Something about that year 2007

Hmmm... This article could mention the fact that it was Bush appointees running MMS and Wildlife, that they'd been guarding the hen house since 2001, they had gutted the regulatory power of the agencies and, in the case of MMS, staffers were literally snorting coke of oil industry asses.

This is what Dick Cheney wanted.

in reference to:

"But in a letter dated Sept. 14, 2007, and obtained by The New York Times, the wildlife agency agreed with the minerals service’s characterization that the chances that deepwater drilling would result in a spill that would pollute critical habitat was “low.”"
- Agency Agreed That Spill Risk to Wildlife Was Low - NYTimes.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

How's That Fossily-Fuelie Thing Working Out For You?

That's a quote from my wife, Robin, after she picked her jaw up off the floor and held back a new round of tears over this picture--a graphic slap in the face to the Dick Cheney School of Government.

A close-cropped picture of the gulf oil slick from NASA made the rounds to a few big blogs yesterday, but I followed the source links to an even more heart-wrenching high definition large view of the entire gulf of Mexico that gives you a better idea of the scope of this damn thing. Then I cropped it and came up with this startling image--sans the handy place labels, but even the geographically challenged will notice the gulf coast of Texas and Florida (left and right respectively).

Anyone who voted for Bush/Cheney Oil Incorporated shouldn't even look at me right now. Anyone who wants to tell me there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans needs to stare at this for a while, print it out, roll it up nice and tight, and shove it. Every last Republican voter is responsible for this. They put foxes in the hen houses, and this is what it got us.

If you have access to a Republican's computer, go get the big version and use it as desktop wallpaper. Print it out and make a post card and send it to anyone who even ever thought about voting for the Grand Oil Party.

The largest environmental disaster in history?

My Dad was a Republican, although he died before the GW Bush "Presidency," so, who knows what he would think about the screw-the-planet-because-Jesus-is-coming-back-soon lunatics in the GOP now. I like to think that he would be like Charles Barkley, a former "Money Republican" like Dad who said, "I used to be a Republican until they lost their minds."

But who knows. Maybe he'd be a crazy tea bagger, in which case we wouldn't talk anymore. Politics isn't a polite sport for me. I know someone's a wingnut, I give them a blast of my best stuff, and then I eliminate any connections with them. Just ask the Guvernator fans in my family.

But one thing I would ask my Dad, what I ask any old person who might have experienced it directly, is what they knew about the dust bowl. After reading this NYT article, Where Gulf Spill Might Place on the Roll of Disasters, I've been researching man-made environmental disasters, and the dust bowl keeps coming up.

Still, for sheer disruption to human lives, several of them could think of no environmental problem in American history quite equaling the calamity known as the Dust Bowl.

“The Dust Bowl is arguably one of the worst ecological blunders in world history,” said Ted Steinberg, a historian at Case Western Reserve University.

Across the High Plains, stretching from the Texas Panhandle to the Dakotas, poor farming practices in the early part of the 20th century stripped away the native grasses that held moisture and soil in place. A drought that began in 1930 exposed the folly.

Boiling clouds of dust whipped up by harsh winds buried homes and cars, destroyed crops, choked farm animals to death and sent children to the hospital with pneumonia. At first the crisis was ignored in Washington, but then the apocalyptic clouds began to blow all the way to New York, Buffalo and Chicago. A hearing in Congress on the disaster was interrupted by the arrival of a dust storm.

By the mid-1930s, people started to give up on the region in droves. The Dust Bowl refugees joined a larger stream of migrants displaced by agricultural mechanization, and by 1940 more than two million people had left the Great Plains States.

Pretty serious stuff. In the last few days in my role as Captain Bringdown as my wife refers to me, I've been reading about Bohpal, Chernobyl, the Johnstown Flood, The Three Gorges Damn, and various oil spills, nuclear contamination sites, deforestation, climate change, and the near extinction of the North American Buffalo. How can anyone decide what the worst is? They're all awful. Many lives are still being claimed by some of these catastrophes, when you take malnutrition, bad water, cancer, and birth defects into account.

So what's my conclusion about the worst man-made environmental catastrophe in history? Homo Sapiens.

I got your implication right here

Ignoring the obvious beginnings of a feeding frenzy in some oxygen deprived waters by the heads of these other oil companies, who have locked in on the bleeding person-hood of BP with their shark-like senses, I find this implication that somehow Mr. Tillerson's company is immune to Murphy's law disgustingly ballsy.

Here's the question: how big of a spill is so big that it's not worth the risk of more? At what point do you just say, screw it, it's too hard to do safely? 100 million gallons? A billion? I'd like to hear some Oil CEO with a carbon footprint the size of Alaska put a number on it.

OK, I'd settle for a person who might lose their job in a moratorium. Let's hear their number. When we get to that number, I'll support a bill to retrain you for building windmills.
in reference to:

"Rex W. Tillerson, chairman of Exxon Mobil, testified that if companies follow proper well design, drilling, maintenance and training procedures accidents like Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 20 “should not occur,” implying that BP had failed to do so."
- Oil Executives Try to Explain Differences From BP - NYTimes.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

Jacques Cousteau's 100th Birthday

"We are living in an interminable succession of absurdities imposed by the myopic logic of short-term thinking."—Jacques-Yves Cousteau

That quote has graced the top of our free desktop wallpaper home page for a very long time now. It is by far my favorite quote. Every time we get another black swan event like Dick Cheney's Katrina down in the gulf, I think of that quote.

Cousteau would, of course, be horrified that his 100th birthday (today) would be marred by this catastrophe. He would be angry at the myopic logic that got us to such a disaster. But, judging from that quote, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't be surprised.

Despite the sorrow born of a clear understanding of the terrifying challenges that await us, Captain Cousteau always thought that humanity has a chance, for he believed deeply in the capacity of humans to adapt, to create, to invent solutions that would save the future. This lucid and creative optimism, united with a great affection for life, allowed him to show us paths that many have begun to adopt: the Rights of Future Generations, a holistic and thoughtful long-term approach to risk-taking, the conservation of biodiversity, the determined search for clean energy and especially solar energy, integrated management of large aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, the resolution of problems of intervention between States to establish compatible and effective legal practices in environmental regulation …

I agree we have a chance. But when I see Republicans (and corporatist Democrats), who many people are thinking about voting for, standing up and saying this is not a catastrophe, standing up to defend BP, I come to the conclusion that the chance is minuscule and getting microscopic by the minute. If people can be so guided by their own bigotry and greed that they vote against their own interests for more myopic logic and more resultant absurdities, then what hope can there be that those of us who do have the capacity to adapt, create, and invent solutions will be able to overcome the power and corruption of the ruling corporate class?