The Times has a good backgrounder explaining why, amid all the sternly-worded letters and talk of moratoriums, deepwater drilling is still moving forward. Some of the reason is the usual Interior Department incompetence, but a lot of it is that Interior is just administering the current drilling laws, which are too lax.
There’s one Senator quoted in the article, Ben Cardin of Maryland. Mary Landrieu, David Vitter, Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby are all notable because of their absence. Vitter’s an interesting example, because he was introducing amendments to force offshore drilling 8 months ago. Now he’s criticizing Democrats for having too many media events around the spill.
For better or worse, regional delegations take the lead on legislation that affects their region. When farmers want something, John Thune, Kent Conrad and other farm state Senators and Representatives get together to make it happen. Chuck Schumer and the rest of the New York delegation keeps Wall Street in bonuses. If the Gulf state delegations aren’t interested in drilling reform, Interior will continue to issue permits for wells almost twice as deep as Deepwater Horizon.
c u n d gulag
Vitter has a back-up plan for future oil spills:
Every hooker and john MUST save any diapers or Depends used and give them to the government for use in mopping up some other mess.
The Grand Panjandrum
It should also be noted current Interior Secretary Salazar is a former Senator from a landlocked state (Colorado). I wonder how a former Senator from a coastal state would approach this?
mclaren
Two words explain why deep water drilling is moving forward:
Peak Oil.
As long as the Balloon Juice commenters drive to work instead of riding mopeds or pedaling bikes, deep water drilling will get more extensive, more hazardous, spill hundreds of millions of gallons more oil, and devastate tens of millions of hectares of wildlife habitat.
Americans always want to have their goodies but never suffer the consequences. Americans want to drive to the Grand Canyon on vacation in their gas-guzzling Ford Aerostar vans but they don’t want to send their military to fight foreign wars in the middle east.
Americans want to blast their air conditioning and chow down on burgers made from beef that takes 100 times as much oil-intensive hi-tech-agriculture corn to produce, rather than eating vegetarian tofu and lentil soup and live in straw-bale-insulated houses that stay cool in the summer and warm in the winter…but Americans don’t want any deep water drilling to get that oil they burn with such wild profligacy.
Americans want to zoom around the world in jets spewing out enough carbon emissions to roast the planet with all the JP-6 jet fuel they’re burning up, but they don’t want to inconvenience themselves with any expensive gasoline taxes or carbon taxes that would double or triple the cost of an airline ticket.
Well, here’s a wake-up call, America: you wanted the oil-intensive agriculture and the gas-guzzling Aerostar vans and the air conditioning in the summer and the cheap jet plane flights so you can vacation in the third world where the dollar is still worth something (unlike Europe), now take the consequences.
Until Americans start biking to work, I have zero sympathy.
Ash Can
Landrieu, Vitter, Sessions and Shelby most certainly do represent their regional interests. They’ll fight tooth and nail for their regional oil drillers, and their constituents don’t give a crap and will continue to re-elect them. It’s up to the rest of the folks in DC to go to bat for the actual, real-life interests of those constituents, and for the good of Americans at large.
rickstersherpa
This goes back to the beginning of the Republic, with the argument over the protective tariff and, for that matter, slavery. The different sections of the country usually elected their representatives that would advance what the local bigshots, correctly or not, thought advanced their economic self-interest. I mean, why would a congressman from a suburban district get interested in farm legislation when he has no farmers or farm equipment dealers in his or her district? Instead, he or she will want to listen to the local bankers, car dealers, and developers are saying, along with the clergy in the big churches in his or his district, since that is where both the votes and the money are. This is also why when gas prices spike, we start hearing all of the congress people squeal, as they feel all their suburban constiuents’ pain as they know that pain may get vented on them.
The Grand Panjandrum
@mclaren: And because Americans are the only ones who do these things we should obviously move back into caves and go on a strict vegetarian diet. But it is a long walk to the nearest cave from my place. Maybe next week. I’m driving to the beach this weekend.
mistermix
@mclaren:
Nice rant, but the 90’s called and they want their minivan back.
The Grand Panjandrum
@mistermix: Bwahahahahaha! It isn’t every day the author win his own thread.
lawguy
Well I’m glad to hear that the current administration has nothing to do with this. Just a victim of circumstances I guess.
Do they have responsibility for anything?
Bill E Pilgrim
@mclaren:
So does this mean when we finally reach Peak Wingnut, they’ll have to start drilling for Republicans in actual clown schools?
Ahasuerus
@The Grand Panjandrum: Come on, he does have a point. For the past 50 years Americans have been calling themselves the leaders of the free world – perhaps they should accept some of the responsibility for those decades of the parochial complacency that passed for leadership. And the fact that they have not been alone in that complacency still does not excuse it.
And as to the false dichotomy of “live in caves and eat only tofu”: is it really that difficult to acknowledge the excesses of the past without attributing a desire for dystopian deprivation to that acknowledgement?
Ahasuerus
@mistermix: OK, substitute Hummer for Aerostar, and he still has a point.
But your comment did make me chortle – well done sir!
Karmakin
@mclaren: The sad thing is that walking/biking to work for a sizable number of people is either extremely unreasonable or even impossible.
The suburban landscape of America makes most transportation related changes both politically and structurally unrealistic.
debit
@Karmakin: I do agree that we need more walkable/bikeable communities. However, unless a person lives more than 15 miles away from your job, a bike commute is entirely doable, assuming they are physically able.
I understand why people don’t commute by bike; they don’t want to get sweaty, it takes longer than driving, etc. The first few times I commuted by bike I thought I was going to die. Now I get pissed if the weather or appointments keep me from biking in. And I only have to fill up my gas tank once a summer.
soonergrunt
@mclaren:
@The Grand Panjandrum:
Funny that. Everywhere I went in Europe, people were driving gas guzzling cars, usually at (inefficient) speeds that would make an American blanche, eating beef and other meats, leaving the lights on, running with air conditioning in many climes, oil-fired heaters, and so on and so on and on.
And considering Greece and Portugal, the dollar is worth more in Europe than it has been in quite a while.
Please update the anti-American memes. The ones you’re using are as dated and tired as they are tedius.
Oh, and go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut.
soonergrunt
@Bill E Pilgrim: WIN
Linda Featheringill
From Nola.com:
And yes, folks are frustrated. Can’t say that I blame them.
Keith G
@mclaren:
There are important points in your typing and they are full of youthful exuberance (a good thing, on the whole), but self righteous, pedantic rants win few converts and ultimately are akin to trying to teach pigs to sing.
Speaking of pigs, its time for a breakfast taco. Oink!
soonergrunt
And on the thread topic, somebody needs to ask David Vitter if he has any of those super absorbent diapers left over, and could he maybe send them down to the gulf marshes to help with the clean-up.
chopper
he does have a point, but let’s be honest, if it’s between eating a hamburger out of a throwaway foam tray while driving a hummer 200 miles to work at 85 mph vs. eating tofu and lentil soup in a straw-bale insulated yurt after hand-digging a well and refining 10 pounds of beet sugar, then we’re totally boned eight different ways.
if the latter is the responsible way to live than none of us has any right to criticize others about the way they live.
and biking to work? i work at home. i walk literally 15 feet to get to my office. i walk everywhere. so am i allowed to talk?
Keith G
@chopper:
Yes you earned the right to talk, a bit. Just not about tofu.
If I were forced to choose between shagging an oil worshiping neocon or eating a tofu based diet, I would be lost.
WereBear
I maintain that the central fallacy is getting us anywhere, when transportation should be about getting stuff to us.
Telecommuting and video conferencing will cover a lot of what people do at work. If you sit at desk and type on a computer, what compelling reason is there for you to consume gallons of gas to bring your ass to that chair?
Likewise, virtual shopping will have all the variety of the internet, while a big truck can deliver everyone’s goods in the same economical radius. We can bring back the milk truck, the bread truck, and the fruit and vegetable cart.
Businesses used to do that. Then they outsourced a chunk of the delivery chain, and instead of one truck driven by a professional, we have acres of asphalt and hundreds of mostly empty cars, bringing people to the location.
Makes no sense.
kay
@chopper:
Walking to work ignores the vast rural areas of this country. Whole states. I suppose they could all cluster around a big employer, and live essentially on-site, but that sort of cuts down their freedom to leave that job, and go 40 miles to a different one, and might create some other problems.
I think some of the problem with national legislation to move from carbon-based energy has to do with regional differences in weather and travel needs. With the Senate like it is, and rural states over-represented, that’s a big lift. The truth is, they’ll get hurt more than urban areas, with energy taxes, or some of the other methods. I don’t know that Senators are going to have the will to tell them that.
Bill E Pilgrim
I work at home and ride an exercise bike to work, is that okay?
Will
In the long run of time, I have no doubt that we’ll be seen as obscenities. Lazy fucks getting fat while burning billions of gallons to keep our half-ton+ personal hunks of metal and plastic cruising between home, office and shopping.
But there’s not much you can do about this personally, in much of the country. Like many towns, I have no bike paths between me and work, making the ride a perilous adventure. I’ve done it many times and have the broken ribs to show for it.
As for the rise of home offices, I don’t see it taking off anytime soon. Management culture in this country has – quite literally – made a science of manipulating office culture to get what it wants.
Managers and HR staff like to personally oversee rooms of employees, doling out rewards and punishment to get what they want. They are not going to give up that lever easily.
artem1s
This. The Great Lakes Consortium has managed to hold off drilling (mostly natural gas) in the Great Lakes for the last couple of decades. Canada has slant wells, I believe, but no actual on-the-lake platforms. It has also kept special interests from draining the lakes to water golf courses in Colorado. No water is allowed to leave the watershed. And it has become the agent of choice for dealing issues that will affect Great Lakes commerce as diverse as alien species invasion.
A Gulf States Consortium would be the most intelligent way of forcing the Fed to develop reasonable drilling regs but there are too many wingnut governors to get on board probably. This would be the best time for them to act on forming such a group but I’m betting that’s about as likely as W developing sane energy policy after 9/11.
chopper
@kay:
i’m not saying that everyone can, or should, walk to work. if you can telecommute you should, but i’m lucky because i have a white-collar office job.
my whole point is that demanding purity and fealty to some oil-free panacea, and denying those that don’t any place at the table, is just plain doing it wrong. it’s prolonging the problem with internal petty squabbling.
R-Jud
@Keith G:
Nah. You can marinade tofu.
Fern
@Will: Another thing about working at home – it can be very isolating. I’m self-employed and have my office at home, and I tell you, between living alone and mostly working alone, I do get a little squirrelly at times.
Will
kay,
I doubt that rural America has much longer anyway. The population is already vanishing to the cities, as the loss of manufacturing and local farmer agriculture has decimated small towns and rural areas.
There are too many small communities in this country that have lost their economic reasons for existing. Governmental policies keep them alive, when we’d be much better off figuring out a way to lure people to urban areas and slowly shutting down small town America.
Environmentally, this is actually a good thing. An apartment building is far more efficient than a suburb. It takes a lot less energy to move food and goods to a city than to 100 small towns.
This is why the city has been the center of human civilization for thousands of years. Suburbs and middle class ruralism are the invention of the era of cheap fuel and will not survive the end of it.
Will
Fern,
I don’t miss working at home much, mostly because I’m a lot more financially secure working in my current office job. But I also realize that there’s absolutely nothing about my job that couldn’t be done at home, maybe with a weekly or monthly meeting with coworkers.
But that will not happen. Our HR staff gets very uneasy with people who work from home. There’s a feeling that someone who does the same amount of work from home is somehow goofing off.
Even if this wasn’t the case, it seems that management types are very focused on monitoring and manipulating office culture. It’s why they take so many “leadership” courses in business school. Without an office, none of their tricks work as well.
Linda Featheringill
@Keith G:
Decisions, decisions . . . .
WereBear
Yes, you’re right. And my mother in law is horrified at the picture I paint of Shopping… of the Future!
However, business doesn’t care. Not about its consumers, not about their own employees.
@Fern: This is the point of the neighborhood pub, which is an institution I would love to see make a comeback.
This is a pet peeve of Mr WereBear, and he’s right. Puritanical zoning puts human watering holes miles out of town, and then people have to drive back and forth to get there. Problems are then inevitable.
Linda Featheringill
@WereBear:
Interesting point, having stuff come to us.
Or maybe we could have it come to within walking distance so anyone could walk down to their local depot and then brink stuff home in a cart.
Something to think about.
WereBear
Yep. Because if we all worked from home, would they have as much of a reason for existing?
scav
This brief and semi-OT interruption to the guilt is brought to you on the assumption that if we don’t vent a bit by giggling, we will have a major, unnecessary blowout. (I’m holding out for the necessary blowout that will take out functionally critical non-juicers). A Brit has just taken the land-speed lawnmower record (now 86.069mph.) from the ‘mercans. John? O Master of Your Domain?
soonergrunt
@WereBear: That’s precisely the issue. It’s about a lack of control, not productivity.
Keith G
@artem1s:
This does seem to be a classic case of being careful what one wishes for.
There has been 30 yrs of “Get government out of our way” and living on the Gulf Coast I see a significant population who view the oil industry as a cash cow.
Even as Jindal is learning to love Uncle Sam, other voices are saying, “What disaster? It’s not that bad.”
This is a shit situation, but this part of the country is getting whacked by conditions it has supported in the past.
Bill E Pilgrim
@WereBear:
Bingo.
chopper
@Fern:
oh, yeah. half of my day is spent working in an office by myself as the wife is a phD student and spends 80 hours a week on that.
the other half is spent taking care of a 16 month old.
jesus, i need more adult human contact.
Keith G
@WereBear:
Come to central Houston. Many traditional style pubs have opened. Very nice.
aimai
@debit:
Oh christ, can we not have this joke of a conversation? Why, yes, people living less than fifteen miles away from work, or shopping, or school, or their parents house may also need to drive. Do you have two or more children? Elderly parents? Are you a senior citizen? Do you live in a cold or snowy climate? Unless you live in an incredibly dense urban environment, like New York, with great public transportation if you are not single, childless, and without other social duties you are going to need to drive.
aimai
chopper
@Will:
if anything rural america will start to rebound in the future. there has been a big movement away from the suburbs to the cities, but that’s in part because the suburbs really are doomed.
the spreading out of information and its access has made rural america more accessible. you can live in the sticks today and be as well-informed and part of general society as i am, and i live in the biggest city in the country.
that being said, i don’t forsee huge migrations back to the country. there’s definitely going to be a rehash of the back-to-the-land movement (we’re already seeing it), but unless some sheer craziness starts people in general will still prefer denser populated places.
@Will:
i guess it’s a little different in that i work for the government. that’s not to say that we don’t have some micromanagers, but our telecommuting system was forced on the office by congress. likewise it’s harder for managers to play favorites too much – we’re primarily judged by our productivity.
aimai
@Linda Featheringill:
NPR did a very good piece the other day about a link up between Federal Nutrition programs (under the stimulus) and Baltimore’s libraries and a food delivery program like Peapod. The Mayor had been a big player in it because Baltimore, like lots of other poor places, just had not good grocery stores within the city that poor people, or people without cars, could get to. They hooked up with the local library and built an online system that enabled people to go to their library, order their groceries over the internet, pay for them, and pick the up the next day at the library itself. Busy single parent households, elderly people, anyone who didn’t have transportation and couldn’t spare the hour and a half it took to get to a good grocery store on the bus were able to walk to their library and get good groceries at their convenience.
aimai
chopper
@scav:
86.069mph. if you hit 88 you go back in time and get to watch yourself, as a child, slowly turn into the sort of utter loser adult who ends up racing lawn mowers for fun.
tkogrumpy
@Ahasuerus: right on.
tim
So where is the LEADERSHIP on this issue from, you know, the president of the united states, who theoretically is not representative of one region, but of the ENTIRE country?
If ever there was a natural trigger/useful crisis with which to kick off an epic Mahattan Project-level national program to get the fuck off fossil fuels, this horrendous oil spill is it. Obama should be pounding the podium, educating the public, and twisting arms in congress and in the regulatory arms of his government, as well as using the justice department to kick criminal oil ass.
But where is Obie? Hardly anywhere that I can see, and mostly on his knees in front of our oil/gas/corporate/finanace overlords. All the while issuing additional deep drilling permits, even while the oil flows and washes up on the beaches. Insane.
This is the most retarded country in the world.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Here’s a thought that falls somewhere between eating tofu in caves and the high-tech gasoline fueled Potlach that is life in exurban America: why not carpool? You know, like that no-good hippie communist Dagwood Bumstead used to do in the comics pages every Sunday for the last 50 years? Even tacky old Aerostar vans leftover from the 1990s will get close to 50 percent better mileage per person when they are carrying two people rather than just one, on the same trip. God forbid we should do something that would double the efficiency of our fleet at a stroke, with a small price to pay in convenience and the unpleasantness of having to talk to
strangersfriends, neighbors and family members before we’ve had our first cup of coffee at work.Just saying.
Keith G
@tim:
Okay….
Where in the hell have you been? That is not how Obama operates. He has never presented himself to be that type of leader.
Linda Featheringill
@aimai: Neighborhood libraries would be a good option.
Actually, it sounds like a good idea.
WereBear
@Linda Featheringill: It’s freakin’ brilliant, is what it is.
I look forward, sooner rather than later, to our reconstitution away from “a car in every household” society. It is not convenient or sensible to require people to pay for a huge purchase, the equally outsized debt service on that purchase, the giant repair bills to keep that purchase running, and soon, the weekly chunk to fuel that purchase.
I would honestly rather pay even the same amount to have a reliable way to get me and my stuff around, because it would be worth it to me in not driving. People could avail themselves of it when they were exhausted, on medication, under the influence, sensory or physically challenged, or too old or young to drive. They could more easily corral their kids, get some work or reading done, or just socialize with this otherwise wasted time.
And the safety boon would be tremendous.
Who makes money from requiring people to have their own cars? Just what freedom are we getting compared to what we are giving up?
suzanne
I’m really sick of the dense city = good, suburbs/rural = bad binary. Dense, pre-car cities are enormously difficult to live in if you’re not of means, and the sneering elitism of urbanites toward the suburbs/rural areas is really fucking disgusting. The suburbs filled a valid need when they were built, and they still do. (Unless a family of four wants to live in 800 square feet for $2K a month and that somehow strikes everyone as a fabulous standard of living.)
There are ways to do smart suburbs (higher-density corridors, transit hubs, mixing zoning types, greater emphasis on landscape/climate sensitivity, decentralized power grids) that won’t eliminate the car, but instead make other options more attractive for a large amount of usage. We’re not going to turn the clock back to the glorious ye olde times before the car-based city, and it would be hugely damaging to both environment and human society to destroy the existing suburb en masse.
I just got my master’s degree last week, WOOOOOOT!
frankdawg
@mclaren:
Actually I bike to work almost every day (17 miles RT). When I don’t I use the barely adequate public transportation system provided.
@Keith G:
Matt Bors is fantastic today along this line. What if BHO were more like Boy Blunder?
http://comics.com/matt_bors/2010-05-24/
wrb
I imagine this will be an orphan here at the end of this thread but it is significant and on-topic
chopper
@suzanne:
right here you’re decrying the ‘city=good, suburb=bad’ binary by pointing out that the stereotype of the suburbs isn’t right, and then stereotyping the cities as elitist havens where 2K a month buys you 800 sq. ft.
PeakVT
@soonergrunt: Actually, your wrong. European economies typically use much less oil per capita as America, and are significantly less energy intensive.
Sticking your head in your ass about America’s energy issues is anti-American, btw.
ruemara
I like tofu. I live in a, to me, small town. I’d take public transit, but the service between my smaller town and the small town I work in that’s just 7 miles away, is once per hour and if the driver get’s sick or whatever, I’m out of luck until the next hour. 2hrs to wait for a bus. May I just point out I also can work until 1 am? No service past 11pm. I can’t ride a bike and all roads between the towns have fairly busy traffic. I’ve done what I can by combining trips but I have no illusions that my need for a car isn’t part of the problem. But I do what I can, with meatless meals being the biggest thing you can do. It’s true.
Now, for Mclaren et al, explain it to me slowly how my neighbors, who drive the biggest guzzlingest trucks just to go to a store 10 blocks away (I walk) can be convinced to support effective public transport, higher cafe standards and switching to smaller vehicles for short trips. One of my neighbors has an-ahem-tackily distinctive truck. She drives it to her job, 5 blocks from her house. Every day. This town is a quarter the size of queens, yet most people drive more than anyone I know in the tri-state area.
edited for clarity
R-Jud
@chopper:
I feel your pain. I work from home, have a husband-about-the-house, and a 16-month-old. Guess who drives the daily conversation around here?
debit
@aimai: Well, pardon the hell out of me. I said it was doable, not mandatory. Jesus.
mclaren
@ruemara:
$10 per gallon federal gasoline tax.