Well, obviously that’s the solution, same as shutting down all supertanker oil transport so we don’t have another Exxon Valdiz, but that ain’t going to happen either.
And how isn’t that argument going to make headway with anyone? We are stuck with it…we don’t have a reliable transportation alternative right now, not to mention a replacement source for the myriad other things oil is used for!
The alternative argument would be something like this:
Let’s say there was a horrible plane crash, for whatever reason. Would you go around telling everyone “hey, as long as people want to fly, we’re going to have horrible plane accidents”? Or would you say “we need to investigate this accident to see if it was preventable, and if it was, we need to re-examine our plane regulations to make this as unlikely as possible.” Which is more likely to come off as appreciating the damage to the people who were victims of the plane crash, and which is more likely to make people resistant to your message?
ETA: I know this is the pit, so of course, a certain amount of crude language is to be expected. But much of the tone here seems to me to be dismissing real and rightful concerns.
Predicting that sometime, at some point in the future an accident will happen in hardly intelligent. I predict that another coal mine will explode at some point in the future. Fear my scary powers!
Can you give me a citation to which safety regulations exactly were dismantled by the Bush Administration which directly caused this accident? Note that for 25% of Bush’s term the Pelosi “do nothing Congress” was in power, so any laws passed during that time are the fault of Democrats.
There’s no need to dismantle safety regulations if you turn the watchdog agency into a sexy-party-time-hotspot as Bush did:
Obama smacks Minerals Management Service
Obama Blasts Government’s ‘Cozy Relationship’ With Oil Cos
Sex, Drug Use and Graft Cited in Interior Department
By all means, let’s kill the “consumer-crap-culture keeping-up-with-the-Joneses math-and-science-are-hard! sickness”, but let’s not to forget to *also kill * any political party that foists presidents on us who whine about what a hard job it is being president. Slacker leadership will be the death of us as surely as will culturally encouraged pride in ignorance.
So…is your response in effect “the claim that safety regulations were dismantled by Bush was false?” Because I didn’t see that in your post.
I know it’s the SDMB where Bush is Satan and all his works evil, but it’s also Cecil’s message board, and so I want to know the facts here. So if there were in fact safety regulations dismantled by Bush, I want to know what they are. Note I don’t assert that none were; I’m keeping an open mind. However, after doing a little searching myself, I’m suspecting that this is just yet another partisan trolling claim, like the one I fought several idiots over in GD that Bush and “evil repugnicans” somehow repealed the Clean Air Act. :rolleyes:
So let’s have the next post addressing me contain links to the Federal Code which was modified during Bush’s first 6 years and which led directly to this accident.
Its truth value is irrelevant. Pick either, it makes no mind to me. You can have all the regulations anyone could want, or none at all, and it makes no mind if no one is minding the damned store. Are you willing to vouch that Bush and his buddies did a competent job of running the Minerals Management Service?
I gave you plenty of evidence of how they screwed the pooch, why need you bring in this “Bush as Satan” red-herring? Is it because you just lost your argument, and want to cover that up with claims that I’m Bush bashing or hateful in some way? I think it is, which is too bad. I thought you had more respect for the facts on the ground than for rules lawyering.
Always kind of thought the Pubbies pretty much openly defined themselves as friendly to the concerns of business. Pretty much openly defined themselves as hard-headed realists who scoff at excessive environmental regulations and other such touchy-feely goo as promoted by the DFH. I’m guessing thats your experience as well.
Given that, is it so unreasonable to presume that the regulatory environment might be, shall we say, more business-friendly under a Pubbie administration? More inclined to accept the sober assurances of men who make their living by offering sober assurances? Seems pretty likely to me, how about you?
Damn, we’ll never stop experiencing Bush. He’s responsible for everything. And shit.
:dubious:
That’s a quote that’s going to come back to haunt you.
No, because I have the personal integrity to say I don’t know the specifics of that particular agency or its management and how it applies to this specific accident.
I missed where you posted the relevant changes to the regulations or CFR under Bush which directly led to this accident. Did you post in invisible font? I’m using Firefox, maybe that’s the problem? 
What the fuck? I haven’t lost anything, because no one has addressed my question, vis with respect to:
What a really…unfortunate thing for you to resort to. You really want to play nasty with me on this? Sorry, I’m too old and too busy nowadays.
I can admit that I don’t know which regulations were “dismantled”, which is why I’m calling Evil Captor on his claim. I want to know the facts, not play the shopworn SDMB game of “my party, right or wrong!” You on the other hand…let’s see, have jumped in with both feet and seem to now be looking for either a way to score points on me, or to deflect my - well, I guess it must be a somewhat embarrassing question, yes?
Do you really want to die on this factual hill, figuratively speaking?
Answer my damn question, or Ignore me:
Sure, I agree that a Republican Administration is more likely to be more business friendly - even to a fault. If that’s what you’re saying, I’m on board with that. And although industry has an important role to play in helping with environmental regulations development and enforcement, all too often it plays an obstructionist role, like a Missouri mule pulling against the rope of government control.
But that’s not what’s in dispute here, despite the attempts by some to move the goalposts clear off the field.
I would think that even those who want to blame the prior Administration of The Great Satan in Clouds of Sulphur for this disaster would want to know the truth of how government policies may, or may not, have led to this situation, so it could be avoided in the future and Obama and the Democrats could take pains to fix what’s broken. Throwing out claims that regulations were dismantled - well, which ones? What can be done to fix it? Which dismantling needs un-dismantling? How do we know what to fix? And if it turns out that in fact no actual regulations were dismantled by Bush which led to this disaster…then we need to know that so new regulations can be developed to plug the safety holes and keep this from happening again. How anyone can argue against that is beyond me.
Instead, I’m faced with the same knee-jerk shopworn partisan shit which has made the SDMB such an unpleasant place to be. Don’t people even care what the root cause is?
Yes. Yes, I do. Are these for sale now or available for pre-order? Do they make boxers? Real boxers like Tommy Hilfiger or fake boxers like Joe Boxer? Yes, it matters even though they’re magical flying underpants. Comfort is important.
Really?
I thought a natural gas plant could be ~85% efficient, and the transmission loss only 7% at most. And an electric motor can reach efficiencies above 95%, while ICE engines appear trapped around 25% for their fuel of choice.
So an upgrade is in order. Green is at bat, gas is on deck.
I would agree with your general numbers on all items except the natural gas plant - do you mean gas combustion to net generation? The top-end right now is just above 60% IIRC.
Really. If so, you are more of an idiot than I thought. I own a car, a pickup truck and a gas-guzzling motor home and I am enjoying the hell out of my life and don’t give a flying rat’s ass what my imprint does to the environment.
I turn the lights out when I leave the room, but my life doesn’t revolve around saving the planet. Good ole mother earth will still be around long after we are.
Gotta live now, dude.
I did.
I shall.
Evil Captor’s claim was likely an exaggeration. Your counter to him ignored the possibility that there were problems with how the rules were administered.
There is evidence of such problems.
Did you expect that not to be pointed out to you?
That’s an unreasonable expectation. You seem so obsessed with your “knee-jerk shopworn partisan shit” that you don’t to want to talk about real issues which lead up to the disaster. That’s disappointing, but I’ve been disappointed with other people before.
I was thinking of Microturbines, and apparently the efficiency is 80%. So… I was a bit mistaken.
I recommend a limited release of high efficiency micro-turbines.
Hell, Una, we all know what the root cause is, the root cause is money!
Why was there no serious research and development towards green energy when we started bitching about it forty years ago? There was no money in it, there was no paycheck for pie in the sky dreams of “green energy”.
Which is why now, when we need it, we haven’t got it.
Which is why when it comes to bold new innovative research, breaking the ground for a better world, investment capitalism bites it.
And there was ignorance, superstition, and dread. Remember, 40 years ago middle America, as stupid and cowlike as it is right now, was even dumber on some issues like the environment than it is today. Forty years ago things were very different in science as well, my friend. Reading technical papers from the 50’s, 60’s, and even 70’s like I do every week, I catch myself judging some of the “top minds” very harshly, as I have the advantage of hindsight.
Did Corporate America drop the ball? Did the government drop the ball? Many would say yes; I would say they barely had a ball to even play with in the first place. How does Esso or Marathon oil in 1968 sell a greener oil production method that costs more, when most folks are worried about gas going up 2 cents a gallon? How much do we spend on windmills when we’re in the quagmire of Vietnam? In a perfect world we would have got out of Vietnam sooner and spent the money on wind and solar, or developing a nuclear programme like France ended up with. (Then again, alternate history buffs may contend that changing the way Vietnam played out may have had all sorts of terrible consequences.)
In a perfect world the concept of renewable energy as a National Security issue would sell much more with the Republican Party nowadays (but I’m not a Republican, so what do I know?). That’s how I see it, anyhow - become self-sufficient, stop the flow of trillions of dollars to the mullahs and tinpot dictators, and watch as their countries slowly slide back into irrelevance. I’d love nothing more than for the US to have a tax-fueled “Una Plan for Energy” in this country which would turn Saudi Arabia from being a giant money pit that leaks into 20 different terror organizations, into a hum-drum stop-over while connecting to someplace interesting.
What was stopping you and/or the rest of the environmental left from investing in “green energy”? What was preventing you guys from harnessing the strength of “investment capitalism” to your own ends? Instead of telling us how much “we” bitched about it 40 years ago, what did you actually do about it?
Er, isn’t bitching enough to get laws passed to temper the effects of acid rain and species loss a pretty significant result?
I wonder if all the science geeks could have pooled their resources to make it to the moon on their own investment?
Oh, and the Virgin Atlantic Superrocket doesn’t count for some very clever and very unassailable reason, but it’s so damn clever that I can’t think of it at the moment. But it’s damn clever, and I think it involves talking shrimp. And Tang. Tang-flavoured talking shrimp.
I find the stench of environmental partisanship to be in the top tier of modern-age evil. Yeah, that’s right, I’m all but Godwinizing here. But the impacts of unwise energy and environment policies over time are equally if not more devastating. And no, I’m not approaching this from an if-only-you’d-listen-to-the-fucking-Lorax perspective; there’s a shitload of harm that stemmed from the environmental left. And I’m not talking about wrong decisions or disagreement with reasoned and dispassionate deliberations–I’m talking about partisanship where there is no cause for it other than our side is great, all of your ideas suck!
(Note: Though I quoted John Mace at the beginning of this post, I am not directing any claims of partisanship at him.)