When we have an offshore oil spill leading the nightly news, isn’t it good news for Democrats that Lindsey Graham’s defection swept some uncomfortable horsetrading under the rug?
The climate and energy bill that passed in the House of Representatives last year did so with the barest of margins. So supporters in the Senate spent months sweetening their version to win over skeptics.
Eileen Claussen, who directs the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, lists just a few: “There are provisions for offshore drilling with revenue sharing, there are provisions for loan guarantees for another, I think, 10 nuclear power plants that were not in the House bill.
[italics mine]
Looking at the timing of Lindsey’s tantrum, I’m starting to believe that Baby Jesus makes things happen for a reason.
jeffreyw
Just how I like my coffee of a morning. Yeah, a crude joke. (Had to work that part in somehow.)
Kobie
You know how I like my coffee? COVERED IN BEES!
(apologies to Eddie Izzard)
I thought revenue sharing only applied to professional sports.
Short Bus Bully
SPILL, BABY SPILL!
jeffreyw
Cafe au Tunch
Third Eye Open
I like my coffee the same way I like my women…
…Chopped-up and in the freezer.
burnspbesq
OT:
Steve Inskeep must die.
Omnes Omnibus
@burnspbesq: Pourquoi, pray tell?
Brian J
Sometimes, things do happen for a reason.
A couple of days ago, Kevin Drum said the following:
At this point, are we supposed to care if offering up immigration reform is playing politics? Did we ask the Republicans in Arizona to offer up a bigoted, almost certainly unconstitutional piece of legislation? If this gets us solid reform, why should we care? We simply seized the opportunity presented to us. Assuming the reform legislation isn’t a laundry list of what immigrant groups want, who the hell cares if the Republicans were dumb enough to hang themselves with the rope they found?
El Cid
I was recently lectured by someone on how my skepticism about new offshore drilling to the extent it involved risks of spills was really foolish because there are hardly any spills from oil platforms, and, well, I guess, statistically there are few. But it’s just really bad when there are.
Joshua Norton
Light, Sweet and Crude
Carnac the Magnificent: Describe Palin’s Twitter account.
SGEW
Re: the Climate Bill.
I hope everyone got a chance to read Sen. Kerry’s TPM post, rallying the troops for his bill. These bits, of course, jumped out at me:
Oy.
S. cerevisiae
Immigrants cannot destroy civilization, climate change can if we don’t start cutting emissions NOW.
Fiddling while the planet burns – disgusting.
rootless-e
@SGEW: there’s a reason he let Bush get into a virtual tie even after 4 years of fuckup.
burnspbesq
@Omnes Omnibus:
The charge is aggravated Rick-rolling.
Brian J
@S. cerevisiae:
Maybe this is a roundabout way of thinking, but if we pass immigration reform and are rewarded at the polls, enacting legitimate climate change legislation might be possible. If the Republicans take back the House, there’s approximately no chance of that happen.
Linda Featheringill
Obama and his administration has been very lucky at times. It is almost enough to make me wonder about divine intervention.
But the Dems should use the time offered to them by Graham’s snit fit to clean up their act.
The real question is whether the two houses will get around to the immigration bills. I have heard conflicting rumors, so I just don’t know.
ericvsthem
From what I’ve read and heard, the compromises written into the Senate Climate Bill are really, really bad. I wasn’t happy with everything in the HCR or the economic stimulus bills, but this bill is really difficult to support.
Zifnab
Is it me, or are these oil spills becoming almost trivially routine? We had a major spill in Louisiana right when McCain was going into full “Drill, Baby, Drill” mode. We had another series of spills after Katrina.
Since 2004, we’ve had about one a year, mostly in Louisiana.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001451.html
You would think this would compel Gulf Coast residents to get a little more fired up. :-p
rootless-e
OT, but I cannot refrain from this wonderful example of emo-progressivism in DKOS yesterday:
By golly, he “explained” that they were “require[d]” to raise rates. Shocking! Of course we know it’s true because in emo-progressive land even insurance company executives are more credible than the Obama administration.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/4/26/142616/516
mr. whipple
I really want to slap around these arrogant little GS douchnozzles.
patrick II
@Joshua Norton: LOL. I can’t believe a comment that sweet cannot go unpraised for ten more comments. Makes me wonder how many here are old enough to know who Carnac is.
slag
@Zifnab:
I was thinking the same thing. Sometimes, depending on the context or timing of the spill, it barely makes the news.
And then there’s the problem of our collective storm water runoff that can produce a relatively constant oil slick right off our shores….
Personally, I’d like to see us start to name oil spills like we name hurricanes. Only I’d like them to be named after the politicians who signed the bills to make them possible. It seems only fair. If we ever see an oil spill named Barack Obama, it would, strangely enough, be a sign of progress.
Keith
If, by “for Democrats”, you really mean “…for John McCain”, then yes, very much so.
jibeaux
The little thread of hope I have on this comes from an acquaintance who is a geologist for an oil company. Says off the East coast, the oil isn’t there in any quantities worth drilling, so as to crude oil it’s a concession with no concession. What there is, though, is natural gas. Which has its own concerns, i.e. it is apparently kept in tankers that could also explode, but overall less environmental impact than offshore oil drilling. If I’m understanding that right. So I hope he’s right about that.
GregB
I think someone should put in an oil drilling bill that specifically targets areas that are adjacent to Republican voting districts.
In Florida, New Jersey, Virginia, California.
We’ll seem what the NIMBY GOP-ers have to say about getting oil stains on their yachts.
joe from Lowell
There’s an important point to keep in mind when debating whether to support or kill a weak energy/climate bill, a dynamic that wasn’t in play over the HCR bill:
The EPA already has power to regulate greenhouse emissions. In fact, this bill would have stripped if of that power. In this case, as opposed to health care, Congress failing to pass a bill this year will not mean nothing gets done.
OriGuy
@patrick II: I miss Johnny. And, yes, I laughed at the Carnac joke.
Punchy
And take out “oil platforms” and replace with “nuclear reactors”, and yup, pretty much the same issue.
Fergus Wooster
@Joshua Norton:
I was thinking more sticky, sour crude. With a lot of sulfur.
PeakVT
@Zifnab: The absolute size and number of spills has generally gone down (see here and here) for the past few decades, so perhaps less coverage is warranted. (There are still too many spills, of course.)
@ericvsthem: This list of the bill’s provisions sure looks unappealing to me. I haven’t figured out if the finer details make the bill a net positive or not.
El Cid
I don’t think Lindsey Graham would have voted for the legislation he helped offer. At the last minute, he just wouldn’t.
rootless-e
@Punchy: there are a lot of areas where people misuse statistics to come up with comforting average or expected results.
Zifnab
@slag: Wouldn’t mind that in the least. I’d settle for Oil Company CEOs though. The BP Tony Hayward plant explosion, the CITGO Alejandro Granado Mississippi Oil Spill… that works fine for me.
Brian J
@jibeaux:
I seem to remember a similar point being made during the “Drill, baby, drill!” phase of the 2008 election. Maybe I am remembering it wrong, but the point some made was that while it wasn’t easy, drilling in some places wasn’t impossible, and the reason it wasn’t done was that it would have been pointless.
Zifnab
@El Cid: Was he one of the yahoos that pulled out of the entitlement reform legislation at the last minute?
It is fun watching Republicans leap away from the thinest of Democrat shadows. Cornering Republicans until they’re running away from their own platforms could pay off in 2010 for Obama. But we’ll see.
If we lose the House or the Senate, there’s going to be a shit storm, either way.
El Cid
@Zifnab: If the Democrats lose the House, there will be hundreds and hundreds of articles of Impeachment drawn up to satisfy the wildest Neo-Confederate Bircher Party of the Deregulatory Talibangelical Racial Purity Front’s aims.
joe from Lowell
@ jibeaux,
Yep. Obama’s “concession” was almost meaningless. For once, the Republicans attacking him were right.
As for natural gas, power plants running on it produce half the greenhouse emissions per megawatt as coal plants. Going from coal to natural gas is an important transition step while renewables get ramped up.
catclub
@Zifnab: #18
“You would think this would compel Gulf Coast residents to get a little more fired up. ”
But then the ocean surface might burst into flames.
I am guessing that there are not enough pictures of oil covered shorebirds, and none of ocean mammals covered in oil, to provoke a reaction. And remember, when those pictures come out the whole point is that it is NOT just the locals who are upset. No would care if only the Alaska natives were upset by the Exxon Valdez spill.
Plus, can Gulf coast residents swim? I know there are no waves for surfing.
El Cid
@catclub: Couldn’t we just confine massive oil spills to poor black neighborhoods in New Orleans? Then no one would give a shit.
Tonybrown74
@El Cid:
There is an analogy I would use here, but I don’t feel like being attacked by ad hominems today.
Linda Featheringill
@Brian J: Do the immigration thing first, secure the House, and then attack the climate. Interesting.
Might actually work.
Poopyman
@jibeaux:
Only carried in tankers if liquified and sent from far away (i.e. the Middle East). Dunno if that’d be the plan for offshore US or if they’d just build a -series of tubes- pipeline like what’s done for the WV and PA NG wells.
S. cerevisiae
I just don’t believe the immigration issue is going to be a winner for the Democrats in the fall. I guess you would need to know the demographics of every state and district in play and analyze if the pro-reform turnout would be greater than the rabid teabagger freakout that would bring out their base in droves.
I just have a bad feeling about deep-seeded American xenophobia winning the day.
Martin
Why should southern state residents care about any of this – the federal government is picking up the tab. Make drill-baby-drill into a ‘fine, but you’re paying the environmental costs out of state coffers’ argument, and the states might dial some of this shit back some.
MikeJ
@Martin: Florida doesn’t want it no matter who pays for cleanup. It won’t matter if the feds clean the beach if they lose an entire tourist season.
El Cid
@Martin: Recall that, in the end, the profits would go to the oil companies, who are the economic influentials and the campaign contributors, and the ‘state’ paying for something means taxing the regular schmucks.
State government, like any other, will spend any amount of your money to protect and further the interests of big money.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@rootless-e: nyceve was one of the many diarists who somehow thought that Obama could have just magically gotten single payer through if he’d only wanted it bad enough, and so the current bill should have been scrapped and the process started over rather than passing the bill. (S)he’s one of those that drives me nuts in the thinking that everything has to happen right now it Obama has failed.
joe from Lowell
@S. cerevisiae
Not so much this fall, as for the ten-twenty federal elections that follow it. Remember, Proposition 186 passed in California. Seen any Republicans from there lately?
Their rabid teabagger base is already going to turn out. The difference the freakout would make is that it would energize our base in opposition.
I remember having that bad feeling the last time the nativists tried to demagogue immigration, back in 2005-2006. The American public is more pro-immigrant than you believe.
S. cerevisiae
Joe, I sincerely hope you are right. Maybe I am too pessimistic.