Bickering and defensive, Newsweek reporters have lost the public’s trust.

Another week, another staggering journalistic lapse in climate science reporting at a once-great media outlet.

How bad is “Uncertain Science,” by Stefan Theil, European economics editor for the near-dead newsweekly?  I asked Dr. Robert J. Brulle for a comment, and the Drexel University “expert on environmental communications,” wrote me back:

This article is basically a condensed version of the climate denier viewpoint.  Mr. Theil significantly distorts the situation, and grossly fails to ground his story in the actual facts, all to support his biased position.  Obviously, Newsweek doesn’t have any fact-checking capability.  How this counts as journalism is beyond me.

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The three worst direct impacts to humans from our unsustainable use of energy will, I think, be Dust-Bowlification and sea level rise and ocean poisoning:  Hell and High Water.  But another impact — far more difficult to project quantitatively because there is no paleoclimate analog — may well affect far more people both directly and indirectly: war, conflict, competition for arable and/or habitable land.

We will have to work as hard as possible to make sure we don’t leave a world of wars to our children. That means avoiding decades if not centuries of strife and conflict from catastrophic climate change. That also means finally ending our addiction to oil, a source “” if not the source “” of two of our biggest recent wars. As the NYT reported last August:

The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.

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Last week, I asked readers to “Name the BP oil disaster and write Obama’s ‘pivot’ speech to the climate and clean energy jobs bill.”  A few people actually wrote entire speeches.  Here is one by guest blogger Stewart J. Hudson, President of the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, suggests Obama deliver a speech centering on the next holiday weekend, July 4:

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Tom Tomorrow’s terrific cartoon in Salon is subtitled, “It’s called the Doomsday Bomb and it’s perfectly safe. Trust us.”

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In Katrina, “at least 1,836 people lost their lives…. Total damage was $81 billion.”

I get it.  Many progressives are angry with Obama for many grievances, some of which are genuine, such as his inane seeming embrace of offshore drilling (though, ironically, he actually closed off most of the coastal US to offshore drilling).  But some progressives seem to be taking the anger a bit far.

I’ve been as outspoken as anyone on the devastation — human and environmental — that the BP oil disaster is going to cause (see “The human dimensions of oil spills” and “The BP oil disaster is a health disaster, too” and “BP’s dispersants are toxic “” but not as toxic as dispersed oil“).  And 11 people have been killed in this tragedy (so far) — by the reckless behavior of BP.

That said, I would have thought people knew what happened in Katrina.  But maybe not.  Of Katrina, Wikipedia reports:

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So how is the president doing on

1. Actually responding to the disaster,
2. Appearing to respond to the disaster, and
3. Messaging on the disaster?

Grade on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 1 being the worst).  Feel free to provide a score on how hard this is going to hit his Presidency.  My scores below.

NYT columnist Frank Rich opines:

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Energy economics expert Craig Severance has written a sequel to “Peak oil production coming sooner than expected.”

It’s time we moved on to something else, or this is going to kill us.

Not only are world oil supplies running out, but what oil is still left is proving very dirty to obtain.  We need to kick our oil addiction now if we expect to preserve any hopes of economic prosperity, or unspoiled habitats.

“This is What the End of the Oil Age Looks Like.”

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From the masters at the New Yorker:

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Women across the nation are preparing to play an integral role in the green economy, and the United States will need their help if we’re going to pull ourselves out of the recession and compete in the new economy on a global scale.  CAP’s Jorge Madrid has the story in this repost.

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TOP KILL = FAIL

The latest attempt by BP to shut down its apocalyptic oil gusher — the “top kill” maneuver — has failed, despite BP CEO Tony Hayward’s assurance yesterday that it had a 70 percent chance of success. There’s no question that the federal government, if the president so decides, can take over the challenge of mitigating the damage of BP’s oil to the shores and waters of the Gulf of Mexico. But can President Obama take charge of stopping the wellhead gusher from the foreign oil giant? The administration argues it’s keeping BP in charge of the attempts to shut down the blown out well because government doesn’t have the equipment or expertise to solve this engineering problem without BP:

Adm. Thad Allen, Incident Commander: “To push BP out of the way, it would raise the question, to replace them with what?” [White House briefing, 5/24/10]

David Axelrod, White House adviser: “They’ve got equipment that our government doesn’t have.” [Fox News, 5/24/10]

Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior: “This administration has done everything we can possibly do to make sure that we push BP to stop the spill and to contain the impact. We have also been very clear that there are areas where BP and the private sector are the ones who must continue to lead the efforts with government oversight, such as the deployment of private sector technology 5,000 feet below the ocean’s surface to kill the well.” [White House briefing, 5/24/10]

The administration has been keeping an ecological criminal in charge of the crime scene during a national crisis. Seventeen nations have offered assistance — but “the final decision is up to BP” to accept it, according to the State Department — and only Canada, Mexico and Norway have been allowed to help so far. The law — Title 33, Section 1321 — mandates that President Obama “shall direct all Federal, State, and private actions to remove the discharge,” using any means necessary. There are not any resources — people or equipment — that Obama doesn’t have the authority to seize and put into service.

It’s certainly fair to expect that private sector resources may be needed for this disaster, but BP’s only unique qualification for the disaster response is that it is the perpetrator. Although BP is by default a party responsible for implementing the cleanup plan, it is by no means the only possibility. The rig was operated by Transocean; the cementing done by Halliburton; the blowout preventer built by Cameron. Other companies involved in ultra-deepwater drilling include engineering giant Schlumberger, Norway’s nationalized oil company Statoil, Shell, and Chevron.

If the Navy can’t direct the undersea mission after it’s given authority over any needed private resources, it calls into question why we entrust it to operate aircraft carriers and nuclear-armed, nuclear-powered submarines.

Obama does not need to keep working with BP management — like CEO Tony “Very Very Modest” Hayward, BP America president Lamar “No Certainty” McKay, BP Chairman Carl-Henric “Big And Important” Svanberg, or COO Doug “Very Optimistic” Suttles — who have repeatedly laughed off the scale of this catastrophe. If federal officials believe that BP engineers should continue to work on the problem, the President has the authority to have those people working directly for the federal government.

In fact, the president has the authority to nationalize BP America and seize all of its assets, rendering the question of reliance on BP moot. If Obama does not believe that the Clean Water Act’s “spill of national significance” provisions give him sufficient authority, he should declare the national emergency that should have been declared weeks ago, or demand that Congress deliver him necessary legislation. Or there’s an easier option: BP is on the hook for all costs of this apocalyptic disaster. Obama can simply buy BP America and send the bill to its foreign parent company.

The relevant legal code of Title 33, Section 1321: Read more

Three attempts to pump mud and 16 tries to stuff solid material into a breached Gulf of Mexico oil well failed to stop the flow, top BP executives said Saturday, and engineers and executives with the oil giant have decided to “move on to the next option.”

Here’s what next, via CNN:

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I have a new Salon piece, which they headlined, “Obama’s daughter asked the wrong question:  There’s not much that Obama himself can do to ‘plug the hole.’ But he could be honest about why the spill happened.”

I’ll file this under humor, since I don’t have a special category for tragedy:

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The University of Virginia has petitioned a state court to “set aside” Attorney General Cuccinelli’s not-so-civil Civil Investigative Demand that it turn over a mass of former UVa Prof. Michael Mann’s documents and e-mail correspondence with 39 other scientists. The university’s action shows some backbone and exemplifies the pushback we should see in responding to political witch hunts aimed at the science community. The petition defends academic freedom and indicates how Cuccinelli’s demands fail to meet the basic requirements of state law.

That’s ClimateScienceWatch.org on the latest turn in the “witch-hunt by the state’s attorney general,” as the prestigious science journal Nature puts it.

The full text of the UVa petition is here.  And this is from the petition’s “Preliminary Statement”:

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At Thursday’s press conference on the BP oil disaster, reporters discussed several of the issues raised by the Center for American Progress in “Calling the Shots in the Gulf.” The president was pressed on the relationship between the federal government and BP, and whether whether this criminally negligent foreign oil company can be trusted to manage so much of the response. Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson has the story in this repost.

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Numerous politicians and oil industry officials have claimed the BP oil catastrophe growing in the Gulf of Mexico is “unprecedented.” From BP CEO Tony Hayward, who called his company’s environmental crime an “unprecedented accident,” to Admiral Thad Allen, U.S. Coast Guard, who called it an “unprecedented anomalous event,” officials and pundits have given the impression that the consequences of this catastrophe could not have been predicted. In a Congressional oversight hearing on the apocalyptic disaster on Thursday, Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA) even argued the country should respond to this “unprecedented” event by making sure “that we continue to produce oil here in the states.”

Watch a compilation prepared by the Wonk Room:

On Thursday, May 27, Rep. George Miller (D-CA) responded to the myth that this catastrophe was unprecedented and thus unforeseeable:

Every time we have a catastrophic event like this involving British Petroleum or other parts of the oil and gas industry, we’re told that this is an unpredictable cascade of unforeseeable errors, that this is unprecedented, that nobody could have foreseen this. This is sort of like the bankers on Wall Street. Nobody could have foreseen the risks that they engineered themselves, so nobody’s responsible. I don’t believe this was some “black swan” or “perfect storm” event. There wasn’t something that could not have been foreseen. And I don’t think this is something you can promise will never happen again.

Like the rest of the oil industry, BP has a long record of tragic, extraordinary environmental disasters, stretching from Alaska to Nigeria. And this particular disaster is not unprecedented in size, in the kind of accident, nor in the methods used to respond. There have been dozens of oil well blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico, including 39 since 2007.

As Rachel Maddow described on her MSNBC show Wednesday, the largest accidental oil spill in history, Ixtoc I, was eerily similar. That 1979 disaster took place off the coast of Mexico in the Gulf of Mexico, a months-long runaway blowout in which the blowout preventer failed. One-hundred-thirty million gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf after cofferdam and top-kill and junk-shot efforts failed, until relief wells were finally drilled. The efforts to limit the catastrophe have not changed either, as booms, dispersants, and burns were used to limit the spread of Ixtoc’s plumes of oil.

Watch the Maddow segment about history repeating itself:

To be fair, the Ixtoc I cofferdam effort was called a “sombrero,” a totally different kind of headgear from BP’s “top hat.”

What makes this catastrophe new is its location in the fertile and fragile ecosystem of the northern Gulf, and the depth at which the well was drilled, increasing the dangers. But this event is yet another tragic reminder of the truth of George Santayana’s dire maxim: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

In the wake of the largest oil disaster in U.S. history, two just released polls by USA Today/Gallup show that Americans are increasingly skeptical of increased offshore drilling — and increasingly support environmental protection.  In the one month since the April 20^th explosion at the Deepwater Horizon rig, support for more offshore drilling has dropped by nearly 20 percent – a big change in a short period of time.

Gallup pollster Jeffrey M. Jones notes that:

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Obama’s science advisors says, “The evidence for the dominance of the human role in what we are experiencing is powerful and I think it should be persuasive to anybody not blinded by wishful thinking.”

President Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren, said this yesterday that the “most important single thing that we need to get done in this country” to address energy and climate change issues is to pass legislation “that puts a significant price on greenhouse gas emissions.” Without that, he added, the U.S. will not be doing enough to reduce emissions “and we will not have the credibility we need ultimately to forge the sort of international agreement that is required.”  WWF’s Nick Sundt discusses Holdren’s remarks in this repost.

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As BP stems flow (for now), Obama asserts, “This disaster should serve as a wake-up call that it’s time to move forward on” climate bill.

The 37^th day since the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig saw several very dark clouds in the BP oil disaster, as well as a silver lining.

BP undertook a “top kill” maneuver to staunch the river of oil coming from the damaged well.   This effort involved shooting drilling muds into the drilling apparatus on the ocean floor to block the oil from escape:

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Murkowski “dirty air” Amendment vote June 10 will be a key test

The inside-the-beltway media mavens at the Politico report today that the Senate climate and clean energy jobs bill has a heartbeat:

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Harvard economist Robert Stavins analyzes the American Power Act’s allowance distribution in this repost.  Here are his main conclusions:

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