Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for June 17, 2010

BP’s in some mighty good company!

Duke is tripping again.

Duke can find the silver lining in every dark cloud. Of course, people not on the same drugs as him can’t see either the cloud or the lining.

“Baldrick, your brain is like the four headed, man-eating haddock fish beast of Aberdeen” “In what way? ” “It doesn’t exist ”

Edmund & Baldrick - The Blackadder

but these are raw data -

data - plural datum - singular

(if you wanna impress the client, duke…)

Hey, somebody finally mentioned Haliburton in conjunction with the oil spill. Kind of. Maybe now somebody will try to hold those f**ers accountable for their part in the mess.

Who am I kidding. It’s Haliburton and this is America. They’ll get away clean. No pun intended.

Raw data? Time to cook those books!

@He-Manatee -

The latest rumors I’ve seen say that Halliburton’s people tried to warn BP not to try some of the dangerous games they were playing with the rig. I’m sure there’s plenty of blame to go around, and some of the truth will come out in the investigations…

I’m not so interested in making the clowns responsible for this mess suffer as I am in reducing and repairing the harm to the victims…

Some t-bagger in another forum commented that BP is socialist because of their “green ” technology commitment and commercials many years ago. OH, and then there is the rumour of the Cap’n Trade boards.

I don’t know if BP is “socialist”, but their marketing strategy over the last several years has integrated strong messages designed to appeal to those on the left. At the same time, they donated significantly to candidates who ran on the left side of the isle, notably, of course, candidate Obama himself.

Has that helped them? Well, the usual anti-business rable rousers have been very subdued considering the magnitude of this disaster. Had this happened 4 years ago with another company, such as Shell or Exxon, we would be seeing a much more vitriolic spin on this. It’s difficult to distinguish if the lid is being kept on because of BP, or, of course, because it is Obama who is floundering trying to act tough while accomplishing nothing beyond his opportunistic agenda items associated with the spill spin.

Hey, our president went down there for photo ops Our president took action and formed a committee Our president blamed the previous administration.Wonder what his administration has been doing. Anything? Our president blamed government corruption. The executive branch enforces. Run by whom? Matter Of fact, Tuesday night he blamed everyone else. He did not mention that there are thousand of shallow water rigs running safely. Why did the greenies want to push rigs into dangerous deep water? He said we should be able to drive for a quart of milk or to go to the movie.Duh? Huh? Why are we dependant? He gave a half sentence to mass transit. How many fishermen are out of work compared to oil workers? Said it was the worst ecological disaster. The Dust Bowl? Loved his speech. Our economy is as safe as Greece’s is.

Omaba floundering? From where I sit, Obama has successfully secured 20bn of funding, and while he was coming close to sabotaging BP with his rhetoric hopefully they will now remain profitable.

And hopefully the lessons will have been learned - the US should make sure its regulations are up to spec, but also all the oil companies should adopt ‘best practise’ - if Canada and the North Sea deep rigs would have had to have relief wells already in place, then those operating in the Gulf should have known not to cut corners even if the US govt was allowing it.

Such trenchant comments… maybe we should all just invest in the spammer company.

@horace

GT’s topic is the oil spill, horace. If you and the Palestinians aren’t getting the attention your self-inflicted “apartheid” deserves, you should ask why most adults like GT are more concerned with real disasters than with crybabies.

lew wrote: ” Why did the greenies want to push rigs into dangerous deep water? ”

WTF!?!?!?!?! Document that one for me.

To be “green”, you understand that oil/coal, like buggy whips, are obsolete 19th century technology If a “greenie” wants to drill, it will be for CHEAP geothermal power.

As long as the fossils of the right wing insist on using fossil fuels, our economy cannot be headed anywhere but third world. We are going down .. just like Holland in the 15th century, just like Great Britain in the early 19th.

@Lewreader: There are over 3500 oil rigs in the Gulf, from Alabama to Texas, and the vast majority of them are shallow water rigs. The NOAA map (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GulfCoastPlatforms.jpg) would suggest that the oil companies have had no problem drilling in shallow water to their heart’s content.

That they are also drilling in deep water is because that’s where the larger oil deposits are located. They’ve pretty much tapped out the reserves closer in to shore – now they’re drilling the farther out, deeper locations.

Lewreader, you keep bringing up the Dust Bowl. Are you an Okie, or just a Steinbeck fan?

Let’s get real: the Dust Bowl doesn’t even come close to this. The Dust Bowl was a regional economic and human tragedy, but ecologically it wasn’t even a blip. This is a nightmare that the entire ecosystem, including us, mostly but not exclusively in and around the Gulf of Mexico, will be feeling for decades. Some areas, some people, some ways of life and culture, will never recover.

It’s all relative. Even the impact that took down the dinosaurs wasn’t the worst extinction event in the earth’s history, not by a long shot. We would do best to focus on the crisis at hand, and not remember past ones as a picayune excuse to criticize others.

It may be that the worst ecological disaster is already too far along to stop. Wonder if the US will stump up a fund to compensate the rest of the world for its gross overconsumption of fossil fuels… nah, thought not.

Wow, Lew, all day to twiddle your thumbs, and you get none of the facts right.

President Obama visits the gulf states to talk to the governors, to the leaders of those trying to stop & clean-up B.P.’s mess, and to residents affected by B.P.’s mess.

Obama has done much more than form a committee. We have thousands of workers cleaning up the oil, and he has established no upper limit on B.P.’s bill for its spill.

Obama has not blamed the previous administration. He correctly cited years of mismanagement by regulatory sections of the Department of the Interior as holding great responsibility for this mess. Do you deny the incompetence & corruption of the Minerals Management Service?

As for which ecological disaster is worse: the B.P. spill or the Dust Bowl, I leave that to you. THIS is the one that we must stop, correct, find the causes, & prevent.

There is no doubt that we must spend more time, money, & attention in alternative energy sources. The U.S. was heading that way in the 1970s. Ronald Reagan stopped that progress. Bush-Dick did little to help. We have had two Big Oil disasters in the last twenty years: Exxon Valdez & the B.P. spill. Each has come after a two-term presidency owned by Big Oil. Maybe it’s a coincidence. Maybe not. Bush-Dick’s administration approved these drilling plans with no relief wells. Yes, Obama’s Department of the Interior should’ve stopped it, but it’s tough to halt & clean up all the messes left by such a disastrous presidency as Bush-Dick’s, particularly when the minority party in the Senate continues to use the Senate rules to keep the Executive Branch short-handed.

As for the economy, apparently you are no more knowledgeable about economics than you are about petroleum drilling. The only thing that would put us in the same state as Greece would be giving you Tea Baggers your way: spend, spend, spend, but do not tax!

Wow, Lew, all day to twiddle your thumbs, and you get none of the facts right.

President Obama visits the gulf states to talk to the governors, to the leaders of those trying to stop & clean-up B.P.’s mess, and to residents affected by B.P.’s mess.

Obama has done much more than form a committee. We have thousands of workers cleaning up the oil, and he has established no upper limit on B.P.’s bill for its spill.

Obama has not blamed the previous administration. He correctly cited years of mismanagement by regulatory sections of the Department of the Interior as holding great responsibility for this mess. Do you deny the incompetence & corruption of the Minerals Management Service?

As for which ecological disaster is worse: the B.P. spill or the Dust Bowl, I leave that to you. THIS is the one that we must stop, correct, find the causes, & prevent.

There is no doubt that we must spend more time, money, & attention in alternative energy sources. The U.S. was heading that way in the 1970s. Ronald Reagan stopped that progress. Bush-Dick did little to help. We have had two Big Oil disasters in the last twenty years: Exxon Valdez & the B.P. spill. Each has come after a two-term presidency owned by Big Oil. Maybe it’s a coincidence. Maybe not. Bush-Dick’s administration approved these drilling plans with no relief wells. Yes, Obama’s Department of the Interior should’ve stopped it, but it’s tough to halt & clean up all the messes left by such a disastrous presidency as Bush-Dick’s, particularly when the minority party in the Senate continues to use the Senate rules to keep the Executive Branch short-handed.

As for the economy, apparently you are no more knowledgeable about economics than you are about petroleum drilling. The only thing that would put us in the same state as Greece would be giving you Tea Baggers your way: spend, spend, spend, but do not tax!

Speaking “from the right”, there;s no particular conservative ilk that ties conservatives to fossil fuels. True, there is a massive business infrastructure that supports the present fossil fuel model, but these companies have supported both sides of the isle in maintaining the status quo on energy utilization. If anything, it has been the right who has championed nuclear energy alternatives, and it has been the left who have thrown roadblocks against progress in that direction.

The problem is simple - fossil fuel energy is amazingly cheap. You can just pick up a chunk of coal from the ground and burn it for energy, or stick a hole in the ground and pull up the oil. For better or worse, the 19th and 20th centuries were built upon the work performed by inexpensive coal, oil, and gas.

Alternatives to these sources sound nice but are expensive. Were we to switch to them, energy costs would more than triple, availability is scarce, and as every president since Carter has known, American hate waiting in lines for gas. Keeping that supply coming is the #1 concern of American voters and the people they vote for, regardless of ideological associations.

Lew’s been having a hard time getting his “medications” - see Bird Brains.

This was posted yesterday on YouTube - it has over 19,000 views”

Glee’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” with Oil Spill Images

BP’s reputation is lower than pond scum.

jakebb2 Re: “GJ, attack the man’s ideas, not the man himself…….”

Ok - Lew’s “IDEAS” are just a bunch of rants that have no tangible base in reality! For example:

“Why did the greenies want to push rigs into dangerous deep water?”

That’s just a BIG OLD LIE!

“Data” IS plural, Chikuku.

Nemesys, if we had continued moving forward from the 1970s, when Jimmy Carter was very much behind alternatives to petroleum, then they would not be so expensive today. All the presidents since Carter have kept us increasingly addicted to foreign oil.

Fear and Loathing…Hunter S. Thompson

Grammar always depends on meaning. When your name is called out from a crowd, you probably won’t say “Here I am” but “That’s me!”

Duke is referring to “this” paper, which contains (singular verb) the (plural) data.

Nemesys: The only reason that fossil fuels are “cheap” is that the market only accounts for the immediate costs of production – not the long-term costs of remediation, or the external costs of, for example, pollution.

To an economist, the reason is simple: classically, a successful market depends on private ownership of all resources and products, both intended and unintended. Classical free-market theory also requires that no one produce or consumer is big enough to avoid being sued or regulated into internalizing the costs their messes impose on others. All of that turns out to be close enough to reality in an amazingly wide range of conditions – but only a fool expects a theory is always good enough to be enshrined and worshiped.

No one owns the future, when available “cheap” supplies run out; or the polluted air, water, soil, critical habitat, etc. – so there are no market transactions that can capture the full cost of those “cheap” resources. That makes their prices unrealistically low, which leads to spectacularly bad market and policy decisions.

What the “invisible hand” of the market can’t fix, the visible hand of the government has to correct – a conclusion that only the most blindly ideological free-market/libertarian advocates would deny.

BrianCrook…Thank you for writing what I consider the “truthiness” of this mess. As for BP, no one seems to remember that they are still drilling elsewhere, so their income has not stopped. and they should have the ability to pay for the cleanup and the compensations without filing for bankruptcy.

Well put, SCAATY. People who feel sorry for–or even grateful to–BP and the big oil producers are making idols of these capitalized juggernauts who gamble with OUR future as well as the future of their idolaters and shareholders.

There’s an analogy here with the tobacco industry and its idolaters/smokers.

Ps. One of those idolaters, Joe Barton (Rep. from Texas and the biggest recipient of lobby money) actually apologized to BP for what he called the White House “shakedown” of his prostrate idol. Reminds one of a hound dog licking the hand that beats it because it also feeds it.

SCAATY, it seems that the market is dealing quite directly with the effects of the BP spill, as the company is paying for those costs themselves. Thier company viability may suffer as a result, but that’s the nature of the capitialistic system. Oh, well. Nobody’s feeling sorry for them, but it wouldn’t hurt to feel just a little sorry for the working class folks in Britain - and the US - whose pensions are anchored in BP stock.

I cannot dispute your reasoning re: cheap fossil fuels and why they’re cheap, but I do dispute that dealing with energy by-products is limited to fossil fuels. The amount of toxic waste produced by creating solar panels, wind turbines, battery storage systems and of course nuclear energy is considerable and has not been considered when contemplating switching to these alternatives, particularly battery disposal issues. Even hydroelectric power requires us to deal with the ecological disruption it causes. Until we discover some Harry-Potter-esk magical perpetual energy source, the issue of cleaning up after ourselves will always be with us, so cheap energy picked up off the ground is always better than energy you have to spend a lot of money on to produce.

It all comes down to what falls out onto your head when you shake the money tree. If you double the price of gas, people will squawk, but they’ll do the same if you double their taxes through energy surcharges. But from a remedial viewpoint, can you tell me any examples where leaving things to the government to correct has actually worked? Even blindly ideological statists/socialsts advocates can’t name any. Today’s shakedown of BP to form a social slush fund doesn’t count.

Nemesys–Do you really believe “the market” and not the government persuaded BP to pay for the spill whatever the cost? Are you one of Barton’s constituents?

Nemesys: You’re correct: BP is bearing the costs of cleanup and compensation themselves. I would point out, though, that in doing so it’s voluntarily internalizing the external costs its mess has imposed on everyone else, rather than being compelled to do so by a court ruling or government demand. None of that is the result of the market. This may, of course, affect its market in the future, since the cleanup and compensation costs will become part of its “cost of doing business”, and will be reflected in its return to its shareholders and the prices it wants to charge for its products.

You’re also correct that the externalities problem is not limited to fossil fuels, and I never meant to suggest anything else. The newer alternatives, however, are more likely to have figured those costs into their product cost already – which is one of the reasons why they’re more expensive – whereas fossil fuels have yet to do so. Also, the externalities costs of alternative energy sources will probably be lower in total than those of fossil fuels. (One exception to that is nuclear power. Disposing of high-level nuclear waste has never been satisfactorily addressed even in terms of how, much less its cost.)

“Leaving things to the government” without condition is on no sensible person’s agenda, I think. Centrally planned economies have a miserable track record. But where government has worked with market forces to adjust for imbalances of market power and gross inequities, it’s worked out quite well. Antitrust legislation is one example; the National Environmental Protection Act is another. There will always be problems with government intervention, but leveling the playing field and making up for things the market is simply blind to for the general good will always be a wise idea.

Did U see last night’s The Daily Show With Jon Stewart? Excellent vintage footage shown of the last 8 Presidents talking about the need to reduce dependence on foreign oil (guess that would have to include Canada & Great Britain).

Watch the segment all the way to the end to see which President has done more for Environmental Protection.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/videos/tag/Richard+Nixon

Well I voted for Nixon in 72! At least now I’m not as embarrassed as I was after Watergate.

Duke is sweating, how uncharacteristic!

jakebb2 said, GJ, attack the man’s ideas, not the man himself…….

He wasn’t attacking Lew himself. It’s a running gag in the “Bird Brains” comments that Lew is going crazy trying to find faces in the comic, thus the medications comment. Lew himself encourages it.

Ain’t sweat, counto.