Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

On July 16, 2008, Colorado’s Congressman Doug Lamborn declared that the United States had to allow more offshore drilling for oil. “We must lift the moratorium imposed by Congress on offshore drilling,” he said.

Last time I checked, Colorado didn’t have any offshore anything. I guess Representative Lamborn figured he didn’t have anything to lose, proposing that other states put their coasts in danger with the risky operation of offshore drilling for oil.

Now, for three weeks, the Gulf of Mexico has seen an oil spill raging after the oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded, killing eleven workers. So, what does Doug Lamborn have to say about offshore drilling now?

Funny thing – all of a sudden, Congressman Lamborn doesn’t have anything to say about offshore drilling any more. He’s gone completely quiet on the subject since the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon.

Postscript: Doug Lamborn is a Republican. So, what do the Colorado Democrats have to say in response to Lamborn’s craven silence?

Nothing. The Colorado Democrats aren’t even running a candidate against Lamborn this year. Thanks to their inaction, voters in Colorado’s 5th congressional district have the choice to vote for Doug Lamborn, or vote for nobody at all.

A story connected to the Transocean – BP offshore drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that bears paying attention to in the weeks to come: Corruption that has enabled lax regulation and slow response to the oil spill.

Consider the telling statement overheard by a grassroots reporter in Florida, before he was kicked out of the room. Florida Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Michael Sole to an executive from BP: “I’m going to take care of you.”

Just how does Secretary Sole intend to take care of BP? With extra rounds of hot chocolate at oil spill emergency response meetings?

The National Weather Service has issued the following advisory for the site of the Deepwater Horizon, the offshore oil drilling rig that exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico one week ago this evening:

SURFACE HIGH PRESSURE WILL QUICKLY TRACK ACROSS THE AREA WEDNESDAY
WHICH WILL SUPPRESS WINDS AND FLATTEN SEAS. AS THIS RIDGE
CONTINUES EASTWARD WEDNESDAY NIGHT, WINDS WILL THEN SHIFT BACK TO
THE SOUTHEAST. THIS HIGH WILL SETTLE IN THE WESTERN ATLANTIC
THROUGH THE WEEKEND. MEANWHILE, A SERIES OF SURFACE LOWS WILL
DEVELOP AND MOVE THROUGH THE SOUTHERN PLAINS. THE RESULTING WINDS
BETWEEN THESE 2 FEATURES, SPOT AREA, WILL BE STRONG PERSISTENT
SOUTHEAST WINDS OF AT LEAST 20KTS FROM THURSDAY NIGHT THROUGH
SATURDAY NIGHT. IN ADDITION, EXPECT SEAS TO BUILD TO A PEAK OF
8-11 FEET DURING THIS PERIOD. ALTHOUGH A FRONT IS EXPECTED TO
APPROACH THE COASTAL WATERS LATE THIS WEEKEND, AT THIS TIME IT
DOES NOT APPEAR THAT IT WILL PUSH THROUGH UNTIL POSSIBLY EARLY
TO MIDDLE OF NEXT WEEK. THUS, SOUTH WINDS WILL CONTINUE INTO
EARLY NEXT WEEK.

The practical upshot: Winds will be coming from the south starting tomorrow all the way through into next week, pushing the growing crude oil slick into Louisiana’s coastline. Two national wildlife refuges are directly in the path of the oil. Starting on Thursday, the seas will be too rough for an effective effort to contain the oil spill.

The effort to prevent landfall of this oil spill has failed.

What’s at stake:

As of 1:30 PM this afternoon, the oil spill was 21 miles from the Delta National Wildlife Refuge, 69 miles from the Breton National Wildlife Refuge, and 69 Miles from the Bon Secours National Wildlife Refuge. Also in the path of the growing oil spill are the Gulf Islands National Sea Shore, and the Fort Pickens State Park Aquatic Preserve.

NASA released this satellite photograph of the rapidly expanding oil slick coming from the site of the wrecked Deepwater Horizon. As you can see, when this photograph was taken, the oil slick was clearly larger than the city of New Orleans. I was astonished by that. Now, that’s small potatoes. The oil slick is at 28,600 square miles, larger than the state of West Virgina.

So far, all efforts by BP to stop oil from surging up from the wellhead and riser on the sea floor have failed, and the slick is getting closer to shore day by day, threatening fisheries, shrimping grounds, oyster beds, tourist beaches, and the mangroves that protect the delta from being washed away by hurricanes. The slick is now just 30 miles from shore and should hit the Breton National Wildlife Refuge and the Delta National Wildlife Refuge first.

The Obama Administration says that it will continue pushing ahead with its policy to expand offshore oil drilling, unchanged, despite this offshore drilling disaster. How is that different from the approach the Bush Administration took? Is that what we voted for in 2008?

Big oil companies, and their political lackeys in Congress, are always going on about how oil spills aren’t very common. But then, oops, reality comes along, as it did yesterday for the Contango Oil company, which had to shut down 6 oil wells when one of its pipelines started leaking petroleum into the Atchafalaya River down in Texas.

Never worry. It’s a rare thing. Really.

The big coal industry is busy putting a lot of advertisements on TV telling us how great clean coal is. Why, you’d think you could use it to wipe your kitchen countertops with, it’s so clean.

And then, reality intervenes, like an explosion… or as an actual explosion. In Turkey, 13 coal miners were killed this week when methane leaking into their coal mine exploded. Many other coal miners were sent to the hospital with severe injuries.

Is that coal that they brought out of the ground along with their blood clean?

Barack Obama angered many environmentalists this week when he promised to promote the coal industry fraud of clean coal. Why would he do such a thing, when there’s never been a single viable commercial use of supposedly clean coal technology, when the technology doesn’t even really eliminate most of the pollution and waste from the process of gaining energy from coal anyway?

Well, there’s a lot of money in that coal. One of the coal giants, Alliance Resource Partners, just announced record profits for 2009. What did they do with all that money? $12,500 of it went to the Central Executive Committee of the Kentucky Democratic Party.

And what did Kentucky’s representatives in Congress do this week? They joined together to reconstitute the Congressional Coal Caucus, which includes Nick Rahall, the Democratic Chair of the House Natural Resources Committee.

Coal dust is settling all over the Democratic Party these days.

Maybe you felt really sad when you saw Avatar: How could we humans attack those blue people… on that planet that doesn’t exist?

If you’re looking for something powerful, and blue, and real, take a look at some of the videos and photographs over at the Extreme Ice Survey. Deep blue ice from the bottom of glaciers is rising up and melting into our seas, and with some very powerful results, aesthetically and ecologically.

It’s a story about what we’re doing to our own planet, right now. The best part is that the story is actually all around you – in 3D.

The environmental consequences of out of control energy consumption are ballooning, you could say. That’s literally true in this short video, produced for viewers in Victoria, Australia.

Care to keep a few of those black balloons from floating up on your account?

One of the consequences of global warming is rising sea levels. There is no rational debate about whether sea levels are rising – this change has been measured worldwide.

At the end of last week, the EPA issued a new report on the likely implications of sea level rise. The report goes into a good amount of detail, making it a useful resource if you’re truly interested in the subject, but not a thrilling read if you’re only casually tracking the issue.

The report confirms that “Rising water levels are already an important factor in submerging low-lying lands, eroding beaches, converting wetlands to open water, and exacerbating coastal flooding.” In comparing the social and environmental costs of trying to preserve current shorelines and managing a retreat to higher ground, the report concludes that attempting to preserve current shorelines will have a lower social and environmental cost in the short run, but will have a higher cost in the long term.