A new "eco-era"? Let's see...
Researchers at Oregon State University have determined the number one threat to PNW salmon and their habitats (you know, what our state's taxpayers have spent billions to "recover") is immigration into the region (the vast majority of which comes from outside the US and Canada - their words, not mine). So... in this new "eco-era" will environmentalists break with the immigration lobby of the Democrat party and insist on true immigration control? For the environment? For the new eco-era?

Not one of Knute's better pieces of work. This article throws in just about everything: Katrina, Vietnam, BP Oil Spill, NY's fake car bomb, Wall Street, Great Recession. Then it mixes it all up into one big hopeless mess.

I'm not sure why anyone would write a conclusion on an epic global disaster that may pollute waters all over the world, not just the gulf coast. This oil well is spewing 5000-10,000 barrels per day and BP officials say that may increase up to 40,000 barrels per day. They also say this may go on for 90 days or more. This disaster has only just begun so it's hard to imagine writing a conclusion on it already.

The author also say that environmentalists have a 'loser's mentality', because they hope for change when disasters happen. Politically, that change has already begun to happen with the Governor of California's change in stance on offshore oil drilling.

The problem is that conservatives will not conserve:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18860-republicans-wont-be-nudged-into-cutting-home-energy.html
Stupid is as stupid does, I guess.
What we should be doing is rolling the entire Defense Department budget into a tax on imported oil. Our military exists today not to defend our borders but to maintain our energy lines of communication to petroleum exporting countries, which, by the way, fund our enemies.

Knute may be right -- that we won't see a tectonic shift in attitudes. But hey, the Governator backed away from renewing drilling off the California coast -- at least that's something. I think Tom Friedman lays it out best in the NYT today.

Bottom line is, unless we protect our natural capital (see Paul Hawken) then our economies and children's future are in serious trouble. Pay it forward America !!

Joe Sperry

Knute Berger describes with near perfection why in my own writing I increasingly refer to the United States as Moron Nation.

The problem with many eco-disasters is that they are slow to unfold and the damage is to complex systems. Investigations and fixes are slow too. The state of Puget Sound is an example of how, despite spills (oil, sewage) the state of the Sound has been slow to get traction with the public, most of whom still believe there is no problem in Puget Sound.

I note today that polling indicates strong support for Obama's expansion of off-shore drilling:
http://njtoday.net/2010/05/05/voters-still-support-off-shore-oil-drilling-but-want-investigation-of-bp-spill/

And unlike Exxon, there has been no backlash at BP at the gas pump:
http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2010/05/massive_oil_spill_doesnt_seem.html

I don't study the public's attitudes about, or knowledge of, the environment, but I have to wonder if most people really understand the connection between our consumption of anything (oil, wood, minerals, food, you name it!) and the plundering of our natural systems. Or do we just have a religious faith that technology will save us?

Is it that too many people are disconnected from our natural environment? We live in cities and the burbs, shop at the malls --- is that why environmentalists are seen as nostalgaic "tree huggers" instead of defenders of our "natural infrastructure"?

I think the business community needs to GET OUT AND LEAD -- help put a price on on the bad stuff (like carbon) and let markets find efficient alternatives. Now that the insurance companies and the Defense Dept. warn of the dangers of climate change and resource competition, maybe there is hope. Or maybe that's a sign of the apocalypse.... Who are the tree huggers now?

joe

JayBird, like the idea of the imported oil tax but think the fatal flaw is that the slogan then becomes "Drive and Support the Troops".

Knute has it laid out pretty well, but we still don't know the end of this story- an oil fountain feeding the Gulf Stream and fouling the air of Jesusland has the potential to strongly change some long standing attitudes. And if the oil cartel uses this opportunity to raise prices at the pump beyond prior ceiling levels (for reasons real or marketing) the national auto obsession might even lose it's grip. The summer of '08 certainly impacted Metro Transit locally. So while I regard Knute's pessimism as well founded, I'll reserve drawing the same conclusions until after the end of June.

With even secular activists now saying Big Oil "has literally punched a hole into hell," the consequences of this disaster as measured in intensified public indifference may be infinitely worse than Mr. Berger foresees.

Among my coterie (nearly all of us news junkies with mass media or public employment backgrounds and long personal histories of political activism), the result is such abject horror at the event itself, many of us can no longer bear to read or watch the news at all.

Indeed it is as if this "hole into hell" has transmogrified the very nature of knowledge, transforming it – as if by the very blackest of black magic – from a proud prerequisite of power and certitude to irrefutable and therefore unbearably painful proof of our absolute powerlessness: the final demonstration of our enslavement by a doomsday Ruling Class that truly does have the hell-opening omnipotence of a malevolent god.

I suspect this reaction – which is undeniably also my own – is fostered by the event's confirmation of the absolute and permanent helplessness we have so long suspected to be our true condition under capitalism: it proves above all else there is absolutely nothing we can do to change our circumstances -- or even to minimize the dying-planet agonies of this last and worst holocaust so inflicted.

But it is at least a bit less wrenching if we now deliberately choose to look away from the graveyard toward which we are being herded by the Lords of Infinite Greed.

And this desperate need to pull the proverbial blankets over our heads is surely not limited to myself and my own circle of friends and acquaintances. I glimpse it too even in MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, who is providing superbly complete video coverage of this apocalyptic event but even despite her obviously iron-willed professional discipline cannot quite banish the subtle wince of fearful aversion from her eyes nor entirely suppress the flee-the-abyss quaver from her voice.

With such crippling emotion justifiably afflicting people who have spent lifetimes not only conceptualizing responses to crisis but actually so responding – people who thus demonstrably have the intellectual tools to cope with such matters – imagine the helpless terror and subsequent all-consuming catatonia that will surely afflict those less favored.

At least beneath the blankets now pulled protectively over my own head there are blessed memories to soothe the anguish of the spreading blackness.

Indeed the unspoiled Nature I knew in the wilderness-privileged summers of my youth has now become my mandala – and today there are flute and drum (Scott August's “River of Stars”) that quicken my passage to the Tao of its gifts: the unforgettable murmur of clear and troutly water; the rhythmic thrust and pull of a wooden paddle in current strong enough its resistance is also its embrace; bottom-deep trout grown huge in shadowed pools darting to invisible mystery beneath an encroaching canoe; the curiously welcoming glare of brightly pebbled shallows in late afternoon sunlight; a tangy drift of woodsmoke; the rush of night wind in tall conifers; and always the river, the clear and troutly river, the river murmuring enchantment like the soft voice of some indescribably lovely woman – verily (and even in my long ago virginal boyhood) as if my lover were calling to me from a dimension just beyond our own...

I can only hope others are similarly blest – and I pity those born too late to ever know the fullness of such realms.

Meanwhile hell pours forth its demon-flood of tyrannosauric malevolence. Moron Nation stumbles drunkenly into final submission, first becoming Zombie Land, then at last and truly the Continent of the Dead – with neither bang nor whimper but an all-too-finite threnody of extinction: violent explosions of individual tantrums, human and environmental, in random blood-red counterpoint to the moaning despair of a toxin-dark chorus of hopelessness.

So, this oil spill is going to spread, and impact the republican shorelines of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas... everything from dead wildlife to busted fishing and tourism is on its way.

And I wonder if the repubican voters of those states are worried about a Hurricane breaking open yet another one of those hundreds of oil rigs in the gulf. Yes, there are hundreds. Imagine Katrina spinning up the oil volcano. Wouldn't that be rowdy?

This could change alot.

Washington Examiner: "Former NOAA Oil Spill Cleanup Boss Says Obama Waited Too Long in Gulf Disaster." Ron Gouguet, who formerly managed the oil spill cleanup department of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as a similar unit for the state of Louisiana, is criticizing the Obama White House's failure to act according to existing government plans in the event of a spill in the area now being deluged with thousands of barrels of crude oil every day.

There is something remarkable about Prince William Sound. You can see the tree line on the sides of the mountains where the tidal or tsunami wave from the 1964 earthquake ricocheted back and forth in the canyon on its way to Valdez. 25 years after the quake, you could see the destruction as it ripped and tore everything in its path. Valdez was destroyed, thirty-two people were killed, most of them children. People began planning the pipeline terminal in 1969, 5 years later, and began building it in 1974, 10 years after that 5 minute long earthquake and the resulting tidal wave. What were they thinking?

I share Knute's pessimism and raise him. What happens when a natural disaster and a man-made disaster happen at the same time? What if it were hurricane season in the gulf?

Now that George Bush is no longer in office it's hard to find someone to seriously blame for this stuff. I guess the American consumer is almost all that's left standing. Knute worries that we will pay "at the pump" for disasters; well Knute where else should the money come from? do you want to have cheap gas? really? Nuclear power is in the air but whatever progress had been made toward rationalizing a repository is now gone and we start over from zero. So our President is telling us we should develop nuclear power plants but we should think a bit more on where the nuclear waste is going to go. It sure as hell is not going to Nevada.

Incidentally, I am intrigued by the idea mentioned above that Department of Defense should be paid for by an energy tax. I have never heard that suggested before but it makes some sense. The more energy we use the more powerful our armed services get; kind of a bad dynamic but we already have a bad dynamic.

It's just like Berger to help unleash the demon-flood of tyrannosauric malevolence.

Somehow I think this oil spill will be different, unless the military-industrial media complex is able to successfully cover it up. After all, oil is an instrument of war.. and for war.

It's different because it's happening right in the heart of the country, not up north in some frozen tundra. It's in a tourist area of the country that is all about water related tourism. It's in a Republican area of the country so even the pro-oil, drill-baby-drill, government haters are going to be turned around by the lies, lapses and lax safety of the oil industry. And their states are going to be hurt for decades.

This oil disaster also isn't going to stop any time soon like it does with a tanker accident. It's going to be spewing 5000 barrels a day (BP's corporate estimate) or 25,000 barrels a day (new estimates) for the next 3 months... all Summer.

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/oil-leak-day-25-oil-spilling-gulf-mexico/story?id=10642498

BP Oil Spill Day 25: How Much Is Really Leaking?
Scientists Say the BP Oil Spill Could Be Up to Five Times Official Estimate

" Nice thought, but liberals are always misjudging the reasonableness of the American citizenry." It is not the reasonableness of the American citizenry, it is the power of interlocking boards of directors, between oil, banking, and the US Chamber of Commerce there is little room for unbiased media coverage. CBS, MSNBC, ABC, CNN, FOX, all provide the same forty experts on every issue. The mainstream media controls the debate, people no longer have representation in Washington D.C. President Obama is no liberal. Dennis Kucinich, Bernie Ward, Barnie Frank, Maxine Waters, are a few of the luminaries inside the beltway who have not forgotten the common people. KILL THE TV, cancel the newspaper, and connect with others working for a common solution.