Barack Obama
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Obama’s failure on climate change
Last week, Josh Green had an op-ed in The Boston Globe called “Even an oil spill won’t move Washington,” which points out the bizarre fact that the BP Gulf oil disaster seems only to have entrenched politicians in their pre-existing positions. They asked me to write a short response for their website. I did, and […]
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Can the Gulf oil spill be environmentalists’ Arizona moment?
A May Day protest against Arizona’s immigration law.Photo courtesy th.omas via FlickrWithin a week of Arizona’s new racial-profiling bill becoming law, the “1 MILLION Strong AGAINST the Arizona Immigration Law SB1070” group on Facebook climbed to nearly 1.3 million people. Via Facebook and emails and phone calls, I’ve been asked to attend vigils and marches, […]
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With Gulf-spill facts in short supply, spin takes center stage
You spin me right round …Photo: Pip WilsonFor all the fire-hose coverage of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, it’s a story with startlingly few known facts. We don’t know how much oil has actually spilled out. We don’t know where or when it will hit land. We don’t know exactly what’s in the chemical […]
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Oil spill update: Interior Dept. negligence, Obama’s BP cash, & greenwashing
The time has come to start peeling the onion on the big, oily Gulf Coast mess. The Washington Post goes at one juicy layer with a story by Juliet Eilperin revealing that the Interior Department gave BP a pass on doing a detailed environmental impact analysis last year because a massive oil spill seemed unlikely. […]
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Any drilling moratorium must be accompanied by a commitment to conserve
New America Foundation’s Lisa Margonelli makes a crucial point about the Gulf disaster in an elegant New York Times op-ed: Moratoriums have a moral problem, though. All oil comes from someone’s backyard, and when we don’t reduce the amount of oil we consume, and refuse to drill at home, we end up getting people to […]
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Against a torrent of oil, a trickle of responsibility
Of the many things lacking in the response to the BP spill, responsibility ranks pretty high on the list. From President Obama’s reluctance to reverse his decision to expand offshore drilling, to BP’s shameless attempts to play the innocent victim card, and the far right’s attempts to pin the blame on environmentalists, responsible words and […]
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One thing Graham is right about: Obama
One aspect of the Graham-Reid flustercluck has gone underappreciated. Atrios, Digby, David Dayen, and other lefties think that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is just being a giant douchebag. His intention was always to string Democrats along, water down the climate bill, and bail at the last minute. I’ve heard from some folks in the green […]
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Wake up, Obama. The Gulf spill is our big chance
President Barack Obama so far has said nothing about the screamingly obvious connection between the spoils of fossil-fuel dependency and the vision of a clean-energy economy that he’s been sporadically promoting. Instead he had this tepid statement on the Gulf oil spill Friday morning: “I continue to believe that domestic oil production is an important […]
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The worst week ever, brought to you by the fossil-fuel industry
It’s a week to remember — or better yet, forget. Who could have imagined such a confluence of terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad events, rounding up what has to be the most disheartening “Earth Month” ever? In what may soon be the worst oil spill in U.S. history, crude is gushing into the Gulf of Mexico […]
