You're Doin' A Heckuva Job Browner

This blog was validated by certain Presidential Commission findings concerning the handling of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, as we reported recently.

That report concerned the aftermath of the event, so in this post we will discuss the validation of Dredd Blog's having gone ballistic prior to the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.

We went ballistic the very day President Obama announced the lifting of the presidential ban on offshore, deep-water oil drilling.

That was about one month prior to the beginning of the disaster that continues to poison the Gulf of Mexico with the deadly carcinogenic toxins still there.

In the president's announcement photo-op, shown in the photo (Mickey Mouse ears and "W" added by Dredd Blog) was made at a military base in Alaska, the home of "drill baby drill" Sarah Palin.

Dredd Blog immediately posted an admittedly radical post, where we raked President Obama over the coals, specifically stating:

He made a pronouncement that drilling for oil in the waters near the coast of the Atlantic and other places is the right thing to do.

In effect, Sarah Palin and the oil barons are right he said, reversing yet another campaign talking point made not long ago.

Offshore drilling has been banned in those areas for decades, but is coming to an end, even though he said he would not do that when he asked for our votes.

(Extinction Clock Nears Midnight - 2). That is a serious charge, so this post will now back it up.

The New Yorker has a fabulous piece which validates these charges Dredd Blog has made, as it validates the title of this post:

In Barack Obama’s primary-campaign victory speech, in St. Paul, Minnesota, he said that his election would be a historical turning point on two pressing issues: health care and climate change. “We will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick,” he said. “When the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” During the campaign, he often argued that climate change was an essential part of a national energy strategy. “Energy we have to deal with today,” Obama said in a debate with McCain. “Health care is priority No. 2.”

(As The World Burns, emphasis added). One immediately wonders "how did that policy directive and campaign promise get turned upside down and inside out so quickly?"

We now have the answer.

First of all, that New Yorker article also explains that the climate legislation, which was to implement the campaign promise, was in reality only actor's make up for senators, Graham, Lieberman, and Kerry, who were pushing the legislation.

To them it was quite important for them to look good first, the Earth and life upon it seemed to be a distant factor in their "mind".

Thus, the typical, mindless, back-room trade deals ended up being the beginning of the capitulation of the democrats to the neoCon republicans, which led to a "strategy":

The strategy had risks, including the possibility that expanded drilling off America’s coast could lead to a dangerous spill. But Browner, the head of the E.P.A. for eight years under Clinton, seemed to think the odds of that were limited. “Carol Browner says the fact of the matter is that the technology is so good that after Katrina there was less spillage from those platforms than the amount you spill in a year filling up your car with gasoline,” the White House official said. “So, given that, she says realistically you could expand offshore drilling.”

(ibid, emphasis added). Wow, Browner had her facts about Katrina all wrong, because Katrina caused major oil and gas spills, destroying large numbers of platforms, damaging many others, as it broke oil and gas pipelines too:

113 platforms totally destroyed, and - more importantly - 457 pipelines damaged, 101 of those major lines with 10" or larger diameter. At least 741,000 gallons were spilled from 124 reported sources (the Coast Guard calls anything over 100,000 gallons a "major" spill).

(Sky Truth). Take note that Carol Browner is the Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change, and that she should be fired yesterday.

Now, not only do we have an ongoing, terrible soap opera As The World Burns, a sequel to Dumb & Dumber as the Earth gets Brown & Browner, but we have institutionalized criminal insanity.

Therefore, Dredd Blog will continue to point out how the federal and state governments are doin' a heckuva job using The W Compass, moving the nation closer to the day when climate change policy will be summed up with the word "triage".

The next post in this series is here.