A presidential speech from the Oval Office such as the one President Obama delivered this morning (his first) usually falls into one of two categories: the commander-in-chief is responding to an immediate crisis, or he’s trying to change the dynamic of an ongoing one.
Slate points out, “it’s too late to be a dramatic first-responder”.
The oil has been leaking for 55 days. Why it has taken so long for Obama to deliver an Oval Office address on this crisis is one question.
Why he chose to bookend his commitment to clean energy, plus a plan to roll out a three-stage recovery plan (partly funded by BP) with that favourite Presidential cop out, a call to prayer, is another:
What sees us through — what has always seen us through — is our strength, our resilience, and our unyielding faith that something better awaits us if we summon the courage to reach for it. Tonight, we pray for that courage. We pray for the people of the Gulf. And we pray that a hand may guide us through the storm towards a brighter day.
Keep praying, Louisiana, because right now the Gulf of Mexico needs nothing short of a miracle to counteract the disastrous side effects of an unthinking and unaccountable corporation initially reluctant to clean up a mess very much of its own making, a mess that is still spewing 35,000-60,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf waters.
Folks, that means that up to half a cubic kilometre of oil has been released so far by BP’s rogue well.
Best of luck, Louisiana. You’ll need it.
Funny how businesses, their lobbyists, advocates and proponents of off-shore drilling along the coast of the US were, not that long ago, trying to persuade their “sceptics”, of it’s safety record, “as exhibited in the scarcity of examples of mishaps” – even Obama, in the face of escalating oil prices, and diminishing fields, was ready to adopt an expansion of the practice, rather than embrace “renewables” (that the oil companies didn’t like?).
Before this one it would have been interesting to know “how many” they would have deemed an “acceptable number of incidents”, before admitting it might not be such a good idea.
Just imagine if this were radioactive waste! And imagine a president who according to media reports of 19 February is underwriting/planning to underwrite the establishment of dozens of nuclear reactors, all the while promoting himself, as he did in his speech at Prague, as a person who wants to reduce nuclear proliferation. Again I say, even when nuclear power is intended as a peaceful activity, the potential for damage to our environment is still huge.
So again I say…imagine if instead of the BP oil spill, we were talking of a nuclear waste spill in our oceans.
@Michaela, 2:37pm:
Nuclear reactors ore OK, provided that they are reasonably modern and that they are managed more or less OK. The safety statistics and the stats on the release of radioactivity are absolutely far better than coal, especially brown coal.
At this stage of the development cycle, it seems to me that the choice eventually boils down to nuclear or blackouts in Australia. Are you in favour of blackouts?
Just for scale…
Chernobyl Exclusion Zone: 2,827KM2
DWH Oil Spill area (as of 30 April: ~10,000KM2
And as if things couldn’t get more chaotic, the Discovery Enterprise was stuck by lightning yesterday.