Obama misses another chance to reframe the debate

But even as we continue to hold BP accountable, we also need to hold Washington accountable….

If the laws on our books are inadequate to prevent such an oil spill, or if we didn’t enforce those laws – I want to know it.  I want to know what worked and what didn’t work in our response to the disaster, and where oversight of the oil and gas industry broke down. We know, for example, that a cozy relationship between oil and gas companies and agencies that regulate them has long been a source of concern.

In his weekly address (video below), Obama makes clear who is primarily to blame here (see “Should you believe anything BP says?“).

But he has taken a bold step to ensure that the country learns about all of the mistakes made this devastating environmental disaster, including those by his Administration.

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One of the epic extreme weather events in U.S. recorded history devastated one of America’s great cities this month.   But the status quo media has barely told the story of Nashville’s Katrina (let alone its link to human-caused climate change).

Since the great Tennessee deluge of 2010 foreshadows the shape of things to come for many of the world’s great cities if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path, I’m going to begin a multipart series on it.  Uber-meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters and I have already touched on the link to warming already (see AP: Calling deadly Tennessee superstorm an “unprecedented rain event” did “not capture the magnitude”), and I’ll have more scientific analysis on that next week.  What follows is some straightforward — but stunning — reporting on the disaster by guest blogger Eric Normand, a Tennessee-based writer and musician.

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You had to wonder when it would happen.  That moment when someone would take us from talk of how to prevent climate change to acknowledging that it was here already, here to stay, and that it had — and would continue — to irrevocably foreclose on many of the opportunities humanity has taken for granted for millennia.

Figures it would be Bill McKibben. His first book, The End of Nature was one of the earliest to introduce global warming into popular culture. His latest book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Hot New Planet, lays out our grim new reality relentlessly (excerpt here). Yet it is not, fundamentally, a pessimistic book.

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