LOST

Here's Ed Stein's commentary on this cartoon:

What’s coming increasingly clear as the Gulf of Mexico turns black, is that the Bush administration’s coziness with the oil industry was worse than incompetent–it was criminal. The Minerals Management Service, already notorious for being in bed  (literally, in some cases) with the industries it supposedly regulates, handed out drilling permits and environmental waivers like candy, in violation of its own rules and environmental law, often against the advice of its own geologists and biologists. Interior Secretary Salazar supposedly drained that swamp, but it turns out that the Obama administration either underestimated or ignored the degree of corruption, and many of their worst practices have continued. The inevitable result of all this hanky-panky is the worst oil spill and quite possibly the worst man-made environmental disaster in history. Funny, I don’t hear anybody chanting “Drill baby drill” anymore.

But you know, he's dreaming if he thinks we won't be hearing "drill, baby, drill" again soon enough, just as soon as this disaster has passed from the public consciousness (given our embarrassingly short memories, I give it a year, tops). And I don't see too many signs that this has given a boost to energy reform legislation - cap-and-trade, alternate energy, conservation - either.

Speaking of the latter, I've heard absolutely no talk about lowering speed limits. And it isn't as though there aren't other benefits to that, in addition to conserving energy. Here's how Eric A. Morris at Freakonomics puts it:

According to a recent paper by Lee S. Friedman, Donald Hedeker, and Elihu D. Richter, the lifting of the federal 55 mph speed limit in 1995 was responsible for 12,545 deaths between 1995 and 2005. That’s about 45 percent more American fatalities than we have suffered in 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan put together. And all those human tragedies are due not to weighty national security imperatives but to the fact that we all want to go just a little bit faster.

I might point out Al Gore's commentary in The New Republic, too:

The continuing undersea gusher of oil 50 miles off the shores of Louisiana is not the only source of dangerous uncontrolled pollution spewing into the environment. Worldwide, the amount of man-made CO2 being spilled every three seconds into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding the planet equals the highest current estimate of the amount of oil spilling from the Macondo well every day. Indeed, the average American coal-fired power generating plant gushes more than three times as much global-warming pollution into the atmosphere each day—and there are over 1,400 of them.

Just as the oil companies told us that deep-water drilling was safe, they tell us that it’s perfectly all right to dump 90 million tons of CO2 into the air of the world every 24 hours. Even as the oil spill continues to grow—even as BP warns that the flow could increase multi-fold, to 60,000 barrels per day, and that it may continue for months—the head of the American Petroleum Institute, Jack Gerard, says, "Nothing has changed. When we get back to the politics of energy, oil and natural gas are essential to the economy and our way of life."

The problem is exactly that nothing has changed. Nothing changed after the Arab Oil Embargo in 1973. Nothing changed after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. Nothing changed after the 9/11 attacks. We've seen, repeatedly, for decades, that change is desperately needed, but we can't seem to muster the political will to do anything.

This is not just about the political power of big corporations, and in particular the oil and gas industry. It's not just about being greedy and gullible, willing to elect politicians who'll tell us whatever we want to hear and willing to let our descendants pay for our foolishness. It's not just about irrational, short-sighted, ignorant non-thinking. It's about all of these coming together to paralyze America and stop us from changing course before even worse disasters strike.

It might be different if we were destroying our planet to buy time, but we're not. We're doing nothing. We're wasting that time. I guess we're all hoping to die before things get really bad. Our kids? Who cares? What have they ever done for us?

Or are we even that smart? Maybe we're just too dumb to notice - and too apathetic to care if we did.