Rep. George Miller (D-CA), the former chairman of the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee, is drafting legislation to prohibit the oil disaster giant BP from drilling in the outer continental shelf for the next five to seven years. In a hearing on Wednesday with Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and Michael Bromwich, the director of the new Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, Miller cited BP’s pattern of “dangerous, lethal behavior” in its refineries, pipelines, and drilling rigs in the United States. He noted that BP is expanding its offshore drilling not only into the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico but also into pristine Alaska seas:

I’m sure they have the technical capabilities to do it. What I’m concerned about is the ethics of this company and how they have performed in the past, to measure their performance in the future. I think they should be debarred from participating in the outer continental shelf for five or seven years. It will have little or no impact on the supply of fossil fuels to this country.

Watch it:

“At some point, the American people are entitled to a standard,” Miller said. His legislation “would block the Interior secretary from issuing offshore leases to a company that is determined to be a danger to workers and natural resources based on a review of records for all subsidiaries and partnerships.”

House Republicans have come to the defense of BP and bashed Miller’s proposal: “Of course, this legislation would kill jobs and lower the supply of energy produced in the U.S. as companies are barred from developing American energy resources.”

*not counting Lindsey Graham or Sarah Palin

Another day, another dreadful opinion piece in the Washington Post.   The print headline easily takes first prize for the most incoherent headline I’ve ever seen on a climate op-ed:  “Carbon pricing won’t achieve emissions goals.”

Seriously.  That’s the headline, though presumably it came from the incoherent editors of the WashPost, and not the author, the self-identified “founder of the venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, which has interests in several aspects of clean technology, including solar, wind, batteries, carbon sequestration, nuclear, geothermal and biofuels, as well as in energy-efficiency technologies such as engines, electric motors, lighting, air conditioning and the smart grid.”

Khosla is one of those people, like Graham and Palin, who simply says whatever stuff pops into his head at the moment, no matter how illogical or self-contradictory it is.

In November he said, “I would venture that the cleanest power will not be solar, it will be coal.” As Casey Stengel said, you can look it up.  In December 2007, Khosla said, “Forget plug-ins. They are nice toys. But they will not be material to climate change.”

Now he says in his WP piece — titled online “A simpler path to cutting carbon emissions”:

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Ken Caldeira: “If we do someday decide that we need to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to avoid a climate crisis, we might find ourselves committed to carbon dioxide removal for a long, long time. A more prudent plan might involve preventing carbon dioxide emissions now rather than trying to clean up the atmosphere later.”

An ounce of prevention is worth a gigaton of cure!

Scrubbing CO₂ from Atmosphere Could Be a Long-Term Commitment

With carbon dioxide in the atmosphere approaching alarming levels, even halting emissions altogether may not be enough to avert catastrophic climate change. Could scrubbing carbon dioxide from the air be a viable solution? A new study by scientists at the Carnegie Institution suggests that while removing excess carbon dioxide would cool the planet, complexities of the carbon cycle would limit the effectiveness of a one-time effort. To keep carbon dioxide at low levels would require a long-term commitment spanning decades or even centuries.

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Here are two things you can do over the holiday weekend.

1. Vote for green radio host Betsy Rosenberg to get a show on Oprah’s new network (click here to see her video audition and vote for it).
2. Support Dr. Glen Barry and the Ecological Internet (click here).

Here’s more from both of them.  First Rosenberg:

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If it weren’t for scientists warning the public decades ago abut ozone-depleting chemicals — and politicians (including Reagan) acting in the national and global interest — the world’s beach-going experience might be very different now (see “Lest We Forget Montreal” and “What would Reagan do about climate change?“).

Now it’s the start of the big beach weekend, and many of us will soon begin slathering on the sunscreen to protect ourselves from harmful rays.  But how effective and safe is that sunscreen from your local drugstore?  CAP has the answer:

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Although the BP oil disaster has killed 11 men, poisoned thousands of animals, and ruined the livelihoods of millions of Americans, Mississippi governor Haley Barbour (R-MS) still believes that the foreign oil giant has suffered the most. Gov. Barbour has dismissed this catastrophe from day one, comparing the toxic oil to “toothpaste” and worrying about the impact of paying damages on BP’s finances. In an interview with NPR on Thursday, Barbour brushed off the suggestion that the conservative ideology of deregulation should be reconsidered, saying that “the idea that more regulation is necessarily better, I think a very suspect idea.” In fact, Barbour cited the greatest environmental catastrophe in American history as proof that “the market system works,” saying that BP is the biggest victim “in this deal”:

I think right now every oil company in the world says, I don’t want to pay $100 million a day to cut corners on drilling a well. And that’s where I believe the market system works. Nobody’s got more to lose in this deal than BP.

Listen here:

“We’ve had a small amount of oil” reaching Mississippi, Barbour conceded, but he claimed that in “almost all the tourist areas, there hadn’t been one drop of oil.” Barbour’s fossil-fueled outlook is unhampered by the facts. Oil has been washing up on Mississippi’s barrier islands for a month now, and Barbour was at Republican fundraisers in Washington, DC, as major oil slicks reached Mississippi’s inner beaches last week. “Countless oil patties” have now washed ashore “along the Mississippi Gulf Coast,” including the major tourist beaches of Biloxi. Last night, “the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources and the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality closed the last open portion of Mississippi’s territorial marine waters” to all commercial and recreational fishing.

Unlike BP — whose 2009 revenues were $239 billion — Barbour’s constituents face the loss of their jobs, health, and homes. Fortunately, Barbour’s insensitivity is not shared by other Mississippi politicians. “The Gulf oil spill is devastating to Mississippi jobs and our way of life,” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) said Wednesday. “There are going to be long-term effects to be dealt with, that it is not just going to be oil on the beach today,” Rep. Gene Taylor (D-MS) said Wednesday. “It is not just going to be this year’s shrimp, this year’s oyster crop.”

“I find myself dreaming of waves of brown oil,” said Kim Cheek, 47, a “social worker and musical director at Christ Episcopal Church in Bay St. Louis, MS,” who helped rebuild her church from the ground up after it was washed away by Hurricane Katrina five years ago.

“When you think about it all, how this has changed everybody’s life and how life here revolves around the water and the beach and the seafood — just even going to get a shrimp po-boy,” said Ocean Springs, MS marine scientist Harriet Perry after finding oil contaminating crab larvae, “it’s just overwhelming.”

(HT FireDogLake)

Let’s fill this under “Duh!” (see History Won’t Warm to “W”)

Over time, as the tragic consequences of our inaction on climate change become more and more obvious to subsequent generations, Bush is certain to fall further (see “Bush will go down in history as possibly a person who has doomed the planet”).

TP has the man-bites-dog story of the year:

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