progress and the damages not fully known at this point? Is it too much, or not enough? Just curious...
[[ None of the appeals have mentioned funds to go to Louisiana and clean up. All of them say, "this is our greatest opportunity to end offshore drilling, so give money to support out lobbying efforts." ]]
Sounds reasonable to me. Traveling to the coast in hopes of being allowed into the fouled areas is problematical. ($300 bond required?) So is any success at cleaning the birds. People who tried in the past developed long term health problems (some current dispersants are poisonous). At best, we can never clean as fast as they pollute.
The only real hope is to stop such drilling in the first place. Once and for all.
Roger -
One poster already mentioned it, but I'd like to reinforce that, and ask you to spread the word if you could. The best green energy is glowing green. Nuclear plants are safer than oil rigs by a long shot, and for far less than it costs us to import as much oil as we do, we could fork over the cash for the appropriate waste recycling facilities.
Even if we only switched to nuclear energy for our heating and energy needs, that would be a solid 30% of our oil consumption. And with the amount of energy a nuclear plant puts out, it would position us to have a strong network for a new fleet of electric cars.
Canadians and Americans are the worst energy wasters on the planet. Part of it has to do with demographics and geography. Many people drive 200 kilometers to work and back each day, by themselves, in big SUVs. That's almost insanely wasteful. But not just demographics and geography, it reflects an economy of money rather than an economy of resources and a lack of urban planning.
Japan is a country that could teach the whole world how to use energy efficiently. This is not to say that Japan does not have a lot of environmental problems. It is no poster pic for the Greens, and its environmental effect on the rest of the world is very negative. However, the country is energy-efficient, and the government relentlessly promotes energy-saving in all its forms because it wants Japanese businesses to succeed and dominate others in the energy scarce future.
Examples
There are hardly any incandescent lights in Japan. Most are fluorescent. You must bear or even appreciate the harshness of fluorescent lighting on ikebana arrangements.
The government cajoles everyone to suffer in the heat of summer by limiting air-conditioner usage.
My new flat screen TV is twice as efficient as the my "old" flat screen TV from just two years ago, and the government will pay me to replace any older inefficient TVs and air conditioners.
The Japanese shinkansen bullet train is astonishingly efficient. No other mode of conveyance can match its ability to move people long distances at low wattage.
Earthquake-prone Japan is not morbidly afraid of nuclear power. It reopened its fast breeder reactor after a 17-year shutdown. The nuclear power industry in Japan does not have a good safety record but they are successful because the government wants to reduce reliance on oil.
And there's no room to waste. Although it's far from being a choice, people don't advertise they are rich by the size of their property. My neighbor is a vice-president of a company with hundreds of millions of dollars in sales each year. He and his wife and two children live in a house with interior dimensions totaling 100 sq. meters (900 sq. feet) and a total property area of 100 sq. meters.
Moreover, I live a five-minute walk from a notable celebrity; his plot is about 200 sq. meters (large for Tokyo) but he has to live with his mother-in-law, hehe. He manages to cram three small cars into his lot only by making the car doors on the driver side open just enough to let him slip in (this is not his only property, but it is what he makes do with in Tokyo).
When I think about anyone doing an unconventional call to arms, saying we should conserve or unite, I can easily imagine a segment of the population laughing and doing the opposite, on purpose, just to be defiant, to show solidarity with their own team, and possibly make the news.
Is there such a thing as being too self-aware? I remember old photographs of people standing stiffly, not smiling, looking somewhat like a person would who was uncomfortable and wondering why the hell they're standing there in front of a camera.
As society gets used to the camera, we learn to smile, some learn to pose, some even learn types of poses for the kinds of effects they want to elicit.
The illusion that all debates have only two sides continues, but now it's hooked up to a media machine that's getting more fragmented, with major outlets picking up on the modern vox pop: blogs, emails, user videos, and whatever other style of responses are out there. I wonder, if these sort of media had existed 50 years ago would they express the same sentiments?
I feel that this awareness that one could be instantly recognized reduces introspection, and prevents us from going through the necessary steps to figure out if a course of action is the right one. We seem more geared toward maximizing impact and exposure, or landing one square in the opposition's jaw.
At least boxing matches END. How much longer are people going to treat debate like a game with winners and losers, instead of a means to figure out solutions? With this constant desire for face time and prepping for sound bites we seem to have lost the ability to think.
A friend of mine would pause when I asked her a question. For the longest time I thought I had posed the question in a confusing way or had made her uncomfortable. It was only later that I learned that, from her perspective, the instant answer, the pose, is thoughtless and rude-- that what we're supposed to do is think of a proper answer, and THEN speak.
In our society that would be a quite a rebellion: to fight against the expectation for a pithy, pretty, comforting phrase. God, what will it take to bring out THAT brand of defiance?
There is a line from JG Ballard's "Crash" that seems relevant: after something like this happens how can a person even look at a car, let alone drive one?
I don't have a car or a license and see no reason to ever change that.
BP should pay for this obscenity with everything they have.
Randy Masters,
The $20B is an amount that BP volunteered to help those affected, and it will also help BP itself be better-protected against law suits from businesses such as seafood restaurants that were crippled by the oil spill. It is, however, not a limit on the potential compensation that BP will be made to pay.
I personally find it tragic that BP was able to destroy the f***in' Gulf of Mexico. How far away are we from a future where Earth becomes an infected ball of pollution and man made filth? How long before our hubris as a species reaches its inevitable day of reckoning, and we destroy our own home? These instances of massive man-made environmental disasters, however rare they may be, must be avoided at all costs. Negligence among the decision-makers who manage precarious facilities that have the potential for this level of disaster, will always occur. And among these instances, some disasters WILL occur. And with the rate that technology is increasing, stricter regulations on safety for dangerous facilities, as well as an overall movement AWAY from dependence on resources requiring such facilities, will help to keep us from doing what so many science fiction novelists have predicted: killing ourselves and our planet with technology.
Thank you, and good night.
I am not saying the government could have done anything to reduce the damage to date, but I am not sure why BP was allowed to run the stoppage efforts for so long. Why were the Coast Guard essentially working for BP and keeping reporters and scientists (not employed by BP) away from the spill area?
As a lefty, I have been disappointed by the administration's response.
Well, I personally think that the US government fails at disaster reconstruction EVERY TIME because the government never calls on volunteers.
It's simple: there's a big mess in the Gulf, every concerned and unemployed American (and there are a lot of them) should be encouraged to head to the Gulf to help clean it up. All the government has to do is offer transport, food, trailers and a per diem to get by. BUT THEY NEVER DO THIS.
I know because I have watched a dozen major disasters in the last few years, and every time, I say to myself: if somebody would just tell me where to go and how to get there, I'd be out the door in a heartbeat.
Instead, all we get is: 'donation money to this organization or that organization'! Well, I and many other Americans have distaste for charities because a) we don't trust charities to allocate the funds efficiently, and b) we don't have much money to donate. Its a bit like carbon offsetting: throw some money at the problem to alleviate your sense of guilt.
Just tell me where to go to help clean up the damned oil! THAT'S AN ACTION PLAN!
The short to why we don't use more alternative energies is that it's probably not feasible right now to do so. Eventually though the costs of oil will get so high that it will be. I don't understand engineering very well but of every one I've heard or read Richard Muller from Berkley makes the most sense. http://www.onpointradio.org/2008/07/physics-for-future-presidents
We could definitely consume less though. Having lived in a seven bedroom house and in a glorified hostel, I can attest first hand to the fact that personal happiness has zero to do with personal space available. I was listening to a radio program in which a guest suggested the solution to the soon coming social state crisis could be more young people staying with their parents longer. Maybe that could also be at least part of the solution the energy crisis.
The U.S. could probably take a note from most other cultures(Asian cultures especially)which don't associate personal maturity with economic self sufficiency the way Americans do in general and Caucasians especially.
The oil spill/leak has brought the world’s dependency on oil and the option of green living to a more common topic of conversation, at least among a majority of people. Unfortunately all the talk and wishes to move to public transit and other green initiatives fail to realise a major point. We aren’t close to being ready for it. We have got ourselves so far away from using something like public transit as an option that we need to rethink the infrastructure of major cities to allow it to work. If even 10% of the normal car drivers stopped driving and moved to public transit the system would be overloaded. It is not ready to handle the capacity.
I wish I could take public transit. It doesn’t suit my needs. Public transit would change my commute from 1 hour to 3 hours. While I understand that taking the bus would be a little longer, obviously that is just too much. My other alternative is to move closer to work. The difference in housing cost is so vast that I would require a substantial raise to afford the move. Lastly, I could change jobs. I could try but in this climate that is a risky option. I am secure in my position now and it would be foolish to risk it.
So I am part of the problem, but I think the greater problem is not only convincing the mass public to change their habits, but also ensuring that the alternatives are ready to handle these changes. That’s where we may need to start.
Musings on the $20B escrow fund that BP is putting together:
It's clearly a win for the Obama administration to be doing something. And, clearly the Gulf folks would like to have $20B over having nothing. But...Is it an extra-legal action … Is it too much, or not enough? Just curious...
As usual, perfect message discipline Randy. Defense of the corporate little guy disguised as “just asking questions”. This is a repackaged creationist defense tactic. “Is it too much?... um um um …I’m just asking the question…”
For those just tuning in, the GOP (GOBP?) is trying feverishly to spin this narrative that Obama is being too tough on BP and that somehow BP is the real victim. The GOBP has been tripping over themselves to defend their corporate overlords and apologize for the $20B “shakedown” that Obama negotiated this week.
Bow to your corporate overlords GOBP.
I find it amazing how quickly misinformation (propaganda) makes its way into the general public.
Like the Community Reinvestment Act (CCA) being blamed for the banking problems (it was in no way related) and now the Jones Act preventing foreign aide to the spill.
A 3 minute check on Google will show you that:
1. The Jones Act is not preventing foreign help
2. Foreign help is being received and that there are ships from other nations already at work in the gulf.
How does this happen?
I think it is laziness...people trust news sources that tell them what they want to hear (Obama is evil!! - Bush is stupid!) and don't bother to check their facts.
We have the greatest source of information ever available (the internet) and people won't even TRY to learn.
My girlfriend has you as one the five people she would want to have a conversation with before she dies. It isn't hard to tell why. In an age where, the adult and policy making generation squabble over any and everything as the nation edges closer and closer to disaster, it is refreshing to hear one person make sense in the increase cacophony that is public opinion. I can't help but wonder, why doesn't everybody else?
P.S. You can have my girlfriend for a day.
Mr. Ebert,
Your comments on ethanol are unfounded. We have more than enough open land to grow the corn needed to make ethanol and displace our dependence on foreign oil. Eery single year, corn yields increase.
Same amount of land = more corn = more ethanol production = less oil use.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shell
Just read this piece from The Guardian on the constant spillage of oil from dilapidated equipment in Nigeria. It sickens. It's just like Azerbaijan in the 1920s.
Washing dishes by hand is wasteful of water. It takes lots of energy to move water. Modern dishwashers are very efficient now. To be ultra virtuous, one could use the wash cycle but then shut off at the dry cycle I suppose.
Clotheslines: an obvious yes.
The worst factoid I know about getting oil from the ground is that in the Canadian Tar Sands (in Alberta), the oil so is heavy and mixed with sand that it takes six to eight barrels of water to extract one barrel of oil. That's six times as much *fresh groundwater* permanently ruined as useable oil produced. Despair.
fsteele: Maybe no one can 'plug the hole', but we could try to contain the oil, recapture the oil, burn it off, etc --and protect wildlife areas on the coast.
Climb out from under your rock and you will find out these things are already being done.
fsteele: One thing Obama could do easily would be allow foreign ships to come in and help.
Sarah Palin lies and you absorb it as reality. You should turn off Fox News before you hurt yourself.
Mr. Ebert,
I was wondering when a post on the oil spill would make an appearance. My love for your (relatively) new blog is rooted in the fact that it gives you a chance to opine on much more of the world than just that which is cinema-related. I, for one, like knowing what artists think about non-artistic issues.
But in this I am confessing my ignorance and pleading to you and your readers, many of whom I understand to be scientists, for some explanation.
I am a writer and musician, but I also work in a PR firm until the former occupations begin doling money into my bank account. Living in Chicago, I take the bus or train everywhere and find that owning a car would be much more frustration than I need. I don't own an air conditioner, a practice I am questioning today when it supposed to be 95 and humid. My point in explaining the above is to say that I live, partly by my own design, in a rather sequestered world. Some days I imagine myself in a little French village where everything is accessible by foot.
The question that will reveal my ignorance is this: I am not understanding the connection you made in your post between oil and electricity. I have never had any interest in science to any depth and so, to my embarrassment, have never read anything on the subject. Now that I have said this out loud, it seems like something I should know. But I mentally associate oil with machines that run on fuel, for which oil forms the foundation. Cars, planes, farm equipment, etc.
Separately, electricity seems much less tangible - except for on the few occasions when I have made a blunder and seen the miniature lightning bolt connect to my skin. I had assumed that electricity was generated by nuclear power in some cases, and by...well, another process of which I am unaware, but that had nothing to do with oil. I am sure it is a far cry from Franklin and his kite, but this is the connection I am not making.
So this post is not primarily an admission of my shortcomings (the world misses David Niven) but rather a plea for enlightenment. How does the oil spill, and the world's reliance on oil in general, affect our usage of electricity?
Sincerely,
Ignorant in Chicago
I think it's very easy to just place all the blame on BP and talk about how corrupt and greedy all the oil companies are. But really, it's our damn own fault; oil companies are just giving us what we want.
It's great (and necessary) to talk about new energy, green buildings, turning off lights, riding bikes, and etc, but frankly, there are just some things that need oil that I'm NOT willing to give up. And I'm not the only one.
Every time I go to the doctors and they rip open a new plastic bag of sterilized tools, I know that the plastic took oil to make, but I don't want to give up those clean, sanitized tools.
Every time I get on an airplane, I know that we're dumping fumes into the atmosphere, but I don't want to give up traveling and seeing the world.
My laptop is currently sucking energy from the wall as I use it, but I don't want to stop using it.
I like the idea of solar panels on all our houses, but most solar panels are built in China, in what I'm sure are factories that consume as much or more oil and coal than they save.
People need to realize that unless we undergo a complete societal transformation, no matter what we do, we will always use more energy than we save. Obviously this doesn't mean we should just waste our lives away! Every little bit still helps. I once had a professor that said "global warming is inevitable and we should just party till it's over." No, we shouldn't!
But to say we should just completely stop drilling/using oil is totally unrealistic. Anyone who says otherwise is just being illogical. That's what I liked best about this journal entry, Roger. It cuts through all the political bs talk (from both sides) I've read lately on the oil spill, and admits that maybe, we can't fix this problem. We can only fix ourselves.
My environmental footprint is pretty small - and could be smaller - but it's not zero, and I don't think it ever will be until one day someone invents a magical energy alternative. I'm optimistic for that day, but realistic that it's still a ways off.
I rode my motorcycle (50 MPG) ten miles to work this morning instead of my Ford Focus (35 MPG). It's not a hybrid, but same result. Doing my part.
"What is Obama supposed to give us hope about? None of us can do anything about the oil spill."
I'm cynically convinced that Obama is not wasting this crisis. I believe he is allowing BP to clearly demonstrate that they do not have the capacity to clear up their mess. I believe that the ultimate goal will be to go before Congress and the Senate, and demand either more capacity for the government to do the cleanup (perhaps creating an arm of the EPA), or a tougher regulatory regime. With the public opinion being the way it is, no elected legislator will dare to vote against.
What form that extended capacity takes, or that tougher regulatory regime takes, will determine whether this is a good strategy or not.
I just would like to say that as we look for alternative fuel sources, we need to beware. There is a proposal to install windmills offshore in Lake Michigan. Sounds good, right? But it takes dirty fluids to make them work, too, and they tend to draw more energy off the grid than they put in. Jumping to the next batch of snake oil an entrepreneur or energy company wants to sell us is not a good way to solve a problem. That's the kind of reaction Roger talks about - the quick-fix - that doesn't really solve anything. Haiti, for example, was poor before the quake, and they'll stay poor now that the world's flashlight is pointed in another direction.
Great post, Ebert. I remember hearing about the oil leak, knowing it was terrible but still being relatively unaffected by it, actually. It was in my mind but I was kind of like, "What are we gonna do about it?" About two weeks ago I was getting ready for work and out of nowhere, it hit me and sunk in and everything about this disaster was put into perspective.
http://www.ifitwasmyhome.com/#loc=Pittsburgh,+PA,+USA&lat=40.475&lng=-79.952&x=-79.952&y=40.475&z=7
Take a look at that link. To me, it was really shocking to see just HOW LARGE the spill was comparatively.
Oh, and on a much, much lighter note, happy birthday! I saw it was your big 6-8 on IMDB earlier today. Well, trip the light fantastic for me, alright?
Roger, your reference to “Edgar Allen Poe” should be Edgar Allan Poe. Poe, by the way, is somewhat underappreciated. Academics ignore or condescend to him because of his sensationalism. More perceptive readers, such as Borges and Edmund Wilson, give him his due. Aside from his famous horror stories, he managed to invent or perfect many of the genres that took off in the 20th century: science fiction, fantasy, detective fiction, and so on. There was also something cinematic in his style; many of his stories are not driven by plot or psychology or ideas, but by a series of peculiarly vivid images. It's a storyboard style and I'm sure it helps explain his adaptability to the movies. Anyone who hasn't read him for a while might find it interesting to reread his classic stories and to look at some of the fascinating lesser-known stories, such as “The Man of the Crowd.” The whole BP nightmare (a topic I seem to have drifted away from) is something Poe might have dreamed up.
Ebert: I've been getting the "Allan" wrong since grade school.
Stan Brakhage told his students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago that they could learn a lot about cinematography by reading Poe.
Hey Roger,
I completely agree with your viewpoints on the matter of the oil spill. And I'm glad that you've defended President Obama with the same reasons that I have had to explain to some of my more boneheaded friends.
But what saddens me the most really is that while we as individuals understand the need for an energy revolution, for the ability to let go of the greed that's plagued us for quite sometime, there's plenty, if not more, who deem otherwise.
My mom for example, tends to be a real cheerleader whenever a lot with plants and wildlife is torn down to put a sad little strip mall. And mind you, we live in South Florida. We're supposed to have random parts with trees! We're supposed to have alligators, and insects, and other pieces of life living with us. But I'm afraid that in the full emersion of self-preservation and comfort, we've severed that connection with nature that we once held preciously.
I look forward to reading your next blog post, and your next review. You are truly an inspiration to the film industry and the whole of society itself, and I hope my generation can do a little better than the one before it.
-Sophia
PS HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
Americans think they're really tough. But they're not, or not anymore... they're soft soft soft, a fake-macho culture controlled by corporations, advertising, and selfish, "can't live without" materialism. I don't know any Americans who could learn to live with less (less energy, less pollution, less crime, less driving) like people in other countries do every day. Americans are sissies. I would LOVE it if the entire world just instantly stopped trading ANYTHING with America. Just up and turned their backs on America. What then?
Very off-topic, and on the danger of coming off as flippant:
Happy birthday, mr. Ebert! Hope you've got many happy years to come!
As for the oil spill - it almost makes me cry. Whatever repairs are made and damages paid, I think nature will be allll the way in the back of the line. :-(
The Karate Kid remake cost more money than running a dishwasher for 35 years, yet you loved it.
Ebert: Your computer cost more money than...oh, never mind.
"Now, Stanley, what did I say to you about becoming head of a major oil company?"
(wrings hat in hands) "Well, Ollie..."
I have no idea what to do about the Spill. Do you? Does anybody? We keep hearing that an enormous explosion could shift so much of the ocean floor that the leak would be plugged.
This is by Prof Iraj Ershaghi, director of petroleum engineering at the University of Southern California. The problem is much harder than we non engineers realize.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/us_and_canada/10268979.stm
The difference is, Bush could have done more with Katrina.
Specifically, what?
Corporations are worse. They don't care. Most modern corporations are managed with three goals in mind: Profits, dividends, and executive bonuses.
Can we drop this argument now? Yes, oil companies (all corporations) are motivated by profits. Name a corporation that isn't. If they weren't they wouldn't be in any business. Does anyone in the world think an oil company would plow through years of regulations and bureaucracy, set up hundred-million dollar rigs in deep and dangerous waters for -- altruism? To lose money? I agree that the oil spill is a tragedy and BP has to clean it up. But consider the thousands of rigs that don't vomit oil like this. It's in the corporation's interest that these things don't happen, and wether we know it or not, these companies go through great pains to prevent such things. Now BP will have to spend untold billions in clean-up, fines, and legal fees. Money ("treasure") that they and shareholders would much rather pocket. This is not an emotional defense of oil companies. It's just logic.
I want to make some money from the web ... If three million people paid two cents for our reviews, there'd be $15 million for us to split!
Sounds like you had three goals in mind: profits, dividends, and executive bonuses. Money.
Ebert: That BBC link is deeply discouraging. Every "solution" seems fraught with problems, and some are perilous.
Suppose you are an Obama loyalist government bureaucrat and you are personally dedicated to ending offshore drilling and forcing us onto alternative energy sources, whether there are actually any viable alternatives or not. The worse this gets, the easier it is to attain your objective. So, you intentionally delay and obstruct at every opportunity. That's not really very good for the environment, but your concern is not the environment, it's advancing your agenda and increasing your power. Besides, most of the states affected didn't vote for Barack anyway.
I don't have first hand factual knowledge to confirm that this is what's actually happening. But I can confirm that's how bureaucrats think. And it's pretty obvious that everything we DO know about what's happening is entirely consistent with that explanation--and with no other.
Looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...
Ebert: I don't even believe you have third-hand factual knowledge.
Tom Dark
I read that comment you made. Right out of the blue and for no good reason, you start badmouthing Thorium. Any man who has nothing good to say about Thorium has nothing to say to me. It is so very obvious that Thorium is a far superior element to Uranium. You can keep on insulting Thorium all you want, but I have nothing more to say on the subject. Case closed. End of discussion.
I haven’t watched the news in ages, and it is events like this that make me glad I don’t. This is too sad of an event to think about for very long. Yet, I do wonder if this was “an accident.” Might it be Iran sending a message? I know this seems like an aluminum foil hat question, but when I think about how many oil platforms there are in the world, I have to ask, “Why this one? And why so catastrophic?” The US Navy SEALS would be capable, although unwilling, to perform a covert operation of this nature. Personally, I wouldn’t put anything past the leadership of a country that wants above all else to have nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Have people been asking questions like this? I mean serious people, not those with aluminum foil hats.
Ebert: Those would be some Navy Seals, to descend a mile below the surface knowing that if they succeeded they would certainly die.
One thing to consider would be imposing a five year, $1/gallon of gasoline tax. It was at $4/gallon that caused widespread behavior change regarding driving cars (reduce miles driven, buy smaller, more efficient cars). The revenue generated would be dedicated to hefty tax incentives for any legitimate home power generation that was carbon neutral: personal wind, hydro, photovoltaic, community wind/hydro. Older electricity generation plants operate at ~33% efficiency, and another 7% is lost in transmission. By distributing power generation with new, much more efficient technology, these losses could be reduced by 50-60%, decreasing the need for new power plants and moving us away from an oil based energy economy.
Speaking as a car guy, I don't think switching to hybrids is going to be much of a solution. One of the problems with Hybrids is that going from a car that gets a 25mpg (4 gallons per 100 miles) average to a car that gets a 50mpg (2 gallons per 100 miles) average isn't as big of a leap as people think. In fact, it's less of a leap than going from a car that averages 10mpg (10 gallons per 100 miles) to one that averages 20mpg (5 gallons per 100 miles). See the problem? For every 10mpg improvement in a car's fuel efficiency we're faced with ever diminishing rewards. So instead of a CAFE average for automobiles, there should be a CAFE minimum and it should be set at 20mpg, end of story. That'd do a hell of a lot more to reduce fuel use than a wildly shifting average.
The perfect example of how hybrids will not be the savior of humanity is the Honda CR-Z. It's an updated Honda CRX (remember those?) that was last sold in 1991. So how does the new car fare with 20 years of advanced technology and a hybrid engine powertrain coupled to the most advanced transmission in the world? 36 city/38 highway MPG. What did it's prehistoric 1991 ancestor do? 40 city/47 highway.
Let me repeat that in case some of you just couldn't believe what you just read. The new car, a hybrid, does 4 miles per gallon LESS in the city and 9 miles per gallon LESS on the highway. So much for technology saving us.
That said, I do think hybrids are the future of the automobile because there's just no other way to make modern cars use less gas. Roger mentionned a 1969 Cadillac in his blog, and yes they are huge cars, but they're not that heavy for their size. Only about 4550lbs. A much smaller 2010 Cadillac STS, in comparison, is about the same weight. All that modern safety equipment takes it's toll, trust me. I'd estimate that by 2020 most cars will have some sort of hybrid powertrain to combat the growing weight problem. You'll also see a smattering of electric cars in the mix, though I doubt we'll have solved most of the problems inherent with battery technology by then.
Maybe I'm too cynical, but I just don't believe that any current environmental regulation existing today is aimed at reducing consumption. What it's aimed at is extending supply. We're trying to force average people to buy more fuel efficient cars so that the sweet, sweet oil can be used by the wealthy in planes and boats and trains and trucks. Gotta keep the good times rolling right?
Did you know that one ride by plane from NYC to London uses up more fuel and creates more CO2, per person, than driving a car all year? Likewise, someone who owns and flies a private jet uses up more fuel and creates more CO2 than I ever could, even if I drove around the clock for 1000 years. The top 10 biggest cargo vessels pollute more than every single car on the PLANET. That's just ten boats. What about the other thousand or so out there? See the scope of the problem?
Oh, and don't bother looking at environmentalists for help, they're utterly useless. All I hear coming from them is "Buy green!", "Buy hybrid!", "Buy organic!", BUY! BUY! BUY!
Stop buying things! Stop spending!!! Consumption IS pollution. Modern environmentalists are starting to look like alcoholics who think they don't have a problem because they drink light beer. It's gotten so bad that I consider everything they say to be nothing more than a subtle marketing campaign for organic products and alternative fuels.
My advice?
On a large scale, we should implement worldwide Carbon and Pollution Credits. Every country would have them. If a country pollutes less than the world standard, they get credits that they can sell. If they pollute more, they have to buy credits from someone who doesn't pollute. Simple as pie. Then slowly tighten the world standards. After all, a country like Botswana's wealth lies in the fact that they're not destroying the Earth like we are. If we wanna pollute our asses off that's fine, but let's pay for it. See how many people think it doesn't matter when they get the bill at the end of the year. We're gonna have to pay for it one way or another, so might as well put a cash value on our devastation.
For the average Joe out there? Simple, just look at how much trash you throw out and try to reduce it by a quarter each year. How much garbage we produce is a good indication of how much useless crap we buy, so reducing trash reduces useless consumption.
This isn't rocket science. Buy less, use less. Sure, go for the environmentally friendly purchase when one is available, but just remember that no purchase at all is better than a green purchase.
Will anything I suggested prevent another BP Spill? Nope, we need oil, whether we like it or not. However, that doesn't mean we need to guzzle it down like there's no tomorrow.
Ebert: It's like we're caught in some kind of maze.
The sad situation in the gulf is a direct result of BP ignoring the rules and ignoring the industry’s and their own best practices just to save money. A profound failure of government (regulation) and an unholy alliance with government (congress) allowed them to get away with it for decades. They would still be cutting every possible corner if it had not caught up with them and killed 11 people, killed unknown amounts of sea life and waterfowl, and screwed things up for a whole lot of people. Had that not happened, they would still be getting away with it.
It is a terrible, terrible tragedy. And it is still going on.
But before everyone swears off oil and gas as an energy source to try to prevent such a calamity from ever happening again, there are some things to consider.
First, only about 60% of oil gets turned into fuel. The rest ends up as fertilizer, shampoo, plastics, paint, tires, pavement, insulation on wires, jackets on fibre optic strands, textiles, motion picture film base, and all sorts of other things that most of us have no idea come from oil. Remove all of them, and it would be a very different world from what we imagine in which we all ride a bike or take the bus.
Second, there is no real substitute for coal, gas, and oil as fuel sources – and there is not likely to be any time soon, no matter how much we wish for it or how much we might need it. I think that Roger knows and understands this (while many of the readers/commenters seem not to).
Roger asks, “Why doesn't every house have solar panels?” The reason is because they are very expensive and are not very efficient. It will take many decades, perhaps more than a hundred years, for them to make as much energy as it took to manufacture, transport, and install them. And most of that energy comes from coal and gas. But, as long as I can get other people (through rebates, tax credits, and such) to pay for most of the cost of them, I will likely buy them for my new, ultra energy-efficient house. (Hey, I’m a practical guy.)
Same for windmills. No windmill has ever generated as much energy as it took to manufacture the windmill, mine, smelt, refine, and fabricate its giant steel pole, transport it all to the windy location on trucks, drill the hole, erect the pole, and install the windmill on top. Nor is one likely to any time soon (or maybe ever). This does not include the energy used to manufacture, transport, and install the transmission lines and towers it will take to get what electricity that is not lost in the lines from the windy area to the area where it is needed. And again, most of the energy to do ALL of that is supplied by coal, gas, and oil.
These so-called renewable systems are NOT pollution-free as their marketing hype contends and as most of the public believes. What they do is displace the energy consumption and pollution in both space and time. The energy (and its resulting pollution) used to manufacture the gear is some where else (usually) and some time in the past. The energy used to manufacture it is, essentially, stored in the equipment. And then, when we install the equipment near us and the wind blows or the sun shines, the stored energy of manufacture trickles out into our wires a little at a time for decades (we hope). It, like most everything else, is a lossy system. Never has as much energy come out as we originally put in.
(Same for ethanol, and all the rest. None achieve unity on any usable scale – if at all -- much less surplus energy.)
Add to that the fact that wind and solar are about the lowest quality energy sources widely deployed. They do not do much in the dark or on cloudy days (solar) or when the wind does not blow. So, a power utility (or society) must still provision things such that there is enough power to recharge electric cars, run hospitals, refrigeration, electric mass transit, and everything else deemed essential as well as that deemed discretionary, but allowable, when the “renewable” systems are not producing full power. Or any power.
This means that they must have a large capital investment in coal, oil, gas, or nuclear generating plants, and storage of fuel, equal to 100% of the possible demand, in place and sitting idle until such time as the wind stops blowing or a cloud covers the sun. So then everyone pays twice – once for the very expensive and inefficient solar and wind systems, and again for the cheaper and more efficient conventional systems. This does not conserve much of anything. In fact, it has used up twice as much resources and energy as just having and using the conventional systems alone.
So, then. How can they afford to sell electricity made from wind power for only a little more than electricity made from coal or gas or uranium? Well, that is the magic of wholesale versus retail. The energy used to manufacture the windmill and pole was purchased wholesale and they are selling the electricity the windmill produces retail. Oh, yes. There are usually government price supports of some kind in there somewhere, which means that everyone pays so that the retail price of wind-generated electricity is low enough to (kinda) compete with regular electricity. And, everyone gets to pay a little bit on my solar panels. Otherwise, I could not afford them.
Hybrid cars, as brilliant as their engineering and execution are, do not save all that much energy, overall – if any. It is not likely that they save as much energy in their useful lifetime as it took to manufacture them and their battery. Do they save energy compared to other cars? Yes and no. There are a number of small cars, everything considered, that take less energy to make and run as a hybrid. But they are smaller and not nearly as nice as a Prius.
Certainly there is a lot that can be done to reduce our need for energy and improve the efficiency of things we need and want in everyday life. But even if we do everything that we can, we will still need oil – and to drill for and produce oil – probably for the rest of our lives.
Government mandates and strenuous wishes will not change this.
Probably the only reason that we even had an industrial revolution – and all the good and bad that came with it – is because of the discovery and commercial production of oil, gas, and coal. Only those things, and maybe nuclear fuels, start out with enough energy that EVERYTHING we have to do to find it, get it out of the ground, transform it into a useful fuel, and transport it to where it is needed takes less energy that what is in it to begin with. What energy is left over, after all of that, is what powers our civilization. No other energy source yet found has a net positive content on any usable scale – if at all.
I am hopeful that some will be found and perfected. But my years on this planet tell me that no matter what new energy sources are found, they will probably have some really unpleasant down sides to them.
Symmetry in nature and all of that.
The previous comment blaming both executives and engineers made me laugh. I'm certain any engineer worth his salt that spoke up was squelched by his executive boss.
Roger,
I read you're reviews and your blog because you are a funny, clever writer who's views fortunately match mine. However I notice in this article you refer to BP as British Petroleum.
I am British,that is not their name.
It was their name I admit however it is now only being used by politicians and media pundits to try and shift the blame on 'foreigners' or 'the other' because hey if it's their fault its not ours or the questionable legislation we passed.
Often in your blog posts you point out the hypocrisy, lies and stupidity of many public figures notably Bill O'Reilly. It saddens me that you appear to be sinking to his level.
Thank you
Ebert: Just a mistake. Americans own as many shares as Brits. It's a global.
"I have no idea what to do about the Spill. Do you? Does anybody?"
Pray for those working toward a solution. Yes, and turn off the air conditioner when it's not really needed, as well the lights and tv, and while you're at it kiss your kids, your wife, your husband, smile at your neighbor and be peaceful, live peacefully.
Things will work out!
25,000 barrels a day, visualized with a videogame development kit. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7_rPDwSKe8
Interesting your mention of books. The classic "Moby Dick" seems an appropriate read in light of the fact that the quest for oil lies at the heart of both sagas. There are many interesting comparisons.
And I hear too in your words that we're all in this together. I use oil so I'm part of the problem. In a away, most of us bear resemblance to Captain Ahab in our relentless pursuit of comfort and convenience and to hell with the cost. We're mindless of the cost.
In the end, the solution will not be technological. The only meaningful way forward, I think, will come from a fundamental shift in values. But for that to happen, we first need to awaken. If anything good happens from the Gulf disaster it may lie in its shrill capacity to rouse a sleeping world.
Picasso said that every act of creation begins first with an act of destruction. Let's hope for all our sake that he was right.
Best wishes,
Well, it may not be appropriate for this wild goat cry at the moon, but, happy birthday, Roger. I'm glad you've reached it!
As far as weaning ourselves from oil goes, we can't just look at it as purely an energy problem. Our roads, our cars, many of our building materials and clothes and containers and computers and so much more that I can't remember are made from oil products. Going cold turkey is a terrifying thought mainly because so many of our First-World Country necessities would not be able to be made.
Having said that, we do, of course, need to wean our collective selves from the teat of such dirty, finite energy. The alternatives to energy are out there. What I really want to be found are the practical alternatives to tire rubber and plastic soda can rings.
Ebert: Readers, quick: What fictional character uttered a wild goat cry to the moon?
No point to make. Just want to say Happy Birthday, Roger. I don't tweet, but I get your feed. I add the numbers together. You are fourteen this year. I'll be thirteen in August:>)
Brought my guy home today. First night he has been home since May 16. No Ireland for us after all next month, but we will be out and about together.
Okay a tiny comment. One of the things I remember about the James Caan movie Rollerball was that it was set "after the corporate wars." Details like that are what stick in my memory.
http://www.prosebeforehos.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/obamarella-cindarella-obama.jpg
About sums it up.
Obama (as Cinderella) scrubs oil off the floor, while an off-screen voice yells:
"Cinderella! Clean up Wall Street!"
"Cinderella! Afghanistan is a mess!"
"Cinderella! Bail out the auto industry!
"Cinderella! Health care is broken!"
"Cinderella! We need more jobs!"
"Cinderella! Don't forget global warming!"
"Cinderella! Make us energy independent!"
"Cinderella! Stop the BP oil leak!"
"Cinderella! Bust some heads!"
"Cinderella! Show a little emotion!"
(In the background, several mice sit in a tea-pot, holding a sign which reads, 'Cinderella, show us your birth certificate'.)
-----
Honestly, in the past few years, the only thing besides alternating fits of face-numbing-terror and gut-wrenching-frustration I've taken away from any kind of popular media has been the occasional desperate chuckle I can get from talented satirists like John Stewart or Tina Fey. A bit like...'Oh look. I'm NOT insane. Ha ha ha @_@.'
We're all just so caught up in (and at the mercy of) this bizarre modern...I can't even say 'media cycle' anymore, because that implies a daily ebb and flow, and it's not. It's a constant memetic drip-feed of garbled arguments and half-chewed phrases for us to vomit back and forth over the dinner table, and everyone seems to be swept up in it without REALIZING it. The whole monster doesn't even have any specific evil masters--though there are certainly some less-than-wonderful people feeding it war-prisoners and petting its tummy.
And worse, it functions as its own echo chamber. An oil rig exploding becomes 'The Oil Rig Crisis' becomes 'The Spill'--and from there we've got reactions TO 'The Spill', commentary ABOUT 'The Spill', someone saying that we should stop talking about 'The Spill', someone saying 'The Spill' isn't getting enough attention...we've got commentators commentating on why everyone STILL seems to be talking about 'The Spill'; we've got expert recursive commentary-commentary analysts releasing books entitled 'Spill: How such and such a thing did such and such a thing (The REAL Story)'"; it just goes on and on and on.
And turning off the TV doesn't get you away from it because, in a modern digital turn that would make Reagan spin in his grave, the NewSpeak propaganda trickles down to your mom and your coworkers, until they're thumbing through their iPhone news going "Did you hear about that [Insert sound of Lovecraftian horror]?".
Trying to close your ears against the sheer noise of it all is like trying to win a shouting contest with the vacuum of space.
'Sound and fury' comes to mind.
---
Roger, you seem like a smart guy. Am I already doomed to a life of baffled, bleary-eyed cynicism, at *nineteen*?
Just tell me how I FIX it. Do I start a blog? Try a top-kill? Do I yell for Obamarella to aid our despairing youth?
(Do I go get a lobotomy, two iPads, and a DoubleDown?)
Hey DONALD:
Are you a 30 year hands-on nuclear expert who developed a containment system?
My brother is. Those were his words. You call it "badmouthing"? You must be a happy elf from happy Fairyland.
While I'm at it, a public service notice:
ATTENTION TOORISTS: rather than cause another 5000 acre forest fire such as I'm looking at out the window right now, please leave your campfires going in your living rooms before visiting the Great Southwest. Thank you.
Ebert: It's like we're caught in some kind of maze.
Bah... it's not that bad. It's just that people are confusing their wants and their needs when it comes to the environment. No one was ever made happy by want, because it's just greed and ambition hiding under a more pleasant name. Our needs are simple. We need shelter, food and water for the body; and entertainment for the mind. That's about it. I read about a book every three days, doing some rough math I estimate that the works in my library would last me about 20 years. So I'm all set for entertainment. As for shelter, it's all around us. Which leaves us with food and water, something we have in abundance as long as nobody gorges.
When you're stuck in a maze, best thing to do is stop running around and bouncing off the walls. You slow down, catch your breath, calm yourself and take a look around. A solution is bound to turn up. Things are rarely as serious as they seem.
In times like this, I like to recall what Stacy Keach reads off the back of a Saint Christopher medal in The Ninth Configuration: "I am a Buddhist. In case of Emergency, call a Lama"
Wise words.
===
Oh, and if everyone wonders why I have a special disdain for environmentalists, just read to talkback to this article, you'll see:
http://green.autoblog.com/2010/06/18/blind-group-displeased-that-nissan-leaf-sound-can-be-turned-off/
@ Josh the Insulter on June 18, 2010 8:38 AM
For those just tuning in, the GOP (GOBP?) is trying feverishly to spin this narrative that Obama is being too tough on BP and that somehow BP is the real victim.
"For those just tuning in", Josh's recap itself is spin. Innacurate spin. You are not even bashing the right argument.
The argument is not that BP is the victim. BP is the guilty party, the spiller. No one is arguing anything different.
BP should pay for the cleanup, as much as it costs. Is $20B the right number to start with? Who knows. That number seems arbitrary and picked out of the air. But, BP should pay whatever the losses and damages end up being.
The argument is also not that Obama is being "too tough" on them. You can't be too tough on BP right now. No one is arguing anything different.
Instead, the "shakedown" argument that Rep. Barton and others are making is the Socialist argument. It goes like this:
By what authority does the President of the United States demand that a privately owned company hand over a portion of it's earnings to a fund controlled by the Federal Government?
Judgements are usually made by courts in the proper course of victims seeking redress. Where is a court order for a judgement against BP? If POTUS can simply demand money from a corporation, then we are bordering on government ownership of private companies (or a portion of their assets). It's the same Socialist power grab as it was when Obama fired the CEO of GM - on what Constitutional authority.
That's the "shakedown" argument. Socialism. You are not criticizing the right argument.
The guy being interviewed in Collapse has his own website, if you didn't already know: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/
collapsenet.com, also.
Ebert: Those would be some Navy Seals, to descend a mile below the surface knowing that if they succeeded they would certainly die.
Well, yeah, sure. If you put it like that.
: )
However, I thought the explosion occurred on the platform and the impact caused the pipeline to rupture below. But as I said, I haven’t been following it much, thank God.
I find the SEALS to be a fascinating group. The Discovery Channel has some shows about their training, which is called Basic Underwater Demolition Service. My comment was refering more to the stealth involved. And of course, they use timing devices for the explosives.
On one of the programs I saw, a SEAL said, “We don’t get paid to wage a fair fight,” echoing what George C Scott said in Patton. “No Son of a Bitch ever won a war by dyeing for his country. You win a war by making the other poor dumb Son of a Bitch die for his country.”
Ebert: Yes, and I included myself in the lecture.
i.e. I got mine.
Ebert:I think we'll all have change forced upon us. What are your suggestions?
Just a few thoughts...
1. It's a big oil spill and it's a tragedy, but it is not the end of life on Earth. The Gulf of Mexico contains 650 quadrillion (almost a million million million) gallons of water; a million gallons of oil is not going to ruin it. Yes, there will be damage to ecosystems and wildlife, but they will recover in time.
2. I'm sick of the word "greed." I work for my money, and it isn't greed. You work for yours, and you probably don't think it's greed. BP delivers oil to customers who want it; that isn't greed, either. Yes, BP might've made mistakes or taken shortcuts; that's a failing of human nature, not of the free enterprise system. No one had any profits at stake in Chernobyl, after all.
3. I'm not a fan of Obama. I feel his Presidency will be, at best, disastrous in the long haul. That said, there isn't much he can really do other than get any regulatory or bureaucratic hurdles out of the way. The government has no expertise in capping oil wells; the engineers in the petroleum industry that design them do.
4. Conspiracy theories? Retarded. Why would Obama ENDORSE off-shore drilling and then have this disaster come about? Why would BP want the bad press or the expense? It's an accident. They happen.
5. It's irrelevant who owns BP or what cou