Should We Be Drawing a Message?

For those who believe that there's a divine hand behind lightning strikes....

• Lightning strikes six-storey Jesus statue in Ohio, burns it to ground

• Ship fire halts oil capture in Gulf, BP says ("A bolt of lightning struck the ship capturing oil from the blown-out BP well in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday, igniting a fire that halted containment efforts in another setback for the embattled company in its nearly two-month struggle to stop the spill, the company said.").

Thank you, Globe and Mail, for your comprehensive coverage of bolts from the blue.

OMG - The President Is Paying Too Much Attention to the BP Disaster!

Where would we be without Beltway journalism. One day its stars are patting themselves on the back for getting President Obama to devote significant face time to the Deepwater Horizon spill. The next thing you know, watch out, that could distract him from the nation's real problems.

In writing that "It's devilishly difficult to explain why deficits are good now and bad later," Dionne neglects to state why - and contrary to the implication of his article, it's not because of the Deepwater Horizon spill. With a Democrat in the Oval Office, the most ardent defenders of Bush's trifecta "joke" and his runaway spending have reinvented themselves as deficit hawks, and a sizable percentage of the voting public is buying it. The media has done a lousy job explaining how deficits work and why this may not be the time for austerity - and if Obama were to support another enormous stimulus package they would resort to the "he said, she said" routine, letting the newly reminted opponents of government spending misrepresent the effects of stimulus spending to date and attack the President for his "out of control" spending. Finding responsible tax increases that could offset the spending? That would only grease the wheels of the Republican noise machine. Dionne knows this.

This is a bit like the bursting of the housing bubble. Nobody saw it coming, right? Except, you know, for everybody who is actually paying attention. It's more accurate to say that there was a lot of intentional blindness and the mainstream media chose to tune out the voices of doom. The President is not going to set himself up for a lecture by Dowd as to how he's being "professorial" and out-of-touch, or the inevitable round of editorials excoriating him for not slashing spending ("Oh no - we're Greece!") knowing full well that neither the media nor his own party has any interest in covering his back. Yes, "advocates of further stimulus have to know they are losing the political argument", but it's not because they've been silent, or haven't been trying to educate the public.

(On a related note, via The NonSequitur, consider what life would be like if political scientists covered the news.)

BP vs. The President

Here's a little rhetorical trick that is surprisingly effective:

The evidence is overwhelming. Any fair-minded person who examines the Gulf of Mexico oil spillage is compelled to two conclusions. First, that there is no evidence of wrongdoing by BP. Second, that the President of the United States has behaved disgracefully.

Wow... there's a lot of evidence, even if I haven't heard it all? And I'm fair minded, right? So how can I not agree with whatever comes next?

Truly, the trick is effective. If you're addressing an audience that hasn't spent much time thinking about the issue, the rhetorical flourish "any fair-minded person would agree," or "as any thinking person would concede," can embarrass a lot of people out of challenging your position. Even if the facts are much more ambiguous, or if you're advancing a position you know to be misleading or wrong.

The author, British right-winger Bruce Anderson, complains that the world needs oil or, more accurately, " meet increased demand and replace declining production in mature fields, [over the next twenty years] we will need the equivalent of two new Middle Easts or four new Saudi Arabias." So, yes, absent a miracle the world will either have to make due with a lot less energy than it wants, invest heavily in alternate sources, and engage in oil exploration in areas that are increasingly remote and difficult to access. Anderson insists, facts be damned, that the oil companies that are pursuing the elusive "four new Saudi Arabias" are "obsessed with safety". That's not to say that safety isn't important to them, or avoiding the cost of a disaster such as the one we're presently experiencing doesn't motivate a significant degree of care and safety, but "safety obsessed" is not a term I would use to describe BP or the management of the Deepwater Horizon.

Anderson suggests that nothing more could have been done, something that is patently false. He also suggests that oil disasters are an inevitable consequence of oil exploration, particularly the complicated and dangerous forms of exploration that are necessary to quench the world's unquenchable thirst for oil, something that is true but in no way excuses the inexcusable. He pulls out the red herring that it would be "absurd to force all oil rigs to cease drilling", something that nobody of consequence has suggested. While it's fun to trot out a straw man, such as his suggestion that the "international left has always hated the oil industry", even if that were true it has no relevance to the present discussion. It's similarly fun to accuse "the Greens" of wining "naive support by exaggerating the threat which oil-drilling poses to the environment", but Anderson's own sin of granting an undeserved industry-wide exculpation for any environmental consequence of the industry's practices.

So what of Anderson's attack on President Obama? He compliments the government's response to the disaster,

Government agencies were on the scene rapidly. There was a much greater sense of grip than over Hurricane Katrina.

So... what is it then? Being unable to criticize Obama's job performance, Anderson attacks (of all things) his speaking skills, suggesting that they're inferior even to GW's. Um... alrighty, then. Anderson also contends that he's incapable of "mak[ing] Americans feel good about themselves", something that if true seems again irrelevant to the present discussion. He then ignores Obama's record, pretending that prior to his becoming a presidential candidate "he took ultra-left wing positions on almost everything", then abandoned those positions "in pursuit of electability". No, actually, Obama has been more consistent than most politicians. He has been very good at maintaining a certain level of ambiguity about his positions, and letting others assume that he agrees with them, but his actual record demonstrates a consistent approach to the issues. But Anderson's on a rant, so facts be damned, right?

So what's Obama's biggest sin, at least according to Anderson? Trying to make up for his inability to make Americans feel good about an oil catastrophe by defaming BP. Anderson offers one, and only one, example of this phenomenon:

It has been 10 years since BP stopped calling itself British Petroleum (patriots could be tempted to conclude that its present misfortunes are divine punishment). Yet the President constantly reverts to the old name, as if "British" were a term of abuse. Not only is Britain the US's most important ally. BP has 24,000 American employees and 10,000 British ones. So when he denigrates this great company, Mr Obama is damaging US interests as well as British ones.

It's almost enough to make you choke on your Kentucky Fried Ch... KFC. Seriously - Anderson's knickers are in a twist because President Obama is calling BP "British Petroleum", making "British" a "term of abuse", and thus transforming any criticism of BP into an attack on Great Britain itself? Let's call Anderson's attack for what it is - a swing and a miss.

Meanwhile, on another (virtual) page of the same paper, David Usborne shares his experience trying to squeeze some candor out of BP.

That BP is now accused of underplaying the awfulness of what is happening in the Gulf is the fault mostly of its CEO, Tony Hayward, who recently said the environmental impact would end up being "very modest". The American public were less than impressed.

No, wait, it's all because Obama doesn't make us feel good!

Ten days ago I was at BP's Houston HQ to interview Mr Hayward at a crucial juncture – the effort to plug the well with the "top-kill". Mr Hayward changed his mind and we didn't see him. But we did see BP's PR machine.

Just before noon on 27 May, I met managing director Bob Dudley and Hayward spokesman, Andrew Gowers. They told me that the top-kill was moving forward. "The top kill operation continues," Dudley told me. "The fluid right now is going in two directions; some out the top and some down into the well and we want to reduce the amount that is going out the top and then we will continue to inject the heavy fluids down into the well..." Please note the "right now" bit.

Usborn later found out that the claim was not true, that "Only later – when the markets had closed – did we learn that all pumping of mud into the well had ceased the night before."

I challenged Gowers by text message about the impression given that pumping was going on. "We cannot offer blow by blow commentary on something as difficult and delicate and market sensitive as this," was his response. There it is – market sensitive.

I think Usborne is too hard on BP. After all, high stock prices make Americans feel good.

(In case you can't get yourself enough of that Bruce Anderson, here are a couple of memories.)

For Many Environmental Groups, Cash Is The New Green

Jonathan Adler, commenting on BP's slipshod approach to safety and environmental issues, states,

BP’s lax operations and corporate culture contributed to the series of events that caused the spill. (See, e.g., this WSJ article.) What’s ironic about this is it was not so long ago that environmentalists were lauding the oil giant for its “progressive” approach to environmental issues (and substantial financial contributions to environmental causes). One CEO even sought to rebrand BP as “Beyond Petroleum” to reflect its commitment to alternative energy sources. Yet it’s becoming increasingly clear that BP’s commitment to the environment was just window dressing.

One of the barely kept secrets of the modern environmental movement is the introduction of corporate money. What better way, after all, to get an environmental organization on your side than to lavish it with funds that could be taken away the moment it dares to criticize you.

[Jay Hair – the president of the National Wildlife Federation from 1981 to 1995] found that the big oil and gas companies were happy to give money to conservation groups. Yes, they were destroying many of the world's pristine places. Yes, by the late 1980s, it had become clear that they were dramatically destabilising the climate – the very basis of life itself. But for Hair, that didn't make them the enemy; he said they sincerely wanted to right their wrongs and pay to preserve the environment. He began to suck millions from them, and his organisation and others gave them awards for "environmental stewardship". Companies such as Shell and BP were delighted. They saw it as valuable "reputation insurance": every time they are criticised for their massive emissions of warming gases, or for events such as the massive oil spill that has just turned the Gulf of Mexico into the "Gulf of Texaco", they wheel out their shiny green awards to ward off the prospect of government regulation and to reassure the public that they Really Care.

At first, this behaviour scandalised the environmental community. Hair was vehemently condemned as a sell-out and a charlatan. But slowly, the other groups saw themselves shrink while the corporate-fattened groups swelled – so they, too, started to take the cheques. Christine MacDonald, an idealistic young environmentalist, discovered how deeply this cash had transformed these institutions when she started to work for CI in 2006. She told me: "About a week or two after I started, I went to the big planning meeting of all the organisation's media teams, and they started talking about this supposedly great new project they were running with BP. But I had read in the newspaper the day before that the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] had condemned BP for running the most polluting plant in the whole country... But nobody in that meeting, or anywhere else in the organisation, wanted to talk about it. It was a taboo. You weren't supposed to ask if BP was really green. They were 'helping' us, and that was it."

What is the consequence of the dependence on corporate case? I expect you already know.

On its website, the Sierra Club says: "If the level stays higher than 350ppm for a prolonged period of time, it will spell disaster for humanity as we know it."

But behind closed doors, they tried to stop this becoming law. In 2009, the EPA moved to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, which requires the agency to ensure that the levels of pollutants in the air are "compatible with human safety" – a change the Sierra Club supported. But the Center for Biological Diversity – an independent group that doesn't take polluter cash – petitioned the EPA to take this commitment seriously and do what the climate science says really is "compatible with human safety": restore us to 350ppm. Kieran Suckling, the executive director of the centre, explains: "I was amazed to discover the Sierra Club opposed us bitterly. They said it should not be done. In fact, they said that if we filed a lawsuit to make EPA do it, they would probably intervene on EPA's side. They threw climate science out the window."

It isn't that environmental groups can't do good work while taking corporate money - it's just that they will bend to the will of their corporate masters, muting criticism of companies like BP and shifting their focus to environmental issues that their corporate sponsors don't care about - those that don't affect corporate profits - while in the worst case scenario lobbying against needed environmental reforms that might imperil the flow of corporate cash.