Riddle me this: In what universe can the monumental and historic environmental disaster in the gulf make you more likely to support off shore drilling?
Public Policy Polling: 28% of Republicans said the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico made them more likely to support drilling off the coast to an equal 28% who said it made them less likely to be supportive.
Just sayin.
Amazing.
(hat tip Ed Brayton)
Please share widely!
I’ll explain why.
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p>Sarah Palin is an idiot.
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p>Newt Gingrich is a dickhead.
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p>from the link:
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p>It would appear that the plurality of the spillers are voting for the dickhead, which leads me to believe that their response on that poll question was them being dickheads as well.
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p>I would posit that 17% of the 28% honestly think the oil spill is good for more drilling, which, while still boggles the mind, is far worse than 28% of the entire polling group.
… I don’t understand why I shouldn’t take it seriously. Either one of two things (or some combination) is going on here. Either they believe what they are saying in the pole, in which case I should be alarmed because this isn’t rational, or they are being so loyal to the tribe that they find no problem in looking like idiots, which is alarming because loyalty in the face of reality means reason plays no part in their political decision making and that they are willing to subvert reason for political ends.
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p>I think that 28% of the GOP being on either side of those possibilities is alarming.
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p>I hope the other 72% are alarmed and reign in the stupidity. Unfortunately, there are probably too many that find the tribal loyalty too convenient to criticize.
I suspect it was an unintended error on your part, but it should be “rein in the stupidity”. However, I got to thinking that the GOP has actually become quite accustomed to “reigning (ie ruling) in the stupidity” of much of the American electorate. Just a thought:)
Mr. Lynne balances the fresh incisiveness and accuracy of his liberal commentary with an equally liberal sprinkling of typos and misspellings.
but you did mess up two: rein and reign, pole and poll.
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p>I’ll gladly accept that in exchange for the frequently new material and perspectives you provide.
It’s poll, not pole. But you may want to hit that 28% upside the head with a pole.
Basically, pro-drilling people probably felt saying anything else would make them seem insincere:
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p>Source,
… too. I think there are members of the community on the right where assertion of believe ‘no matter what’ is an ideological virtue.
…who encouraged us to look at the big picture and over all record. He would tell us not to let one instance like this change our opinion on drilling, not to let Chernobyl change our opinion on nuclear power, not to let the Challenger disaster sour us on the space shuttle program, etc.
… it’s not this one point of data on drilling that I’m afraid of. It’s the one piece of data in a string of data on corporate disregard for safety and responsibility. I’d normally not worry that much but the effect of campaign finance on our ability to be watchdogs guarding against corporate natural tendencies does give one pause. For us, this kind of spill was new and novel (and the fact that is a deep water spill is new in general), but from what I’ve heard, in West Africa this kind of thing happens all too often (more frequently, but with each occurrence on a smaller scale).
There has been offshore drilling for nearly 40 years, and this is one of two incidents that I have been able to identify. That makes it safer than shipping petroleum with tanker ships, which have a history of repeated spills and catastrophic spills.
In less than 20 seconds I was able to identify nine offshore oil rig accidents that killed a total of 771 people…
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p>If you had typed “offshore oil rig accidents” into google before responding, you’d have found a wealth of information on the dozens of ‘incidents’ where human life was lost and millions of gallons of oil were spewed into the ocean. While statistically it may still be safer than tanker ships, to suggest that there isn’t a string data on corporate disregard for safety and responsibility, ignores reality.
I guess I was unfair to Lynn, as he was referring to all drilling.
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p>I understand that the drilling industry, like all natural-resource extraction, is dangerous. My point was simply that doesn’t seem to be any more dangerous, and possibly less so, than any other kind of oil drilling. Because the platforms use pipelines rather than tankers, they eliminate the risks associated with tankers, which are the source of more spilled oil. Thus, panicky BAN IT!! reactions, as happened after 3 mile island to nuclear power, don’t seem to me to make much sense at all. Better to find a way to address or improve the industry-capture-of-regulator problem.
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p>Nevertheless, I’ll withdraw the comment, because it responds to a point Mr. Lynn was not making.
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p>But: we want to ban oil drilling, on land and at sea; we want to end the use of coal as fuel, because these fossil fuels will be so philosophically destructive as to risk human civilization; we want to eliminate nuclear power because it is even worse than fossil fuels; we don’t want to put dams on rivers because the salmon wont have a place to spawn.
… that our “industry-capture-of-regulator” problem is much more pervasive and endemic of a problem than any single event or industry. I bemoan that while, natural resource extraction can be dangerous, it didn’t have to be this dangerous. I don’t see a way out without campaign finance reform. Incentives need realigning.
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p>All that being said, it does need to be said that consequences (their scope and magnitude) necessarily needs to be part of any risk assessment. What this spill does, is illustrate an example where it wasn’t taken into account enough. Certainly we can agree that there can be a point at which the danger and impact risk and scope risk of a given activity necessitate that we ‘ban’ it. I’ve got to imagine that even in the context of your point this is at least hypothetically true. If so, then it could be easily seen why many might react to these particular consequences by coming to that conclusion (at least as laymen). Furthermore, you could argue that the threshold for banning might need to be lower in the US precisely because our “industry-capture-of-regulator” problem puts us in a position to trust the risk assessments even less.
The point above, with which I was attempting to agree, is that the lay-person reaction and conclusion is likely to be profoundly wrongheaded.
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p>Lay reactions to disasters are generally wrongheaded overreactions. In this sense, the urge to now ban offshore drilling stems from the same unfortunate impulse that begat the Patriot Act.
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p>I don’t claim to know where the line is or should be. I suspect that BP would have been more motivated to invest in preventative measures were its potential liability not capped.
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p>Nor do I have an easy answer to the capture problem. I suppose it would be super if all of the drilling regulators had no connection to the industry, but then they would be ineffective on account of ignorance rather than because of capture.
To say that something like this incident, or Chernobyl, shouldn’t give us pause on deep-sea drilling, or nuclear energy for mass production, is honestly absurd. Oil rigs themselves have frequent accidents, but I think it’s telling that we’re having so much damn trouble with Deep Horizon, because it was a Deep Sea rig, of which there aren’t particularly many. We simply do not have the technology to stop the damage and probably won’t for a very, very long time, because this was a Deep Sea rig. For the difficulty and challenges that the Deep Sea presents, we may as well be drilling on Mars.
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p>As for Nuclear Energy, an entire generation (or two or three) of people suffered a great deal because of that accident. Cancer rates rose all across Europe and beyond from it. And worse things could have happened. It’s telling that even in this day and age, there are still serious nuclear accidents, including in the country most known for its nuclear energy production — France.
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p>When you’re talking about doing activities which could not only ruin thousands or millions of lives, but present a possible regional armageddon, society should take great pause and not do it unless it’s absolutely, positively necessary. Nuclear energy is not absolutely, positively necessary for use as a major energy-producing means for society. Deep Sea oil rigging is completely unnecessary and represents a tiny sliver of the world’s oil — that is clearly too dangerous to collect.
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p>Maybe you’ll feel differently about Deep Sea drilling when the full impacts are understood. Because of the gas from this leak — which is far worse than the oil — Deep Horizon’s damage could literally wipe out the oxygen in the water in the entire Gulf, killing an entire ecosystem. And the gas could get stuck in that water for decades, so it won’t come back. That’s how bad this is. Or how about when all that oil, tarballs and some of that gas in the water… that kills the oxygen in the water and stays there for generations… starts inching its way up the East Coast? Because that’s what we’re facing, too, thanks to the currents.
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p>It’s this kind of BS that makes me go insane in my brain. If I had a child who had a teacher who said this sort of incident shouldn’t turn us off Deep Sea drilling, or the Chernobyl shouldn’t have given us great pause about nuclear energy, I would go absolutely berserk and there would have — at the very least — been a serious and lengthy conversation with that teacher.
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p>Scoffing at Chernobyl? Seriously? This kind of batshit craziness and stupidity makes me lose hope in humanity.
The reaction to Three Mile Island clearly snuffed the nuclear power industry, in the US at least, and has led to expansion of power from coal. I have it on good authority that power generation from coal has significant costs of its own, which might have been easier to manage or contain in 2010 if a greater proportion of energy had been derived from nuclear power from 1979-2009.
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p>Energy is dangerous business, and causes significant environmental impacts, among other negative effects. However, it also prevented several hundred million people from freezing or starving to death last winter.
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p>It isn’t fair to pile up the negatives on one scale while ignoring that not doing dangerous things also has costs.
… is that so much is externalized and not represented in its price. I think managing or containing these costs could be much better served in addressing pricing.
Though any effort to internalize those externalities–carbon tax– is politically a nonstarter.
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p>The problem with some of these externalities is that we only know about them post-hoc. It would have been super if a carbon-tax directed investment elsewhere when our power plant infrastructure was being built, but this would require Marty McFly’s help.
There should be solar panels on every rooftop and wind farms in every feasable location. Oil is on the way out.
It’s as old fashioned as granite countertops. I think it’s time that solar panels be required in building codes for new commercial and residential building. The more we use them, the less they will cost to install.
… is ubiquitous in Europe in new residential construction from what I understand. And from what I understand it is so because of building codes.
Granite counter tops are old fashioned?
I’m of the mind that associating the Republican desire to continue to drill with the crack addict’s desire to continue his or her addiction at any cost. Pretty soon we can distill (no pun intended) that image down to its elemental components: Republicans are the crack addicts of oil dependency. Think of the political cartoons that would yield.
it’s the oil-money that they are addicted to.
Oil is money.
I have really enjoyed watching the right shift their commentary from “This is Obama’s Katrina” sort of comments, which you heard a lot in the days after the leak began… counting how many days Obama went without addressing the issue publicly, etc… to now saying how the leak isn’t that bad, and that the sea water will clean itself.
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p>It has been amazing. They realized they are more known for drilling so by attacking the president on drilling they were hurting themselves… so the dance began so that Rush and others are now saying “no big deal” “oil always seeps into the ocean” “we’ll see if it reaches valdez size” (implying it won’t)
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p>back to drill baby drill.