The Gulf oil spill is a visceral example—a sticky and black one—of how dysfunctional our national policy on oceans and shorelines really is. In granting energy companies leases to drill ever deeper in the Gulf of Mexico, the Department of the Interior seemed to give little thought to how a blown well might impact the region’s …
Politics
Military Veterans Against the Oil Spill
Didn’t get a chance to link to this earlier, but on the way back from New Orleans on Friday I wrote and posted a piece on the mainpage about a trip I took to see the oil spill with military veterans from Operation Free. It’s a new think tank/advocacy group that is making the oil dependency and climate change case on national security …
Cap and Trade Isn’t That Costly
Once you get past those who insist climate change is the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people and engage with global warming critics who actually have use of their rational faculties, the main point of debate tends to be the cost of trying to reduce carbon emissions. The conservative writer Jim Manzi over at the New …
The Oil Spill and the Perils of Losing Trust
Last week the Coast Guard sent out an announcement to the media: from now on there would be a 20-meter safety zone established around all protective shoreline boom, booming operations and general oil spill response operations taking place in southeast Louisiana. Any ship that comes with 20-meters of the boom could be liable for up to …
Why Paying Damage Claims for the Gulf Oil Spill Won’t Be Easy
It might take King Solomon to properly decide the hundreds of thousands of damage claims on the oil spill that will likely be filed before the crude is finally cleaned up. We don’t have King Solomon, but we might have the next best thing: Kenneth Feinberg, the Washington lawyer who ran the compensation fund for victims of 9/11. Feinberg …
Why Aren’t People Getting Angrier at the Gulf Oil Spill?
Over at his new blog on the New Republic, Jonathan Cohn—the TNR writer who covered health care like Darrelle Revis on a wide receiver—asks where the public outrage is on the Gulf oil spill:
Two months after the Deepwater Horizon rig first exploded, where are the marches on Washington? Where are the phone calls lighting up Capitol
…
Hope Seems to Dim for Cap and Trade
Other than maybe Jason in Friday the 13th, nothing has supposedly died and come back to life more often than climate legislation and carbon cap-and-trade. A year ago, thanks in part to fierce opposition from business interests led by the Chamber of Commerce, the cap-and-trade bill cosponsored by Henry Waxman and Edward Markey just barely …
White House Space Policy: Good News For Greens
NASA junkies continue to howl at the Obama administration’s plans for human space exploration, and with good reason: there’s just no there there. Space partisans won’t be any happier with a 14-pg. policy statement released by the White House yesterday. (You can read a summery here at whitehouse.gov and download a PDF of the report.) But …
Death (of an Agreement) on the Nile
Nine countries that border the Nile failed to reach agreement on Sunday on a deal to share the river for irrigation and hydro power projects—a troubling indication that water rights will become increasingly difficult to manage in the face of climate change.
In May, Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Kenya signed a new agreement …
Storm Seems Likely to Miss Spill—But Politics Won’t Stop Onshore
Bad news good news. The bad news is that the tropical depression that had been forming in the Caribbean has now officially become a tropical storm—named Alex—the first of what’s likely to be many in a rough season. The storm may even strengthen to become a minimal hurricane by the time it makes landfall. The good news is that it’s …
