I’m impressed with this new found love of environment in the USA, especially by Republicans.
Any chance consumption of 25% of the worlds oil by 5% of the worlds population will be reduced soon?
Speeches like this are boring if it’s about clearing up an oil mess under the sea. Far better clearing up another kind of oil mess in a faraway country you invaded for the purpose. That’s proper attention grabbing and worth watching - this just wasn’t in the same league.
The Senate are going to do a real number on BP; why should Obama get in their way?
If BP haven’t invested their vast profits wisely and diversely, and instead are completely reliant on their oil industry income and assets, then they deserve everything that happens to them, and if they’ve had to learn the hard way, fuck 'em. They’ve had a nice run up until now.
Right, it’s about finding blame with an abstract like a corporate identity rather than considering the issues that have allowed entire industries to buy their own levels of regulation, oversight and culpability from a corrupt and entirely self-serving political class.
I blame ACORN.
What do you want him to do, go all Bobby Knight and stand up and throw his chair? If he rants and raves about how he’s got BP by the short hairs, that’s just going to make BP say “screw you, take us to court if you want anything out of us”.
Dr. Chu may not know squat about drilling. But he knows enough to know what he doesn’t know and knows how to ask intelligent questions so that he can put it in terms Obama can understand and make informed decisions. In a crisis of an engineering and scientific nature, why not call the number of the guy on your team with the best science background?
What’s going to be ignored is the call to wean ourselves off the finite oil resource. As long as one party refuses to act like grownups and come to the table and talk seriously, meaningful change just isn’t going to happen.
Is he going to drop a giant coconut on the oil well?
Probably not, since those 5% use that oil as an input to produce 25+% of the world’s wealth.
http://www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=804
But as we get more productive and efficient over time, I would expect that ratio of gallon/$GDP to decline somewhat.
As long as it’s not related to industrial output and the national SUV wankfest and the like, that’s outstanding.
Of course. I didn’t even realize that was up for debate.
Industrial output and SUVs = Bad.
Yep, Obama is revealed to be the empty suit he is. Where is “Plan B”?
This guy has had two months to meet with experts, plan a strategy, and remediate the destruction…and we get another teleprompter speech.
As Yogi Berra said “deja vue all over again”…only this time, we have a guy who isn’t as smart as Carter.
Eric Holder should sue BP…that’l solve everything.
In your haste, you neglected to include your brilliant plan to remedy the situation. We wait wtih bated breath.
Strange logic afoot here. Chu is a scientist ,but the wrong choice to be in charge of the oil teams because it is not his field. But, Obama who is not a scientist or an oil man is at fault for not stopping the flow.
He had to rely on BP. There were no other options. They said they could stop it from the first day. If they did ,all would be fine. But they failed over and over. They also lied repeatedly. That must be Obama’s fault too.
Sarah Palin: Call The Dutch To Help The Oil Spill, Because They Know About Leaks
Humor aside, we’re already on Plan B. Plan A was to use effective government oversight to prevent a deepwater disaster like this in the first place. Of course, there were some who chose to sabotage plan A. They don’t like to talk about that now. They prefer to talk about how Obama didn’t magically and instantly fix the problems they created.
Yeah, those two were on the top of my list. I just forgot to post them. :rolleyes:
Look, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard about “Nobel Prize Winning Physicist…” from Obama. I’m sick of hearing it. It’s his job, not mine, to make sure people working on this know something about oil drilling. This guy doesn’t. I expect more from Obama than a throw away line about a “Nobel Prize Winning Physicist…”.
Here’s another thought: Obama is anti-British, and known to be. Letting his personal animus into things does not sell well. Fortunately he’s intelligent and realised this, so he’s letting other people be the attack dogs while rising above it.
What I was hoping for was a pivot from BP to the need to address the problem of climate change. The one big thing he really could have done was start selling America on the necessity of doing that, and outlining what that would involve in practical terms, and what it would mean to them.
But even if he was going to just address the problem of our dependence on foreign oil, he needed to go a bit further than he did. Because most of us are, like it or not, tied into a life where there’s really no alternative to putting a lot of miles on one’s car every year. And that’s going to be the way it is until we’ve got other ways of getting around. We need more mass transit, and we need to (hear this, libertarians) get rid of the regulations that prevent dense development around subway and light rail stops, so that more people have the option of living and working near public transit.
Whether we’re talking about climate change or energy independence, a major investment in mass transit infrastructure, be it subway, light rail, or even GPS-equipped buses with dedicated lanes at rush hour, needs to be part of the solution.
Except that the oil drilling experts obviously don’t have the solution to this problem. It makes sense to gather new ideas from people outside the field with scientific expertise. Given his combination of scientific and administrative experience Chu is a good person to do this and in fact there was a storyabout a suggestion he made about using gamma rays which turned out to be useful:
As for the speech itself it seemed to be OK. Obama laid out the steps he has taken to deal with the issue and what he wants to do in the future. There was nothing very original but there are probably many people who are confused about what’s going on so it makes to lay out the basic story. This is one of the those occasions where media pundits who are obsessed with the issue forget that much of the average public is unaware of the basic facts.
Also pundits love the grand gesture like Kennedy aiming to go to the moon but not every issue can be solved using that approach. Energy policy is a much larger and more complex issue than the moon landing and Obama can’t dictate solutions. He can nudge Congress to move on the issue which is what he did.
Pray tell how? Is the US going to try seize BP assets and then magically hope for the oil you need to run things appear? What pray tell does this have to do with the other oil companies?
At least this is a practical thought. Good one actually.
Eh? Don’t have that impression at all. Clive Crook in FThad a rather adult take on this (his critique of the speech is interesting as well).