Needlenose

Tell me this ain’t so…another rig in the Gulf of Mexico just exploded.

Just in case you forgot why nuclear energy is so bad, here is an unpleasant reminder from Chernobyl – the wildfires are near the contaminated area – a burn in the region could release radioactive ash.

Just as BP shuts down the undersea gusher, some drunken redneck smashes his boat into a small wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico.  What are the odds that this could happen?  Well they have a lot of boat-driving drunken rednecks down there in the Gulf, and a lot of wells and pipelines…

The People’s Republic of China has surpassed the U.S. in energy usage.  Seems like only yesterday when CMike was berating me for negatively comparing Chinese output of CO2 to that of the U.S.  That’s a first-place we really didn’t need

Could BP have finally stopped the oil gusher?  Looks plausible in the ROV cam:

BP Oil Spill Cam

*Update 7/19/10* Uh oh, seepage detected…

*Update 7/19/10 7:27P PT* and oil leaking out of the cap

*Update 7/21/10* The oil spill in China is now deemed twice as bad as originally thought.

For years it’s been trendy to argue that in pricing fuels it’s important to use  ’true (or full) cost accounting’  to adequately compute the total cost of fuels.  Alternative fuels, through this reasoning, don’t look nearly so bad in comparison on a cost basis once you add in environmental costs, cleanup costs and the like to the cost of fuel.  The usual public policy conclusion is invariably that the greenshades sharpen their pencils to compute externals, and the government then add those externals to the cost of the fossil fuels in the form of a tax.

So I’ve been reading about this true cost of accounting for nearly 3 decades and while there has been a lot of accounting done, gubbermint has sat on its ass and delivered nothing in the way of the tax.  In fact, under the Shrubya Reign of Error, they larded the fossil fuel industry with massive additional subsidies in a hellish ‘false cost accounting’ variant that could only have been concocted by a coterie of cthonic cretins on K Street.

The BP oil disaster, however, points to a novel approach for implementing at least a portion of applying ‘external’ costs – forget fossil fuel taxes that lily-livered  Congress will never pass – instead, make the fucking companies pay directly for their messes!

For example, the various oil companies could start with a supervised safety review of the other offshore wells currently in production as well as the 27,000 abandoned wells just in the Gulf of Mexico whose capping were most likely never supervised and which may be decaying as I type.  How about forcing the coal companies to put out the millions of tons of coal burning in thousands of coal seam fires around the world that are spewing noxious chemicals and carbon dioxide with zero benefit to anybody?  Or nuclear power plants paying for permanent storage of the 64,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel that will stay radioactive for up to 250,000 years?

We don’t need technology breakthroughs in alternative energy.  We need to eliminate the unbelievable corporate welfare the industry currently enjoys in subsidies, we need to force the companies to clean up the messes they have already created and to have plans to prevent and correct future messes, and we need to invest in conservation and modern grid infrastructure to properly use the power we do produce.

But first we need to break the link between the conservatives and the fossil fuel companies, otherwise we’ll keep circling the drain, faster with each turn of the spiral.

*Update 7/15/10* Could Congress actually be taking action to investigate those 27,000 abandoned Gulf Wells?  Or is this just more ‘look concerned’ bullshit?

Remember the climate-change deniers mocking Al Gore last winter during the unusually heavy snowfall?  Funny that they’re keeping their traps shut in the face of record-breaking June heat wave - the Earth Fuckers really owe Mr. Gore an apology.

And right after apologizing to Mr. Gore, the Earth Fuckers should apologize to the scientists of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit for stealing their emails and smearing them mercilessly over the last year – an independent panel of researchers has upheld their research results and professional integrity.

Don’t hold your breath, though – Uber-Earth Fucker Apologist Benny Feiser doesn’t put much faith in either solid science nor an unbiased review process:

But Benny Feiser, who runs the skeptic-leaning Global Warming Policy Foundation, said there was strong evidence that legitimate requests for information had been repeatedly stifled.

“I don’t think the university can just claim that this is a vindication,” he said. He promised his own inquiry into the matter, to publish its report in August.

This is the real difference between real scandals and reactionary-inspired scandals – just like Whitewater, Climate Gate has turned out to be nothing more than a Reactionary smear campaign of dirty ad-hominem attacks designed to muddy the waters of public discourse and keep it off the course from the discussion that really matters.

(Note: I had this title last night, when I read the New York Times article discussed below and started to write a post… then procrastinated until everybody else in the world had posted about it waited to consider other viewpoints.  So even though Spencer Ackerman and probably others have riffed on the same obvious gag, I’m not changing it!)

In an apparent burst of nostalgia for the bad old days of the Bush-Cheney administration, when anonymous “senior administration officials” would bluff high-profile journalists for major newspapers into peddling dubious propaganda (somehow puffed up into sounding like a major scoop), the New York Times reported last night:

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

Showing that a Democratic president is now in office it’s no longer the early 2000s, even mainstream journalists have reacted to the NYT “scoop” with skepticism bordering on outright scorn.  Meanwhile, among progressive bloggers, the reflexive hue-and-cry has predictably arisen: This is just a pretext to stay in Afghanistan forever to control its mineral wealth, just like we’re staying in Iraq forever to control its oil!

Which might be more persuasive were it not for the fact that we aren’t staying in Iraq forever (even as wrangling over forming a government continues, the withdrawal of U.S. troops is proceeding on schedule, with American influence fading concomitantly), and Iraqi politicians — who, unsurprisingly, covet the benefits of the country’s black gold for themselves — never have gotten around to signing over major oil fields wholesale to U.S. corporations.

Nor do I think Obama wants to stay in Afghanistan forever — certainly not long enough for him to reap the downsides of an endless, unsuccessful war while U.S. megacorporations in future decades garner the benefits.  To me, the president’s seemingly contradictory announcement last December of an immediate escalation combined with a hoped-for exit timetable was clearly designed to mimic Dubya’s 2007 “surge” in Iraq… that is, not so much a plan to win the war as an attempt to postpone the inevitable while being able to say we gave it our best shot (and, perhaps, take public-relations advantage of any unexpected lucky breaks, as occurred in Iraq).

In fact, although today’s NYT story is undoubtedly propaganda of some sort, its intent may be the opposite of what everyone is assuming.  Instead of providing an excuse for the U.S. to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely, what if it inspires other forces in the region to hasten our exit? Karzai is known to be greedy and dishonest; why would reports of vast mineral wealth encourage him to be a loyal and scrupulous American puppet rather than tempting him further to ditch his former benefactors and cut a deal with the Taliban to split the booty?

Even more intriguing is the Chinese angle acknowledged by the Times:

At the same time, American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, which could upset the United States, given its heavy investment in the region. After winning the bid for its Aynak copper mine in Logar Province, China clearly wants more, American officials said.

Anyone else get a whiff of Br’er Rabbit from that passage?  “Oh, no, whatever you do, don’t push us out and entangle yourselves deeper in Afghanistan’s problems — please, anything but that, China!”

Hell, if we could get out of the business of providing armed security for Chinese-owned copper mines and lure the People’s Republic into taking our place, battling the Taliban and miscellaneous warlords for control of all those buried minerals, that would be nearly a best-case scenario at this point.  (It would be even more entertaining if the reported mother lodes turned out to be illusory… hasn’t someone written a science-fiction novel or something to that effect?)

That’s my conspiracy theory, and I intend to stick with it.

Louisiana Republican

The gushing goo destroying the livelihoods of the folks who live on Louisiana’s coast hasn’t damped the ardor of Louisiana Repug leaders to drill, baby drill.  You know, I feel bad for the poor Louisianans, but riddle me this – why do they continue to vote for abusive politicians?  Let Jindal go clean up the fucking mess his philosophy has created.

*Update 9:50P PT* Forrest Gump in 2010: bad news, BP oil spill destroyed his livelihood, his entire shrimping fleet had to be shut down.  Good news – he bought Apple stock, and held on to it!  Only question is, will he vote for David “double down on offshore drilling & liability cap” Vitter again this year, or will he realize that his shrimping business would be better off with a vote for Melancon?  Remember, stupid is as stupid does…