UPDATE: As noted below, Rehm’s show always made clear that this show would be trumped by an Obama announcement on his Supreme Court nominee. And so it goes.
Thanks for all your suggestions. They will be put to good use. And the show may get reprised in the future.
Suggestions for soundbites, metaphors, and framing are always welcome!
You can listen live to the show Monday 10 am edt (click here). The theme is, “The Environmental and Economic Consequences of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill.”
Barring a last-minute breaking story bigger than the BP oil disaster — Obama’s nominee for Supreme Court, for instance, I’ll be on with:
Kevin Book, managing director of research, ClearView Energy Partners. Stephen Power, reporter, Wall Street Journal.
Sitting in for Rehm will be Katty Kay, a Washington correspondent and anchor for the BBC World News America.
More details here.
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
Joe, I work in the cleantech world, and often with investors. It struck me the other day that perhaps we should be thinking of our environment through the lens of ROI. Mother Nature has invested her resources in us. As the BP spill clearly shows, the ROI on that investment has been appalling. No smart investor would continue to plow resources into a losing cause. If we’re not very careful, Mother Nature will pull back on her investment, liquidate her assets and come up with a new investment thesis.
Best, William
How timely.
You can start to drive the correct meme! This is a “deep sea blowout”, or something – not a spill. Spill implies a finite container that can’t be that much.
This is unknown quantities of oil because nobody knows how much is under the sea floor.
I think everyone in the media that is not fossil-controlled should call this correctly to drive the message home if we want minds changed. And to be accurate. She will have 3 guys from the Heritage Foundation to take you down. But it is great that she at least gives the other side a chance. TAKE IT!
This is NOT a limited accident that leaked from a container like a ship.
It is an “oil well blowout on the sea floor”. It is a “sea floor gusher” an “ocean floor blowout” a “catastrophic well blowout 5,000 feet under the ocean”
If you haven’t watched that video yet, linked in to by an earlier commenter, it puts the oil spill in perspective!
http://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_jackson.html
It’s so important because he links the synergy between pollution, climate change, and overfishing to the overall destruction of life in the ocean – which is mirrored on land between pollution, climate change and resource depletion.
It’s something people need to connect in order to understand that an enormous paradigm shift is essential in the way that we have been exploiting our habitat, if there is to be any possibility of long-term survival.
Joe,
How about this for a soundbite. When drill baby drill becomes spill baby spill the best thing BP can do so far is burn baby burn, or when the oil companies drill and successfully extract the oil in the gulf its “their” oil but when one of their wells blows out all that oil is ours all of a sudden.
Fixing The Thing
Joe, if you haven’t already seen, I’ve made a series of comments in the “BP blew it” thread (or rather the “BP dealt setback…” thread) involving how to do a much better job with their present initiative. Make sure you read the comment, near the bottom, containing a correction to my earlier imaginative conception of the large diameter pipe necessary.
In hindsight (but also in a way that they should have been able to predict ahead of time), their implementation of the idea was “not good”. My comments describe some things that I think would be wise and necessary fixes. Of course — and hopefully — those folks will have thought of such things by now. But, clearly, they didn’t do so the first time around, and it’s unclear to me (especially now) whether those folks know what they are doing. Or, perhaps, they know what they are doing but they want to try cheap and unlikely approaches in order to keep their own costs down. But, at this point, they need to do something in a way that should actually work.
Anyhow, good luck with the show tomorrow.
Jeff
By the way — and just so you have this as context — as far as I can tell, The New York Times hasn’t yet covered (in the paper itself) the letter from over 250 scientists that was published in the journal Science Friday. I checked Friday’s paper, and yesterday’s paper, and now today’s (Sunday’s) paper. As far as I can tell, there has been no coverage of the matter in The New York Times, yet. Of course, they could cover it tomorrow (Monday) by the time you do your interview.
Cheers,
Jeff
Be aware that radio is a slightly different medium than TV. You will be essentially whispering into the ear of your listeners, you will have perhaps the most direct access to minds, undistracted by image and flash. Plus with Rehm you have the freedom to calmly state essential truths. Go for it.
In the hope of preventing further disasters of this sort, please raise the question whether BP conducted thorough search and side-scan sonar sweeps of the area surrounding its well prior to any drilling, because industry and MMS were well aware years ago that the entire deepwater area of the Gulf is in effect a minefield of dumped and discarded unexploded bombs, torpedoes, mines, and other explosives — millions of pounds of them — disposed of by the U.S. military from 1940 to at least 1970. No one knows where they all are. (If you want the industry and MMS documents, please ask; I don’t know how to include links here.) Please ask why no one is raising the question whether one or more of these could have caused the initial explosion.
Also please ask how a Rube Goldberg “containment vessel/dome” 40 feet high was expected to cover a blowout preventer that is 50 feet high.
Many thanks — Carol Van Strum
If one were brutally honest, one could tell radio listeners that the root of the problem is capitalism and the Ponzi scheme of perpetual growth. I would definitely avoid appeals to “return on investment” because that’s exactly what mandates the growth.
But if that seems too radical or too complicated to explain, I recommend the same framing offered by Bill McKibben:
… and Al Gore:
Good luck1 Interesting fact to mention: Since spill, Feds gave BP+others 27 waivers to drill oil in Gulf without in-depth environmental studies: http://bit.ly/OilWaiver
Keep bringing up the contrast between the potential for unexpected problems, such as this deep sea blowout, with fossil fuels and the benign alternatives such as solar and wind (less so nuclear perhaps). Can anyone foresee a comparable disaster with wind or solar? There just aren’t the same hidden costs.
The loop current in the Gulf is basicaly the gateway to the gulfstream;that warm resivour of sea water which flows from the tropical Atlantic northward to western Europe.Scientists agree that absent the Gulf Stream much of Europe would develop an artic like climate,since much of that land mass lies as far north as artic Canada and northern Alaska;places which are nearly uninhabitable.Considering this knowledge I can not help but wonder what effect an oil slick would have upon the surface of the Gulf Stream.Could oil riding north atop of that warm conveyor of water and air, actualy lead to the collapse of that stream, due to changes in the salinity,density and other physical attributes of this river of warm water ? Is anyone even considering this possibility ? It seems to me that they should;since the collapse of the Gulf Stream would mean the end of civilization as we know it !
O/T But JR, can you do a post about the CLEAR Act, why we should or should not be supporting it as an alternative to Waxman/Markey?
http://supportclearact.com/about
thanks
Here’s A Thought:
Fighting against the future is ultimately doomed to failure.
Cheers,
Jeff
“Fighting against the future is ultimately doomed to failure.”
We need to adapt to, and protect our environment to prevent unhealthy conditions, which affect us today and more so into the future.
And i would stretch the human health impacts.
=======================================================================
An illustrated guide to the latest climate science
* Many of the predicted impacts of human-caused climate change are occurring much faster than anybody expected — particularly ice melt, everywhere you look on the planet.
* If we stay anywhere near our current emissions path, we are facing incalculable catastrophes by century’s end, including rapid sea level rise, massive wildfires, widespread Dust-Bowlification, large oceanic dead zones, and 9°F warming — much of which could be all but irreversible for centuries. And that’s not the worst-case scenario!
* The consequences for human health and well being would be extreme.
http://climateprogress.org/2010/02/17/an-illustrated-guide-to-the-latest-climate-science/#comments
The risc from off-shore drilling – even happening rare, the consequences when it comes to environment pollution, outweight the short time gain – many magnitude wide. With alternative energy sources, events like this cannot happen in the first place.
We need to protect and preserve our environment, we all belong and depend on. The oil and used dispersants will wreck havoc in the ocean for hundred of years or thousand. Environmental and economic impacts on hundreds of millions of people – the long term devastation to huge areas of the GOM, florida, eastern Coast, islands like bahamas, cuba and nobody should wonder if we find oil emissions or dispersants in europe fish.
In the video linked in 3#, you have this comparsion from today’s small fish with back in history much larger catch. This kind of stuff happens all over the place and disaster events made from BP’s oil extraction just pushes this further – threatens many species and will drive the acceleration of species extinction.
Oil off-shore drilling is a steady threat, we need to transform our energy system to a more sustainable one.
Instead of oil off-shore drilling, we could build off-shore wind farms!
Yes, whenever we reject choosing the sustainable way, we pick an inevitable fight against the future (i.e., we humans are picking a fight against our own human future), and such a path is, by definition, doomed to fail. The sooner we adopt sustainable ways, the better.
Sigh,
Jeff
The media focus on what can be seen, but the problem is literally much deeper. See veteran oceanographer Sylvia Earle’s interview on the NewsHour last week:
In much the same way, just because you can’t directly see CO2, doesn’t mean it’s not a problem.
The emphasis is on what happens if we don’t get off of oil.
Is there some way of briefly describing the beautiful world without oil and coal?
Modern technological life will never prove to be sustainable.The problem is that so much of our natural world has been destroyed already,that for most people a natural sustainable lifestyle is probably not even possible.That does not mean that we can not attempt to lead simpler more sustainable lives.
Change has been said to be unavoidable.While this may be true as to natural changes,the destruction of our natural world has not occoured accidentaly,nor has that destruction taken place in every case as an attempt to better the collective human condition.In many cases entire species and ecosystems have been destroyed by tyrannical enities in an attempt to make ceartain groups of people economicaly or materialy dependent upon those enities.More than a few historians ande political scientists will tell you that the history of civilization is in fact the history of power elites engaged in the destruction of natural systems as a means of rendering human populations subserviant to those elites.When people can depend upon their natural surroundings for their susistance they are not at all easy to control.Destroy their natural enviroment and it becomes difficult for many people to know the difference between servitude and freedom.
It may be worth driving home the fact that this disaster is but one of many ongoing disasters resulting from fossil fuel use IN ADDITION to climate change. Let’s see…there’s mountain-top removal, there’s the health and death of miners, there’s respiratory disease and cancer (and what else?) from air pollution (the dollar costs and yearly deaths being huge, though i don’t know the figures off hand), there are all the oil spills in places we don’t hear about (what we’re seeing now is pretty much a common occurance in Nigeria, I believe), and of course there’s the money we spend overseas. No doubt I’m missing something. Oh, right: Peak Oil. This spill should be seen as an illustration of all the other truly awful things happening, not an aberation. An opportunity to get people to look at the wider field, not just fixate on the disaster at hand. Add all that to climate change, and you really have to ask whether we are not simply insane. How you crunch that all down for radio or if you do at all…I will leave to you. But having listened to Rehm a fair amount I think breaking through the conventional fragmentation of all these “different” issues in a common sense way is something she will be receptive to and give you room to run with.
Ah. To put the above more briefly: The gusher in the gulf should remind us to think ECOLOGICALLY, i.e., remind us that it’s not a single-issue (climate change) but a range of interconnected disasters, some slow-motion (and so rendered invisible given how our media works) and some too dramatic to ignore, but all of them connected and cumulative and much bigger than we tend to realize.
The huge crowd in Washington DC On Earth Day got
ZERO media coverage.
Why? Conspiracy?
How about “burners” instead of “deniers”, “denialists”, or even “delayers”?
These guys always claim that variations of “denier” are ad hominem smears, that they aren’t denying any “sound science”, . . . The slickest ones can list reams of science that they accept, and quote IPCC chapter and verse. Consider Pielke, Lomborg, Mcintyre, Monckton, Pat Michaels, Lindzen, Fred Singer, Wegman, the SuperFreakeconomists, and now even Curry.
Every “burner” concludes — somehow — that it’s ok — or even good — to keep burning fossil fuels. Every burner has a slightly different take on the science, but presto and voila! it says “burn, baby, burn”.
And remember:
A clean energy economy will make us healthier, wealthier, safer, and more secure.
Daniel,would you agree with me that scociety instead of focusing on job creation,”which usualy only results in more enviromental destruction”should began considering the possibility of teaching people how to gain material security via the use of our remaining natural and semi natural landscapes.For example instead of training people to work as commercial loggers,why not teach our young people how to retrieve forest products,”including lumber”for personal and small scale community use.Instead of teaching millions of people how to balance checkbooks,and mannage bank accounts,perhaps we should be teaching people the basics of organic gardening,herb gathering and leather crafting ? Do you understand my basic premise ?
Far to many people refuse to understand that our economic system is inherintly unstable,unjust and unsustainable.In fact our system is one that depends upon the economic failure of a ceartain portion of the population ! While being a system dependent upon human poverty our system is also one that readily creates that poverty.We should keep in mind that true poverty is not the same as a lack of capital,despite the fact that that all impoverished persons lack suffecient capital to meet their basic needs.True poverty is actualy a creation of modern market economies in which people are no longer able to sustain themselves directly from their natural surroundings.Conservitives mistakenly argue that all pre capatalist or pre industrial cultures existed in a state of perpetual impoverishment.This of course is an absurd line of reasoning ! As people who study poverty will tell you perpetual poverty always leads to a corosponding impoverishment of the individual and collective health of the peoples who suffer from material poverty.Now consider how on earth could it have been possible for say,the native Americans to have been suffering from perpetual poverty,while at the same time thriving for thousands of years in some of the most inhospitible places in the western hemisphere !? The fact of the matter is that no group of people suffering from perpetual poverty could live for thousands of years in such places as northern Alaska,the bone dry deserts of the Southwest or the bacteria laden, steamy jungles of the Amazon ! Takeing into account that these so called perpetualy impoverished peoples lived without combustion engines and electricity,but yet made their homes even in the coldest,hottest,wettest,driest and stormiest places known to man,the assumption that these pre capitalists cultures were chronicaly impoverished becomes espeacialy ludacris !Sadly untill we convince people that our modern economic system has in fact made poverty a common an prevalent feature of human civilization,enviromental degradation and needless human suffering will continue unabated.
Joe, here are some thoughts. This disaster lays bare some of the hidden costs of fossil fuels that we never pay at the pump. In so doing, it should prompt us to move away from a fossil fuel economy to a clean energy economy. Of course, the larger hidden costs of fossil fuel consumption will come with global warming. But that is harder to see advancing toward the white, sandy shoreline than an oil slick. So this disaster provides an opening by which to see the greater disaster looming in the future if we fail to confront our fossil fuel addition.
Secondly, and I’ll defer to your knowledge of the facts here about specific compnaies and specific actions, but is it the case that the oil companies that having been telling us that more offshore drilling is oh so safe and have been fighting additonal safety rules that they said were unnecessary, are the same oil companies that have been funding a good deal of the anti-science climate-change denying disinformation machine? If so, this disaster shows how they are not to be trusted, and neither is the psuedo-science they have been peddling on climate change.
Possible sound bite:
The environmental crisis is like being diagnosed as having HIV or hepatitis C. The symptoms may be minimal to none. Ultimately, without treatment, the devastation will be total.
James, you are making some trenchant observations that challenge our most fundamental notions of how society and economies should operate in relation to the natural world. I have been wondering lately whether humans have maintained their culture without either exploiting the easy energy of fossil fuels or each other through slavery or the functional equivalent.
I would point out that the vast majority of wildlife killed by this spill will never be seen. This is typical; in an oil spill or other environmental disaster, the bodies are rarily recovered. When biologists plant a known number of dead animals or fish and then have a crew come in to conduct a count to test efficacy of damage assessment techniques, the result is inevitably that almost all are never seen by the observers.
In this case, I noticed that the AP photography at the site of the blowout (MSNBC headline story) noticed and photographed a completely oiled bird trying to climb up the side of a response vessel. They also noted that an oiled egret that landed on their ship.
There is no reason to expect a higher density of oiled birds at the site of the blowout. Rather, they would be more common towards shore. But extrapolate by taking the proportion of the slick the photographer could see (a football field sized area?), divide into the size of the slick (10,000 sq miles?), and multiply by the number of birds seen (2) and you get millions of birds. I could be over by two magnitudes and it’d still be really really bad.
Birds float, lots of other wildlife and fish don’t. And these birds actively sought the vessels as a refuge from drowning. Who knows what is dead or dying unseen.
Joe,
If you could make one ‘<-straight up' point that could save our children from 'hell and high water,' it would be the following:
Every concerned citizen must call on President Obama to go on prime-time national TV to clear up the mass confusion about climate change. People figure that if there were REALLY a problem they'd hear about it–but the media perpetuate the false notion that our scientists are split (the almighty 'balanced viewpoint')!
We must break this information log-jam before larger positive feedbacks kick in. At that point citizens will be cursing and complaining: "Why the heck didn't somebody explain this to us?"
Obama's number is 202-456-1414; or go to http://www.whitehouse.gov.
Good luck with the show. We'll be listening, and cheering!
Roger (& Susan)
Put as concisely as possible: Encourage listeners to call President Obama (202-456-1414) to ask him to inform misinformed Americans of the critical need to move aggressively toward clean, renewable energy.
Wits end;have you ever considered the fact that the vast majority of humans are by nature basicaly coopertive,peace desiring and even somewhat generous ? Unfortunately most people are also very gullible.Over the past thousand years or so,a minority of sociopathic and overly competitive humans have made great strides towards the total subjection of the masses to their will.They have made these strides via a combination of brute force,propaganda,out right trickery and most importantly, the destruction of the natural commons.My point is that with the exception of a minority of vicsous self serving brutes,people are inately able to live in realitive harmoney with nature and one another.Sadly most people are also inately prone to being led like sheep to what looks like greener pastures,but in reality are only the farms where they will be sheared and finaly slaughtered.
I believe you have been pondering whether or not what we now call human civilization would have become possible absent the exploitation of nature and humanity by humanity ? I would argue that given the degree of savagery man has shown to man and his natural world since the time of the Greek empire and espeacialy since the rise of the Roman empire,civilisation is something that the world has yet to experience.By the way,I have been accused of romancitising pre industrial tribal cultures.Surely though ancient peoples who actualy valued life for the sake of life, and believed that any battle that had claimed the lives of more than ten men was a battle that must be ended,did indeed sport cultures worthy of admiration !? Does it not make more make more sense to ramanticise a culture that considered the morning bath in a river to be a spiritual experience,than to admire a culture which holds people who play games for a living in greater esteem than even doctors and nurses who save lives every day ?!
Just went to tune in, crap.
May I add:
A lot of people would like to feel confident that going off oil/coal will not cause them to lose their job, or result in them not being able to afford to drive their car/heat their home.
I am very sorry to hear that the broadcast was cancelled.
Our Supreme Court will deal be dealing with global warming cases.. sooner or later. There are a handful of cases ready.
James, if you are still watching this post (or anyone else), absolutely, the roots go much deeper and, as you say, the underlying rules of the system generate poverty and degradation. It’s hard-wired into capitalism. Whether that’s the message to take to a radio show of this sort, given the immediate circumstances, I’m not sure. (Personally I would, but it’s a tough call.)
At some point, you gotta talk about Marx. Yes, Marx, as in Karl. The most interesting (and encouraging) quote I’ve seen recently is from the Dalai Llama. “I am in the Marxist camp. I am a Buddhist Marxist, a Marxist Monk.” And no, this is not to suggest anything remotely like Stalinism or Maoism. It is to introduce an analytical perspective that helps us understand how things work, and thus to figure out new paths. Anyway, that’s for another thread…but thanks for raising these issues.
Mr. Rohm
Ed Schulz, radio tv host is going strong on the spill. On his radio show today,he said that it is more important than the supreme court appointee.
Would you consider contacting them, to see if you can be a guest on their programs?