skippy the bush kangaroo: obama must have misspelled

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

obama must have misspelled

the chant is supposed to read "krill, baby, krill"

we here in santa barbara know all to well what offshore drilling can do to our big, blubbery neighbors. and we will use another republican quote..."just say no!!!!!!" when it comes to offshore drilling.

Labels: ocean, offshore drilling, santa barbara, whales

posted by Cookie Jill at 8:00 PM |

6 Comments:

Jill

This one's all optics.
I suspect you missed a couple nuances that were pointed out to me by commenters on Kevin Drum's site :

1. The Bristol Bay Alaska no-drill zone cancels some actual drilling plans on some existing leases, in areas that we really don't want to see developed for oil.

2. There are no leases granted yet in the zones declared opened -- and the process of getting a lease is lengthy and uncertain.

3. The "oilfields" opened are not hot prospects - even if leases are granted, the oil companies are not curreently exploiting better prospects than these in their existing leases.

4. The opened areas are all on the coasts of red states; California was not opened.

So : Obama gets "centrist" and "moderate" cred from the Villagers for opening more area to drilling, and co-opts a Republican talking point. The Administration's actions actually _reduce_ the amount of drilling that will occur in the short-to-intermediate term, and Bristol Bay is protected. The states whose politicians like to chant "Drill, Baby, Drill" are the states who may see platforms along their coasts.

I hope I got all that right ...

commented by

joel hanes, 9:30 PM PDT

This comment has been removed by the author.

commented by

Fran, 1:32 AM PDT

This comment has been removed by the author.

commented by

Fran, 1:34 AM PDT

Hell no!

When it comes to the health of ocean ecosystems, there are no red or blue states....
the ocean is all one.

commented by

Fran, 1:35 AM PDT

Yeah well all continental shelves are not the same.

On the West Coast it is narrow meaning that any rigs are likely to be visible from shore and or smack in the way of the whale migration path all well as seriously endangering breeding grounds of many species of marine mammals. A repeat of the Santa Barbara spill closer to the Channel Islands would be devastating, perhaps permanently so.

On the East and Gulf coasts the shelves are wide meaning rigs can be sited enough off shore so as not to be seen or endanger sensitive tidelands and shorelands. Moreover the rigs offer pretty good habitat for certain species of fish that currently are seriously over-fished, each one being a mini-sanctuary at least safe from a trawler's nets, so the the net environmental impact is much lower.

I refuse to get all hot and bothered over this, the biggest environmental threat from the 'drill, baby, drill' contingent was land installations in ANWR and nobody in the Obama team seems to be entertaining that idea. Frankly when given a trade between a rig thirty miles off shore using modern technology and knocking off the top of a mountain in Appalachia and filling dozens of miles of streams to get at the coal I am going to go for the oil and gas.

commented by

Bruce Webb, 9:03 AM PDT

The safe habitat theory sounds like an industry pipe dream.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0qkSAEPq6E&feature=player_embedded

I did a piece on offshore oil drilling back in January.

Oil rigs can explode, leak & when they do, you can't put the toxic goop Genie back into the bottle.

http://ramblings-fran.blogspot.com/2010/01/offshore-oil-drilling.html

The Exxon oil spill is still there 20 years later.

They have mysterious dead zones in the ocean (no oxygen), here in Oregon, in the vicinity where an oil carrying ship crashed on shore. They decided to drag the remnants of the ship out to sea & blow it up.

The dead zones kill everything on every level of the food chain to the bottom of the ocean floor.

For all the $ they are going to spend on oil, they could & should be tapping into solar.

I see the new Nissan Leaf- electric car will come w a free installation of a 220 charging station installed at your home.

It will get 100 miles to the charge.

Most homes would be able to use solar panels
new solar panels utilize all spectrums of the suns rays, so even cloudy overcast days would harness power from the sun.

Germany really embraced this energy source & gave generous rebates, and made solar a building requirement for new construction.

The US is just stuck in the combustion engine oil consumption mode.

None of our oil sources will sustain long term consumption.

We need to be responsible stewards of the land- that includes not trashing the ocean ecosystem.

commented by

Fran, 9:29 AM PDT

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