The WaPo reports BP crapped 4.9 million barrels (205.8 million gallons) of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Or about a quarter of the U.S. daily consumption of oil, per CIA World Factbook 2008 estimate.

But double that of India, whose population is significantly larger than my native land. So per capita, it’s pretty sad .

But not as sad as Canada! Canadians rank 19 by that measure, above the U.S. at 23. Small consolation, though, since Canada consumes only 2,260,000 a day (CIA) or 71.009 bbl per 1,000 people, compared to the U.S. 68.627 bbl.

If we cut down to UK levels (29.008 bbl per 1,000 ppl), we would still out-consume China by about 800,000 barrels a day. (That’s 8.7 m U.S. vs. China’s 7.9 m.) To achieve even that will require Man on the Moon efforts at the government level, not to mention WWII notions of national sacrifice overtaking our consumer culture. Still, after we collect reparations from BP, we should ask the Brits how they do it. After all, at over half the rate of oil consumption, they still maintain a comfortable lifestyle AND contribute to illegal wars of opportunity.

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And today’s installment of the “Search Party” story of Wanderlost.

I didn’t do a Lieberman cartoon, because, really, as much of a dick as he is, his exaggerated power merely underscores the political witlessness of the Democratic leadership. According to Mike Madden, here is what we have to look forward to:

They managed to kill not just the notion of a public health insurance option, but also the compromise Democrats had hatched just a week ago, which would have expanded Medicare a bit instead of launching a government-run insurance plan. That’s not the end of the damage. To get the bill through the Senate, Democrats will probably have to fund its $900 billion price tag by taxing expensive health benefits packages, instead of with a new tax on the rich, as the House prefers. Some sort of language restricting access to abortion under the new, government-supervised insurance exchanges will be thrown in, as a sop to win Nelson’s anti-choice favor. Access to Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor, won’t be expanded as much as many progressives want. And yes, the bill would dole out $50 million to groups teaching abstinence-only sex education plans, which helped buy the support of Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark.

That’s $50 million toward programs that don’t work, of course. Nice job, changey pants.

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The political import of Avatar — and there’s no waving this aspect away because it’s right in your face start to finish, and especially in the third act — is ardently left. It is pro-indigenous native, anti-corporate, anti-imperialist, anti-U.S. Iraq War effort, anti-U.S.-in-Afghanistan (and anti-troop-surge-in-that-country, or strongly against the thinking of President Barack Obama and Gen. Stanley McChrystal), anti-rightie, anti-Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld, etc.

I am all of those things, too, but I can’t get quite as enthusiastic about it as Jeffrey Wells. My first (and subsequent) impression, based on the trailers and a New Yorker fluff piece on Cameron is more in line with snarky right-wing assessment by AllahPundit: “A three-hour lecture on imperialism starring Smurfs.” Audience reaction to a special preview shown at Comic-Con last summer, judging by the tweets from my friends who attended, focused on the Smurfy qualities of Na’Vi, the natives of Pandora. Yet the more I think on it, they remind me of Ewoks.

What neither Wells nor AllahPundit seem to recognize is that for all of “pure Che Guevara (more the Motorcycle Diaries or Che-in-Cuba version than Che in Bolivia), Naom Chomsky, Hugo Chavez, Howard Zinn, Gore Vidal, Oliver Stone, etc.” politics, Cameron’s portrayal of an exotic indigenous culture and white boy assisted uprising is squarely within the traditions of imperialist literature. Start with James Fenimore Cooper, follow the trail to Kevin Costner’s “Dances With Wolves” — but, please, do make a detour at Thomas Berger’s “Little Big Man”, which subverts the genre — and note along the way how indigenous cultures are romanticized in the eyes of the white protagonist. You’ll see this trope in several movies on the American war in Vietnam from the 1980s, although Joseph Conrad pushes that view in a darker, yet no less romanticized direction. The plot hinges upon the White Savior’s ability to rescue the indigenous culture from the ravages of the imperialist forces. If he fails, it’s a tragedy; if he succeeds, he’s Luke Skywalker chuckling at the quaint minstrelsy of the Savage Teddy Bears.

The nutjobs on Sean Hannity’s forum are incensed by Cameron’s “liberal fantasy”, mostly because they reject reflexively anything reminding them that their American privilege rests upon the violence Europeans have inflicted upon the rest of the world. But they do have a point. It’s a small one, but it’s worth teasing out. The liberal fantasy does not deny the ravages of imperialism, and can eloquently decry it; but then what? We watch the movie’s portrayal of cultural genocide and ecological devastation, and either feel the white protagonist’s sorrow in surveying the carnage; or we cheer that some small blow has been made against the Evil Empire. Then we walk out of the multi-plex movie theater attached to the ginormous shopping mall full of goods manufactured overseas by people subsisting on less than a dollar a day; get in our cars that put CO2 in the atmosphere, warming the planet and raising sea levels that threaten to erase entire island communities that have existed for thousands of years; and marvel at the 3D special effects that cost almost half a billion dollars to produce.

In sum, this is the same blind “feel good” shit that our current President traffics in, even as he pursues policies of war, torture, detention and globalization. Even as his negotiators in Copenhagen weaken and subvert global efforts to address the negative impacts of climate change felt by indigenous people around the world.

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Will ignores the fact that climate change is a noisy, long-term process. Today it is cooler at my house than it was yesterday. That does not mean that next week I will wake up to find snow on my doorstep. If you look at the annual mean temperature of the planet, you can cherry-pick one year, such as 1998, in order to make the false claim that there is no global warming. Of course, you could just as easily pick 1999, in which case the same logic would force you to conclude that there has been a staggering increase in temperature. But that’s not how climate scientists actually study global warming. They look at long term patterns, such as the red line in this graph from NASA, which represents the five-year mean since 1880. And when they do, they recognize a long-term trend of rising temperatures.

Zimmer goes on to quote the dodge made by the WaPo Ombudsman (shorter: Will is a columnist on the opinions page, so opinions don’t have to be so rigorously fact-checked) and laments the ongoing poor presentation of scientific information by mainstream corporate media.

I sympathize, of course, and wish the news media were more diligent about important issues that affect the fate of our species — like, say, Kim Jong Il lobbing warheads into the Sea of Japan, rather than CNN turning itself into 24-7 MJNN. But no one is going to get George Will to backtrack, and no one at WaPo has the temerity (to use a Willy word) to broach the subject with the nerdy blowhard. If they started with global warming, why not proceed to all the other disinformation he has been spreading these past 30 odd years? And why stop with George Will when Charles Krauthammer is only a click away? Why does David Broder’s inane “conventional wisdom” get a pass? And that’s just the op/ed pages, nevermind the news divisions that pass on Pentagon dictation and used Dick Cheney as a “confidential high-level source.”

All that is beyond Zimmer’s immediate concerns for the low level of scientific knowledge among the public. Yet the fact is, news is broken. The industry itself is collapsing, but even when it thrived, it spewed disinformation like an upchucking baby.

Hey, are you looking for an In Contempt strip today? Me, too!

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Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

The rest of the article sounds like some green socialist hacked into Friedman’s column and questioned the basis of the pro-growth propaganda he’s been spewing for, well, ever. Did he have some Road to Damascus moment? Is this the same guy who was insulting the protesters in Seattle in 1999?

In fact, yes. His core argument for greening the economy is based on both an accurate prediction that global warming necessitates a fundamental restructuring of energy generation and usage; and on the assumption that America needs to be the top dog as globalization adapts to this crisis. In the article that forms the basis for his best-seller “Hot, Flat and Crowded,” Friedman insists:

Well, I want to rename “green.” I want to rename it geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic. I want to do that because I think that living, working, designing, manufacturing and projecting America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century. A redefined, broader and more muscular green ideology is not meant to trump the traditional Republican and Democratic agendas but rather to bridge them when it comes to addressing the three major issues facing every American today: jobs, temperature and terrorism.

Granted, if some green socialist did hack into his column, the hacker seems not to have read the more dire Krugman assessment of Obama’s stimulus plan.

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For more than two years, Cheney and a relatively unknown administration official, Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell, have been regularly visiting the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to ensure agency officials rewrite regulatory policies and bypass public hearings in order to streamline the licensing process for energy companies that have filed applications to build new nuclear power reactors, as well as applications for new nuclear facilities that are expected to be filed by other companies in the months ahead, longtime NRC officials said.

Before being sworn in as deputy energy secretary in March 2005, Sell, a lawyer whose roots extend to Bush’s home state of Texas, was a White House lobbyist working on energy issues. He had also participated in secret meetings with Cheney’s Energy Task Force.

In April, Sell and Cheney had both met with NRC officials to sign off on the final regulatory policies related to new nuclear reactors. Following the meeting, Sell had alerted a group of energy companies they could begin to take advantage of the faster application process, NRC officials said.

NRC officials said that Cheney has expressed a desire to see applications for nuclear reactor projects approved by the NRC when he and Bush leave the White House in January 2009.

The energy corporations Cheney and Sell have been personally lobbying the NRC on behalf of this year have advised the vice president and his staff on energy policy in a way that would boost their companies’ profit margins. These corporations have also donated millions of dollars to President Bush’s and Cheney’s past presidential campaigns.

Read the rest at Cheney’s Plan to Combat Global Warming: Nuclear Power
The Public Record – Tuesday, 10 June 2008

Em-phass-is mine.

Tags: nuclearpower, global warming, climate change, energy, dick cheney, lobbyists, BushAdmin

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