Facing the People

Via Rumproast:

A photo gallery: When the cold and detached president met the angry people.

Big Winner of Gulf Catastrophe Should Not Be Ethanol

What could make the BP oil gusher/catastrophe worse? A bailout for the boondoggle ethanol industry.

Kevin Drum:

The BP oil spill is bad enough already. But I'm here to make it even worse. Here is Robert Bryce in Slate today:

The most disgusting aspect of the blowout in the Gulf of Mexico isn't the video images of oil-soaked birds or the incessant blather from pundits about what BP or the Obama administration should be doing to stem the flow of oil. Instead, it's the ugly spectacle of the corn-ethanol scammers doing all they can to capitalize on the disaster so that they can justify an expansion of the longest-running robbery of taxpayers in U.S. history.

....Why does the ethanol business need federal help? The answer is so disheartening that after five years of reporting on the corn-ethanol scam, I find it difficult to type, but here goes: The corn-ethanol industry needs to be bailed out by taxpayers because the industry was given too much in the way of subsidies and mandates. And now the only way to solve that problem is — what else? — more subsidies and mandates. The BP mess provides the industry with the opening it needs to win those subsidies from the federal government.

....The strongest indication that an ethanol bailout is imminent came last Friday when Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack (former governor of Iowa, the nation's biggest ethanol-producing state) said, "I'm very confident that we're going to see an increase in the blend rate." The "blend rate" refers to the federal rule that limits ethanol blends to no more than 10 percent for standard automobiles. Commonly known as "E10," the fuel contains 90 percent gasoline and 10 percent alcohol. The Obama administration bailout, which would come via approval from the EPA, will likely allow gasoline retailers to blend up to 15 percent ethanol into U.S. gasoline supplies.

Three years ago, responding to an increase in corn ethanol subsidies, I wrote: "Can anyone think of any other single policy that has as many simultaneous baneful effects? Are we complete morons?" The answer, apparently, is yes. Read Bryce's whole piece to get the entire grim story.

If a fraction of the tens of billions of tax dollars that have been wasted on ethanol over the past thirty years had been spent instead on genuine renewable energy, we wouldn't be drilling for oil today.

Ethanol can't replace oil; solar, wind and geothermal can.

Bigger Mess Than the Gulf is the Oil Industry Itself

At Jesus' General, Austin Cline makes the case for cleaning up not just the oil industry's mess in the Gulf, but the industry itself:

The understandable focus on cleaning up the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico must not distract us from the need to also clean up the oil industry itself. Indeed, we should get used to thinking that no matter how successful the efforts to clean up the Gulf of Mexico ultimately are, it won't matter much in the long term if we ignore the terrible mess of the oil industry.

It will be difficult for this to really sink in for most of us, though, because practically everything we see about the BP oil disaster tends to reinforce the perception that it's an isolated accident. When was the last time anyone in the mainstream news media did a report trying to connect aspects of this disaster to larger problems in the oil industry? How often do we instead just see a focus on the accident and BP alone? We must actively resist this narrow focus and push back against what is essentially pro-oil propaganda.

Instead, we must learn how to see the deeper connections which link individual disasters with broader problems. We must learn to see the patterns of abuse and negligence across the industry — and we must communicate this to others so that they can see the same. This is critical because no fundamental changes will occur unless there is popular demand for it. That's why industry and even government are actively depicting the problems as existing merely with one oil platform or, at most, with BP alone.

The less of the spilled oil that sticks to the industry as a whole, the more likely the oil industry will be able to preserve the status quo — and it is precisely the status quo which we need to overturn.

SNIP

But we also need to change the background culture. We currently live in a society where no one seems to find it strange that shareholders' capital investment might receive stronger legal protections than employees' health and safety, nearby residents' lives and livelihoods, or the environment upon which we all depend. We need a culture where it's inconceivable that the law would require corporations to maximize profits, but not maximize employees' well-being or minimize the costs paid by others for a corporation's activities.

Read the whole thing.

BP = Bad Perpetrator

If you've been passing up Exxon/Mobil gas stations the last few years in favor of self-proclaimed "green" corporation British Petroleum, last week's oil rig explosion proves that BP is no better than its "competitors."

Laura Flanders in The Nation explains:

It's too bad for British Petroleum. Or is it? For days after its Transocean operated rig exploded and sank with eleven of its workers in the Gulf of Mexico, the company said it had the oil contained.



Not exactly. The rig's been gushing 1,000 barrels of oil a day since Saturday.

Costs for cleanup are likely to be huge. The U.S. Coast Guard's already batting about a figure of $100 million. You'd think that'd be the last we'd hear of the Obama administration's plan for for offshore drilling.

After all, compare and contrast; a sea of sludge, edging towards New Orleans vs. reaping power from Ocean Breezes -- the headline on a story about Cape Wind, the country's first offshore turbine -- also just approved by the White House.



You'd think there'd be no contest. But then there's this -- even as it belched, BP on Tuesday reported a more than doubling of its first-quarter profit: Profits rose from $2.56 billion to $6.08 billion while its alternative energy division saw losses.

A few hundred milllon out of $6.08 biliion. The price of all that Cajun coastline just may not be high enough to make a dent.

And that's why it's not a level playing field. We don't need even-steven energy policy. We need aggressive government affirmative action for alternatives.

The death throes of the fossil fuel industry are going to be cataclysmic unless we have a large, strong, profitable renewable energy industry in place to protect us.