Tag Archives: BP

Joe Barton Is Ashamed

Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) haz a sad:

Barton came under a lot of pressure, he then retracted his apology to BP. That didn’t stop Republican leadership from trying to distance themselves from Barton:

Barton apologized to BP this morning for the “tragedy” of its $20 billion fund to pay damage claims from the Gulf Coast oil spill. Barton has since apologized for apologizing to BP. Nonetheless, Reps. John Boehner (R-OH), Eric Cantor (R-VA), and Mike Pence (R-IN) released a joint statement this afternoon calling Barton’s original statements “wrong.”

“Congressman Barton’s statements this morning were wrong. BP itself has acknowledged that responsibility for the economic damages lies with them and has offered an initial pledge of $20 billion dollars for that purpose.”

Never mind that Eric Cantor was saying the exact same thing as Barton yesterday. He just didn’t say it loud enough, I guess. But here we have the Republican Party platform in a nutshell. Corporations should be able to do whatever they want without any oversight from government.

Reflecting On Obama’s Speech

There was quite a bit of discussion on Obama’s speech yesterday and the concensus was that we didn’t like it. I have to say that I also agree that I didn’t like the speech. I didn’t dislike the speech but I’ve also realized I am not the target of the speech and neither are you. The target of the speech was not news junkies who are watching the live spillcam but the American public

MMonides, an energy policy expert at Balloon Juice had this to say about the speech:

IM less than HO, POTUS addressed every issue he needed to last night. He discussed the past, how we got in this situation, his own mistake in believing the safety technology was sufficient, the government response, and BP’s “recklessness.” He went on to commit to the Gulf’s recovery and to accountability, and presented a blue print for our government’s next steps. He tied the situation to our energy policy specifically, but without pushing any hot-button issues. He acknowledged MMS corruption, and his Administration’s plans to address it. He even pointed out how our addiction to fossil fuels has led us to us to risky deep water drilling, and how the environmental costs of fossil fuels far outweighs any energy tax. He continued to be the mature one in the room, asking his opposition for ideas instead of attacks.

It was sober, responsible, and an important update for confused citizens trying to understand this situation, presented by their POTUS in simple language that was designed to inform and reassure.

There was just no way that President Obama was going to give specific details in a 20 minute speech. I heard him trying to say that there’s no easy answers to this problem and he was pointing us to the future.

It’s not only MMonides that had good things to say about the speech. Here’s Jed Lewison at Daily Kos:

Moreover, I think he made several very important points on energy policy.

1. Obama gave the House credit for passing “a comprehensive energy and climate bill” and said that the House’s bill reflected the principles that he campaigned on.

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2.Obama said that the time to act is now, and that any legislation must “tackle our addiction to fossil fuels.”

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3. Obama argued that energy reform will provide a boost to our economy

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4. Finally, President Obama explained the basic ideas behind peak oil in plain, easy-to-understand English

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That is about as clear and concise an explanation I’ve seen of why dependence on oil is going to be increasingly risky and expensive. True, it didn’t cover climate change, but there’s more than one reason why oil is a bad idea, and in the context of a speech about an offshore drilling disaster, this was a very important point to make.

It’s true, President Obama did not get into the details of procedural issues like whether and when the Senate should vote. But one of the things we learned from the health care debate is that dwelling on procedure turns off the public. And he wasn’t as detailed on policy proposals as Jimmy Carter was in 1979. But Jimmy Carter’s approach didn’t manage to solve our energy problems, no matter how well-intentioned he may have been.

Do you think the American people have heard the case for moving to cleaner energy presented this way? Most haven’t. It may be something we’ve discussed on the activist left but what most Americans have heard is “drill baby drill.” As Jed explained, this is Obama as Educator-in-Chief, rather than Crisis-Manager-in-Chief.

Just in case you don’t remember what we’re up against, here’s the Republican reaction to the speech:

The Republican Study Committee, a group of conservative members of the House, released a statement today calling the $20 billion BP escrow account a “Chicago-style political shakedown.”

“BP’s reported willingness to go along with the White House’s new fund suggests that the Obama Administration is hard at work exerting its brand of Chicago-style shakedown politics, wrote chairman Tom Price (R-GA). “These actions are emblematic of a politicization of our economy that has been borne out of this Administration’s drive for greater power and control.”

I think one problem that Obama has is that people don’t want to believe that we don’t know how to stop the oil spill, even though that’s the truth. I hope we get policy addresses by people like Steven Chu and Ken Salazar with more details, for the people like us who crave more information.

Boehner Sides With BP Over American Taxpayers

By all measures, Democrats should get slaughtered this November. However, Democrats have to run against Republicans in November and they seem determined to remind everyone why we were so eager to get rid of them.

John Boehner was asked whether he agreed with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that the government and taxpayers should pay for the oil cleanup.

In response to a question from TPMDC, House Minority Leader John Boehner said he believes taxpayers should help pick up the tab for the clean up.

“I think the people responsible in the oil spill–BP and the federal government–should take full responsibility for what’s happening there,” Boehner said at his weekly press conference this morning.

No matter how bad Democrats screw up, there always seems to be a worse choice.

Oilpocalypse Update

In the on-going slow-motion environmental disaster there’s good news and bad news. First, the bad news:

Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.

“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.”

The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes.

Right now we’re performing a huge, uncontrolled experiment in the Gulf of Mexico. We’re pouring enormous amounts of oil, chemical dispersants and dispersed oil into the ocean. We really have no idea what effect this is going to have but it can’t be good. We’re used to pictures of oil-covered birds and shoreline. This time we have oil-covered shrimp, krill and plankton.

Now for the good news:

In a significant step toward containing a massive Gulf of Mexico oil leak, BP said a mile-long (1.6 kilometer-long) tube was funneling crude Sunday from a blown well to a tanker ship after three days of wrestling to get the stopgap measure into place on the seafloor.

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Kent Wells, BP’s senior vice president for exploration and production, said during a news conference that the amount being drawn was gradually increasing, and it would take several days to measure it. Company spokesman Mark Proegler at the joint spill command center in Louisiana had initially said the tube was containing most of the oil coming from the pipe, which is contributing an estimated 85% of the crude in the spill.

I hope this works. The first step is to stop the leak, then we can assess the damage.

For an extra special bonus, “energy expert” Sarah Palin speaks:

And here’s part of a Palin speech on the topic:

“After inheriting a good pro-development GOP plan that opened up both coasts for drilling, the Obama administration halted development … and now we’re gonna study, more study of the South Atlantic and parts of the Gulf of Mexico … my goodness, folks, these areas have been studied to death … I have seen so many, many studies! I say, let’s send the White House this message: that, you know, we can save taxpayer time, save money and announce: there is oil and gas down there, and we can produce it safely and responsibly! We don’t need more studies, we need more action! Because energy produced in America is security for America, and it is jobs for American workers, jobs that can’t be outsourced. Let’s drill baby, drill, not stall, baby, stall!”

Yep, you read that right. We don’t need to study anymore, just drill! Obviously, we know all about how to stop oil spills in deep water since we were able to stop the leak right away…oh wait… Well, we do know the effects of oil on marine life…uh, move along…