Keith Olbermann is scheduled to interview me at around 8:08 pm on the circular firing squad at the BP/Transocean/Halliburton hearing today.
Thoughts on messaging are always welcome.
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I’m sure you’re planning on it, but I’d point out how ridiculous it is that this oil spill is making it HARDER to pass comprehensive energy and climate legislation. Only in Washington.
Possibly link to climate change/clean energy bill being introduced tomorrow and quote Al Gore’s stat from his TNR piece that humans dump as much carbon into the atmosphere every 3 seconds when compared with the carbon content of oil gushing EVERY DAY into the Gulf (at the high end of BP estimates).
I also think your stat from “Hell and High Water” about the U.S.wasting more energy every year than the giant economy of Japan uses in a whole year is quite effective at portraying how easy it is for us to use efficiency to replace things like offshore drilling.
Point out how none of the corporations consider themselves really accountable for the disaster, and while they point fingers, Gulf residents get lung damage, destroyed livelihoods, and decimated ecosystems.
Joe, I would add that the only independent estimate of the oil leak rate is 5x what most news agencies are quoting. I’m sure you’ve seen it but skytruth.org estimated the leak at 1.1 million gallons/26,500 barrels per day. Which means it’s already 2x the Valdez spill and fast on the way to 3x.
The circular firing squad is demonstrative of the fact that this is not an isolated incident limited only to one oil company (BP).
Rather, it points to the way in which the entire fossil fuel industry, with all of its complex corporate inter-relationships, continues to feed America’s dirty addiction and fight clean, renewable energy. Sure, they are fighting among themselves now, but two weeks ago they were all happily profiting at the expense of America’s future.
The clean, renewable energy of the future holds the promise of American leadership in a global economic growth platform. But the fossil fuel industry is threatened by this future, and is doing everything it can to keep us chained to the status quo and subservient to the world’s petro-dictators.
Only the concerted support of the American people and of our political leaders for Clean Energy/Energy Independance Legislation can break the power of the fossil fuel industry, free us from dependance on security-threatening foreign oil, and open the door to the clean economic growth opportunies of the future.
I’d frame the oil spill as a failure of regulation, and put it in the context of the recent coal mining disaster and the financial crisis. They all come from the same root cause: private actors have not had a real check on their behavior for a very long time, and this is what happens when government allows companies to run amok. When are we going to learn this simple lesson?
I like the “Titanic” metaphor.
For today, the strongest message is probably about passing the buck. It’s easy to use this to jump from the spill to the climate.
“Three companies are trying to pass the buck on a disaster that, in the long run, will probably cost billions to trillions. Meanwhile, the House, the Senate, the White House, not to mention China and the rest of the world, are passing the buck on the bigger disaster of climate change, which, in the long run, will surely cost at least a thousand times as much – trillions to quadrillions. In both cases, there’s enough responsibility to go around, and it’s time to stop pointing fingers and get to work.”
Hi Joe,
May I direct your attention to the WSJ article cited by Jeff Sessions this morning?
Please note Andrew Leonard’s piece in Salon:
http://www.salon.com/news/louisiana_oil_spill/index.html?story=/tech/htww/2010/05/11/gulf_oil_spill_hearing_2
The BP spill is part of a bigger picture of human impact on the oceans, and could perhaps be put into context of a cumulative series of environmental impacts, including our deforestation of the ocean floor which makes land deforestation look like the garden’s been pruned.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0VHC1-DO_8
Hearings in same room as Titanic hearings.
‘Mr. Newman said it was possible that what prevented the blowout protector from chopping the pipe was not a joint but material rushing back up the well — material “not from Transocean.”‘… in other words, our blowout protector didn’t work because of the blowout, and so it’s not our fault. That’s pretty iconic buck-passing.
I wonder if it is relevant or helpful to point out that these corporations are drilling for oil in US waters, polluting US coast lines in this incident, but they are not US based. Haliburton is now a Dubai corporation; BP is British, and I am not sure about Transocean (Cayman Islands?).
These companies incorporate oversears (in the case of Haliburton, anyway; obviously not BP, and I really don’t know about Transocean) to escape US taxation. No matter what, the Federal and State governments, as well as US citizens will have uncompensated expenses – and the entities most responsible for the needed reaction do not pay their share of taxes.
Joe, I know you’ll do a great job as always.
What do the oil spill, the Massey coal mine disaster, the Iceland volcano European air corridor shut down and the near-1000 point drop in the stock market last Thursday all have in common?
I don’t know, you tell me.
Okay, after channeling my inner-Pee Wee Herman there for a moment: They’re each part of incredibly complex systems that can’t be solved with more complexity, which is almost the only direction we ever go.
Each was human-caused except for the Iceland volcano, but putting ourselves in harm’s way (having all those air flights in the first place) is at least half of any disaster.
We need to simplify all our systems as much as possible if we want more resilience and fewer disasters, and one key to simplification is to go from drilling almost five miles below the BP oil rig and a mile underwater to simpler and more resilient systems like solar panels and wind turbines.
@homunq (#6): I like your “passing the buck” language! Nice.
It would be wonderful to make the point that oil rig/drilling platform safety is REALLY NOT THE ISSUE. Safty is important, BP needs to find the cause of the explosion but they had not had a blow out like this in a very long time. The difference is, the last time this happened it WAS NOT IN 5000 ft of water. We can hardly explore the oceans at that depth. Oceanographers have a very hard time just observing and collecting specimens at that depth. Trying to repair an oil well blow out in 5000 ft of water is a completely experimental procedure. We cannot risk the environment, and the livelihood of those who depend on it, with experimental deep sea oil wells.
We need clean energy. We have a moral imperative to STOP burning fossil fuels for energy and transportation. I like your dirty 19th century / clean 21sth century energy phrase.
Chiming in with Richard above, I’d contrast the emerging clean energy technologies – modular, quickly assembled and put in place, failure-tolerant and getting cheaper all the time – with dirty energy technologies – large and complex, hard to assemble and subject to catastrophic failure, and getting more expensive each passing day. To which pathway do we want to entrust the future?
On the catastrophe-prone nature of big technologies, I would sink the knife in deep and twist hard. Note BP prediction this event was unlikely, and the glaring fact that they are doing everything on the fly. They don’t know what the hell they’re doing, it shows. Can we trust them, or people with nuclear and coal sequestration interests who similarly downplay dangers? Obviously not. This event should undermine confidence in all such technologies and their proponents, and we should take every opportunity to do so.
Don’t have full cable – will catch you tomorrow on the web.
Great job, Joe! It’s a heckuva lot easier and simpler with a friendly host, huh? You had your talking points down well and got to all the best ones, and the more-relaxed setting allowed your humor and personality to come out even more, which is always good.
Keep practicing with the knee-jerks at Fox, cause you do that as well as anyone, also.
I just watched Joe Romm’s interview on MSNBC. I thought Keith Olbermann had the best joke:
My only criticism is that I thought the references to Cheney and conflicts of interest were partisan and ineffective, mainly because Obama maintained many of the same Bush policies, as Howard Fineman noted earlier.
[JR: That isn't how Fineman framed it. Play it back.]
I thought these were the best quotes from Joe:
Great interview, Joe, you’re honing your skills, knocking them out of the park, one after the other. How about putting a link to the interview up your website.
What I’d also like to see Keith Olbermann do is to bring on the someone like American Petroluem Institute head Jack Gerard, who’s been audibly silent these days. The API website talks about how safe oil drilling is and how many safety precautions they have in place, while Jack keeps whining about having to pay additional “taxes” – his word for the removal of ridiculously unjustified drilling subsidies. Keith has a sharp mind and sharper tongue and could rip Jack and new one, maybe that’s why you don’t see Gerard speaking anywhere but where he knows he has a friendly audience.
Good job, Joe. You are gaining confidence in these situations, and your grasp of the subject is sorely needed on television.
Yes, you definitely are getting better with experience Joe. Keep up the good work.
Best,
D
OK … let’s review the tape. Here’s what Howard Fineman said:
But Obama didn’t do that. Perhaps oil industry contributions to the 2008 Obama campaign were a great deterrent to prompt reform of the regulators.
[JR: Next time you excerpt a video to try to disprove what I say, excerpt all the relevant parts, which I will do shortly. Yes, the GOP delayed the key senior political appointees at Interior and undoing 8 years of damage takes a long time, something I learned at DOE in the 1990s.]
Joe, if you think I didn’t excerpt enough of what Howard Fineman said, then I’ll wait with bated breath for the missing “relevant parts” of his interview.
[JR: It's coming. Anybody can watch, though, and see for themselves.]
Thank you, Joe Romm! Well put: ‘Dick Cheney’s hiding.”
I hope to see and hear more of you on the MSM. You are fresh air to replace all the garbage stink from the MSM deniers about the dangers of our changing climate and what we can do to lessen the upcoming climate chaos.