The Miami Herald has a very good article detailing the Kendrick Meek/Stackhouse connection. Kendrick tried to get the bum money from the Federal Government twice (Kendrick had to halt one payment from the Feds) while his mom was lobbying for Stackhouse (who is awaiting trial for stealing more than $1 million from a fake project). Sorry Kendrick, you can't distance yourself from your mother now. Won't work.
Anyone who doesn't believe I sometimes know what I am talking about and that I can size up an issue, should read my December 28,2007 post and then read today's article in the Herald. You can also check out this blast from the past. And, this is my best article EVER on Carrie Meek. The Herald missed this one big-time!
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Splendid Anti-Sprawl Video. By Geniusofdespair
Julian from Miami did this video. I hope he comes forward, he appears to be a student. Well done!
If you can't see the video hit on this link.
If you can't see the video hit on this link.
Gulf Oil Spill: will the blob surface by the GOP convention? by gimleteye
There are a thousand points of horror to consider about the abandonment of precaution in the proliferation of oil and chemicals in the environment and the subtle, gradual impacts to human health. One of the outcomes of the Deepwater Horizon disaster is along the lines of not knowing-- at all-- what happens to a massive oil spill when it is released into cold water, 5,000 feet beneath the surface.
Although the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico spans a huge area, scientists believe that the visual measurement is only a fraction of what is pouring from an 18,000 foot deep hole in the earth that represents the height of hubris. No one knows where the rest of the oil is. That makes your guess as good as anyone else's, including Phd's consulting for BP or TransOcean or Halliburton or scientists at the University of Louisiana or RASMUS. This is why you have tough, enforceable regulations: to stop ordinary people from scratching our heads and wondering what happens next, with a few million gallons of oil sloshing around in the Gulf of Mexico.
President Obama inherited a decade or more of abandonment of the federal regulatory mission. Still, it is frustrating to watch the president's rising anger in view of the fact that his Administration ought to have implemented, as a matter of first responders to the devastated regulatory mission-- thoroughly neutered under Bush--a crash course in regulatory reform of the environment and new training and competency requirements for regulators. The house needed to be cleaned but it wasn't, because the president's top advisors didn't believe it was a priority.
How do you measure trace hydrocarbons in shrimp or any of the food chain; how do you know if volatile organic compounds are being sucked up into the rainclouds and deposited on land? What are you breathing, ingesting, and what happens if you go swimming in water where pollution isn't being measured? These are all questions that were not considered priorities, either by Congress or the White House, until catastrophe struck. Rahm Emmanuel et al. never gave time to these issues and especially in the area of staffing sub-Cabinet level appointees in regulatory agencies. You see, at the White House even under Democrats the environment is a lesser order of concern, mostly involving the political balancing act driven by large and wealthy corporate interests. Until it is not or, as in the case of Bill Clinton, a president leaves office.
First responders are claiming that the tar balls now washing ashore are like jello, similar to the consistency of political will when it comes to cracking down on polluters. It is easy to imagine that the oil is forming floating blobs or clouds underwater that will kill all marine life in its path, as it drifts in deep water currents. But where this subsurface ocean of oil is headed, and what happens to real estate values where it lands is up in the air. The oil is predicted to drift for decades and make landfall in Tampa in the summer of 2012 where the Republican National Convention will be meeting. Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Jeb Bush, and the rest of the "Drill here, drill now, pay less coalition" will explain how many more billions are needed to compensate people for the costs of the Gulf Oil Spill. We might find out sooner or they might use another issue, like abortion for instance, to paper over damage done to fetuses from chemicals derived from oil.
Friday, May 14, 2010
Gulf Oil Spill, Pay Less and Marco Rubio: have a great weekend! ... by gimleteye
The spatial extent of the Gulf Oil spill is growing by the minute. Here is the latest version by a Google engineer, allowing you to overlay the spill extent with the city and region of your choice. The surface area of the spill is measured from May 13. The mainstream press is starting to fill in, the "what if" scenarios that first appear on the blogs: what if a hurricane passes through the spill zone? what if the technological obstacles of capping a blowout 5,000 feet underground are insurmountable? what if the only way to stop the spill is to let the whole underground reservoir of oil seep itself out, over years and years? what happens to Florida real estate and tourism under a worst case scenario? Here's what GOP Senate hopeful Marco Rubio said in 2009: "A small minority in this country are opposed to offshore oil and they do so on grounds that are not factually based."
Marco is part of the "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less Coalition". Here is what I found from July, 2008: "The same old men that propelled George W. Bush into office in 2000 and 2004 are behind Newt Gingrich’s multimillion-dollar front group, American Solutions for Winning the Future (ASWF). ASWF has capitalized on the energy crisis... to promote a “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” campaign. Although the campaign’s priorities are just a rebranding of an oil-company agenda, ASWF’s well-funded drill-drill-drill message has achieved significant success..." Things change.
Have a great weekend!
Marco is part of the "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less Coalition". Here is what I found from July, 2008: "The same old men that propelled George W. Bush into office in 2000 and 2004 are behind Newt Gingrich’s multimillion-dollar front group, American Solutions for Winning the Future (ASWF). ASWF has capitalized on the energy crisis... to promote a “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” campaign. Although the campaign’s priorities are just a rebranding of an oil-company agenda, ASWF’s well-funded drill-drill-drill message has achieved significant success..." Things change.
Have a great weekend!
"Imagining a New Florida" on WPBT Channel 2, a critical review ... by gimleteye
Click 'read more' for a review of the WBPT/ PBS documentary: "Imagining a New Florida".
"Imagining a New Florida", a new documentary narrated by TV newscaster Dwight Lauderdale offers a panoramic view of Florida's landscape, with helicopter shot HD fly-bys of gated communities and platted subdivisions and forms of land use that substantially contributed to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. It also attempts to focus how people could shape a new sense of place, respecting diversity, the environment, history and all that, to reform Florida's built landscape. What Florida turned into is a quagmire of sprawl. I call the phenomenon, on this blog, the design of the Growth Machine. Its gears and levers include the engineering cartel, rock miners, well drillers, wetland fillers and local legislatures that have deformed democracy from serving the health, welfare and safety of citizens to a money machine driven by campaign contributors from real estate development and related industries.
As to this point of view, fifty eight minutes of documentary film unspooled before-- in the last two minutes-- a conclusion made a belated attempt to define the future of Florida's landscape as a matter of public choice; of people taking the matter of community shape and design into their own hands and out of the hands of Big Box retailers. It was an opportune moment to insert the point that Florida Hometown Democracy's Amendment 4, to be voted in November on a state-wide ballot, is all about giving people a vote in their communities. But not on PBS.
In other words, the elephant in the living room-- the politics of growth and development in Florida-- remained in full disguise behind a fig leaf.
If it were my documentary, I would have established from the start that Florida's GOP legislature has set out repeatedly to destroy what passes for growth management in Florida. But avoiding hard political realities about growth seems to be mostly what PBS in Florida is all about. If not for the fact this is an election year, the Florida Department of Community Affairs would have been decapitated in Tallahassee and its head hoisted on a pike for the red-meat, development interests who have taken the opportunity of serial financial bailouts at the federal level to reinforce their capacity to build more suburban sprawl with less regulations when markets revive. I would have shown how the Growth Machine and its lobbyists think of New Urbanism as a trifling distraction from the hard work of providing more Lowe's Home Improvements stores and Wal Marts in wetlands. If I had given former US Senator Bob Graham a platform in my documentary, I would have shown how Miami Lakes and the Graham Companies represent the conflicted agendas of profit vs. community building vs. the environment.
But it wasn't my documentary. "Imagining a New Florida" stands in a line of PBS Florida documentaries that unspool as though the politics of growth are too radioactive to show the public. This one stands as a harmless primer on the principles of community building and design, intended perhaps for middle school students whose teachers will organize some sort of discussion that will materialize, somehow, in better leadership fifteen or twenty years from now.
The only inkling of substance related to political choices comes through the voice of the former Orange County chairwoman, Linda Chapin. She notes that the challenge for the future of Florida is to convert the old and first ring suburbs around the state's main cities into livable communities with a sense of place. She adds -- correctly-- it is much more difficult and costly to re-invent the built landscape than to build strip malls in farmland. What she didn't say and what the program failed to do was to explain how the entire apparatus of county government, through planning and zoning, has been deformed to avoid this choice and its consequences. The program, for instance, might have described how the investment priority of sprawl and related growth inflicts harsh penalties, mostly, on the poor and least able to afford its costs.
As a penultimate note, I had missed Herald writer Glenn Garvin's senseless tirade against the documentary as "elitist", filled with all the sound and fury of sprawl boosters cloaked in the mantle of libertarianism. All heat, no light. Notably, the documentary did not try to include real actors like the Latin Builders Association, or the Florida Builders, or Associated Industries or the National Association of Homebuilders. Maybe the producers tried but couldn't get them to cooperate, maybe they felt the Florida built landscape in its impoverished, ghost suburbs speaks for itself. But the point is: those are the interests who run Florida. They control the county commission; in Miami-Dade we call it "unreformable" for good reason. Perhaps the documentary producers felt that in an hour, they could take the high road and leave the sprawl behind.
It is not what I think PBS is for. I would have organized the documentary with the intensity of an episode of "Frontline". I would have shown the de facto chair of the county commission Natacha Seijas on camera, scurrying from her Miami Lakes condo to her no-show job at the YMCA, supported by developer contributions. I would have explained how she controls votes on zoning at the county commission, that lead to so much suburban sprawl. I would have shown Joe Martinez and Pepe Diaz and Bruno Barreiro, her cohorts. I would have shown how a quorum of the former Palm Beach County Commission could now be conducted from prison, because of insider deal-making. I would have shown how the politics of Florida are reflected, perfectly, in a marred landscape of low density, scattered subdivisions without a sense of place or community. And I would have ended with a brief view of the New Urbanists and their uphill struggle. My program would not have been the attractive trifle that the Florida Endowment of the Humanities funded and apparently wanted, but it would have been real. REAL. I'm afraid that WPBT has other, smaller fish to fry.
(Note: the documentary will air again on Sunday at 3:30 PM on WPBT.)
"Imagining a New Florida", a new documentary narrated by TV newscaster Dwight Lauderdale offers a panoramic view of Florida's landscape, with helicopter shot HD fly-bys of gated communities and platted subdivisions and forms of land use that substantially contributed to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. It also attempts to focus how people could shape a new sense of place, respecting diversity, the environment, history and all that, to reform Florida's built landscape. What Florida turned into is a quagmire of sprawl. I call the phenomenon, on this blog, the design of the Growth Machine. Its gears and levers include the engineering cartel, rock miners, well drillers, wetland fillers and local legislatures that have deformed democracy from serving the health, welfare and safety of citizens to a money machine driven by campaign contributors from real estate development and related industries.
As to this point of view, fifty eight minutes of documentary film unspooled before-- in the last two minutes-- a conclusion made a belated attempt to define the future of Florida's landscape as a matter of public choice; of people taking the matter of community shape and design into their own hands and out of the hands of Big Box retailers. It was an opportune moment to insert the point that Florida Hometown Democracy's Amendment 4, to be voted in November on a state-wide ballot, is all about giving people a vote in their communities. But not on PBS.
In other words, the elephant in the living room-- the politics of growth and development in Florida-- remained in full disguise behind a fig leaf.
If it were my documentary, I would have established from the start that Florida's GOP legislature has set out repeatedly to destroy what passes for growth management in Florida. But avoiding hard political realities about growth seems to be mostly what PBS in Florida is all about. If not for the fact this is an election year, the Florida Department of Community Affairs would have been decapitated in Tallahassee and its head hoisted on a pike for the red-meat, development interests who have taken the opportunity of serial financial bailouts at the federal level to reinforce their capacity to build more suburban sprawl with less regulations when markets revive. I would have shown how the Growth Machine and its lobbyists think of New Urbanism as a trifling distraction from the hard work of providing more Lowe's Home Improvements stores and Wal Marts in wetlands. If I had given former US Senator Bob Graham a platform in my documentary, I would have shown how Miami Lakes and the Graham Companies represent the conflicted agendas of profit vs. community building vs. the environment.
But it wasn't my documentary. "Imagining a New Florida" stands in a line of PBS Florida documentaries that unspool as though the politics of growth are too radioactive to show the public. This one stands as a harmless primer on the principles of community building and design, intended perhaps for middle school students whose teachers will organize some sort of discussion that will materialize, somehow, in better leadership fifteen or twenty years from now.
The only inkling of substance related to political choices comes through the voice of the former Orange County chairwoman, Linda Chapin. She notes that the challenge for the future of Florida is to convert the old and first ring suburbs around the state's main cities into livable communities with a sense of place. She adds -- correctly-- it is much more difficult and costly to re-invent the built landscape than to build strip malls in farmland. What she didn't say and what the program failed to do was to explain how the entire apparatus of county government, through planning and zoning, has been deformed to avoid this choice and its consequences. The program, for instance, might have described how the investment priority of sprawl and related growth inflicts harsh penalties, mostly, on the poor and least able to afford its costs.
As a penultimate note, I had missed Herald writer Glenn Garvin's senseless tirade against the documentary as "elitist", filled with all the sound and fury of sprawl boosters cloaked in the mantle of libertarianism. All heat, no light. Notably, the documentary did not try to include real actors like the Latin Builders Association, or the Florida Builders, or Associated Industries or the National Association of Homebuilders. Maybe the producers tried but couldn't get them to cooperate, maybe they felt the Florida built landscape in its impoverished, ghost suburbs speaks for itself. But the point is: those are the interests who run Florida. They control the county commission; in Miami-Dade we call it "unreformable" for good reason. Perhaps the documentary producers felt that in an hour, they could take the high road and leave the sprawl behind.
It is not what I think PBS is for. I would have organized the documentary with the intensity of an episode of "Frontline". I would have shown the de facto chair of the county commission Natacha Seijas on camera, scurrying from her Miami Lakes condo to her no-show job at the YMCA, supported by developer contributions. I would have explained how she controls votes on zoning at the county commission, that lead to so much suburban sprawl. I would have shown Joe Martinez and Pepe Diaz and Bruno Barreiro, her cohorts. I would have shown how a quorum of the former Palm Beach County Commission could now be conducted from prison, because of insider deal-making. I would have shown how the politics of Florida are reflected, perfectly, in a marred landscape of low density, scattered subdivisions without a sense of place or community. And I would have ended with a brief view of the New Urbanists and their uphill struggle. My program would not have been the attractive trifle that the Florida Endowment of the Humanities funded and apparently wanted, but it would have been real. REAL. I'm afraid that WPBT has other, smaller fish to fry.
(Note: the documentary will air again on Sunday at 3:30 PM on WPBT.)
Let's Get Ethnic/Racial: The Not Hispanic, Not Black Seat. By Geniusofdespair
We have district voting in part to ensure that we have diversity on the County Commission and the districts are drawn to help achieve that goal (look at the gaping hole in the middle of the map above). We have 4 Black, 7 Hispanic and 2 White Commissioners at the present time. So, what will happen with the District 8 seat, one of the two? That is the big elephant in the living room that no one is talking about. Will Whites avoid voting for a Hispanic in this race, even if they think that candidate is better, because they want to hold on to this seat? I don't know. I tried to find the demographics for District 8 but couldn't get them except that in the 2006 election, 18,128 people voted. I believe the White vote is at about 50% in the district.
I am just throwing this out there because you just know the Miami Herald will avoid this issue and I think if race/ethnicity becomes a factor it could change the whole ball of wax in this election.
Gulf Oil Spill and Deepwater Horizon: "managing expectations" of oil spill volume ... by gimleteye
Photo from the Boston Globe.
The numbers don't add up. What started out as an estimate of 1,000 barrels per day of spilled oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster quickly changed to 5,000 barrels per day. Based on that revised estimate, I wrote that the current disaster would exceed the Exxon Valdez by mid June.
Independent scientists took it upon themselves and calculated a spill rate much higher: at 26,000 barrels per day. Now comes news that the spill rate could be 70,000 barrels per day, plus or minus twenty percent, based on the BP released video. (click 'read more' for full report) In this case, the disaster already exceeds the Exxon Valdez in volume of oil spilled.
The CEO of BP now admits that his company could have done more to anticipate the response needed for this disaster. Really? BP, TransOcean, and Halliburton are al multi-billion dollar corporations. Do you think that risk analyses hadn't been done to estimate damage from a blowout at the bottom of the ocean? Of course they have and my guess is that these risk assessments were buried to ensure that profits would not be interrupted by outlandish provisions to protect natural resources. Why, even editorial writers like Mike Thomas of the Orlando Sentinel, bought the picture of safe and necessary offshore drilling. These are Thomas' thoughts, published by the Orlando Sentinel on April 23, 2009. Exactly a year after he wrote these words, the Deepwater Horizon rig blew up. "Drilling foes don’t have any recent pictures of oily birds to make their case, so they throw out worst-case scenarios that are about as likely as an oil bit goosing Godzilla out of the depths."
All that oil is just hanging out there in the Gulf of Mexico. Congealing in the water column, drifting, toxic. Where it goes, nobody knows.
(May 13, 2010: Gulf spill could be much worse than believed) The volume of oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig may be at least 10 times higher than previously estimated, NPR has learned.
The U.S. Coast Guard has estimated that oil was gushing from a broken pipe on the Gulf floor at the rate of 5,000 barrels a day.
But sophisticated scientific analysis of seafloor video made available Wednesday by the oil company BP shows that the true figure is closer to 70,000 barrels a day, NPR's Richard Harris reports.
That means the oil spilling into the Gulf has already far exceeded the equivalent of the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker accident in Alaska, which spilled at least 250,000 barrels of oil.
The analysis was conducted by Steve Wereley, an associate professor at Purdue University, using a technique called particle image velocimetry. Harris tells Michele Norris that the method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent. That means the flow could range between 56,000 barrels a day and 84,000 barrels a day.
Another analysis by Eugene Chiang, a professor of astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, calculated the rate of flow to be between 20,000 barrels a day and 100,000 barrels a day.
Even the most conservative of those estimates is much higher than what the Coast Guard has so far said.
But the pipe is spewing both oil and gas and it's not clear in the BP video how much is oil and how much is gas.
BP disputes these results, and maintains there is no reliable way to calculate the flow of oil from a broken pipe.
But, Harris said, the uncertainty could be reduced if BP would share more information with the scientists.
Palmer-Trinity hearing from hell...Guest Blog By Miamigal
This came in while I was away....
Palmer Trinity won at the May 4th meeting...but not entirely because a seemingly endless list of amendments were added to the application. One amendment in particular softened the impact of the vote. The amendment was placed on the table to reduce the maximum number of students that Palmer-Trinity could have from the proposed 1150 to 900. The motion was made by Shelley Stancyzk, and seconded by Brian Pariser. Voting for the motion was Mayor Flinn, Shelley Stancyzk and Brian Pariser. The motion passed 3-2. This vote locked in the student size. The student limitation requirement should be interesting since Palmer can’t seem to seem keep their current student population at the current allowed level of 600 students. Attorney Stanley Price did not look happy.
The hearing was crazy from the start.
Upon entering the sanctuary we were surprised to find the village council seated in front of a giant light house, with blue water behind them and fish bones to either side. It turns out the zoning hearing was slated to be held right smack-dab in the middle of Perrine Elementary School’s “Little Mermaid” drama set.
The circus that followed started with a parade of commission District 8 Candidates. The news was out in South Dade that there would be a large crowd at the hearing. The threat of unhappy future constituents did not deter this bunch. Pam Gray, Albert Harem-Alvarez and Lynda Bell were all working the room. That was an easy thing for them to do since they were not chairing the meeting, like Mayor Eugene Flinn, who had to stay near to dais prior to the meetings start. The Palmetto Bay council and mayor candidates were out in force as well.
Then along came the TV cameras. Video cameras were popping up everywhere. Some cameras actually were from T.V. stations that were looking for news. And other cameras were a bit unusual. It seems that commission candidate Alvarez brought his own video crew. Two cameras? The hearing attendees were not going to behave bad enough to be a hit on YouTube.
The sound system was so incredibly bad that the village council could not hear their cohorts speak; they could not hear staff nor the speakers at the podium. What the audience could hear were the politicians, attorneys and public speakers, unfortunately multiple times. The system was producing an echo chamber effect. Even the attorneys were having some very strong issues giving their presentations. As one attorney put it, “The echo is so bad I can’t hear myself think, only what I am saying”.
As with many public hearings, there were numerous speakers who meant well, but had no idea that they were supposed to be talking about. It is surprising how off topic people can get with only 2 minutes. We got to hear them twice too - the echo.
In the end, about 1:30 AM, on May 5th, the issue came to a final vote. A very tired council and audience kept pushing to get this hearing done. The final vote was taken; it passed in favor of Palmer-Trinity, 3-2.
Mayor Flinn and Councilwoman Shelley Stancyzk voted with the community to oppose the mega complex. Councilmen Ed Feller, Howard Tendrich and Vice Mayor Brian Pariser voted in support of the expansion leaving village residents angry and feeling disenfranchised.
Palmer Trinity won at the May 4th meeting...but not entirely because a seemingly endless list of amendments were added to the application. One amendment in particular softened the impact of the vote. The amendment was placed on the table to reduce the maximum number of students that Palmer-Trinity could have from the proposed 1150 to 900. The motion was made by Shelley Stancyzk, and seconded by Brian Pariser. Voting for the motion was Mayor Flinn, Shelley Stancyzk and Brian Pariser. The motion passed 3-2. This vote locked in the student size. The student limitation requirement should be interesting since Palmer can’t seem to seem keep their current student population at the current allowed level of 600 students. Attorney Stanley Price did not look happy.
The hearing was crazy from the start.
Upon entering the sanctuary we were surprised to find the village council seated in front of a giant light house, with blue water behind them and fish bones to either side. It turns out the zoning hearing was slated to be held right smack-dab in the middle of Perrine Elementary School’s “Little Mermaid” drama set.
The circus that followed started with a parade of commission District 8 Candidates. The news was out in South Dade that there would be a large crowd at the hearing. The threat of unhappy future constituents did not deter this bunch. Pam Gray, Albert Harem-Alvarez and Lynda Bell were all working the room. That was an easy thing for them to do since they were not chairing the meeting, like Mayor Eugene Flinn, who had to stay near to dais prior to the meetings start. The Palmetto Bay council and mayor candidates were out in force as well.
Then along came the TV cameras. Video cameras were popping up everywhere. Some cameras actually were from T.V. stations that were looking for news. And other cameras were a bit unusual. It seems that commission candidate Alvarez brought his own video crew. Two cameras? The hearing attendees were not going to behave bad enough to be a hit on YouTube.
The sound system was so incredibly bad that the village council could not hear their cohorts speak; they could not hear staff nor the speakers at the podium. What the audience could hear were the politicians, attorneys and public speakers, unfortunately multiple times. The system was producing an echo chamber effect. Even the attorneys were having some very strong issues giving their presentations. As one attorney put it, “The echo is so bad I can’t hear myself think, only what I am saying”.
As with many public hearings, there were numerous speakers who meant well, but had no idea that they were supposed to be talking about. It is surprising how off topic people can get with only 2 minutes. We got to hear them twice too - the echo.
In the end, about 1:30 AM, on May 5th, the issue came to a final vote. A very tired council and audience kept pushing to get this hearing done. The final vote was taken; it passed in favor of Palmer-Trinity, 3-2.
Mayor Flinn and Councilwoman Shelley Stancyzk voted with the community to oppose the mega complex. Councilmen Ed Feller, Howard Tendrich and Vice Mayor Brian Pariser voted in support of the expansion leaving village residents angry and feeling disenfranchised.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
"Imagining a New Florida" on WPBT Channel 2, tonite ... by gimleteye
I'm curious about tonite's hour-long local PBS documentary on Florida and its signature state bird: the gated subdivision. OK, sprawl is not a bird, but low density, scattered subdivisions define Florida. The excesses of sprawl substantially contributed to the greatest economic decline in Florida since the Great Depression. I strongly doubt tonite's documentary will even touch its political and financial underpinnings. This blog is one of the only places that point of view crosses the great divide established between passive consumers and advertiser sponsored media. Public broadcasting in general and Channel 2 in particular has done an extraordinarily lousy job of putting powerful special interests under the microscope for viewers. I know, because I pay attention to coverage of politics and the Growth Machine. I've been interviewed on Channel 2 news programs-- representing the environmental point of view-- and I can feel the temperature rise in the studio when my point of view pushes too hard. Hardball on sprawl and the environment? Hardly. It is part of the "fair and balanced journalism" that is rarely ever fair and balanced when it comes to issues of growth, economic prerogatives, and the environment. But I'll suspend judgment on tonite's broadcast. I keep hoping for better from local PBS. Maybe tonite is the night.Click this link for the Herald story.June Bonanza: Miami-Dade's Mega Tax Certificate Sale. By Geniusofdespair
There is over a quarter of a billion dollars in unpaid property taxes in Miami Dade County. I got a copy of the Miami Times, they carry the ads -- that paper has all the good public notices because it is an acceptable vehicle but the paper is hard to find, so what is the point? You would think the Miami Herald would have these adds because it makes more sense with their circulation.
There were 218 pages of properties in the Miami Times totaling about 77,172 homes. I averaged that each one owed about $3,000 (which is low since there were many in the $20,000 to $100,000 range).
On Monday June 1st at 2pm tax certificates will start to be sold on the listed properties to pay the amount due for the delinquent taxes. Is it any wonder the property appraiser is in a black hole?
There were 218 pages of properties in the Miami Times totaling about 77,172 homes. I averaged that each one owed about $3,000 (which is low since there were many in the $20,000 to $100,000 range).
On Monday June 1st at 2pm tax certificates will start to be sold on the listed properties to pay the amount due for the delinquent taxes. Is it any wonder the property appraiser is in a black hole?
Deepwater Horizon: "managing expectations" of oil spill ... by gimleteye
Yesterday, BP released a short video of the oil spill, taken one mile down. This is one of two leaks in the pipe out of the blowout preventer. I suppose BP released this to show that it is not "all" oil but oil mixed with methane that is coming out of the hole drilled deep in the earth, and so, makes it difficult to assess exactly how much oil is pouring into the Gulf of Mexico. Estimates range from 5,000 to 26,000 barrels per day.
Curious, but Google Earth overlay of the spill spatial extent haven't been updated in the past few days. A Google engineer had provided his own assessment in an overlay that users could adapt to their own cities. This site, which we noted for Eyeonmiami readers earlier in the week, was picked up by the mainstream press including NBC Nightly News. But that site, too, has not been updated. Hmmm, wonder why.
Some excellent photos of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy, from the Boston Globe.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Google Earth: best source of mapping on oil spill crisis and forecast ... by gimleteye
Here is a link to a Google Earth site that has many overlays and images of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill crisis, including a forecast track. The spill, about 23 days and counting, could massively expand if BP is unable to stop the blowout. It will take up to three months to drill a reliever well; a process like performing vascular surgery with industrial equipment by remote control.
Another worthwhile article: "... this Deepwater Horizon thing is an example where a worst-case analysis would have been useful. If they had done a worst case analysis they’d have to consider, well, ‘What if our blowout preventer didn’t work? And what if it happened during a bout of bad weather when the spill might reach the shore?’” Instead, BP officials admitted they were stunned by the disaster, and they and the government have largely improvised their response."
Another worthwhile article: "... this Deepwater Horizon thing is an example where a worst-case analysis would have been useful. If they had done a worst case analysis they’d have to consider, well, ‘What if our blowout preventer didn’t work? And what if it happened during a bout of bad weather when the spill might reach the shore?’” Instead, BP officials admitted they were stunned by the disaster, and they and the government have largely improvised their response."
Counterpunch: Is Arcadia Lost?
From Counterpunch, "Oil and Wetlands", a worthwhile meditation on what is at stake in the Gulf of Mexico and the Deepwater Horizon disaster.May 4, 2010
Is Arcadia Lost?
Oil and Wetlands
By DARWIN BOND-GRAHAM
The entire Gulf Coast wetlands ecosystem is a delicate and profound balance of tides, winds, and ocean temperatures. It's almost cosmic. Tides push and pull vast and deep columns of water through narrow passes into lakes and bays and back out to the open ocean. This is a marine cardiovascular system on a continental scale, one supporting waters that roil with life. Winds move shallow layers of salt water toward the shore and push back with undercurrents of brackish and freshwater from lakes like Pontchartrain, Borgne, and Salvador. The coastal prairies and cypress swamps breath. Water temperatures and salt concentrations from the edge of the continental shelf and as close as the shallows of Chandeleur Sound and Barataria Bay trigger complex movements of sea life, telling them when to spawn and where to feed. Larger seasonal shifts provide signals to migratory birds, ushering them to land upon horizon-to-horizon beds of grass where they feed from the bounty all around.
And humans too live in this balance. For hundreds of years Cajun, Isleno, Creole, and African American fishermen have watched the tides and licked their fingers to the winds, following the shrimp, oysters, fish, and fowl of this land-meets-ocean edge world that their ancestors deemed a paradise. "Acadiana" from which "cajun" is a modified anglicization which at its root refers to the idyllic place of Greek beauty and bounty, Arcadia.
But as Nicolas Poussin's shepherds remind us, even "et in Arcadia ego" — interpretable as "even in paradise, death exist." The seeming paradise of southern Louisiana, resulting from cosmically dynamic interactions of ocean tides, wind, and river flows, has been morbidly upset by human greed. Beginning with the plantations in the 1700s vast forests along the Mississippi and distributary bayous were cleared, wetlands drained, levees erected and canals dug with slave labor. King cotton and queen sugar reigned supreme and befouled their hinterlands until the early twentieth century when the petrochemical industry and shipping industry eclipsed any ecological harm they had ever caused. The shift from agricultural plantations to chemical plants, from the extraction of crops to the extraction of minerals did more than upset the balance. Southern Louisiana is dying today. The land is disappearing. What land remains has been made toxic by the chemical plants and oil wells, dump ponds, slag and waste.
The Deepwater Horizon's explosion, and the "river of oil" now flowing from its ruptured well riser five thousand feet beneath the ocean surface is a catastrophe, the proportions of which are unknown and only beginning to be understood. Usually indifferent to the "everyday" environmental disasters surrounding their city —including almost monthly chemical leaks, explosions and oil spills on relatively smaller scales— New Orleanians can smell the oil coming at their coastline, blown by strong onshore winds.
Estimates of just how much oil is spewing forth from the undersea well are being upped on a daily basis. First BP claimed 1,000 barrels, but now they agree it's 5,000 and up. Some knowledgeable observers estimate that the flow is actually much higher. BP and the government are now desperately throwing resources at the oil slick, but the company's efforts have so far been mismatched to the speed at which the disaster is unfolding. Upset with the slow pace at which the federal government has marshaled resources, some in the Crescent City have already called this "Obama's Katrina," or a "slow-motion Katrina." The administration finally declared the spill an "event of national significance" on Thursday, April 29.
Billions and Trillions
Shrimp are almost cosmic. Their life cycle is fused with geophysical forces - tidal and temperature movements propelled by the sun, earth, and moon, and by unfathomably complex wind patterns. Their life cycle begins far out in the ocean in waters of several hundred feet in depth. There are right now many trillions of shrimp eggs floating in the Gulf of Mexico, suspended in columns of water. April and May are in fact the heaviest spawning months, but the phenomenon occurs year round and follows both seasonal and episodic fluctuations in temperatures and tides.
From their early nauplius and protozoea larva stages they remain in the deep waters, the pelagic zone that is neither close to shore nor the ocean bottom. They move with the current, feeding off anything suspended around them, growing with amazing speed. From this stage to adulthood they provide a source of food for nearly everything that swims around them. They are reduced from many trillions to fewer trillions in number. Into the mysis larva and post-larva stage shrimp begin to move toward shore with flood tides. Strong northerly winds also push them toward the marshes when they rise toward the surface. They continue to feed and grow. From the juvenile through adult phases of their lives they live right along the coast, often letting surface flows, deep currents, and tides push them far into the brackish water marshes. Here they flit among the protection and abundance of the Spartina grass that is absolutely necessary for their survival. They forage along the shallow bottoms of bayous and bays. In these rich saltwater prairies they gain mass and prepare for the final stages in their lives.
Subtle signals in the water, from temperature to salinity, stimulate a final movement among adult shrimp, back out into the ocean. They congregate by the hundreds of millions in bayous and passes at night and await strong tides to pull them back out into the open Gulf where they will forage along the bottom at depths of up to several hundred feed. In this benthic zone they grow to full size and finally, when water temperatures increase, they rise and spawn, floating trillions upon trillions of eggs to renew the cycle.
But there are other sublime numbers beneath the Gulf: billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. These billions and trillions are measurable as billions of dollars in profits for corporations like BP, Halliburton and other major energy firms. It was with the discovery of oil in the swamps in the early 1900s that Acadiana, paradise found, was lost for good. The industry tore byzantine networks of canals through the marshes in order to reach prospects and haul drilling equipment in on barges. The shipping industry —a large portion of which services the petrochemical refineries upriver of New Orleans, which themselves were sited in proximity to the natural gas fields of the Gulf— did its part also to cut the wetlands into fragments. Concentrated salt water intruded where it should never had. Flood deposits of sediment were reduced and finally deleted as the Mississippi and other major waterways were locked into place. Subsidence, storms, the die-off of cypress and oak forests, and the melting of horizon stretching expanses of prairie grass, it all intensified after World War II. By the 1990s southern Louisiana had seen almost 2000 square miles of land disappear beneath the Gulf's waves. In the early 2000s the rate of land loss was 24 square miles a year, an area larger than Manhattan.
Atë, another word of greek origin comes to mind here. In Greek tragedies atë is the action of a protagonist leading to downfall as a result of their hubris. Atë means defying the gods. Few words better describe the cosmic folly some humans have brought upon the Gulf Coast today: tragic, hubristic nemesis. But here all literal refrains to Greek mythology and language fall flat. Unlike Greek tragedies where the hero brings shame and death upon himself, the slow-Katrina destruction of Acadiana is not clearly the fault of prideful Louisianans over-stretching their limits and pretending to godly levels of knowledge and power. Search as you might, you will find few people more humble and happy with simplicity and sustenance than the majority of New Orleanians, Cajuns, Creoles, Islenos, and African Americans who call southern Louisiana home.
Rather, the death of the wetlands is the result of corporate and state hubris, largely beyond the control of most Louisianans. Their state is being disappeared by a hydrocarbon hungry US economy and the major oil corporations that sit atop it. The gods, the cosmic forces of tides, river flows, winds and temperatures that is, are being defied by a small elite who seek the billions in profits at the expense of trillions of living beings, including millions of Louisianans who live in New Orleans, Houma, St. Bernard Parish, Terrebonne Parish, and down all the bayous.
Orders of Magnitude
The latest National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration projections show that the oil slick from the Macondo blow-out has already reached portions of Louisiana's marshlands around the "bird food," the delta tip where the Mississippi terminates in the Gulf. It's also pushing oil ashore to the north, across portions of Chandeleur Sound's marshes. One internal NOAA estimate (dated April 30) reads:
"Strong SE winds of 15-25 kts are expected to continue through Saturday night. These winds will continue to bring oil towards the shoreline. Oil was observed today within several miles of the Delta between Garden Bay and Pass A Loutre. This could be the leading edge of the tarballs concentrating in the Mississippi River convergence as well as oil from an additional (unrelated) source near platform Ocean Saratoga. Shoreline impacts are likely to begin Thursday evening with the persistent onshore winds."
Documents leaked from NOAA and other federal authorities indicate that the well may soon begin to flow without any restrictions whatsoever, a scenario in which millions of gallons of oil could shoot into the Gulf every day. What is already a major disaster could very well become the second largest oil spill in history. The first, the oil apocalypse unleashed by Saddam Hussein and the United States military during the Gulf War in 1991 resulting in a much as 400 million gallons, would be hard to rival from a single well head, no matter how much pressure it's under. But the second largest spill, from the Ixtoc I well is very much like the Macondo blow-out. Ixtoc I spewed between 450,000 and 500,000 tons of crude oil, also into the Gulf of Mexico between June 1979 and March 1980, the time frame it took for Pemex to cap the well. Ixtoc I released about 10,000 barrels each day, exactly the same amount the Macondo blow-out is probably releasing right now if the latest candid projections of this spill are true.
A NOAA document dated from April 28 reads that:
"[t]wo additional release points were found today in the tangled riser. If the riser pipe deteriorates further, the flow could become unchecked resulting in a release volume an order of magnitude higher than previously thought.
Shrimp might almost be cosmic, but being almost cosmic is by no means unique to them. Many shellfish, fish, birds, crustaceans, and other life forms live in similarly sublime tandems with the tides and winds of the Gulf Coast. And that's the final damning reality of this catastrophic oil leak. Crude spewing from the Deepwater Horizon's well into the Macondo prospect is now riding the same wind-driven waves as the shrimp. It's coming ashore into the wetlands with them. BP and federal authorities have begun using dispersant chemicals to break up the oil patches and sink it beneath the surface. This strategy, however, may prove unwise. It will sink the oil so that it rides the deep currents and affects submarine life.
A 2005 National Academies study on the use of oil dispersants observes that little is actually known about the trade-offs between sinking oil slicks with chemicals versus struggling to contain them on the surface. These are two very different strategies that lead to very different kinds of exposure for sea life. After all, "dispersing" oil is simply a euphemism for sinking it in particulate form where it remains dissolved in columns of water, eventually settling on the ocean floor. For the shrimp, an indicator species in the sense that countless coastal species depend upon them for food, dispersants are perhaps just as bad as letting the slick reach the shore. In the former case they may be killed in open waters by oil particles, or at the bottoms where they feed. In the latter case their marsh habitats may be choked with crude oil. There seems to be no good strategy, just bad and worse. According the National Academies:
"the relative importance of different routes of exposure, that is, the uptake and associated toxicity of oil in the dissolved phase versus dispersed oil droplets versus particulate-associated phase, is poorly understood and not explicitly considered in exposure models. Photoenhanced toxicity has the potential to increase the impact “footprint” of dispersed oil in aquatic organisms, but has only recently received consideration in the assessment of risk associated with spilled oil. One of the widely held assumptions is that chemical dispersion of oil will dramatically reduce the impact to seabirds and aquatic mammals. However, few studies have been conducted since 1989 to validate this assumption."
And that:
"Many studies have shown that oil, floating above subtidal reefs [on the surface], has no adverse effects on the coral; however, if allowed to reach the shoreline, the oil may have long-term impacts to a nearby mangrove system. In addition, oil may persist in the mangrove system creating a chronic source of oil pollution in the adjacent coral reefs. The trade-off would be to consider the use of dispersants. Application of dispersant would result in dispersion of the oil in the water column and so provide some degree of protection to the mangroves; however, the reef system would now have to endure the consequences of an increase in dispersed oil in the water column...."
Furthermore, little is known about the ecosystemic effects of precipitating oil into columns of water, as well as the toxicity of the dispersants themselves, especially when combined with oil.
Is Acadiana lost? In truth the cajuns and their kindred have been losing their idyllic wetlands for decades. Deepwater Horizon may just be the atë, if you will.
Darwin Bond-Graham is a sociologist who splits his time between New Orleans, Albuquerque, and Navarro, CA. He can be reached at: darwin@riseup.net
Is Arcadia Lost?
Oil and Wetlands
By DARWIN BOND-GRAHAM
The entire Gulf Coast wetlands ecosystem is a delicate and profound balance of tides, winds, and ocean temperatures. It's almost cosmic. Tides push and pull vast and deep columns of water through narrow passes into lakes and bays and back out to the open ocean. This is a marine cardiovascular system on a continental scale, one supporting waters that roil with life. Winds move shallow layers of salt water toward the shore and push back with undercurrents of brackish and freshwater from lakes like Pontchartrain, Borgne, and Salvador. The coastal prairies and cypress swamps breath. Water temperatures and salt concentrations from the edge of the continental shelf and as close as the shallows of Chandeleur Sound and Barataria Bay trigger complex movements of sea life, telling them when to spawn and where to feed. Larger seasonal shifts provide signals to migratory birds, ushering them to land upon horizon-to-horizon beds of grass where they feed from the bounty all around.
And humans too live in this balance. For hundreds of years Cajun, Isleno, Creole, and African American fishermen have watched the tides and licked their fingers to the winds, following the shrimp, oysters, fish, and fowl of this land-meets-ocean edge world that their ancestors deemed a paradise. "Acadiana" from which "cajun" is a modified anglicization which at its root refers to the idyllic place of Greek beauty and bounty, Arcadia.
But as Nicolas Poussin's shepherds remind us, even "et in Arcadia ego" — interpretable as "even in paradise, death exist." The seeming paradise of southern Louisiana, resulting from cosmically dynamic interactions of ocean tides, wind, and river flows, has been morbidly upset by human greed. Beginning with the plantations in the 1700s vast forests along the Mississippi and distributary bayous were cleared, wetlands drained, levees erected and canals dug with slave labor. King cotton and queen sugar reigned supreme and befouled their hinterlands until the early twentieth century when the petrochemical industry and shipping industry eclipsed any ecological harm they had ever caused. The shift from agricultural plantations to chemical plants, from the extraction of crops to the extraction of minerals did more than upset the balance. Southern Louisiana is dying today. The land is disappearing. What land remains has been made toxic by the chemical plants and oil wells, dump ponds, slag and waste.
The Deepwater Horizon's explosion, and the "river of oil" now flowing from its ruptured well riser five thousand feet beneath the ocean surface is a catastrophe, the proportions of which are unknown and only beginning to be understood. Usually indifferent to the "everyday" environmental disasters surrounding their city —including almost monthly chemical leaks, explosions and oil spills on relatively smaller scales— New Orleanians can smell the oil coming at their coastline, blown by strong onshore winds.
Estimates of just how much oil is spewing forth from the undersea well are being upped on a daily basis. First BP claimed 1,000 barrels, but now they agree it's 5,000 and up. Some knowledgeable observers estimate that the flow is actually much higher. BP and the government are now desperately throwing resources at the oil slick, but the company's efforts have so far been mismatched to the speed at which the disaster is unfolding. Upset with the slow pace at which the federal government has marshaled resources, some in the Crescent City have already called this "Obama's Katrina," or a "slow-motion Katrina." The administration finally declared the spill an "event of national significance" on Thursday, April 29.
Billions and Trillions
Shrimp are almost cosmic. Their life cycle is fused with geophysical forces - tidal and temperature movements propelled by the sun, earth, and moon, and by unfathomably complex wind patterns. Their life cycle begins far out in the ocean in waters of several hundred feet in depth. There are right now many trillions of shrimp eggs floating in the Gulf of Mexico, suspended in columns of water. April and May are in fact the heaviest spawning months, but the phenomenon occurs year round and follows both seasonal and episodic fluctuations in temperatures and tides.
From their early nauplius and protozoea larva stages they remain in the deep waters, the pelagic zone that is neither close to shore nor the ocean bottom. They move with the current, feeding off anything suspended around them, growing with amazing speed. From this stage to adulthood they provide a source of food for nearly everything that swims around them. They are reduced from many trillions to fewer trillions in number. Into the mysis larva and post-larva stage shrimp begin to move toward shore with flood tides. Strong northerly winds also push them toward the marshes when they rise toward the surface. They continue to feed and grow. From the juvenile through adult phases of their lives they live right along the coast, often letting surface flows, deep currents, and tides push them far into the brackish water marshes. Here they flit among the protection and abundance of the Spartina grass that is absolutely necessary for their survival. They forage along the shallow bottoms of bayous and bays. In these rich saltwater prairies they gain mass and prepare for the final stages in their lives.
Subtle signals in the water, from temperature to salinity, stimulate a final movement among adult shrimp, back out into the ocean. They congregate by the hundreds of millions in bayous and passes at night and await strong tides to pull them back out into the open Gulf where they will forage along the bottom at depths of up to several hundred feed. In this benthic zone they grow to full size and finally, when water temperatures increase, they rise and spawn, floating trillions upon trillions of eggs to renew the cycle.
But there are other sublime numbers beneath the Gulf: billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. These billions and trillions are measurable as billions of dollars in profits for corporations like BP, Halliburton and other major energy firms. It was with the discovery of oil in the swamps in the early 1900s that Acadiana, paradise found, was lost for good. The industry tore byzantine networks of canals through the marshes in order to reach prospects and haul drilling equipment in on barges. The shipping industry —a large portion of which services the petrochemical refineries upriver of New Orleans, which themselves were sited in proximity to the natural gas fields of the Gulf— did its part also to cut the wetlands into fragments. Concentrated salt water intruded where it should never had. Flood deposits of sediment were reduced and finally deleted as the Mississippi and other major waterways were locked into place. Subsidence, storms, the die-off of cypress and oak forests, and the melting of horizon stretching expanses of prairie grass, it all intensified after World War II. By the 1990s southern Louisiana had seen almost 2000 square miles of land disappear beneath the Gulf's waves. In the early 2000s the rate of land loss was 24 square miles a year, an area larger than Manhattan.
Atë, another word of greek origin comes to mind here. In Greek tragedies atë is the action of a protagonist leading to downfall as a result of their hubris. Atë means defying the gods. Few words better describe the cosmic folly some humans have brought upon the Gulf Coast today: tragic, hubristic nemesis. But here all literal refrains to Greek mythology and language fall flat. Unlike Greek tragedies where the hero brings shame and death upon himself, the slow-Katrina destruction of Acadiana is not clearly the fault of prideful Louisianans over-stretching their limits and pretending to godly levels of knowledge and power. Search as you might, you will find few people more humble and happy with simplicity and sustenance than the majority of New Orleanians, Cajuns, Creoles, Islenos, and African Americans who call southern Louisiana home.
Rather, the death of the wetlands is the result of corporate and state hubris, largely beyond the control of most Louisianans. Their state is being disappeared by a hydrocarbon hungry US economy and the major oil corporations that sit atop it. The gods, the cosmic forces of tides, river flows, winds and temperatures that is, are being defied by a small elite who seek the billions in profits at the expense of trillions of living beings, including millions of Louisianans who live in New Orleans, Houma, St. Bernard Parish, Terrebonne Parish, and down all the bayous.
Orders of Magnitude
The latest National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration projections show that the oil slick from the Macondo blow-out has already reached portions of Louisiana's marshlands around the "bird food," the delta tip where the Mississippi terminates in the Gulf. It's also pushing oil ashore to the north, across portions of Chandeleur Sound's marshes. One internal NOAA estimate (dated April 30) reads:
"Strong SE winds of 15-25 kts are expected to continue through Saturday night. These winds will continue to bring oil towards the shoreline. Oil was observed today within several miles of the Delta between Garden Bay and Pass A Loutre. This could be the leading edge of the tarballs concentrating in the Mississippi River convergence as well as oil from an additional (unrelated) source near platform Ocean Saratoga. Shoreline impacts are likely to begin Thursday evening with the persistent onshore winds."
Documents leaked from NOAA and other federal authorities indicate that the well may soon begin to flow without any restrictions whatsoever, a scenario in which millions of gallons of oil could shoot into the Gulf every day. What is already a major disaster could very well become the second largest oil spill in history. The first, the oil apocalypse unleashed by Saddam Hussein and the United States military during the Gulf War in 1991 resulting in a much as 400 million gallons, would be hard to rival from a single well head, no matter how much pressure it's under. But the second largest spill, from the Ixtoc I well is very much like the Macondo blow-out. Ixtoc I spewed between 450,000 and 500,000 tons of crude oil, also into the Gulf of Mexico between June 1979 and March 1980, the time frame it took for Pemex to cap the well. Ixtoc I released about 10,000 barrels each day, exactly the same amount the Macondo blow-out is probably releasing right now if the latest candid projections of this spill are true.
A NOAA document dated from April 28 reads that:
"[t]wo additional release points were found today in the tangled riser. If the riser pipe deteriorates further, the flow could become unchecked resulting in a release volume an order of magnitude higher than previously thought.
Shrimp might almost be cosmic, but being almost cosmic is by no means unique to them. Many shellfish, fish, birds, crustaceans, and other life forms live in similarly sublime tandems with the tides and winds of the Gulf Coast. And that's the final damning reality of this catastrophic oil leak. Crude spewing from the Deepwater Horizon's well into the Macondo prospect is now riding the same wind-driven waves as the shrimp. It's coming ashore into the wetlands with them. BP and federal authorities have begun using dispersant chemicals to break up the oil patches and sink it beneath the surface. This strategy, however, may prove unwise. It will sink the oil so that it rides the deep currents and affects submarine life.
A 2005 National Academies study on the use of oil dispersants observes that little is actually known about the trade-offs between sinking oil slicks with chemicals versus struggling to contain them on the surface. These are two very different strategies that lead to very different kinds of exposure for sea life. After all, "dispersing" oil is simply a euphemism for sinking it in particulate form where it remains dissolved in columns of water, eventually settling on the ocean floor. For the shrimp, an indicator species in the sense that countless coastal species depend upon them for food, dispersants are perhaps just as bad as letting the slick reach the shore. In the former case they may be killed in open waters by oil particles, or at the bottoms where they feed. In the latter case their marsh habitats may be choked with crude oil. There seems to be no good strategy, just bad and worse. According the National Academies:
"the relative importance of different routes of exposure, that is, the uptake and associated toxicity of oil in the dissolved phase versus dispersed oil droplets versus particulate-associated phase, is poorly understood and not explicitly considered in exposure models. Photoenhanced toxicity has the potential to increase the impact “footprint” of dispersed oil in aquatic organisms, but has only recently received consideration in the assessment of risk associated with spilled oil. One of the widely held assumptions is that chemical dispersion of oil will dramatically reduce the impact to seabirds and aquatic mammals. However, few studies have been conducted since 1989 to validate this assumption."
And that:
"Many studies have shown that oil, floating above subtidal reefs [on the surface], has no adverse effects on the coral; however, if allowed to reach the shoreline, the oil may have long-term impacts to a nearby mangrove system. In addition, oil may persist in the mangrove system creating a chronic source of oil pollution in the adjacent coral reefs. The trade-off would be to consider the use of dispersants. Application of dispersant would result in dispersion of the oil in the water column and so provide some degree of protection to the mangroves; however, the reef system would now have to endure the consequences of an increase in dispersed oil in the water column...."
Furthermore, little is known about the ecosystemic effects of precipitating oil into columns of water, as well as the toxicity of the dispersants themselves, especially when combined with oil.
Is Acadiana lost? In truth the cajuns and their kindred have been losing their idyllic wetlands for decades. Deepwater Horizon may just be the atë, if you will.
Darwin Bond-Graham is a sociologist who splits his time between New Orleans, Albuquerque, and Navarro, CA. He can be reached at: darwin@riseup.net
Gov Charlie Crist: please veto HB 1565 ... by gimleteye
Governor Charlie Crist should veto HB 1565: this isn't one of the bills that the mainstream press has bothered to pick up, but it reads like just the kind of trash the Florida legislature would slip in, to boost the fortunes of special interests who ran the economy right off the rails. Tea Party'ers: are you connecting? Contact Gov. Crist today: Charlie.Crist@MyFlorida.com or (850) 488-4441
From the Orlando Sentinel blog:
"Another agency that has a beef with the bill: the St. Johns River Water Management District, whose general counsel Kathryn Mennella, says it would impact every nook and cranny of state government, pitting the scientific analyses of state agencies against the lobbying fire-power of regulated industries.
Here’s a portion of her brief on the bill:
To subject, in effect, most new agency rules, or amendments, to legislative review and an affirmative ratification before the law can be implemented is unprecedented and significantly frustrates the efficient operation of government solely reserved to the executive branch by Florida’s Constitution. The rulemaking process itself is lengthy, but this additional ratification hurdle effectively stifles any promptness in implementing the law, or at worst can result in suppression of the law’s implementation and frustrate executive branch operation if the Legislature perpetually fails to act on the rules session after session.
In only the environmental context, the vast majority of resource protection rules would exceed the monetary threshold, and the provision would frustrate the enactment of rules concerning TMDLs, minimum flows and levels, MFL recovery or prevention strategies, water conservation, alternative water supplies, wetland protection, and even the newly enacted septic tank evaluations. Of course, the provision is all-inclusive and would subject rules for all State regulatory programs to legislative ratification. Moreover, the provision shifts rulemaking accountability from the procedural and evidentiary process of section 120.56, Florida Statutes, to legislative lobbying. Put simply, a regulated party would no longer have any need to contest a rule under the mandated processes of Chapter 120 where the scientific and technical expertise of the agency and regulated party is presented on numerous complex technical issues to a neutral administrative law judge. Rather, the regulated party would simply lobby the Legislature, outside the processes of Chapter 120, to eliminate the rule or to encourage the Legislature to never address the bill ratifying the rule.
The preparation of these statements in each instance where a person appears and suggests some “lower cost regulatory alternative”, no matter how frivolous that alternative may be, will substantially complicate and increase costs associated with adoption of any rule. Typically, preparation of such economic analysis will require the agency to contract and retain outside consultants at public expense. The automatic triggering of an expensive study process requiring procurement of outside consultants under these circumstances is unreasonable and excessive interference with the ability of executive branch agencies to carry out statutory mandates that are already in place."
From the Orlando Sentinel blog:
"Another agency that has a beef with the bill: the St. Johns River Water Management District, whose general counsel Kathryn Mennella, says it would impact every nook and cranny of state government, pitting the scientific analyses of state agencies against the lobbying fire-power of regulated industries.
Here’s a portion of her brief on the bill:
To subject, in effect, most new agency rules, or amendments, to legislative review and an affirmative ratification before the law can be implemented is unprecedented and significantly frustrates the efficient operation of government solely reserved to the executive branch by Florida’s Constitution. The rulemaking process itself is lengthy, but this additional ratification hurdle effectively stifles any promptness in implementing the law, or at worst can result in suppression of the law’s implementation and frustrate executive branch operation if the Legislature perpetually fails to act on the rules session after session.
In only the environmental context, the vast majority of resource protection rules would exceed the monetary threshold, and the provision would frustrate the enactment of rules concerning TMDLs, minimum flows and levels, MFL recovery or prevention strategies, water conservation, alternative water supplies, wetland protection, and even the newly enacted septic tank evaluations. Of course, the provision is all-inclusive and would subject rules for all State regulatory programs to legislative ratification. Moreover, the provision shifts rulemaking accountability from the procedural and evidentiary process of section 120.56, Florida Statutes, to legislative lobbying. Put simply, a regulated party would no longer have any need to contest a rule under the mandated processes of Chapter 120 where the scientific and technical expertise of the agency and regulated party is presented on numerous complex technical issues to a neutral administrative law judge. Rather, the regulated party would simply lobby the Legislature, outside the processes of Chapter 120, to eliminate the rule or to encourage the Legislature to never address the bill ratifying the rule.
The preparation of these statements in each instance where a person appears and suggests some “lower cost regulatory alternative”, no matter how frivolous that alternative may be, will substantially complicate and increase costs associated with adoption of any rule. Typically, preparation of such economic analysis will require the agency to contract and retain outside consultants at public expense. The automatic triggering of an expensive study process requiring procurement of outside consultants under these circumstances is unreasonable and excessive interference with the ability of executive branch agencies to carry out statutory mandates that are already in place."
Young Turks on Stop-o-Marco Rubio. By Geniusofdespair
Republican Credit Card Spending....The Florida Tobacco Company No Tax Deal....The Florida International University Job....Rubio's "Lobby Shop" With Hospital Contracts....
It is hard to believe that today, a Republican icon like Ronald Reagan, could not get elected by his party...too lefty.
It is hard to believe that today, a Republican icon like Ronald Reagan, could not get elected by his party...too lefty.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Pray, baby, pray ... by gimleteye
The Rev. Jack Kale of Gulf Breeze United Methodist Church leads a prayer circle along the shore in Pensacola Beach, Fla. (Photo by Bruce Grane/ Penasacola News Journal via AP) Accompanying story: Florida Panhandle residents report kerosene-like odor.
New Candidate in the District 8 "Katy" Seat and an Additional Mayor Candidate. By Geniusofdespir
Add number 8 to the list of candidates for Katy Sorenson's District 8 Commission seat: Daniel "Danny" Marmorstein. His treasurer is Anne Katz. He wrote "Rabbi" on his form and crossed it out so I would suppose this is a photo of him. This is an August 2009 report on the arrival of the "Hitler Torah" to his congregation.Also running for Miami-Dade Mayor is Lazaro R. Gonzalez. I believe that is the same guy who ran the unsuccessful mayor recall campaign a few months back.
Mike Thomas, Orlando Sentinel: blundering on the carpet with oil on his shoes ... by gimleteye
Orlando Sentinel columnist Mike Thomas wins the award for "worst timed editorials" of the century. Reading him witlessly bash offshore oil opponents and admit to his failure to do "due diligence" after the fact, reminds me I was pushed off the editorial page at the same newspaper for far less offense. (see note, below)
Here are a few excerpts from Thomas editorials on offshore oil drilling, including one published by the Sentinel exactly a year to the day a killer methane bubble flew up the Deepwater Horizon drill pipe, creating the towering inferno and "greenie" scenarios that Thomas dismissed jokingly:
"The image of oil villains despoiling our beaches is simplistic rhetoric aimed at simple minds. It is fodder for political grandstanding and greenie fundraising. Drilling foes don’t have any recent pictures of oily birds to make their case, so they throw out worst-case scenarios that are about as likely as an oil bit goosing Godzilla out of the depths."
Mike, here's a picture of that bird.
The April 23, 2009 editorial was titled, "Could Gulf Coast oil wells drill vision into us?" Here's more:
"Some places, like Alaska's Bristol Bay, are too precious, too unique and too valuable to allow drilling except in a national energy crisis. The deep waters off the Gulf of Mexico hardly fall into this category. It's nothing but an undersea desert out there. But you'd hardly know it listening to the worn-out, hysterical screeching about oil-stained shores destroying the environment and the economy."
Mike, here's a dead sea turtle. (From Newsweek, it's really dead.)
"Ranked in order of environmental threats, drilling in the Gulf ranks far below freighters emptying their bilge pumps. Yet every day in Florida, some editorial writer, columnist or greenie gets out of bed, turns down the air conditioning, cooks breakfast, drives to work and lashes out at drilling. It's time for members of the congressional delegation to stop pandering to eco-nonsense and cash in on the opportunity that now presents itself."
Pandering. Is that what Mike Thomas was doing on May 1st, when he went back and seemed to eat crow with readers, admitting that he had not done due diligence?
"... The only shameful ploy I see in this drilling debate is opponents using outdated scare stories about oil-coated shorelines destroying our “pristine” beaches. The last offshore blowout of an American well happened 40 years ago off the Santa Barbara coast in California. Ever since, the industry has vastly improved its technology and safety record. Last year, the Santa Barbara Board of Supervisors actually voted in support of oil drilling. Some people move on."
This photo was taken a year to the day Mike Thomas' April 23 column appeared in the Orlando Sentinel. Although the Deepwater Horizon sunk, taking eleven lives with it, Thomas' columns still stand.
What is interesting about Thomas' May 1 column is that he fast-backwards to his April 1 column, but doesn't touch on the year earlier, "Drill, baby, drill". I don't disagree with Thomas' on big picture stuff. For poo-poo'ing environmentalists who have argued the precautionary principle for decades, there is no criticism that is too off track. Click 'read more', for the Thomas editorials mentioned above.
(Note: For three years I wrote regular opinion pieces for the Orlando Sentinel as a special contributor. My opinions on politics and the environment engaged readers and worried editors enough that when criticism of them, for publishing me, grew too heavy, they cut me loose. (The archive of opinion pieces is available at: alanfarago.wordpress,com) I started co-blogging Eyeonmiami around the same time. Today, my op-eds are regularly published at Counterpunch.)
Mike Thomas: Drill, baby, drill!
April 23, 2009
Orlando Sentinel
The American oil cartel is using the state’s budget crisis to slip through a last-minute law opening up Florida’s coast to drilling.
For every steel proboscis the kings of crude poke into a fossil-fuel depository, we would get millions of dollars in royalties, which then would be used to buy and preserve land under Forever Florida.
It’s a clever ploy by future House Speaker Dean Cannon to link our most cherished environmental program with our biggest environmental boogeyman.
The St. Petersburg Times calls it a “shameful ploy.”
I call it a golden opportunity to pursue good public policy.
The only shameful ploy I see in this drilling debate is opponents using outdated scare stories about oil-coated shorelines destroying our “pristine” beaches.
The last offshore blowout of an American well happened 40 years ago off the Santa Barbara coast in California.
Ever since, the industry has vastly improved its technology and safety record. Last year, the Santa Barbara Board of Supervisors actually voted in support of oil drilling.
Some people move on.
The reason is simple. Another accident would devastate the oil companies. There would be the immediate costs of cleanup, economic damages, lawsuits and fines. Then there would be the long-term political consequences of being blocked from future drilling.
The image of oil villains despoiling our beaches is simplistic rhetoric aimed at simple minds. It is fodder for political grandstanding and greenie fundraising.
Drilling foes don’t have any recent pictures of oily birds to make their case, so they throw out worst-case scenarios that are about as likely as an oil bit goosing Godzilla out of the depths.
Not that Miami couldn’t use a good stomping.
The drilling ban always has been a political luxury. We could afford it when gasoline and natural gas were relatively plentiful and cheap. The only reason to drill here, foes argued, was to increase oil-company profits.
Then came the summer of 2008, when gas hit $4 a gallon and there was talk of worsening worldwide shortages caused by demand from China and developing countries.
Florida’s protected status came under the gun. Even Gov. Charlie Crist backed off his longtime opposition to drilling.
Then prices collapsed, as did the motivation for seeking out new supplies.
This would be a wonderful thing if the respite came from vast new discoveries or some breakthrough in hydrogen power. But it came from collapsing demand caused by a global recession.
When economies pick up, so will energy use. Demand will rise, and prices will skyrocket once again.
And we will be back right where we started.
We lurch from energy crisis to energy crisis because decisions are made based on the here-and-now instead of the future.
Critics say this law won’t provide any immediate salve for the Florida budget.
This is true. We probably wouldn’t see any oil or gas or royalties until well into the next decade.
By then, gas could well be rationed at $20 a gallon.
We could slough off such scenarios if we weren’t mopping up after our second oil war, confronting a nuclear-armed Iran, drone-bombing al-Qaeda in Pakistan, facing 200 million SUVs in China and kowtowing to a Saudi royal family that makes Castro look like a Cub Scout.
The oil off our shores won’t by itself solve the above, and it won’t bring down prices. It simply will be one of many small steps we must make on the journey to a future free from burning dead dinosaurs.
The environmental agenda is to eliminate access to oil in hopes we can pull off some technological Hail Mary pass to eliminate the need for it. That day remains decades away. So all they are doing is laying the groundwork for the next energy crisis.
Hybrids are nice. But they still burn gas.
Perhaps even more important than the oil off Florida’s shore are massive reserves of natural gas. The nation, particularly Florida, has grown increasingly addicted to this energy source to fuel power plants. And like oil, most of the world’s reserves are found in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia.
A rational energy policy would direct us toward conservation, insulation, renewable energy, smaller cars and more mass transit.
It also would recognize the continuing need for fossil fuels during the transition away from it.
Conserve — and drill? We must do both
April 01, 2010|By Mike Thomas, COMMENTARY
For decades we have had an energy policy based on no.
From the environmentalists, we got no to drilling, no to nuclear plants and no to coal.
From conservatives we got no to conservation and no to increased mileage standards.
The policy of no is taking us in the direction of constant shortages, brownouts, huge price increases and more dead troops in the Middle East.
The policy of no threatens not only our economic development but our national security.
And now, at least, we have a president with the common sense to begin saying yes to everything. We need drilling, we need nukes, we need energy-efficient lifestyles, we need cars that can go from Orlando to Daytona on a gallon of gas.
In unveiling the drilling portion of his national energy plan, Barack Obama proves once again he is more pragmatist than socialist.
Long ago, Jimmy Carter declared that pursuing oil independence was the moral equivalent of waging a war. At last we have a president who seems to be pursuing it.
As part of his energy policy announced Wednesday, Obama would allow drilling within 125 miles of Florida's west coast, where the rigs would be far, far from view. Given the safety record of drilling in American waters, this is about the most benign way possible to extract fossil fuels.
It sure beats blowing the tops off mountains in West Virginia to get coal, or poisoning aquifers out west from the increased use of a natural-gas-drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing.
Obama's energy team understands all this. It is why sensitive areas in the Arctic either were put off limits or were required to undergo more study before drilling is allowed.
Some places, like Alaska's Bristol Bay, are too precious, too unique and too valuable to allow drilling except in a national energy crisis.
The deep waters off the Gulf of Mexico hardly fall into this category. It's nothing but an undersea desert out there.
But you'd hardly know it listening to the worn-out, hysterical screeching about oil-stained shores destroying the environment and the economy.
Please. Florida's major beaches now consist of dredged-up offshore silt piled up in front of condos and hotels.
Florida's beaches are as phony as the opposition to drilling.
We have dumped so many pollutants into the Gulf we have turned it into a red-tide cesspool. On top of that, we are wiping out the fish stocks.
Ranked in order of environmental threats, drilling in the Gulf ranks far below freighters emptying their bilge pumps.
Yet every day in Florida, some editorial writer, columnist or greenie gets out of bed, turns down the air conditioning, cooks breakfast, drives to work and lashes out at drilling.
It's time for members of the congressional delegation to stop pandering to eco-nonsense and cash in on the opportunity that now presents itself.
Last year, there were proposals in Congress to bring drilling rigs within 45 miles of the west coast. They could come closer in the Panhandle to tap into a massive natural-gas deposit south of Pensacola. To entice Florida into taking the deal, one idea was to give the state 37.5 percent of royalty fees paid to the federal government.
Over time, this could amount to billions of dollars.
We need to revive this deal. There is no difference between drilling 45 miles offshore and 125 miles offshore.
And just to be clear, this will not end our dependence on foreign oil. We can't drill our way out of this mess because we don't have the reserves. Drilling will not bring down prices. The pro-drilling forces who promise such things are lying.
But as Obama says, we can tap into our own energy sources as a bridge to the future. A gas field that meets only a fraction of our needs today will meet a much bigger fraction in 10 years when we are more efficient.
Drill, baby, drill.
Conserve, baby, conserve.
COMMENTARY
May 2, 2010
There is nothing like the taste of crow deep-fried in a barrel of light, sweet crude.
With a side of poached tar balls.
It has been served up daily in my e-mail:
Dear Mike: Remind me one more time why offshore drilling is responsible and necessary? Your brain is diminishing more quickly than your carbon footprint.
Dear Mike: The first thing I thought of when I saw pictures of the oil slick were your columns swearing these drilling platforms were harmless and could be used for sunbathing within a dingy hop from St. Pete Beach.
Here is what I said only one month ago about drilling off Florida's coast: "There is no difference between drilling 45 miles offshore and 125 miles offshore. Given the safety record of drilling in American waters, this is about the most benign way possible to extract fossil fuels."
Not if you're a Louisiana pelican, it seems.
For someone who covered the shuttle Challenger explosion, I should have known better. I bashed NASA for its negligence, then fell into the same mindset on offshore drilling.
The space and oil disasters share many similarities. The technology behind them had not failed in the past, creating a complacency that they would not fail in the future despite the harshest operating environments possible. With the shuttle it was space; with drilling it was ocean depths up to 5,000 feet and holes drilled another 20,000 feet. The heat and pressure are tremendous.
Both endeavors require an army of people do their jobs correctly and that thousands of components function properly. Margins for error are miniscule. The smallest of breaches can lead to catastrophic failure in a fraction of a second.
It is impossible to eliminate such risk, just manage it with training, oversight, engineering and redundant safety systems.
NASA believed it had the risks of space flight so well managed, a crew escape plan was not necessary.
The oil companies believed they had the risks of drilling so well managed, a fast-response blowout plan was not necessary.
Now there is a plan to lower a dome over the leak and funnel the oil up to a tanker. But it has never been tested at extreme depths. A plan to bring in another rig and drill a second hole to plug this one will take months.
Given the increased amount of deep-water drilling, the natural questions are:
Why haven't they tested a dome at depths to see if it would work? Why isn't a dome ready to go?
And why isn't there a backup drilling rig stationed in the Gulf, ready for immediate deployment?
I know the answers. The drilling industry considered the blowout risk so low that it did not justify the cost of adequate preparation.
And I fell for it, based on the industry's record. I didn't do my due diligence and ask, "What if?"
Chew. Chew.
Here are a few excerpts from Thomas editorials on offshore oil drilling, including one published by the Sentinel exactly a year to the day a killer methane bubble flew up the Deepwater Horizon drill pipe, creating the towering inferno and "greenie" scenarios that Thomas dismissed jokingly:
"The image of oil villains despoiling our beaches is simplistic rhetoric aimed at simple minds. It is fodder for political grandstanding and greenie fundraising. Drilling foes don’t have any recent pictures of oily birds to make their case, so they throw out worst-case scenarios that are about as likely as an oil bit goosing Godzilla out of the depths."
Mike, here's a picture of that bird.
The April 23, 2009 editorial was titled, "Could Gulf Coast oil wells drill vision into us?" Here's more:
"Some places, like Alaska's Bristol Bay, are too precious, too unique and too valuable to allow drilling except in a national energy crisis. The deep waters off the Gulf of Mexico hardly fall into this category. It's nothing but an undersea desert out there. But you'd hardly know it listening to the worn-out, hysterical screeching about oil-stained shores destroying the environment and the economy."
Mike, here's a dead sea turtle. (From Newsweek, it's really dead.)
"Ranked in order of environmental threats, drilling in the Gulf ranks far below freighters emptying their bilge pumps. Yet every day in Florida, some editorial writer, columnist or greenie gets out of bed, turns down the air conditioning, cooks breakfast, drives to work and lashes out at drilling. It's time for members of the congressional delegation to stop pandering to eco-nonsense and cash in on the opportunity that now presents itself."
Pandering. Is that what Mike Thomas was doing on May 1st, when he went back and seemed to eat crow with readers, admitting that he had not done due diligence?
"... The only shameful ploy I see in this drilling debate is opponents using outdated scare stories about oil-coated shorelines destroying our “pristine” beaches. The last offshore blowout of an American well happened 40 years ago off the Santa Barbara coast in California. Ever since, the industry has vastly improved its technology and safety record. Last year, the Santa Barbara Board of Supervisors actually voted in support of oil drilling. Some people move on."
This photo was taken a year to the day Mike Thomas' April 23 column appeared in the Orlando Sentinel. Although the Deepwater Horizon sunk, taking eleven lives with it, Thomas' columns still stand.
What is interesting about Thomas' May 1 column is that he fast-backwards to his April 1 column, but doesn't touch on the year earlier, "Drill, baby, drill". I don't disagree with Thomas' on big picture stuff. For poo-poo'ing environmentalists who have argued the precautionary principle for decades, there is no criticism that is too off track. Click 'read more', for the Thomas editorials mentioned above.
(Note: For three years I wrote regular opinion pieces for the Orlando Sentinel as a special contributor. My opinions on politics and the environment engaged readers and worried editors enough that when criticism of them, for publishing me, grew too heavy, they cut me loose. (The archive of opinion pieces is available at: alanfarago.wordpress,com) I started co-blogging Eyeonmiami around the same time. Today, my op-eds are regularly published at Counterpunch.)
Mike Thomas: Drill, baby, drill!
April 23, 2009
Orlando Sentinel
The American oil cartel is using the state’s budget crisis to slip through a last-minute law opening up Florida’s coast to drilling.
For every steel proboscis the kings of crude poke into a fossil-fuel depository, we would get millions of dollars in royalties, which then would be used to buy and preserve land under Forever Florida.
It’s a clever ploy by future House Speaker Dean Cannon to link our most cherished environmental program with our biggest environmental boogeyman.
The St. Petersburg Times calls it a “shameful ploy.”
I call it a golden opportunity to pursue good public policy.
The only shameful ploy I see in this drilling debate is opponents using outdated scare stories about oil-coated shorelines destroying our “pristine” beaches.
The last offshore blowout of an American well happened 40 years ago off the Santa Barbara coast in California.
Ever since, the industry has vastly improved its technology and safety record. Last year, the Santa Barbara Board of Supervisors actually voted in support of oil drilling.
Some people move on.
The reason is simple. Another accident would devastate the oil companies. There would be the immediate costs of cleanup, economic damages, lawsuits and fines. Then there would be the long-term political consequences of being blocked from future drilling.
The image of oil villains despoiling our beaches is simplistic rhetoric aimed at simple minds. It is fodder for political grandstanding and greenie fundraising.
Drilling foes don’t have any recent pictures of oily birds to make their case, so they throw out worst-case scenarios that are about as likely as an oil bit goosing Godzilla out of the depths.
Not that Miami couldn’t use a good stomping.
The drilling ban always has been a political luxury. We could afford it when gasoline and natural gas were relatively plentiful and cheap. The only reason to drill here, foes argued, was to increase oil-company profits.
Then came the summer of 2008, when gas hit $4 a gallon and there was talk of worsening worldwide shortages caused by demand from China and developing countries.
Florida’s protected status came under the gun. Even Gov. Charlie Crist backed off his longtime opposition to drilling.
Then prices collapsed, as did the motivation for seeking out new supplies.
This would be a wonderful thing if the respite came from vast new discoveries or some breakthrough in hydrogen power. But it came from collapsing demand caused by a global recession.
When economies pick up, so will energy use. Demand will rise, and prices will skyrocket once again.
And we will be back right where we started.
We lurch from energy crisis to energy crisis because decisions are made based on the here-and-now instead of the future.
Critics say this law won’t provide any immediate salve for the Florida budget.
This is true. We probably wouldn’t see any oil or gas or royalties until well into the next decade.
By then, gas could well be rationed at $20 a gallon.
We could slough off such scenarios if we weren’t mopping up after our second oil war, confronting a nuclear-armed Iran, drone-bombing al-Qaeda in Pakistan, facing 200 million SUVs in China and kowtowing to a Saudi royal family that makes Castro look like a Cub Scout.
The oil off our shores won’t by itself solve the above, and it won’t bring down prices. It simply will be one of many small steps we must make on the journey to a future free from burning dead dinosaurs.
The environmental agenda is to eliminate access to oil in hopes we can pull off some technological Hail Mary pass to eliminate the need for it. That day remains decades away. So all they are doing is laying the groundwork for the next energy crisis.
Hybrids are nice. But they still burn gas.
Perhaps even more important than the oil off Florida’s shore are massive reserves of natural gas. The nation, particularly Florida, has grown increasingly addicted to this energy source to fuel power plants. And like oil, most of the world’s reserves are found in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia.
A rational energy policy would direct us toward conservation, insulation, renewable energy, smaller cars and more mass transit.
It also would recognize the continuing need for fossil fuels during the transition away from it.
Conserve — and drill? We must do both
April 01, 2010|By Mike Thomas, COMMENTARY
For decades we have had an energy policy based on no.
From the environmentalists, we got no to drilling, no to nuclear plants and no to coal.
From conservatives we got no to conservation and no to increased mileage standards.
The policy of no is taking us in the direction of constant shortages, brownouts, huge price increases and more dead troops in the Middle East.
The policy of no threatens not only our economic development but our national security.
And now, at least, we have a president with the common sense to begin saying yes to everything. We need drilling, we need nukes, we need energy-efficient lifestyles, we need cars that can go from Orlando to Daytona on a gallon of gas.
In unveiling the drilling portion of his national energy plan, Barack Obama proves once again he is more pragmatist than socialist.
Long ago, Jimmy Carter declared that pursuing oil independence was the moral equivalent of waging a war. At last we have a president who seems to be pursuing it.
As part of his energy policy announced Wednesday, Obama would allow drilling within 125 miles of Florida's west coast, where the rigs would be far, far from view. Given the safety record of drilling in American waters, this is about the most benign way possible to extract fossil fuels.
It sure beats blowing the tops off mountains in West Virginia to get coal, or poisoning aquifers out west from the increased use of a natural-gas-drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing.
Obama's energy team understands all this. It is why sensitive areas in the Arctic either were put off limits or were required to undergo more study before drilling is allowed.
Some places, like Alaska's Bristol Bay, are too precious, too unique and too valuable to allow drilling except in a national energy crisis.
The deep waters off the Gulf of Mexico hardly fall into this category. It's nothing but an undersea desert out there.
But you'd hardly know it listening to the worn-out, hysterical screeching about oil-stained shores destroying the environment and the economy.
Please. Florida's major beaches now consist of dredged-up offshore silt piled up in front of condos and hotels.
Florida's beaches are as phony as the opposition to drilling.
We have dumped so many pollutants into the Gulf we have turned it into a red-tide cesspool. On top of that, we are wiping out the fish stocks.
Ranked in order of environmental threats, drilling in the Gulf ranks far below freighters emptying their bilge pumps.
Yet every day in Florida, some editorial writer, columnist or greenie gets out of bed, turns down the air conditioning, cooks breakfast, drives to work and lashes out at drilling.
It's time for members of the congressional delegation to stop pandering to eco-nonsense and cash in on the opportunity that now presents itself.
Last year, there were proposals in Congress to bring drilling rigs within 45 miles of the west coast. They could come closer in the Panhandle to tap into a massive natural-gas deposit south of Pensacola. To entice Florida into taking the deal, one idea was to give the state 37.5 percent of royalty fees paid to the federal government.
Over time, this could amount to billions of dollars.
We need to revive this deal. There is no difference between drilling 45 miles offshore and 125 miles offshore.
And just to be clear, this will not end our dependence on foreign oil. We can't drill our way out of this mess because we don't have the reserves. Drilling will not bring down prices. The pro-drilling forces who promise such things are lying.
But as Obama says, we can tap into our own energy sources as a bridge to the future. A gas field that meets only a fraction of our needs today will meet a much bigger fraction in 10 years when we are more efficient.
Drill, baby, drill.
Conserve, baby, conserve.
COMMENTARY
May 2, 2010
There is nothing like the taste of crow deep-fried in a barrel of light, sweet crude.
With a side of poached tar balls.
It has been served up daily in my e-mail:
Dear Mike: Remind me one more time why offshore drilling is responsible and necessary? Your brain is diminishing more quickly than your carbon footprint.
Dear Mike: The first thing I thought of when I saw pictures of the oil slick were your columns swearing these drilling platforms were harmless and could be used for sunbathing within a dingy hop from St. Pete Beach.
Here is what I said only one month ago about drilling off Florida's coast: "There is no difference between drilling 45 miles offshore and 125 miles offshore. Given the safety record of drilling in American waters, this is about the most benign way possible to extract fossil fuels."
Not if you're a Louisiana pelican, it seems.
For someone who covered the shuttle Challenger explosion, I should have known better. I bashed NASA for its negligence, then fell into the same mindset on offshore drilling.
The space and oil disasters share many similarities. The technology behind them had not failed in the past, creating a complacency that they would not fail in the future despite the harshest operating environments possible. With the shuttle it was space; with drilling it was ocean depths up to 5,000 feet and holes drilled another 20,000 feet. The heat and pressure are tremendous.
Both endeavors require an army of people do their jobs correctly and that thousands of components function properly. Margins for error are miniscule. The smallest of breaches can lead to catastrophic failure in a fraction of a second.
It is impossible to eliminate such risk, just manage it with training, oversight, engineering and redundant safety systems.
NASA believed it had the risks of space flight so well managed, a crew escape plan was not necessary.
The oil companies believed they had the risks of drilling so well managed, a fast-response blowout plan was not necessary.
Now there is a plan to lower a dome over the leak and funnel the oil up to a tanker. But it has never been tested at extreme depths. A plan to bring in another rig and drill a second hole to plug this one will take months.
Given the increased amount of deep-water drilling, the natural questions are:
Why haven't they tested a dome at depths to see if it would work? Why isn't a dome ready to go?
And why isn't there a backup drilling rig stationed in the Gulf, ready for immediate deployment?
I know the answers. The drilling industry considered the blowout risk so low that it did not justify the cost of adequate preparation.
And I fell for it, based on the industry's record. I didn't do my due diligence and ask, "What if?"
Chew. Chew.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Homeward bound. By Geniusofdespair
Leaving the land of good pizza and bagels for Miami. What a food vacation I have been on, a whirlwind of fine meals. I am at the airport and I am hungry again. Back to real life and steamy weather in a few hours. No one is talking about oil spills here. Oh, almost forgot - I read USA Today sometimes when I am away, their Editorial today said that "ultrasound mandates in abortions cross a line". That should tell you how bad it is. Do you think the Florida legislature is out of touch?
Deepwater Horizon: "managing expectations" of oil spill volume ... by gimleteye
The blog, Skytruth, is focusing on an area of inquiry that is escaping the mainstream media attention for predictable reasons. How much oil is being spewed out of the miles deep hole, one mile under the Gulf of Mexico? Skytruth calculates the rate of spill is five times what BP is reporting; 26,500 and not 5,000 barrels per day. That puts the total disaster at 21 million gallons so far; which would be twice the size of the Exxon Valdez in 1989 in scarcely twenty days.
4/22 - Deepwater Horizon rig sinks; Coast Guard estimates "up to" 8,000 barrels per day (bpd) is leaking - source
4/23 - Coast Guard reports no leaking at all from the damaged well - source
4/24 - Coast Guard reports well is leaking, estimates 1,000 bpd - source
4/25 - BP repeats 1,000 bpd estimate - source
4/27 - 1,000 bpd still the official Coast Guard and BP estimate - source
4/27 - SkyTruth and Dr. Ian MacDonald publish first estimate that spill rate is 20,000 bpd - source
4/28 - NOAA weighs in and raises the official estimate to 5,000 bpd based on aerial surveys "and other factors"; BP disputes this higher estimate - source
4/29 - Coast Guard and NOAA repeat their estimate of 5,000 bpd - source
4/29 - BP's Chief Operating Officer admits new estimate of 5,000 bpd may be correct; "He said there was no way to measure the flow at the seabed and estimates have to come from how much oil makes it to the surface" - source
5/1 - SkyTruth and Dr. Ian MacDonald publish revised estimate of at least 26,500 bpd - source
5/1 - Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen "acknowledged there was no way really to know the extent of the leak" - source - and stated that "Any exact estimate is probably impossible at this time" - source
5/1 - Coast Guard and NOAA cease estimating the rate of the spill.
4/22 - Deepwater Horizon rig sinks; Coast Guard estimates "up to" 8,000 barrels per day (bpd) is leaking - source
4/23 - Coast Guard reports no leaking at all from the damaged well - source
4/24 - Coast Guard reports well is leaking, estimates 1,000 bpd - source
4/25 - BP repeats 1,000 bpd estimate - source
4/27 - 1,000 bpd still the official Coast Guard and BP estimate - source
4/27 - SkyTruth and Dr. Ian MacDonald publish first estimate that spill rate is 20,000 bpd - source
4/28 - NOAA weighs in and raises the official estimate to 5,000 bpd based on aerial surveys "and other factors"; BP disputes this higher estimate - source
4/29 - Coast Guard and NOAA repeat their estimate of 5,000 bpd - source
4/29 - BP's Chief Operating Officer admits new estimate of 5,000 bpd may be correct; "He said there was no way to measure the flow at the seabed and estimates have to come from how much oil makes it to the surface" - source
5/1 - SkyTruth and Dr. Ian MacDonald publish revised estimate of at least 26,500 bpd - source
5/1 - Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen "acknowledged there was no way really to know the extent of the leak" - source - and stated that "Any exact estimate is probably impossible at this time" - source
5/1 - Coast Guard and NOAA cease estimating the rate of the spill.
Commentary: Like Gulf of Mexico oil spill, lobbyists' pretty lies spread
By Julie Hauserman, Special to the Times
In Print: Sunday, May 9, 2010 ... The butterflies are so fragile. I can't stop thinking about them as I sit at the state Capitol and listen to the men in suits talk money, talk deals.(Please click, read more)
I never knew that the monarch's wings are made of clear webbing with orange and black dust. To put a tiny tag on the butterfly, I have to rub a little of the color off its wing. Then I stick on a minuscule tag and set the butterfly free. I watch it teeter off on the sea wind toward Central America.
It's a bit of an improbable experiment, tagging butterflies on the clean, bright Panhandle coast, hoping somebody across the Gulf of Mexico will find a beautiful dead insect, pick it up and call the number on the teensy tag to tell us where it has landed. But this is how we are trying to quantify this mysterious, awesome journey. Scientists tell us that only one in a thousand monarchs makes it from the wintering grounds in Mexico back to the Florida coast. They move across America to Canada in waves of birth and death. It is the seventh generation that makes it home to Canada. The butterflies have been making this flight for millions of years, over these turquoise waves and this old sandy shore. At the front of the room, the men in suits are making a hideous promise to Florida legislators. The money from their dirty oil rigs, they propose with hopeful faces, can go to conservation programs! They will actually be saving Florida! It's a slick bargain that makes the lawmakers look up from their
BlackBerrys.
Except. The Panhandle sand is famous, blindingly perfect, out of this world and in it. We are living the Florida postcard. Our kids toddle to the waves, make drip castles, chase gulls. Our grandparents sit under wide-brimmed hats, listening to the surf. Our dogs dig ghost crabs under the full moon. Why on earth would we gamble on wrecking a place where butterflies linger,
where crabs skitter and dolphins prowl? The Exxon Valdez spill happened 20 years ago, and still people can stick shovels in the shoreline and expose black oil. We dig down into Florida's sandy beach and find arrowheads and ancient shells, and we pull them up into the sunshine. Lucky us.
When I sit on the Panhandle beach, the sugar sand I sift with my toes is 5 million years old, quartz crystals sorted and carried by water and wind. It squeaks when I walk, squeaky clean. We never had sand like this where I came from, up north. I could hardly believe it the first time I saw it. It looked fake. Now I see these dunes in my dreams, in a love affair with this coast
that's two decades strong.
Once, when I was deeply troubled and walking the bone-white beach, I found a trail of small bird feathers, attractive with two white dots on black. Every time I picked one up, my thoughts gained clarity. At the end of the trail, I had a pocket full of feathers and a solution that moved my life forward. The beach is like that. It gives us time to breathe; it gives us the rare gift
of perspective in our scurrying lives. In our postcard, black skimmers with their gaudy orange clown beaks build a nest right on the beach. The nest is nothing more than a wispy scrape on the bare sugar surface, as delicate as a monarch's wing. I like to lie quietly in the early morning beach fog, flat against the sand, and enter the shorebird world, waves rocking, tiny legs moving in a blur, crabs fleeing for their lives.
We are so blessed. The oil lobbyists whisper pretty lies in the lawmakers' ears; hands over fat checks, they praise and bow to power. They are good at what they do, as relentless as sharks chasing prey in gray winter waves. I want to stand up here in this windowless Capitol room and tell them they can't buy our postcard, no matter how much money they flash in their fat
wallets. I want us all to circle like dolphins and run them off.
Julie Hauserman, a former capital bureau reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, is a freelance writer and activist based in Tallahassee. This piece is part of an anthology of essays on oil drilling in "Florida, UnspOILed: Writers Speak for Florida's Coast," to be published this summer and available at unspoiledbook.com.
In Print: Sunday, May 9, 2010 ... The butterflies are so fragile. I can't stop thinking about them as I sit at the state Capitol and listen to the men in suits talk money, talk deals.(Please click, read more)
I never knew that the monarch's wings are made of clear webbing with orange and black dust. To put a tiny tag on the butterfly, I have to rub a little of the color off its wing. Then I stick on a minuscule tag and set the butterfly free. I watch it teeter off on the sea wind toward Central America.
It's a bit of an improbable experiment, tagging butterflies on the clean, bright Panhandle coast, hoping somebody across the Gulf of Mexico will find a beautiful dead insect, pick it up and call the number on the teensy tag to tell us where it has landed. But this is how we are trying to quantify this mysterious, awesome journey. Scientists tell us that only one in a thousand monarchs makes it from the wintering grounds in Mexico back to the Florida coast. They move across America to Canada in waves of birth and death. It is the seventh generation that makes it home to Canada. The butterflies have been making this flight for millions of years, over these turquoise waves and this old sandy shore. At the front of the room, the men in suits are making a hideous promise to Florida legislators. The money from their dirty oil rigs, they propose with hopeful faces, can go to conservation programs! They will actually be saving Florida! It's a slick bargain that makes the lawmakers look up from their
BlackBerrys.
Except. The Panhandle sand is famous, blindingly perfect, out of this world and in it. We are living the Florida postcard. Our kids toddle to the waves, make drip castles, chase gulls. Our grandparents sit under wide-brimmed hats, listening to the surf. Our dogs dig ghost crabs under the full moon. Why on earth would we gamble on wrecking a place where butterflies linger,
where crabs skitter and dolphins prowl? The Exxon Valdez spill happened 20 years ago, and still people can stick shovels in the shoreline and expose black oil. We dig down into Florida's sandy beach and find arrowheads and ancient shells, and we pull them up into the sunshine. Lucky us.
When I sit on the Panhandle beach, the sugar sand I sift with my toes is 5 million years old, quartz crystals sorted and carried by water and wind. It squeaks when I walk, squeaky clean. We never had sand like this where I came from, up north. I could hardly believe it the first time I saw it. It looked fake. Now I see these dunes in my dreams, in a love affair with this coast
that's two decades strong.
Once, when I was deeply troubled and walking the bone-white beach, I found a trail of small bird feathers, attractive with two white dots on black. Every time I picked one up, my thoughts gained clarity. At the end of the trail, I had a pocket full of feathers and a solution that moved my life forward. The beach is like that. It gives us time to breathe; it gives us the rare gift
of perspective in our scurrying lives. In our postcard, black skimmers with their gaudy orange clown beaks build a nest right on the beach. The nest is nothing more than a wispy scrape on the bare sugar surface, as delicate as a monarch's wing. I like to lie quietly in the early morning beach fog, flat against the sand, and enter the shorebird world, waves rocking, tiny legs moving in a blur, crabs fleeing for their lives.
We are so blessed. The oil lobbyists whisper pretty lies in the lawmakers' ears; hands over fat checks, they praise and bow to power. They are good at what they do, as relentless as sharks chasing prey in gray winter waves. I want to stand up here in this windowless Capitol room and tell them they can't buy our postcard, no matter how much money they flash in their fat
wallets. I want us all to circle like dolphins and run them off.
Julie Hauserman, a former capital bureau reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, is a freelance writer and activist based in Tallahassee. This piece is part of an anthology of essays on oil drilling in "Florida, UnspOILed: Writers Speak for Florida's Coast," to be published this summer and available at unspoiledbook.com.
Sunday, May 09, 2010
Deepwater Horizon: "managing expectations" in the impact zone ... by gimleteye
Deepwater Horizon represents the first instant, large-scale defeat in the era of climate change hopelessness. Capitulations to come will bring far deeper misery and chaos; a real-time slaughter of the lambs. I'm not sure what to do with this despondent news, but I am not inclined to rousing speeches about national character and sacrifice. Not with so many thieves running loose.
Today's disaster arises from pursuit of oil under conditions of risk illuminated by common sense but overshadowed by politics and profit. Yes, we can drill under a mile of water, five miles or more into the earth, but should we? The surrender of logic in the modern age began when Americans rejected President Carter's appeal to address the moral weakness of the nation by breaking our dependency on oil. The Reagan revolution followed, spurred in no small part by corporations swinging right back in response. They brought the stamp of the Wise Use Movement to environmentalism, the Sagebrush Rebellion funded by energy corporations support by conservative think tanks, and caravans of protestors infiltrating Florida, funded by Big Sugar that tagged along under the banner of property rights. The Green Groups quickly calibrated to the new reality: of "win-win" solutions wherever they could be invented and funded. The surrender accelerated during the Bush terms in the White House when energy industries provided cover for politicians and lobbyists to hijack the operation of environmental regulatory agencies including the federal Minerals Management Service whose mission under Bush turned into a sex and drug fueled happy hour for which no one went to jail. No one ever says, "just say, no" when it comes to limiting profits by stopping the riskiest forms of technology.
“Filaments of the (Gulf) Loop Current are within tens of kilometers of the oil spill,” said Robert H. Weisberg, an oceanographer at the University of South Florida who has been modeling the movement of the spill. Once the current catches the spill, he said, “the speed of the current is such that it only takes a week before oil will be at entrance of the Florida straits and another week until it gets as far as Miami.… Whether the oil gets into the Florida Bay or the Everglades depends on what local winds are doing when oil is flowing past.” (LA Times, May 4, 2010) It is horrible to imagine an oil slick sloshing back and forth, in and out of Florida Bay. Environmentalists have worked for decades-- as volunteers and civic activists-- trying to turn agencies of state, federal and local governments to the tasks of moving more fresh water into the Bay, in the right formula of cleanliness, to give nature a chance to heal the injuries and chronic assaults of management regimes designed to protect suburbs from flooding and Big Sugar prerogative to pollute the Everglades. "The Everglades is a test. If we pass, we may get to keep the planet," said Joe Podgor, former director of Friends of the Everglades. The small grass roots group was founded by Marjory Stoneman Douglas who was given the Congressional Medal of Freedom by President Clinton at age 103 for a lifetime of dedication to the environment. Ms. Douglas, a year later, rejected the state's attempt to name a landmark 1994 act after her because she believed-- correctly-- that far from curing, it memorialized Big Sugar's pollution of the Everglades.
There is so much oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, that the idea of oil slicks drifting for months and months at the edges, seeping onto Florida's beaches, coastal mangroves, and into Florida Bay -- poisoning for decades into the future-- is sickening.
We don't need proof this will happen. It did happen. "For third-generation fisherman John Platt, the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill is a financial and psychological nightmare that won't end. Three years after the 11 million-gallon spill in Prince William Sound blackened 1,500 miles of Alaska coastline, the herring on which he and other Cordova fishermen heavily relied disappeared from the area. Platt and some others stuck around, fishing for salmon and hoping things would improve. The herring never returned to Cordova. Platt's income plummeted, severely straining his marriage and psyche. He dipped into his sons' college funds to support his family. "People's lives were ruined," Platt said. "There were damn good fishermen here in the Sound, and they just said, 'Screw it' and left, and tried to make a living elsewhere." As for Platt, who stayed: "I wasted 20 years of my life," he said. Platt and other people in the Alaskan village of about 2,500 people say they still are suffering economically and emotionally 21 years after the oil disaster. About 3,400 miles away, an oil leak that started last month in the Gulf of Mexico is threatening the Gulf Coast. "Here we go again," Platt said of the oil leak in the Gulf. "I feel real bad for the people who are going to potentially go through what we did here." (CNN, May 9, 2010)
We shouldn't be allowing deep water oil exploration. The reason you don't do it, is because there is no control in place to fix the results of disaster if it occurs. The same is true of a thousand environmental insults. The exploitation of Florida's underground aquifers by rock miners in Everglades wetlands. Billions of gallons per day of scarcely treated municipal wastewater injected, legally, through underground wells so that it "disappears", approved by the US EPA. There's the pesticide, "Roundup" by Monsanto, that is pushing a massive wave of new superbugs. “We’re back to where we were 20 years ago,” said a farmer to the New York Times. “It is the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,” said Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts." (Farmers Cope with Roundup-Resistant Weeds, May 3, 2010)
We don't learn these lessons because the benefits of technology caused a gaping breach between consumer expectations and logic favoring restrictions and meaningful prohibitions to protect people from harm we cause, ourselves. This is where Karl Rove put deranged optimism to words in an interview with journalist Ron Suskind (“Without a Doubt”, October 17, 2004, NY Times) ; “… that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
In light of Deepwater Horizon and repetitive failures of government to manage risk-- whether in finance, insurance or natural resources we depend on for civilization-- Americans must reassess what we believe in and not just as a matter of faith but judiciously in this life: what fair and just punishments should be meeted to outcomes and actors that wrecked the promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Today's disaster arises from pursuit of oil under conditions of risk illuminated by common sense but overshadowed by politics and profit. Yes, we can drill under a mile of water, five miles or more into the earth, but should we? The surrender of logic in the modern age began when Americans rejected President Carter's appeal to address the moral weakness of the nation by breaking our dependency on oil. The Reagan revolution followed, spurred in no small part by corporations swinging right back in response. They brought the stamp of the Wise Use Movement to environmentalism, the Sagebrush Rebellion funded by energy corporations support by conservative think tanks, and caravans of protestors infiltrating Florida, funded by Big Sugar that tagged along under the banner of property rights. The Green Groups quickly calibrated to the new reality: of "win-win" solutions wherever they could be invented and funded. The surrender accelerated during the Bush terms in the White House when energy industries provided cover for politicians and lobbyists to hijack the operation of environmental regulatory agencies including the federal Minerals Management Service whose mission under Bush turned into a sex and drug fueled happy hour for which no one went to jail. No one ever says, "just say, no" when it comes to limiting profits by stopping the riskiest forms of technology.
“Filaments of the (Gulf) Loop Current are within tens of kilometers of the oil spill,” said Robert H. Weisberg, an oceanographer at the University of South Florida who has been modeling the movement of the spill. Once the current catches the spill, he said, “the speed of the current is such that it only takes a week before oil will be at entrance of the Florida straits and another week until it gets as far as Miami.… Whether the oil gets into the Florida Bay or the Everglades depends on what local winds are doing when oil is flowing past.” (LA Times, May 4, 2010) It is horrible to imagine an oil slick sloshing back and forth, in and out of Florida Bay. Environmentalists have worked for decades-- as volunteers and civic activists-- trying to turn agencies of state, federal and local governments to the tasks of moving more fresh water into the Bay, in the right formula of cleanliness, to give nature a chance to heal the injuries and chronic assaults of management regimes designed to protect suburbs from flooding and Big Sugar prerogative to pollute the Everglades. "The Everglades is a test. If we pass, we may get to keep the planet," said Joe Podgor, former director of Friends of the Everglades. The small grass roots group was founded by Marjory Stoneman Douglas who was given the Congressional Medal of Freedom by President Clinton at age 103 for a lifetime of dedication to the environment. Ms. Douglas, a year later, rejected the state's attempt to name a landmark 1994 act after her because she believed-- correctly-- that far from curing, it memorialized Big Sugar's pollution of the Everglades.
There is so much oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, that the idea of oil slicks drifting for months and months at the edges, seeping onto Florida's beaches, coastal mangroves, and into Florida Bay -- poisoning for decades into the future-- is sickening.
We don't need proof this will happen. It did happen. "For third-generation fisherman John Platt, the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill is a financial and psychological nightmare that won't end. Three years after the 11 million-gallon spill in Prince William Sound blackened 1,500 miles of Alaska coastline, the herring on which he and other Cordova fishermen heavily relied disappeared from the area. Platt and some others stuck around, fishing for salmon and hoping things would improve. The herring never returned to Cordova. Platt's income plummeted, severely straining his marriage and psyche. He dipped into his sons' college funds to support his family. "People's lives were ruined," Platt said. "There were damn good fishermen here in the Sound, and they just said, 'Screw it' and left, and tried to make a living elsewhere." As for Platt, who stayed: "I wasted 20 years of my life," he said. Platt and other people in the Alaskan village of about 2,500 people say they still are suffering economically and emotionally 21 years after the oil disaster. About 3,400 miles away, an oil leak that started last month in the Gulf of Mexico is threatening the Gulf Coast. "Here we go again," Platt said of the oil leak in the Gulf. "I feel real bad for the people who are going to potentially go through what we did here." (CNN, May 9, 2010)
We shouldn't be allowing deep water oil exploration. The reason you don't do it, is because there is no control in place to fix the results of disaster if it occurs. The same is true of a thousand environmental insults. The exploitation of Florida's underground aquifers by rock miners in Everglades wetlands. Billions of gallons per day of scarcely treated municipal wastewater injected, legally, through underground wells so that it "disappears", approved by the US EPA. There's the pesticide, "Roundup" by Monsanto, that is pushing a massive wave of new superbugs. “We’re back to where we were 20 years ago,” said a farmer to the New York Times. “It is the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,” said Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts." (Farmers Cope with Roundup-Resistant Weeds, May 3, 2010)
We don't learn these lessons because the benefits of technology caused a gaping breach between consumer expectations and logic favoring restrictions and meaningful prohibitions to protect people from harm we cause, ourselves. This is where Karl Rove put deranged optimism to words in an interview with journalist Ron Suskind (“Without a Doubt”, October 17, 2004, NY Times) ; “… that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
In light of Deepwater Horizon and repetitive failures of government to manage risk-- whether in finance, insurance or natural resources we depend on for civilization-- Americans must reassess what we believe in and not just as a matter of faith but judiciously in this life: what fair and just punishments should be meeted to outcomes and actors that wrecked the promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Deepwater Horizon: government and industry are "managing expectations" ... by gimleteye
On network news tonite, I heard U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry say, "I must continue to manage expectations on this groundbreaking effort to address this challenge." Here's a better context for "managing expectations": CLICK THIS LINK. It is a website showing "How big is the Deepwater oil spill" using Google Earth overlay and your favorite city. Who is in favor of offshore oil drilling now? Just listen to this, from John Stewart and The Daily Show.
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