Yesterday I posted a few ideas of what Obama can do during his press conference today. Here is what he has done so far:
Obama has appeared almost scarily unengaged from what the public increasingly recognizes is a genuine national emergency. When he goes before the press corps and the nation this afternoon, he faces a fateful choice: Will he respond with another of his now-familiar outbursts of anger with no follow-through? Or will he take charge of the national response and announce a clear plan of action?
Here is a full list of what he can do. Some of them look familiar, don’t they?
with your list. In fact given the leaks for his speech I swear his actions are almost in the same order as your list.
For all you know he could have read it. He spends an hour a day surfing the web.
Here is my list:
Permanent moratorium on offshore drilling, replacing the 2 million barrels a day with alternative incentives to reduce demand:
A permanent “cash for clunkers” program that gives credit for only replacement vehicles with 35 miles per gallon efficiency or greater, rising by 5 miles each year. Paid for by a high tax on vehicles that get less than 20 miles per gallon, also rising by 5 miles each year.
Free mass transit in every major city, coupled with expanded service and full funding.
A tax on freight transported by truck, which pays for a subsidy for freight transported on rail.
A Federal Program that electrifies the entire US rail corridors. All rail travel can be converted to electric.
The imposition of Green Belts around all major cities. A property tax regime which taxes only building improvements in rural designated areas, and that taxes only land within urban areas.
A national program to convert mid and large trucks to hybrid. A program along the lines of UPS voluntary program that saved the company 3 million gallons of fuel in a year.
First of all, pigs can’t sing. More importantly, even if they could, they wouldn’t appreciate it.
Obama is who he is. He’s not going to get mad and become raging bull in behalf of the people and other living species. He’ll continue to be his cerebral self. So getting mad for some cathartic moment in behalf of an a supposedly enraged public will, in my opinion, just draw another yawn…been there, done that.
In view of the oil and nuclear power friendly legislative solution, the American Power Act, one has to wonder if he’s even inclined to change course right now. Maybe he knows something or has confidence that this will be quelled and that he’ll be able to do enough to recover effectively.
What would work with the public is not the busy list from the Huffington Post. It’s this. The president needs to invoke the huge powers he has thanks to Bush-Cheney and the somnolent Congress:
1) federalize the operation,
2) deliver some serious financial punishment to BP right now; and
3) drive over to Congress and tell them to get the damn liability cap lifted on oil spills.
If he’s really serious, he can even set up special tribunals to settle claims against BP promptly. This is a national emergency, an assault on our territory by a foreign corporation. What more does he want?
But that’s all pie in the sky thinking. That won’t be done. Just look the flood of offshore drilling contracts since April (with lousy regulation in place), including approvals after April 22, plus the ridiculous American Power Act. The past predicts the future and the future means industry first, the political class second, and the people so far behind, they’re not even visible on the chart.
would be a disaster. The Coast Guard by the way are all over this thing doing what they can. BP is the only entity with the expertise for deep well. No way around that. Federalizing is a meaningless and probably misguided impulse.
Right now the financial impact is somewhere proximate to $14 billion. I don’t know what ‘serious’ is, but right now that is looking pretty stiff. We will see on that.
The liability cap is already removed on BP, and it is absent in the event of wrongdoing. The cap will be lifted, but I think there is a process here. Remember these 2,500 oil rigs are all operating with insurance that considers the cap. All that needs to be figured out. I would love to see some of these getting shut down because they can’t get insurance, but can the US withstand a decline of 2 million barrels a day? You tell me.
I saw a set of comments from an oil platform engineer, and post it below. The guy has been in the business a long time and these are his thoughts on the BP response.
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BP has an carte blance from all oil companies …small and big to redeploy their resources at minutes notice…….and what BP has been able to put together in 30 odd days ….it nothing short of the absolute best DW response ever achieved by anyone …..I cant believe the dispatcher and logistics ppl at BP have had more than 2 hr of sleep in days ……
1- there are more than 10 ROVs operating in SYNC here….this is unheard of …..Oceaneering (the ROV guys) are proving they are the best ….they have had to essentially make air space (water space i guess) and run ROV traffic through sonar …..for comparison ….even complex DW jobs have at most 3 ROV’s.
2- custom fittings were designed,fabricated and installed on the BOP stack…..(this in itself is a 4 week job under normal work loads)
3- the engineering expertise being employed is second to none here…….
normal works loads == this is a 6-9 month project …. the ring master at BP has been cracking whips 24/7 for a month …..
the logistical people at BP have really manned up …..i guess a carte blance form all GOM producers helps but wow …what logistical operations ….incredible to put this together under such timelines…
but yes….the sub sea response is easily the most comprehensive ever deployed….this response will be standard reading literature for sub-sea responses for decades to come…
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I include that because I do not believe BP has been sitting on its hands. This latest effort is really remarkable. We can hope it works, so have resources been focused on this. You bet they have. What is unfortunate is that everyone steps up to the plate AFTER a disaster.
But I also think this attitude is as much human nature as it is government laxity. We never prepare for disaster until it hits, AND we can never know when preparation for a disaster that works works, because we can never know what disasters out there were avoided.
But BP fit nine months into 30 days on this one.
By the way I am a big supporter of ANY non carbon solution to energy. That would include nuclear. I would add that the tech on nuclear now is first rate, the structures of reactors today bear no resemblance to reactors from thirty and forty years ago. They wold be like comparing our cars today to those built in the 1970′s. They are small, powerful, efficient, and the nuclear rods are embedded inside of their own containment systems. After spent, the coating seals the remaining radioactivity. I think anti-nuclear is also an old school response to energy solutions. I appreciate the ability of politicians to recognize the new technology solutions wherever they come from. That is the essence of progressive.
I’d prefer a local income tax and elimination of property taxes.
Development can be controlled by zoning, general plan amendments, and development fees.
Except for Houston.
And all freeway HOV lanes must be converted to light rail routes. Just watch the development near the light rail stations, which must be mixed use.
No so fast. Thermal plant require much cooling water, and so do we Humans. We should not compete with our machines for water or food.
Many thermal plants are the water equivalent of using food for ethanol. not so smart.
And the decommissioning and disposal of nuclear plants is still a nightmare.
Buildings with opening windows, and structural (fixed) control of incident sunlight would reduce air conditioning loads, and electricity consumption, significantly.
I’m also up for bicycles, and requiring showers in the workplace for cyclists.
Some of best modern designs dont use water for cooling at all.
make taxes progressive or regressive.
Any system I have seen that eschews property taxes inherit severe problems. You cannot run local or state government on income tax, it is too unwieldy and variable. Property tends to be less variable over time and can be adjusted more easily. Any state that was too dependent on income tax in this downturn was eviscerated.
nuclear design does not use water. The more efficient plants use far less.
The other fact of the matter is that nuclear plants use water as a throughput. It isn’t used up, the temp is raised and there are limits to how quickly it can be returned to the source.
This is the same issue with ethanol. The new plants are now required to reprocess the water on site and return used water back to the system. I would note there is minimal water pollution in nuclear as there is with the resulting effluent in an ethanol plant.
Now as to your second point – efficiency. There are some technology breakthroughs for buildings that are nothing short of amazing. One of the newest technologies OLED lighting uses 2% of the electricity for equivalent light as incandescent, something like 20% of fluorescent. More remarkable they will run on 12V rather than 120V. There will be a transition in electricity smart grid production to include 12V and savings will be huge.
Windows are now up to R-29, which lets 2% of heat through. Insulation designs are approaching R-100 in some advanced materials. Fiber Optic systems bring outdoor light in through light cables. I have seen windows that can be placed on commercial buildings that are also solar cells. Applied, the opportunities are endless. I would envision a zoning requirement some day that requires every building to be 100% self energy generating. They cannot use more energy than they can produce. I don’t care if the facilities continue to be owned by the utility or not, but the idea is a decentralized and diversified energy production system.
But again, there is so little understanding of modern nuclear plants, everyone is envisioning the 1950s behemoths. No one is truly reimaging the buildings, cars and roads. But folks are starting to. I mean, within a densely populated urban area there is absolutely no need for any highway system at all to move people. It is a ridiculous waste of money. Public transit for the same dollars could be provided for free to everybody. Probably at half the cost.
These guys, including Matt Simmons seem to think there’s a lot the military could be doing to shut the well off. We could presume Matt Simmons knows what he’s talking about.
To a discussion by Clive cook:
The notion that the government should be directing, as opposed to merely supervising, the effort to stop the leak — BP should be pushed aside; bring in the military — is absurd. So far as that side of the operations goes, all that matters is who has more technical expertise: the company or the administration? (If your house was burning down, would you want the White House directing the fire crews, or maybe calling in air strikes, as a sign of how seriously Obama takes your problem?)
wapo
Are you really going to make a comparison bewteen BP and the fire department, which is a *government operation* specifically because of the conflict of interest inherent in a privately run, for-profit fire department?
Would I want the government making sure my house doesn’t burn down? Why yes, yes I would. In fact, I do. And I count on the government to maintain an expensive level of emergency readiness at all times in the event that my house catches on fire, regardless of whether I am at fault for that. Strangely enough, there is little controversy about this. Even more strangely, the same argument for such a fire department applies to oil spill containment. There should be more than adequate containment and emergency response equipmrent and teams ready to go at all times in response to a disaster such as this, because such disasters are foreseeable and the consequences of them affect a very large body of people in both the short and long-term. We’ve already seen that not enough boom was available, nor crews to properly place it, to deal with a disaster of this size. We’ve seen that BP didn’t have systems at-the-ready to deal with this blowout in case it happened – delays were accrued due to the necessity to divert equipment from other areas to attempt to stop the flow. We’ve seen that there really aren’t any tested methods of actually dealing with this problem, should it have occurred, leaving BP now stuck with trial and error. These are problems that could have been avoided if we treated the possibility of a blowout of a deep water oil extraction operation like we do the possibility of a fire: inevitable and potentially calamatous.
And if that turns out to be too expensive to do, then the risk may not be worth the reward.
But please, don’t condescend me by making an *obviously* specious comparison. That’s just insulting.
The reason that income taxes are variable is that income is variable. Property taxes shift the hardship of lost income from the government to the individual. Without an income, you don’t have to worry about income taxes, but you do still have to worry about property taxes. Eviscerating the state’s revenues is bad, but the kind of human and economic losses from increased homelessness, though less visible, are probably worse. And that’s the short term. Long-term, it’s hard to have to move from a place where you’ve lived most of your life because the property value and property taxes have greatly outpaced your income.
I’m under the impression that the rapid increase in property taxes in California was what kicked off the whole Proposition 13 tax revolt that ended up getting residents to reject all taxes to fund what had been a first-rate public sector.
of really rich people avoiding paying property taxes and starving the State of desperately needed funds for education and the resulting mess the State is in. I am a fierce advocate of absolutely NO Federal dollars going to help California ever. That place is Greece, it is the land of tax avoidance. The idea of folks in $50 million mansions paying virtually no property taxes to support their community it is sick.
The Proposition Revolt was a right wing nuttery, that pairs only with the nuttery of Arizona’s immigration rulings. Education funding has got to be stable or you destroy the educational opportunity of the young. I am also tired of all the Governmental resources going to older folks, while starving off the funds to young people.
Education should be virtually free from preschool through Doctoral degrees. Educational opportunity should be a right that is properly funded. Education is a State and local obligation, and states have failed in that obligation because folks just plain don’t want to pony up.
is watch the oil drum. Prevention is a worthless discussion at this point, as the cows have left the barn. The FACT is that the Federal Government lacks expertise in THIS area. End of story. You need underwater Sonar ROV’s for deepwater. You need the engineers that can build the gear, you need the ships, you need the ships having the appropriate personnel. What in the hell would the military do?
In Kuwait it wasn’t the military that shut those oil wells down, it was teams of drillers with expertise. Its obvious that the Government has applied a rational response to this crisis by maintaining the highest level of expertise applied to the problem, even as the nattering politicians say all the crap they say.
Last I heard the Secretary of Navy wanted to sink a battleship over the top of the leak. When the BP engineers heard that they are said to have erupted in laughter.
As far as using explosives, the ground in this location has about 800 feet of sediment. All an explosive would do is blow away the now existing apparatus that has been holding flow to the levels it is now at. Without that gear it would be an exponentially worse disaster. So yeah send the military in and really make a disaster, I think that is actually what they are best at.
As far as flow rate goes, I buy off on the estimates at the oil drum. Their site is indicating that the scientist estimates are just basically a bidding war among professors as to how high you are willing to go. The professor with the next highest estimate gets to be on TeeeVeeee.
permanent moratorium on offshore drilling, and with reduced oil flow a raising of the CAFE standards.
Now this is a direction to back.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/05/new-bill-ban-offshore-drilling-increase-fuel-economy-standard.php