CalCars’ Kramer writes Obama’s JFK energy moonshot speech

“I am not willing to be the latest in a succession of Presidents telling you we’re going to end our addiction to oil. Finally, it’s time to begin. Oil is holding us all hostage, economically and physically. If terrorists had poisoned 40% of our wetlands and 25% of our fisheries, we wouldn’t ask, “How much will it cost to fight back? The good news? At last we have ways to get far within a few years, not over decades! And it will cost much less than you think.”

Tuesday night, President Obama will speak to the nation about the Gulf catastrophe. In a pre-response to that speech, Felix Kramer, Founder of the California Cars Initiative http://www.calcars.org, who successfully advocated for plug-in hybrids like the forthcoming Chevy Volt, proposes that the President follow that speech up with a “realistic and conservative” roadmap to halve our oil use in 10 years.
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Obama to address nation on BP disaster Tuesday, asserting it “echoes 9/11,” vows he’ll use his presidency to insure country embraces “new way of doing business when it comes to energy.”

When it comes to a cap on carbon, the White House’s strategy for 18 months has been to speak softly and … nothing more. Now the oil spill has forced Obama to ramp up his rhetoric. Does he mean it this time? Either he starts fighting or he doesn’t. The “stealth strategy” is inoperative. The White House can’t fake it any more.

That’s Eric Pooley, former managing editor of Fortune, in an email to me about his new book, The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth.  Anyone interested in climate politics should read it, and I’ll review it later.

Rahm Emanuael and David Axelrod are certainly two of the main reasons that Obama has been far too tame on climate.  Obama will apparently be giving his long-awaited prime time BP disaster and energy policy speech on Tuesday — and it could well be make or break for both his presidency and the efforts to address global warming this decade.

Pooley has a short adaptation of his book at The Climate Desk, “Obama’s Climate Complacency: Blame Rahm?” that I excerpt below:

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HuffPost asks, “How do you generate buzz if you’re a magazine up for sale and fighting claims of irrelevance?”

Since you’ve already shown Palin’s legs on the cover back in November — to much consternation – now you have to flip the classic dual image of women and make her a saint.  As if — see, for instance, Shill, baby, shill: Sarah Palin to “Extreme Enviros: Drill, Baby, Drill in ANWR – Now Do You Get It?”

The near-death news magazine is on the chopping block, and we learned earlier this month that the “publisher of the right-wing monthly magazine Newsmax” is seriously interested.

Coincidentally, also back in November, uber-conservative Sean Hannity gave Palin another chance to answer her flubbed Katie Couric question about where she gets her news, and she named Newsmax first:

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“Conservatives who have long urged limits on the federal government are now suddenly discovering their inner FDRs.”

I agree with virtually everyone out there who’s complaining on camera and in print that our response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has been just terrible. Except that by “our” I don’t mean the government’s or the country’s but ours””the media’s….

To read and watch the coverage of the Exxon Valdez is to be transported back to a different time. There was no effort to implicate Bush in the accident, few calls for him to emote more, no great clamor that he magically “do something” to get the awful images off the television screen. In fact, he never traveled to see the oil spill.

Fareed Zakaria nails it.  Here’s more:

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Yesterday, Chevron discovered a leaking pipeline that was spewing 50 gallons of crude oil per minute into Red Butte Creek in Salt Lake City. By the time crews capped the leak, more than 21,000 gallons “” between 400-500 barrels “” of oil had spilled out, “coating geese and ducks” and closing the city’s largest park.  TP’s Amanda Terkel has the story.

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The New York Times has been widely criticized for its terrible climate coverage in the past three years.  But you would never know that from, “A Final Report From Internal Affairs,” the last column of Clark Hoyt, the public editor.

Hoyt was supposed to represent an objective, independent perspective that represents the public’s concerns — in order “to help this newspaper live up to its own high journalistic standards,” as he put it.  But he has nary a word to say about the one area where the NYT failed to live up to its standards more than any other.

Future generations will certainly never remember what Hoyt calls his “disagreement of greatest consequence [with exec editor Bill Keller] “” over the Times article suggesting that John McCain had had an extramarital affair with a young female lobbyist.”

But they will be bitter and puzzled over how the one-time ‘paper of record’ blew the story of the century (see Science Times stunner: “”¦ a majority of the section’s editorial staff doubts that human-induced global warming represents a serious threat to humanity” and the 2009 “Citizen Kane” award for non-excellence in climate journalism and below).

This year alone, the NYT has put three dreadful, unbalanced “teach the controversy” climate pieces on its most precious real estate — the front page: Read more

Millions of gallons of oil continue to spew into the Gulf of Mexico, now reaching Alabama’s beaches in a toxic soup mixed with chemical dispersants. The dispersants — primarily Corexit 9500A from the oil-industry company Nalco, have been administered on the surface and at the blown out wellhead at the bottom of the sea by BP, unnamed subcontractors, and the federal government since April 26.

On May 15, after a few test runs, the Environmental Protection Agency approved the regular use of subsea dispersants, which had never been done before and whose impacts are unknown. BP has now injected 380,000 gallons of Corexit at the wellhead.

On May 20, the Environmental Protection Agency directed BP to stop using Corexit and find a less toxic dispersant, but BP refused, saying there were no alternatives available at the vast quantities needed for this catastrophic discharge.

On May 26, the EPA and Coast issued a new directive, saying that BP “shall eliminate the surface application of dispersants” unless approved by the Rear Admiral James Allen, the Federal On-Scene Coordinator, and “be limited to a maximum subsurface application of dispersant of not more than 15,000 gallons in a single calendar day,” with “an overall goal of reducing dispersant application by 75% from the maximum daily amount used.”

A Wonk Room analysis of information released by the oil disaster command center found that the May 26 directive has not been followed — 120,000 gallons of dispersant have been used at the surface, total use is only down by 25 percent, and on Sunday, June 6, BP used 33,000 gallons of subsea dispersant, more than twice the allowed amount.

After notified of this discrepancy by the Wonk Room on Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) responded the next day that BP blamed “mechanical difficulties” but “do not expect it to happen again”:

BP informed the Federal On-Scene Coordinator (U.S. Coast Guard) they experienced mechanical difficulties that resulted in them applying more subsea dispersant than they intended to several days last week. They claim they have fixed this problem and do not expect it to happen again, and EPA will continue to monitor their usage to ensure BP complies with our directive and does not exceed the limits set forth in that directive without prior written approval from the FOSC.

They don’t make ‘moderate’ Republicans  the way they used to, as this TP repost makes clear.

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BP and the other companies involved in the Deepwater Horizon disaster face a host of potential fines under various environmental and safety laws, but a recent Houston Chronicle investigation found that few fines are ever actually collected after drilling accidents.

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Despite the massive devastation caused by BP’s oil gusher, a growing number of Republicans have called for an immediate increase in offshore drilling, opposing President Obama’s moratorium on new wells until an investigation of the Deepwater Horizon disaster is complete. Pennsylvania Republican Senate nominee Pat Toomey joined the club Friday.  TP has the story in this repost.

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