Faced with devastating BP disaster, Louisiana’s governor demands … more deepwater drilling ASAP?

A stunning new letter by the oil-addicted governor of Louisiana gives the lie to right-wing claims that environmentalists are to blame for the BP oil disaster.

On Wednesday, Bobby Jindal, who blames everybody but himself for the environmental disaster hitting his state, wrote to President Obama and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar pleading with them to end the deep water drilling moratorium immediately.

Jindal has been trying to position himself as the can-do guy in the face of the worst environmental disaster in US history, but fundamentally like so many Louisiana politicians, he is beholden to Big Oil, and thus inherently oblivious to the consequences of the states addiction to petro-dollars.  My latest Salon piece discusses the shameless letter he wrote and what it says about pro-pollution politicians like Jindal — and Palin.

Read more

LARRY KING: I know you appear so calm. Are you angry at BP?

OBAMA: You know, I am furious at this entire situation because this is an example where somebody didn’t think through the consequences of their actions. It’s imperiling not just a handful of people. This is imperiling an entire way of life and an entire region for potentially years… [T]he one thing that I think is important to underscore is that I would love to just spend a lot of my time venting and yelling at people. But that’s not the job I was hired to do. My job is to solve this problem and ultimately this isn’t about me and how angry I am.

Poor Obama, he is no Howard Beale, and everybody in the TV business knows that anger drives ratings, which was a key point of satire of the classic movie,  Network.  Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote earlier this year:

Not long ago I was debating someone on television. I thought the discussion was going well until the commercial break when a producer said into my earpiece “be angrier.”

“Why should I be angrier?” I asked him, irritated that he hadn’t appreciated the thoughtfulness of debate.

“That’s how we get channel surfers to stop and watch the program,” the producer explained. “Eyeballs are attracted to anger.”

HuffPost’s Jason Linkins has a great post, “Obama’s Oil Spill Response: Do Americans Want Him To Show More Emotion? No, They Do Not,” which I’ll excerpt below.  He in turn cites another great post, by Alex Pareene, listing all of the media pundits demanding Obama throw a fit, “Why won’t Obama just get even madder about this oil spill?“:

Read more

Will Offshore Drilling ‘Go The Way Of Nuclear Power’?

Oil is still spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. The feds are looking into criminal charges against BP. And it may take months before the well is capped.

What are the long-term implications for BP, and for the oil industry?

Read more

With the headline “All Florida Waters Open to Fishing,” the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission claims the “state’s recreational and commercial fisheries have not been affected by the oil spill.” But a Wonk Room analysis finds that oil has spread into areas of the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast that are still open to commercial and recreational fishing. An image of the Gulf taken early this morning by the European Envisat radar satellite and processed by the Center for Southeastern Tropical Advanced Remote Sensing at the University of Miami shows the main body of the BP slick extending for hundreds of miles south from the mouth of Mobile Bay. Nearly all of the visible slick is within the boundaries of fisheries closure established by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

However, part of a slick twenty miles long and five miles wide is in open state waters less than seven miles off the barrier islands of Pensacola Bay, and a twenty-five-mile ribbon of oil is in the open federal waters south of Destin:

Map created by the Center for American Progress Action Fund from Google Earth, NOAA’s June 3, 2010 fisheries closure map and Envisat’s June 3, 2010 radar image of the Gulf of Mexico processed by the University of Miami’s CSTARS group.

Communicating by email, remote sensing scientist John Amos, the president of environmental imaging non-profit SkyTruth, confirmed the Wonk Room’s analysis that there are oil slicks and sheens outside the boundaries of the fisheries closure after reviewing the satellite imagery.

With the headline “All Florida Waters Open to Fishing,” the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission dangerously claims the “state’s recreational and commercial fisheries have not been affected by the oil spill”:

As millions of gallons of oil and over a million gallons of toxic dispersants have spewed into the ocean since the explosion of BP’s exploratory rig 45 days ago, NOAA has expanded the area closed to fishing to a present-day 37 percent of the Gulf, and some state waters in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama have been closed. A federal fisheries disaster declared earlier for Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama has been expanded to Florida.

However, NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco, National Incident Commander Thad Allen, and BP CEO Tony Hayward continue to express doubts that plumes of oil and dispersants are invisibly contaminating the Gulf.

Update

Dr. Oscar Garcia-Pineda and Dr. Ian MacDonald of Florida State University have given the Wonk Room their exclusive analysis of the oil slick that has moved into Florida’s open fishing waters:

“We conclude that global temperature continued to rise rapidly in the past decade” and “there has been no reduction in the global warming trend of 0.15-0.20°C/decade that began in the late 1970s.”

Note:  Hansen wants comments on this draft, so keep ‘em coming.

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has released a revised draft of “Global Surface Temperature Change,” by James Hansen et al.  It is a must read for warming junkies.  There’s also a a summary discussion of the paper (reprinted below), and two PowerPoint posters of key figures like this one:

Blue curve: 12-month running-mean global temperature.   Note correlation with Nino index (red = El Nino, blue = La Nina).   Large volcanoes (green) have a cooling effect for ~2 years.

NASA makes it official:  We have set the 12-month record, just as CP pointed a few weeks ago (see “NASA: Easily the hottest April “” and hottest Jan-April “” in temperature record“) — and that is all the more powerful evidence of human-caused warming “because it occurs when the recent minimum of solar irradiance is having its maximum cooling effect,” as the paper notes.   This didn’t make a lot of news — see this tiny Bloomberg story — nothing compared to all the nonsensical stories about global cooling.

But will 2010 actually set the record for the hottest calendar year?  NASA explains:

Read more

The foreign oil giant BP has launched a new series of advertisements to contain the damage to its reputation and stock price from its uncontrolled disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. In a television advertisement that aired nationally this morning, BP CEO Tony Hayward promotes how his corporation is running the response to the environmental calamity it caused. Unlike the attitude expressed in interviews when he dismissed the scope of the disaster and complained that he wanted his life back, Hayward tells the camera he is “deeply sorry” for this “tragedy that never should have happened.” With the cries of seabirds in the background, he expresses an air of authority, lumping “volunteers” and “the government” together in his thanks for their help:

The gulf is home for thousands of BP employees and we all feel the impact. To all the volunteers and for the strong support of the government, thank you. We know it is our responsibility to keep you informed and do everything we can so this never happens again. We will get this done. We will make this right.

Watch it:

While BP is on the hook for the billion-dollar costs of the cleanup, it still has money to conduct a broad greenwashing campaign with the support of an army of lobbying and public relations firms and former Dick Cheney press secretary Anne Womack-Kolton. Full-page ads in major newspapers promote the slogan: “We will get this done. We will make this right.”

Hayward’s recognition of BP’s “responsibility to keep you informed” flies in the face of reality, with its demonstrated willingness to misinform the public, lie to Congress, and restrict media access to the scene of its crime.

Hayward’s lack of respect towards the United States government’s authority reflects his company’s position. In addition to the failed efforts to stop the leaks, BP controls millions of dollars of claims processing, thousands of environmental contractors on land and sea, telephone lines, volunteer assistance, access to the disaster site, and data collection. The Center for American Progress recommends that the government take control of the cleanup, instead of keeping the perpetrator in charge.

It is, of course, too late to “make this right” for the 11 workers who died in the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, or for the countless animals and miles of shoreline that have been killed by BP’s toxic sludge.

Transcript: Read more

Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) adds, ‘Acts of God are acts of God.’

Salon has a great feature called, “This Week in Crazy.”  Here are some nominees from Big Oil’s biggest boosters in Congress, courtesy of Think Progress.

Read more

The Biloxi Sun Herald reports that oil began covering two miles of Mississippi’s Petit Bois Island yesterday as a “larger glob crept close to Dauphin Island in Alabama, and the edge of the main slick has moved to within about 35 miles of Mississippi, about half the distance it was last week.” Much of the oil hitting the beaches had “escaped detection because it was floating a couple of feet below the surface.” Reacting to the looming disaster, Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS) sounded the alarm to local press yesterday. “This could turn out to be something catastrophic and terrible, but that has just not been the case so far,” said Barbour.

Barbour’s new rhetoric strikes a very different note from his upbeat tone since the disaster started (see “As oil continues to gush into the Gulf, Mississippi offers $75 gas cards to tourists“).  In this repost, TP has the story of the effort to whitewash this environmental nightmare by dirty energy lobbyist-turned-Governor Barbour.

Read more

In recent weeks, reporters and photographers for major news organizations around the country have been speaking out about the attempts by BP to prevent them from getting a first-hand look at the Gulf Coast oil spill. A CBS News crew was threatened with arrest when it tried to photograph the spill, and a BP representative in Louisiana told a Mother Jones reporter that she couldn’t visit the Elmer’s Island Wildlife Refuge without a BP escort.  TP has the story in this repost.

Read more