Below find a thread that developed somehow between people who received some kind of request to petition re: BP. It's all a big oil-slicked blur at this point. But below are some fascinating points that bear reading. If you feel inspired to add to the discussion, simply fill in your reply at the comment area below. I find it easiest to write the response in Word and then paste into the field.

All the Best,

Jim Crotty
Crotty Farm Report (CFR)
Resolved (www.resolved.tv), my documentary film about inner city education, currently in post-production (as this film makes clear, for me anyway, it's all about education)

Hi Jim,

Thanks for setting up the UberOil section on your blog for us. This discussion seems to have taken on a life of its own. I’m going to have to print out the entire thing at work tomorrow and study it carefully.

I completely missed discussing the biodiesel angle in the previous discussions go-arounds. While they’re still hydrocarbon fuels, they are more amenable to the concept of locally-produced renewable energy sources. Quite simply, biofuels have the potential to significantly reduce our total dependence upon foreign sources of the stuff they now pump out of the ground. As long as biofuels production quantities don’t place our food production infrastructure in jeopardy, It’s difficult to see where it has any significant downsides. One thing’s for certain, a breakdown at a biofuel plant would have a hard time causing the kind of damage that oil heaed blowout is causing in the Gulf right now.

Best Regards,

Geoff

Thanks Geoff, Wonderful that you included the history with your post. China is moving ahead. Education remains my main concern, and the fact that so many of my own friends say they are democrats as though it were a great thing, and then blame republicans for their problems. I personally blame stupidity and poor education. World History is not a requirement even at the University level in U.S. schools. Evident by our foreign policy, or lack of it. Neither is Modern Physics, that has been removed from the curriculum from many public Colleges, while 19th century physics remains.

Here are some of my points, only listed for those who are interested:

-- In 2002 One hundred and Eleven House and Senate Democrats voted to send U.S. troops into Iraq, a sovereign nation who posed no threat to the United States. And even if we thought they did "Adolph Hiter invented Preemptive warfare." (U.S. President & Five Star General, Eisenhower)

President Obama (Democrat) has not pulled our troops out of Iraq because he cannot figure out how to control the massive quantities of oil in that country.

President Obama allowed the federal financial bail-out of the manufacturer of the HUMMER.

President Obama recently threatened Iran because he cannot figure out how to control their massive quantities of oil.

President Obama wants to drill for more oil in our Oceans because he cannot figure out how to use less oil or make friends with countries that have oil. Only a disaster and a threat to his popularity caused him to Postpone this action. When it would have been simple to make an intelligent decision in the first place.

President Obama joined the Democratic party, a party that grew strong on a pro-slavery platform. And grew even stronger as an opposition party to the modern Republican party's president Abraham Lincoln who wanted to put a stop to the spread of slavery-- no, this is not the old "Jeffersonian Republican Party", Lincoln was a member of the current Republican party active from 1854-Present.

Canada sells lots of crude or refined oil to the United States, but Shell sells gobs of refined oil to us. And the last time I checked Royal Dutch Shell buys plenty of oil from Iran because the Dutch government gets along with Iranians. The Dutch government prefers to purchase their oil from the Middle East--rather than invade their countries, or threaten their governments. The Dutch have a ruthless and intelligent government, we have a ruthless and moronic government. Shell is also up to no good in Africa, and elsewhere, and has been implicated in plenty of murderous actions in their endeavours to profit from oil.

In the 1950s after Iran democratically elected Mosaddegh who then kicked out British Petroleum from Iran, and put a halt to Britain's blatant stealing of their resources-- the United States helped Britain go into that country (Iran) illegally and remove Mosaddegh (a democratically elected prime minister) and place a Monarch (The Shaw) in power. In reaction to this, Iran rebelled aggressively and created their current extremist government.

In the 1980s The United States armed Iraqi soldiers with weapons to use against Iran, and watched the Iraqi Soldiers kill a generation of Iranian boys along their borders. The family members of those dead Iranians are still alive and have not forgotten this.

The United states elected George W. Bush, not once, but twice. And large number of the American people will not acknowledge it. Since they will not acknowledge it, then they cannot address the horror of it. And thus he was elected a second time, because no real action was taken to prevent it. Because the only thing people said was, "Well, we didn't Really elect him." If that were the case, then were was the revolution and violence that should have followed. I for one, believe we did elect him, and that is the thing we should be afraid of and fight againts

Politicians I know personally:

Nancy Pelosi (democrat) Pushed a Health Bill through at the expense of Education in the this country when she attached it to the education bill. The health bill sent insurance stocks souring and bolstered what I consider to be one of the most insidious of industries "The Insurance Industry"-- the health bill will not help poor people because it is tailored to assist the middle class, and poverty stricken people need education, and already have access to health care. Pelosi and her husband are elitist and racist, and do not care about educating under priveliged people.

Diane Feinstein (democrat) Voted to send U.S. troops into Iraq. Feinstein is elitist and racist.

1990s Former California Governor Grey Davis (Democrat) Supported the firing of K-12 teachers who worked in low income districts because their students test scores were too low, based on national statistics. Obama recently did the same thing when 100 percent of the teachers were fired from an East Coast school for similar reasons and Obama made a very public statement supporting the action.

Quentin Copp (republican platform) Pushed BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) through. Fought for years to get BART to run directly to the airport from downtown SF, as it was designed to do. And to get a leg of it to run out to the very rich, and very white, Marin County, as it was designed to do. He met too much opposition from Marin County-- but he did get the system running, and used State money to do it. Kopp is now retired from the Senate and is currently the force behind the Fast Train that will go from San Francisco to Los Angeles. He is a proponent of public transportation. A principled human being, neither racist, elitist, or sexist.

Republican, Democrat, Jewish, Catholic, Christian, Muslim, Atheist--- as with masturbation, people will go blind trying to place values using these parameters. It is much simpler to look at peoples actions. All men and women are created equal, and some of them turn into real creeps, and many of them call themselves democrats. I certainly know why people voted for Obama, and I also know why people voted for George W. Bush. And this is what worries me.

Caitlin

"What matters is that those with the largest oil reserves ultimately call the shots on the price of oil." If that was the case wouldn't we have much higher oil prices? The price of oil is determined by the strength of the dollar and by how skittish investors are. Same as metals. I know a little bit about both.
XXOO-Jo

Hi Caitlin,

I said in an e-mail to Jim Crotty that I’d let this drop pending his setting up an opt-in list for us all but I felt that I should add in something that most people in the US aren’t aware of. Yes, the US is the largest consumer of oil but China’s right behind us and catching up fast. Why? Industrialization, based on their sudden position as THE manufacturing center for the world. They’ve gone from being a mostly agrarian, communist society to being a highly industrialized and amazingly capitalistic one in record time. The Japanese underwent a similar industrial growth explosion in the 1960’s and 70’s…and they’re presently third on the world’s list of oil consumers. Pretty impressive (and distressing) considering how much smaller Japan is compared to the US. We’d literally bombed Japan into the stone age during WWII (as General Curtis LeMay once said), but they certainly weren’t defeated when it came to economic realities and finding ways to exploit and build upon what they had. Same goes for the Chinese as well as other recent industrial boom-countries like India.

When you need to power an new infrastructure in a hurry and do it as cheaply as possible, you turn to the proven way to do it: burn petroleum or coal and lots of it:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_con-energy-oil-consumption

This above list is from 2007. China’s oil needs have shot significantly upwards from even the quoted levels of only 3 years ago.

Jim Crotty sent out another quite interesting e-mail since I started this one that I said I wouldn’t write…I really gotta go but this is certainly an interesting topic to continue pursuing at a later time.

Geoff

Hello Jim (Crotty) as well as the others in my CC list who seem interested in discussing this topic,

I think that the missive you refer to below is the one sent out by me. You’re right; I probably shouldn’t have just sent it out carte blanche to everyone on that list as I did. A lot of people simply either aren’t going to care enough to read what I wrote and take the time to reply or they’ll just consider it to be a long-winded rant by some right-leaning, ex-Oregonian redneck and they’ll delete it. I’ve already received one angry response demanding removal from this thread, so there’s no point in our further haranguing or pestering those who don’t care…

I’ve read your “Farm Report” in the past but I didn’t realize you were on this rather sizeable mailing list until I received your reply below. I’m pleased to see that you are involved and have taken the time to share your thoughts with us.

Your opt-in plan via your blog is a splendid idea and I encourage you to proceed with implementing it if you so desire. What’s been said thus far is of very high interest to myself (as it should be to the balance of the planet’s populace) and is worthy of continued consideration and debate.

I was going to reply to Jim B’s further comments, as well, but as I stated above, most people on this list haven’t taken the time to respond or have done so angrily. In light of your opt-in plan, and to avoid flooding completely disinterested parties e-mail clients with long op-ed pieces, I’ll defer sending out any further thoughts on alternative energy pending your setting up a more appropriate vehicle in which to do so.

Having personally worked as an engineer for a number of large defense companies, as well as civilian-oriented places like AMD, 3M and Dell; I’d have to say that your assessment of corporate behavior is pretty much spot-on. However, your comparing corporate behavior to that of a robot’s is just slightly amiss. A robotic system is one which, by design, operates in a controlled and predictable manner. While corporations (as well as governments) do attempt to at least project an air of control and predictability to the outside world (especially towards their shareholders), they’re often fraught with levels of internal chaos and political intrigues which have to be experienced to be appreciated.

For example, here in Round Rock (TX), Dell went internally nuts when they had that Sony lithium-ion battery fire problem with their notebook PC’s a few years ago. It was a PR nightmare for them (as well as for Sony, a company that used to actually produce high-quality products). Heads rolled. Can you imagine what’s going on right now, inside places like BP and Halliburton, as a result of the mess they’ve created in the Gulf? The fingers they’re a-pointing on Mahogany Rows and CEO’s have probably already instructed their HR departments create form versions of an “unsatisfactory job performance review” sheet for their upper-level managers to sign and issue en masse.

Sadly, there’s a significant problem with “going electric” to the degree we’d need to when it comes to transportation in this country (and most other countries, as well). As it presently stands, getting rid of internal combustion-powered vehicles and switching to all-electrics simply moves the pollution/oil dependency problem away from the neighborhood gas pumps and pushes it squarely onto the North American power grid. Were we to stop driving our gas-or-diesel powered vehicles tomorrow and start plugging our new rides into wall sockets to recharge their batteries; there’s simply not enough excess electricity generating capacity available at this time to allow us to safely do so. Naturally, such problem could be easily solved by, uh, building more power plants. Unfortunately, due to our existing technological and economic restrictions, nearly all of the new power plants required to keep America’s new-paradigm electric cars on the road would have to be fired by fossil fuels. Moving forward with such a radically different way of getting around would also “require” untold amounts of collateral government oversight to ever begin getting anything off of the drawing boards (or these days, the AutoCAD systems). Then there’s the NIMBY (Not-In-My-Back-Yard) factor. Installing a number of smaller, localized power generating facilities close to the places that need them the most would almost certainly raise howls of protest from the locals. (A fossil-fueled “peaking plant” sitting off in the woods is one thing but can you imagine the public response to proposals involving the placement of small nuclear facilities in downtown LA, San Francisco or Manhattan?)

None of the above takes into account the very considerable remaining forms of transportation that either can’t be economically or sanely switched to all-electric propulsion methods for the foreseeable future: jet aircraft, most railroad systems and seagoing commercial cargo vessels. Other than nuclear power, there’s nothing we have at this time that packs as much transportable energy into a given space as does fossil fuels. Nuclear-powered trains, aircraft or even commercial oceangoing vessels are clearly not just over the horizon. Hydrogen is an interesting, and even somewhat practical, alternative to oil. Sadly, the infrastructure needed to exploit it will take decades to implement…and the best sources of hydrogen we can come up with for now either involves further cracking of petroleum at oil refineries or employing water electrolysis that is powered from, you guessed it, commercial power companies that mainly run on nuclear or fossil fuels.

Ain’t no free lunch to be found anywhere these days when it comes to energy sources. Like you, I fear that we’re currently addicted to oil so strongly that no amount of rehab or 12-stepping will help in the short term. And considering that BP was one of Obama’s top campaign contributors, well, you be the judge as to what he’s going to do about all of this.

Boy, for someone who said he wasn’t going to write any more longwinded missives, I sure seem to have dropped the ball somewhere! Now I really will “shut up shutting up” and give everyone’s e-mail client a breather. Please do set up something on your website that we can use to share our thoughts and opinions on this if you care to do so. I, for one, would much rather spend my time pontificating on the problems of the world than sitting in my little cubicle at work answering phones or shuffling company paperwork.

Geoff

Look at the countries with the largest oil reserves:

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2178rank.html

Notice Iran and Iraq.

Caitlin

CIA Factbook: US ranked as Number 1 oil consumer in the world.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2174rank.html

Caitlin

Yes, and how many shell stations have you seen today? Haha. Any way you slice it, we use way too much oil. And we own very little.

Caitlin Maynard

Caitl-
Currenetly Canada is our largest foreign supplier

See You In The Future,
Greg

Jim- I drove an electric car for years and they're not very good; particularly when you run our of juice there's no quick re-fill. Check out "compressed air technology" cars for a more viable alternative. Biodiesel is a fuckin' nightmare. Currently hundreds of thousands of acres of rainforest are being mowed down to make way for palm oil plantations to feed this new thirst. Sadly fully half of of the world's animal species live in forest canopies. It takes a lot of diesel to make biodiesel and the photo-chemical smog from rotting palm is horrendous; simply put biodiesel has a greater carbon footprint than regular diesel. Certainly waste vegetable oil and salvage vegetable oil are good uses of a by-product from obese America but only yield a small amount of energy. Current hybrids are a joke as well. The extra money they cost is primarily the oil costs of the earth killing to bring nickel-hydride batteries to the fore.

See You In The Future, Greg

Where does oil come from? (Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia) Who controls this oil? Who sells this oil? Who is consuming this oil? (U.S.A)

Please look at this chart. I am looking for one that shows ownership of the Oil companies as well, Shell Oil as assets listed at 300 Billion, and is owned by the Netherlands. They sell that oil to the United States-- because we all drive cars and they ride their bikes. Look at the top few countries on this list, and consider the U.S. and British policies toward these countries. Notice IRAN, and IRAQ. President Obama is threatening Iran.

http://www.petrostrategies.org/Links/Worlds_Largest_Oil_and_Gas_Companies_Sites.htm

If you have a better chart, please forward it to me, I do not know how accurate this one is. Here is a link to a very short movie that talks about oil coming out of Africa--

http://northbeachfilms.com/movies/oil.mov

Caitlin Maynard

Jim -- great to hear from you.

When you say "us", I assume you include corporations, because corporations are people too, right? Some Supreme Court decision from 100 years ago or something.

So BP is among the "us" who are responsible for this.

But if corporations are people, why don't I see more of them acting like Scot Nakagawa?

It's not as if they are structurally incapable of doing so; in fact Mc Donald's does a lot of charity work involving children with horrible diseases, it's easy to say "why don't they just make good food instead," but I guess that's their choice as a *person*.

Also, I used to work for www.livescience.com, who took lots of greenwashing ads from BP, and every time there was some eviro disaster I had to pull all the BP ads from the site. I don't even have to look, I bet if you go to www.livescience.com you won't see any BP ads. This seems to me like a form of lying, a form of bad citizenship. Given, you know, that BP is legally a person and all. A person who could choose to behave as a responsible citizen or could on the other hand choose to use a lot of legal tactics to avoid being a good citizen. A good person. They're a person, right? They're part of the "us" you mention. Right?

n Jim Baldwin

On 05/15/2010 11:54 PM, James Marshall Crotty wrote:

Scot:

While I applauded your heroic efforts against Lon Mabon and Measure Whatever It Was back in the day in Oregon, and wrote about these efforts, I must humbly disagree with you here.

I have never been a big fan of petitions generally, and, in this case, I think it would distract from the real culprit: us.

Every single one of us who drives a fossil-fueled vehicle is to blame. Because as long as we drive oil-powered cars, then there will be oil companies taking huge risks to get us the oil we covet.

You don't like the externalities of oil? Stop driving oil-powered cars.

The equation is that simple.

It's time we stopped trying to pressure governments, and, instead, en masse, stopped buying or using any and all fossil-fuel-based transport. Actions speak louder than any petitions. And when huge masses of Americans start saying no to Oil, then, the government and the oil companies will get the message loud and clear.

The people have the power with their pocketbook.

There are, right now, electric vehicles available for purchase in America. If you can't afford an electric car, or it's too impractical to take mass transit, then reduce your oil consumption in other areas.

Let's get Americans to commit to a 50% percent decrease per annum in their oil consumption. That would be a huge start. Oil companies operate on a simple cost-benefit analysis: what is the relationship of risk to reward. Right now, the addiction to oil is so high that oil companies are willing to take huge risks to get to it. But, if, by our individual behavior, we start empirically showing that our addiction to oil is plummeting, then oil companies will not take risky, speculative bets on oil drilling, such as happened 5000 feet down in the gulf.

We don't have to wait till oil runs out to shift the policies of oil companies. If Americans stopped using oil-based products, energy companies would sincerely move "beyond petroleum." Period. End of debate. So, let's put the onus on ourselves and get some real lasting change.

One last thing: if we move from an oil or fossil-fuel based energy system, we are essentially moving towards the electric grid to power everything, from stoves to car batteries. This is all fine. Except you then have to consider how electricity is generated. And how you are powering the plants that will produce those solar arrays, wind turbines, and all the rest. You can use oil to power the infrastructure and machinery needed to take the leap to a fossil-fuel-free future, OR, you can cut to the chase and do the following:

A. Expand the use of nuclear power;
B. Incentivize massive conservation and energy efficiency through various tax breaks or tax increases;
C. Radically step up a partial or hybrid solution, such as natural gas or biodiesel.

I prefer B and C. Because if we can muck up the gulf with oil, we can surely, no matter how great our engineering know-how, easily muck up nuclear power generation. The ecological risks far outweigh the rewards with both oil and nukes.

So, let's put the onus on ourselves to push for B and C, and then let's see where we are in a decade hence.

Best,

Jim Crotty
www.monk.com
www.crottyfarmreport.com
www.resolved.tv

Just to put it into perspective, $75 million is less than the patent-infringement damages Apple had to pay to Creative Labs for stealing the iPod navigation wheel thingie. Apple had to pay $100 million.

-- Jim Baldwin

The problem with nuke plants is exactly the same as the problem with this oil rig -- they built it with *no idea* how to handle a failure. They know how to recover from shallow offshore spills, but this one is like a mile deep, so they have no technology in place to deal with it. They can't dive that deep, etc. Plus oil bubbling up from 200 feet is just oil, but oil bubbling up from a mile deep is emulsified with water, spread out over far larger distances, creates methane clathrate, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate. Ditto nuke plants. Look at the safety plan they had in place for Chernobyl. Um, none.

Another problem with nuke plants is precisely the one Greg points out here with the oil rigs -- their liability is limited. If their liability is limited, well, duh, why wouldn't they take a lot of crazy risks in order to reduce costs?

A third problem with nukes is also precisely the same as with oil. What do you do with the waste? In the case of oil, the answer is to dump it into the atmosphere, will well-known results. For nukes, you don't dump the waste into the atmosphere, but NOBODY knows what to do with the waste. They don't even have the faintest idea. Nuke waste created at Hanford 65 years ago has *still* not been dealt with, and they are already 25 years behind their delivery date for dealing with it.

Also identical with oil, the problem of what to do with the waste is answered with, "oh, we'll figure that out later."

So given that nuclear power has all the same problems as oil, what exactly is better about it that should make us accept all these disadvantages?

n Jim Baldwin

Probably the only immediately-available and proven solution to the ongoing dance of death we're doing with oil at this time isn't something that will sit at all well with any of the tree-hugging, limousine liberal or blame-everything-on-Bush-and-Halliburton crowd...we start building nuclear plants once again, lots of them and we do it damned fast.

The last nuclear power plant was built in America in 1977. We did indeed have one major accident with a power generating reactor, at Three Mile Island back in 1979 (I lived about 90 miles south of TMI when that happened). That accident was caused by a combination of a faulty control system and a lack of operator knowledge regarding how to respond under such circumstances (although they did do what they thought was right under the circumstances). Nobody died as a result of TMI (or has since died of anything related to the release of radiation). It was a scary accident at the time but Americans grossly over-reacted to it. What happened at TMI was NOT the same thing that occurred at Chernobyl. Chernobyl is what you get when you keep an antiquated, unprotected and shoddily-constructed reactor in operation within a backwash Communist country (like the Ukraine was in 1986). TMI is what you get when you have a competent American engineering firm design a contained nuclear facility in the early 1970's; one that happened to have a part fail.

Neither of those events were desirable but overall, I'm rather happy with the fact that I was living near TMI in 1979 rather than near Chernobyl in 1986...

Believing that American nuclear power facilities which could be built today are as "dangerous as they ever were" is a bit like thinking computers made in 1977 are as capable as the ones made in 2010. Let's just say that nuclear engineering knowledge, metallurgy, structural engineering, redundant/failsafe controls technology and hazardous material handling techniques have improved "a little bit" since the 1970's; in the same sense that a modern computer is "just a tad" more sophisticated than an Apple II of 1978 vintage.

The American public is sadly undereducated and misinformed when it comes to energy issues (or pretty much anything else requiring a level of engineering or scientific sophistication above that of the average 9-year old who was in school around 1960); a result of our watching too much CNN, Grey's Anatomy and Oprah, evidently.

France gets over 75% of its power from its nuclear plants and has about the lowest-cost electricity on the entire European continent. France is also a very significant net electricity exporter to England, Germany and several other EU countries. Yes, the same country who gave us Renault automobiles and the Maginot Line is actually capable of designing and building nuclear plants that are both efficient AND safe. Who'da thunk it?

Obviously, the US is lagging just a bit behind France in this regard. That doesn’t say very much for America's abilities to solve technical problems as well as we used to.

Then there's Japan. You remember the Japanese, they're the fine folks who brought us WWII (as far as America was concerned, anyway). Considering the payback we gave them for the headaches they caused us prior to August of 1945, you'd think that they'd have quite an aversion to just about anything involving U235 or Pu239. Quite the contrary, the Japanese wisely put all of that behind them a while ago. Japan pragmatically now has about 55 nuclear plants online at this time, producing about 25% of its total electrical power. They built their last one in 2005 but they're bringing a couple more online this year and will have another 11 online within five years.

China (as in Red China) currently has only about 11 nuclear plants online but is planning to built 132 (yes, that's 132) more of them within the next 20 years. It certainly must take a lot of electricity for them to keep making all of those McDonald's "Happy Meal" toys they've been selling us. Let's all hope that the Chinese are at least a little smarter than the Russians were when it comes to incorporating proper design and safety features into that many nuclear facilities. There's a good chance that the Chinese will be buying a significant amount of their nuclear technology from the French. I feel better already.

One thing's for damned certain: "Hippie-friendly' power generation technologies, such as wind and solar, will never amount to a pile of AA-cell batteries when compared against the potential nuclear energy has and always will afford us. Texas has the largest wind generating facilities of anywhere in the US (as well as the most places to put them), yet they still only supply a tiny amount of the state's total power requirements. Solar energy production capability is many times smaller than even wind power's. Both cost WAY too much to implement and their pitiful ROI's make them economic dead-ends for any power company who actually cares about staying in business (unless they're getting huge federal subsidies for their "green-ness"). Hydro's nice but I'm afraid we're fresh out of new rivers to dam up. What we have now is about all we'll ever have as far as hydroelectric power is concerned. Finally, I liked "Star Trek" as much as anyone, but fusion power presently offers about as much hope for solving our long-term energy needs as dilithium crystals do.

"Renewable energy" certainly is a cool buzzword and it seems to make everyone (besides power engineers) feel all warm and fuzzy. At the present time, though, wind/solar/geothermal mostly just a pipe dream as far as commercial-scale practicality is concerned. The laws of physics, economics and thermodynamics do have an irritating way of pissing on everyone's Cheerios in this regard. So, bearing that in mind, and until somebody in Washington gets a clue regarding the immediate value of exploiting nuclear power generation technologies, we can still count upon getting the vast majority of our power in this country from burning coal, natural gas and that evil, Halliburton-inspired, polluting goop pouring into the Gulf of Mexico at this time.

Geoff

Doubly infuriating is the condition mandated during the Bush reign that caps the reparations costs imposed upon the guilty oil company at $78 million! Just wait for years of litigation while this paltry sum is fought over by all of the affected communities.

See You In The Future, Greg

Subject: Fwd: Monster oil spill

Hi all,

I never send out those emails that include everyone's email addresses in the address line, and I rarely send one out to so many. I usually take the time to think, who will be particularly interested in this or that, and does this represent something people are surely going to want to know about?

But not this time. If you, like me, have gotten fed up with sloppy policy making and the politics of convenience and you're sick of bs like this happening because we are always parsing issues and horse trading on vital concerns from health care to welfare reform to whether or not it is legal to turn race into a category of suspicion in criminal investigations in places like Arizona, you might take action on this one. It's a particularly galling case of government backing off on commitments in order to appease the most vocal and, let's be frank, crazy but well organized cash roots, corporate-financed activists pretending to represent real people when they really represent corporations like BP at the expense of the rest of us.

What are fishermen and others who depend on the Gulf to do now? Just what will the eventual ecological consequences of this giant, steaming pile of b.s. be? It's time that folks were brought up on the carpet and for this, along with the financial crisis and the mortgage crisis and the mushrooming crisis in the Mid-East to finally be brought to account and for us to realize we just can't keep going on like this.

Okay, nuf said. Sign up if the spirit moves you.

Scot

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Ben Wikler - Avaaz.org __ Date: Thu, May 13, 2010 at 3:34 PM Subject: Monster oil spill To: "scotnakagawa@gmail.com"

Dear friends,

A horrific oil spill is spreading through the Gulf of Mexico. Yet U.S. law-makers still plan to ramp up offshore oil drilling. Let's send a global outcry to President Obama and Congress urging them to overturn offshore drilling expansion -- sign the petition, it will be delivered to the White House:

We've all seen the outrageous images: a monstrous oil spill is gushing as much as 2,500,000 gallons of crude a day into the Gulf of Mexico.

Before the spill, U.S. President Obama and Congressional leaders were planning to ramp up offshore drilling. Now, with the spill, the politics have shifted -- and an opportunity has opened for the world's biggest historical climate polluter to shift away from oil and towards climate-safe energy sources.

At a moment like this, when leaders are making up their minds, the world's voices can help tip the balance. Sign the petition urging the U.S. to stop offshore drilling and invest instead in clean renewable energy -- the signatures will be delivered to the White House in Washington DC when we reach 500,000! Click to sign on now and spread the word:

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/stop_offshore_drilling_2/?vl

This disaster is expected to be catastrophic for the land and people in the gulf. The oil has already reached land, contaminating wildlife sanctuaries. Authorities are so concerned about the impacts of more oil reaching land that they are prefer to set the gulf on fire, burning as much of the oil as possible.

Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry is raking in windfall profits. BP, which operated the sunken rig, more than doubled its first quarter profits in 2010 to $5.65 billion.

For years, the world has waited for the U.S. to step up on climate. But with the carbon lobby's strangle-hold on Washington, we’ve had more drilling in place of stronger investment in cleaner, safer energy sources. It’s time to for a change -- Senator Bill Nelson of Florida has already introduced legislation to repeal plans to expand offshore drilling. Let's back him up with an outpouring of global public outrage. Sign the petition calling on President Obama and Congress to end offshore drilling, and take the US and the world to clean energy future:

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/stop_offshore_drilling_2/?vl

With Hope, '

Ben, Iain, Alice, David, and the Avaaz team

SOURCES:

"Gulf Oil Spill Presents Political Challenges," Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/29/AR2010042902290.html?hpid=topnews

"Gulf oil spill washes up on political shores," BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8665312.stm

"Black storm rising," The Economist: http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=16059982

"Recovery still incomplete after Exxon Valdez," NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/us/06alaska.html

"Fly your sea turtle flag high: a slippery stew of shrimp, oil, and sea turtles," Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wallace-j-nichols/fly-your-sea-turtle-flag_b_563773.html

"How much oil has leaked into the Gulf of Mexico?," PBS (source of 2.5 million gallons per day outward estimate):

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2010/05/how-much-oil-has-spilled-in-the-gulf-of-mexico.html