How to Make a Bad Problem Worse

BP and the Unmitigated Disaster

By Alan Caruba

The Gulf of Mexico could turn into a giant dead zone if some means cannot be found to staunch the flow of oil and toxic gases emerging from the damaged well beneath the Deepwater Horizon. Industry insiders who understand the engineering of wells are beginning to speak openly among themselves of an unmitigated disaster.

It is essential to understand that the oil business is like no other. Oil companies that drill too many dry holes go out of business. Oil is too often in places run by despots and gangsters that would make Hollywood villains seem tame by comparison. Oil companies must deal with them even at the risk they will renege on their promises; something they do a lot.

The oil business depends on technology that attempts to give geologists an idea of what is hidden way below the surface of the land or water. It often means having to team up with your competitors to finance an operation such as building a pipeline so both can move their crude oil to refineries.

Beyond that, oil companies do not set the price of oil. OPEC does not set the price of oil. Traders do that and they do it 24/7. You can lose money by not having enough oil and you can lose money from having too much oil that has to be stored until the price improves.

With the exception of a tanker spill in the 1980s, among the major oil companies ExxonMobil has an extraordinary record of safety. Its company ethos is such that decisions are made only after serious consideration and its emphasis has always been on managing to achieve the best results with the least amount of risk, primarily by paying attention to good practices. Its management is not flashy and does not seek the spotlight.

In contrast, British Petroleum has always been about risk and about cutting corners. Prior to CEO Tony Hayward who was pushed aside by its board of directors after two months of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time during the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP was largely a reflection of John Browne, an egotist who was driven to build the company through mergers and buy-outs. His interest in the engineering and technological aspects of the business was minimal.

As Tom Bowers, the author of “Oil: Money, Politics and Power in the 21st Century”, put it, Browne’s “mantra of ‘more for less’ to boost BP’s share price was a poisoned chalice.”

The result was that BP routinely paid multi-million dollar fines for breaking U.S. environmental and safety laws, including admitting to outright fraud. No other oil company has a comparable record of safety violations. In two separate incidents prior to the Gulf oil rig explosion, 30 BP workers had been killed and more than 200 were seriously injured.

By skimping on safety a Texas City refinery explosion not only dealt a blow to BP’s reputation, but the estimated minimum cost in lost profits and compensation was calculated to be $4 billion. BP had decided to save money by not insuring the facility against the possibility of such an accident. By extension, it increased the public’s distrust of the oil industry.

In an article about its safety record, it was noted that Occupational Safety and Health Administration statistics showed that BP “ran up 760 ‘egregious, willful’ safety violations,” while Sunoco and Conoco-Phillips each had eight, Citgo had two and ExxonMobil had only one such citation.

Oil companies run their own trading operations and BP ran afoul of the law when it conspired to manipulate the propane gas market, ripping off $53 million from consumers who depended on it to heat their homes.

BP through its lobbyists and corporate representatives worked to influence Congress and reportedly played “a major role in drafting the Kerry-Lieberman bill”, the Cap-and-Trade Act currently waiting for a vote in the Senate. It is based on blatantly false "global warming science" and is a tax on energy use.

Under the leadership of John Browne, BP more than any other oil company, actively sought to re-brand itself from being an oil company to being an advocate for the environment, using an advertising motto, “Beyond petroleum” and supporting the fraudulent “global warming” hoax. With Browne at the helm, he promised that BP would invest $1 billion in solar energy by 2010 and invest $8 billion in alternative energies over ten years.

It did not, apparently, invest in the kind of engineering and inspection of rig construction that might have prevented the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon. The event and previous explosions at its refineries were the result of years of an internal BP philosophy that focused on profits before safety. Whether it was accident prone refineries or corrosion in the Alaska pipeline, BP cut corners.

Even when Browne reached the mandatory retirement age of 60 in 2008, he did everything in his power to avoid it. He had run out of support in the company he had built through his quest to be among the largest, if not the largest, oil company in the world. By then, however, it was too late to save BP from what, in hindsight, was an inevitable disaster.

Suffice it to say that everything that could go wrong following the Deepwater Horizon explosion has gone wrong. The oil industry has never been faced with an engineering failure of this magnitude.

For the creatures of the Gulf, it is an ecological disaster of biblical proportions. For the coastal states affected, it is an economic disaster that will rapidly eat through the $20 billion BP has pledged to set aside for remediation over the next five years. The losses to the nation as a whole are probably incalculable at this point.

Industry insiders believe that neither BP, nor the Obama administration, are telling the public the truth, nor the full ramifications of what will occur if the blowout preventer, all 450 tons of it, literally tips over deep below the waters of the Gulf.

“It won’t be long after that the entire system fails,” predicted a writer in Oil Drum.com. “BP must be aware of this. They are mapping the sea floor sonically and that is not a mere exercise. Our government must be aware too, but they are just not telling us.”

It is essential to keep in mind that this is a BP problem. It is not something for which the entire oil industry should be blamed. America runs on oil and, if the politicians will just get out of the way, we shall have it.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Heads Should Roll

By Alan Caruba

The only person who has been fired in the midst of the oil spill fiasco has been the former head of the Minerals Management Service of the Department of the Interior.

According to a June 17 editorial in The Wall Street Journal, it is now clear that both the Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, and the White House energy “czar”, Carol Browner, both lied to the nation regarding the recommendations by drilling experts, alleging that they had agreed to a moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf.

Browner, citing the falsified recommendation to impose a moratorium, inserted after the memorandum had been received, said, “No one’s been deceived or misrepresented.” She lied.

From the beginning of the oil spill, the administration has failed to respond in a timely fashion.

In an article in Human Events the following lack of action by the administration was cited:

It failed to accept help offered by the Netherlands to help with skimming booms and plans to create barriers.

It failed to suspend the Jones Act in order to allow foreign vessels into American waters.

It failed to suspend the Davis-Bacon wage laws to allow rapid deployment of new workers to help the containment efforts.

It failed to suspend FEMA contracting and bidding rules.

It failed to allow coastal governors to immediately begin dredging to create barrier islands.

Failure on this scale requires that those involved should lose their jobs. We cannot “fire” the President, but his administration is shot through with people from the highest level to those below that exacerbated the Gulf oil spill.

The Secretary of Energy, Dr. Steven Chu, has barely been heard from. The Secretary of the Interior has been silenced since his comment that he would keep his “boot on the neck of BP.”

It took nearly two months before the President met with officials from BP.

The President has been soundly criticized for his lack of competence in office while he devoted himself to passing the hated Obamacare legislation and drove the national debt to levels unseen in the history of the nation.

What the President has offered is a “commission” to study the event. He continues to advocate “a clean energy future” filled with solar and wind farms. Neither can even begin to meet the needs of a small city, let alone the nation. All must be backed up by coal-fired, natural gas, and nuclear plants.

Waiting in the Senate for a vote is the infamous “Cap-and-Trade Act”, renamed several times now to mask the fact that it would impose a massive tax on all energy use by Americans and cede to the Environmental Protection Agency powers based on the entirely false assertion that carbon dioxide is responsible for “global warming.” There is no global warming. It is a lie.

A recent vote by the Democrat-controlled Senate opened the door to this eventuality even if the Cap-and-Trade Act is not enacted.

The Secretary of the Interior should be fired. Carol Browner, the President’s energy advisor should be fired. The Secretary of Energy should be fired. They won’t be.

In November the midterm elections will permit Americans to replace every member of the Senate and House up for re-election whose votes have been responsible for the nation’s unsustainable debt level, for the failed “stimulus” bill, for their failure to address the nation’s immigration crisis, for their vote to pass Obamacare and for their failure to extend the Bush administration tax cuts.

In 2012, we can cast out Barack Obama, his endless “czars”, and an administration that has consistently worked to destroy America.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

It Doesn't Matter What Obama Says About the Oil Spill

By Alan Caruba

It doesn’t matter what President Obama says from the Oval Office Tuesday evening. He can lay out all manner of things that BP must do in the wake of what is shaping up to be a major ecological disaster, but he and Congress are also working to put a cap on BP’s financial liability. Both know that this leak will ultimately cost upwards of a trillion dollars or more to ameliorate.

It’s not that BP isn’t liable for the leak, but rather that it had the great, good fortune to tap what in the oil industry are called “elephants”, discoveries of huge multi-million barrel reserves. It had the bad fortune to have the huge rig blow up and a leak so far down only robots can attempt to shut it off.

What one rarely hears about are the “dry” holes that oil companies drill. They don’t make news, but they spell disaster for an oil company that does it too many times. As Tom Bower says in his timely new book, “Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century”, “In recent years, dry holes had wrecked major oil companies. The skeletons of Gulf, Texaco, Arco and other past icons mercilessly testified that only the fittest and bravest survived.”

The amount of investment in a single hole is significant. When that hole is in deep water, a billion dollars can be spent at a rate of hundreds of thousands a day to rent a rig. Naturally, the oil companies use every form of technology available to geologists to decide where to drill, but even then it is a high risk gamble.

To cite one BP gamble, when in 1969 Arco drilled in Alaska it only found non-commercial gas. BP geologist, Jim Spence, concluded the oil was closer to the rim of a potential reservoir instead of its “sweet spot.” The result saved BP. The company then put its chips on the Gulf of Mexico. It became the largest acreage-holder and owned a third of all the oil discovered there.

All the major oil companies knew that the Gulf of Mexico represented a treasure of oil, but it was BP that rolled the dice the most. In 2005, one deep water rig called Thunder Horse was nearly ready when Hurricane Dennis hit the Gulf and it had to be abandoned. When the engineers returned, they found flaws in some of its valves. In hindsight, it foretold the problems encountered by the Deepwater Horizon.

The irony was that BP’s latest discovery was the mother lode of oil reservoirs. Vladimir Kutcherov is a Russian specialist in the theory of the abiogenic deep origin of oil, the view that it is not created from the activity of living organisms; that oil is the result of dead dinosaurs.

Oil, it would appear, is created deep within the Earth. Kutcherov believes that BP drilled into “a migration channel”, a deep fault on which hydrocarbons generated in the depth of the planet migrate to the crust.

The other irony is that the BP disaster should put an end to the widely disseminated “peak oil” theory that says the Earth is running out of oil. If Kutcherov is right—and I think he is—that means the “hole” that President Obama and BP wants “plugged” is comparable to trying to plug a volcano. The effort could take months, if not years.

That is why whatever President Obama tells Americans and the rest of the world is probably going to be something far less than the truth. Obama faces some fearful political consequences no matter what he says. BP is heavily invested in America. It employs several thousand. It pays huge royalties. Many British pensioners depend on its dividends as do other investors.

The unions to which Obama owes much for his election are resistant to allowing non-union workers to help protect against the growing spill affecting Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. The spill also threatens to reveal how closely associated BP was with many leading environmental organizations.

As F. William Engdahl, the author of “A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, points out in a June 11th Global Research commentary, “”The deafening silence of leading green or ecology organizations such as Greenpeace, Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club and others may well be tied to a money trail that leads right back to the oil industry, notably to BP.”

“Leading environmental organizations have gotten significant financial payoffs in recent years from BP in order that the oil company could remake itself with an ‘environmentally friendly face’, as in ‘beyond petroleum’, the company’s new branding.”

Among those groups have been the Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, the Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club, and Audubon.

The drive to drill in deep waters off shore was in part driven by the resistance by environmental organizations to doing so far more safely on land. The refusal to allow drilling in Alaska’s ANWR is a glaring example. The fact that oil companies began decades ago to look far afield of the U.S. and its forbidden offshore reserves of oil is another.

A president who has already managed to destroy whatever popularity he had when he took office a scant year and a half ago is not likely to survive the BP disaster no matter what he says or does.

All Americans must be especially watchful for an effort by Obama to impose what was called “Cap-and-Trade”, then called a “climate” bill, and now is touted as a “Jobs” bill. It will require a major effort to thwart the Senate from signing yet another suicidal piece of legislation that would impose huge taxes on all energy use.

As always, Mother Nature will have the final word.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

BP, PR, and the Oil Spill

By Alan Caruba

I have plied the magic arts of public relations since I left journalism in the late 1960s. There was no difficulty making the transition. PR is a form of journalism insofar as it packages information, but it adds the element of advocacy. The objective is the maintenance and protection of a good reputation and good will.

By contrast, the media’s natural instinct is to go for the kill. Bad news sells and there is always plenty of bad news.

I built my PR practice telling clients that they must tell the truth. The worst kind of PR person is the one who is so eager to “spin” the story they forget that telling lies always, always, always comes back to bite them and their client.

I tell you this as someone who has watched the BP oil spill story unfold with the same fascination that a reticulated python has for a prey that is about to become dinner.

The irony is that BP, taking a page from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, avoided its mistakes. BP went out of its way to be as open to questions and to provide as much information as it thought it reasonably could. I have no doubt that BP lawyers immediately advised its management to keep its mouth shut, say as little as possible.

Lawyers always advise clients to say nothing. PR people always advise them to get out in front of the public as quickly as possible with a statement, followed by an endless series of advisories.

No one has said a word about the fact that no oil company has ever had to cap a deepwater well at such depths. Just consider how many ways BP has tried thus far.

I have a friend who, after graduation from West Point and service, spent fifty years in the oil industry. He began as a petroleum reservoir engineer and later as an oil and gas attorney.

In a discussion of the event with him, he said, “No one yet has noted that BP drilled into a monstrous oil and gas reservoir; a reservoir which could replace much of our imported foreign oil. Such a well dwarfs the best Saudi wells.”

That’s a major part of the story and that is why the oil spill is so large.

There appears to be enough oil out there under the Gulf of Mexico to free the United States from having to import 60% of the oil it uses, but only if the federal government lets oil companies drill for it. This applies to all our oil reserves, on-shore and off.

When it comes to bad PR, there is seldom anything worse than the photos of oil-drenched birds struggling for life. Here, though, is the other side of the story that is rarely reported by the mainstream press, so hats off to the St. Petersburg Times PoliFact.com.

“The latest independent reports estimate the number of birds killed by wind turbines at 100,000 per year. That’s according to a 2007 report from the National Research Council called ‘Environmental Impacts of Wind Energy Projects.’” And that may be a low estimate.

Those wonderful “clean energy” wind turbines that the Greens and the Obama administration are touting routinely kill more birds than the BP oil spill ever could or will. One of the dependable “green jobs” around wind turbines involves picking up the carcasses of dead birds.

PR experts are already weighing in on what BP has done right or wrong. I found one fascinating tidbit of news that BP has hired “a former U.S. Department of Energy official as head of U.S. media relations, as it fights to defend its reputation in the face of political attacks and public rage over its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.” Anne Kolton is the former head of public affairs at the DOE.

This takes on significance in light of the way President Obama is actually criticizing BP for its advertising campaign to explain what it is doing and to apologize to the public for the spill. That is precisely what BP should be doing!

Meanwhile, the president has been vacillating between trying to look like he’s been doing something “since day one” while at the same time putting all the blame on BP. That is grade-school petulance and incompetence.

Fraser P. Seitel, a communications consultant, author and teacher, writes for Jack O’Dwyer’s PR Newsletter, one of the most respected trade publications. Seitel wrote that, “BP has tried admirably to be candid and transparent in dealing with a terrible situation.”

Seitel cited two critical PR errors. He gave BP low marks for offering predictions early in the spill as to how much would be involved. In a crisis like this one, you never make predictions. The other error was the failure to tamp down expectations as to when the well could be capped. Other experts have discussed the hits taken to BP stock and, ultimately its reputation.

Say “Exxon” and the only thing the public thinks of is “Valdez.” There is much more to this corporation, but don’t expect to find it in the nation’s press. And, yes, Exxon’s handling of the spill in 1989 is now a textbook case of what not to do.

The BP oil spill will cause immeasurable harm to those immediately affected by it, the beaches, the tourism, and the fishing industry of the states where the oil is washing up. There is no way, nor reason, to minimize that. Keep in mind, however, the well will be capped. The cleanup will continue. The wildlife will return. The spill will become history.

The still untold story, however, is that there is an unimaginably huge amount of oil in the U.S. territorial waters of the Gulf and this is true also for the vast continental shelf of Alaska and the lower 48. That’s the good news.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

"Oil Addiction" Lies

By Alan Caruba

Next to the huge international hoax about global warming allegedly caused by carbon dioxide, the biggest lie being told to Americans these days is that we are “addicted” to oil and that we must convert our economy and society away from its use.

The first time I recall hearing this was during George W. Bush’s 2006 State of the Union Speech and, frankly, I was astounded to hear it from the son of a former President who made his fortune in oil. The latest to repeat the lie is President Barack Obama, but he is allied with environmental organizations that are anti-energy no matter what form it takes.

Americans and everyone else around the world are not “addicted” to oil or other energy sources such as coal and natural gas. They are used to maintain and enhance modern life.

Data from 2006 makes it abundantly clear that 85.5% of the electricity we use comes from carbon-based fuels. Nuclear and hydroelectric energy add over 20% of the rest. All that magical “clean” energy, solar and wind, provides 3% or less of the electricity the nation requires.

As Robert Bryce, an editor of Energy Tribune and author of several books on energy, says, “The simple unavoidable truth is that we humans cannot (and) will not quit using oil. If oil did not exist, we’d have to invent it. No other substance can compare to oil in terms of energy density, flexibility, cost, and convenience.

“About 95% of the world’s transportation fuel comes from oil,” notes Bryce. “Thus, without oil, there is no commerce.” No commerce, no world economy.

Americans are being force-fed lies about energy and the worst of them are about “clean energy research and development.” There are no viable or sensible substitutes for oil, coal, and natural gas.

According to an October 28, 2009 report by the Congressional Research Service “U.S. proven reserves of oil total 21.3 billion barrels and reserves of natural gas are 237.7 trillion cubic feet. Undiscovered technically recoverable oil in the United States is 145.4 billion barrels, and undiscovered technically recoverable natural gas is 1.162.7 trillion cubic feet. The demonstrated reserve base for coal is 489 billion short tons, of which 262 billion short tons are considered technically recoverable.”

So why has the Obama administration announced a shutdown of the auctioning of oil leases? Why have several administrations refused to allow access to the oil beneath the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve or the potentially vast offshore Alaskan reserves?

If the ban on offshore drilling for oil and natural gas on 85% of the U.S. offshore regions is maintained, the nation will be forced to rely on foreign sources, many of whom are unfriendly, even hostile.

Think about this. Beneath a 1.5 million acre tract on the North Slope of Alaska there are an estimated three to nine billion barrels of recoverable oil. In 1987 the Department of Interior recommended development. There has been none because a succession of Congresses has refused to allow drilling on what would amount to a postage-size part of the vast Coastal Plain.

The U.S. must import the vast percentage of the oil we require, some 60%, and yet Americans are being denied the right to access, extract, refine and use the oil we have or look for more. Oil companies are routinely demonized despite the billions they must spend in exploration, extraction and refining.

Are we that stupid?

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, is promising to bring the Cap-and-Trade bill, an energy tax bill now called a “climate” bill, to a vote in July. Studies suggest its passage would destroy more than two million jobs nationwide.

One analysis projected that the bill would reduce gross domestic product (GDP) by $9.4 trillion over the next 25 years. The U.S. doesn’t have 25 years. Our current national debt is $13 trillion and our GDP is $12.9 trillion. Do the math!

Likewise, raising taxes on oil and natural gas companies would reduce the amount of private capital available for vitally needed investments to access our energy resources.

The big, awful oil and natural gas industry has already invested $58.4 billion to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and there is no need to reduce carbon dioxide. It plays no role whatever in a global warming that is NOT happening. The Earth has been cooling for a decade.

Significantly, an increase in carbon dioxide would yield more crops and healthier expanded forests.

Finally, let’s get a grip on reality. As bad as the leak has become, there is just one oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico leaking oil. It’s out there because environmentalists and government policies have forced oil companies to explore and drill in hazardous places.

The rest of the rigs, several hundreds, are still safely pumping oil. The BP Deepwater Horizon rig will be capped eventually. That problem will end. The spilled oil will be worked on by the forces of nature, dispersing and evaporating it. In five years, just like the Valdez spill, there will be no evidence of the spill.

The real “addiction” that threatens the United States is a Congress that will not stop borrowing and spending an unsustainable amount of money on programs that should have been abandoned or adjusted years ago.

Editor's Note: Here's an explanation for the BP oil rig disaster provided by a veteran oil industry professional. You are not likely to read this anywhere in the mainstream media, but you will find it here!

"A drilling engineer never, never, never, never replaces heavy mud with light saltwater.

That is a No-No on every well, even on dry land. The reason for the heavy mud is to overcome the high pressures found in deep reservoirs. No doubt that was what the argument was all about before the explosion—replacing heavy mud with light saltwater.

The natural gas at the top of the reservoir simply pushed the light saltwater out of the hole. When anyone sees fluid, in this case saltwater, coming out of the well, that is the clue to shut the blowout preventers.

Fluid had to be coming out of the well before the natural gas arrived at the surface. (Physics) Someone was assigned to watch this! Someone saw this! There was still time to prevent a disaster after seeing fluid coming out of the well.

Failure to close the blowout preventers when fluid was coming out of the well was fatal and caused the explosion."

© Alan Caruba, 2010

That Sinking Feeling

The Incredibly Shrinking President

By Alan Caruba

Lyndon B. Johnson said he knew the war in Vietnam was over when news anchor, Walter Cronkite, reporting from there said we were losing. On Sunday, Maureen Dowd of The New York Times lit into Barack Obama for his failure to react to the oil spill disaster in the Gulf.

“Too often it feels as though Barry is watching from a balcony, reluctant to enter the fray until the clamor of the crowd forces him to come down. The pattern is perverse,” said Dowd, adding, “The wound-tight, travel-light Obama has a distaste for the adversarial and the random.”

Lynn Cheney, the daughter of the former Vice President, speaking as part of a Sunday Fox News panel, put her finger on the problem, noting that Obama seems to believe that merely saying something is the same as doing something.

The coup de grace was delivered by Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal, writing “The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen.”

When the adoring mainstream media begins to back away and the base of Obama’s popularity—-what’s left of it—youth, blacks, Hispanics, enviromaniacs and the Democrat Party’s far Left have second thoughts, you have a presidency in deep trouble, but one that still has just over 960 days to serve in office.

This is a President whose political endorsement has increasingly become the kiss of death at the polls.

The news is filled with commentary about the spill being Obama’s “Katrina”, comparing him to former President Bush’s response to the category five hurricane that hit New Orleans in 2005. One can only wonder what will happen when the 2010 hurricane season begins to display once more the power of Nature over man.

This year’s hurricane season is widely predicted to be one of the worst in recent years. Accuweather’s expert, Joe Bastardi, predicts that “The 2010 Atlantic hurricane season may rival some of the worst in history with meteorological conditions mirroring the 2005 season.” He is predicting a total of 16 to 18 named storms that could last into the month of October.

Presidents don’t get to pick and choose the events that shape their term in office. They are elected to manage those events with the resources of the nation and Obama is proving to be so poor in this essential skill-set that confidence is sinking like a tar ball to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

It did not go unnoticed that, after 309 days of no press conferences, the one he held to staunch the bleeding was remarkably lame for a man who gained and entered the Oval Office on the basis of his oratory.

It lasted an excruciating hour, the first fifteen or so minutes of which was taken up by a prepared statement. Unless reading from a TelePrompter, Obama’s halting, word-by-carefully-selected-word, pause-by-pause response without technological aid is painful listening.

After LBJ’s fall from grace that forced him to forego a run for a second full term, one has to go all the way back to Jimmy Carter to find a president who disappointed the voters sufficiently to end with just one term. President George H.W. Bush was a one-term president largely because Ross Perot peeled off 19% of the vote he would have received and he had broken his no new taxes pledge.

History has since revealed that President George W. Bush’s perceived failure following Katrina was largely the result of Louisiana’s incredibly inept governor at the time and New Orleans’ moronic mayor. It did not help that, despite ample warning, a large part of the city’s population failed or refused to evacuate. Even with all that, the federal government’s effort was less than stellar.

In the face of major acts of nature or an unanticipated technological failure on a deepwater oil rig, the limitations on government are manifested for everyone to see. The faith of the public in government “action” is overblown and unrealistic, but why should that come as a surprise in the wake of years of failure to close off the nation’s southern border to a full scale invasion from Mexico.

The nation has thus far suffered with a federal government since the 1970s that has shut off most domestic oil exploration and extraction.

It has failed to encourage the building of a single new nuclear plant since Three Mile Island when literally no harm occurred to anyone.

It has fallen prey to the environmentalist campaign against coal.

It has literally been responsible for the housing bubble and the predictable financial collapse that followed in its wake.

Unable to muster international opinion, North Korea still has nukes and Iran will soon have them. Meanwhile the president wants to reduce the U.S. stockpile!

In the end, presidents are elected to lead and the only things Obama has led have been the tripling of the nation’s debt in a year and a half, the takeover of the auto industry, the takeover of the nation’s healthcare sector, and recent efforts to takeover its banking and investment sector.

The nationalization of America’s industrial and business sector mirrors what has occurred in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela and has earned the plaudits of Chavez and Cuba’s Castro brothers.

The only thing remaining to challenge this presidency is a major expansion of war in the Middle East or anywhere else. He took three months to decide what to do in Afghanistan after having previously declared that conflict to be more important than Iraq. And he has backed off support for Israel. Not smart. And very dangerous.

He has been lucky in the failure of the Christmas and Times Square bombers and less lucky in the Fort Hood killings by an Islamic-American fanatic.

Obama is the incredibly shrinking President.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Cartoon Roundup

The Invisible Dr. Chu

By Alan Caruba

While we all are now familiar with Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar’s remark about keeping the government’s boot on the neck of BP, one of the most remarkable aspects of the oil spill drama has been the near absence of Dr. Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy.

Other than an appearance MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, the Nobel Prize laureate for physics has not been the designated spokesman for the Obama administration. That job has fallen to Carol Browner, the energy and environment advisor to the president. One might think the man overseeing the Department of Energy might logically also be addressing the oil spill, but no.

Perhaps the answer can be found in the fact that Secretary Chu has been double-dipped in all the environmental lies about global warming and no one has told him that the Earth has been cooling for the past decade or that a huge batch of leaked emails is evidence of massive data tampering to support the global warming hoax.

Well, he has a lot on his plate. It’s hard to be Secretary of Energy when you pretty much hate most hydrocarbons, coal, oil and natural gas, blaming them and the six billion people on Earth for generating the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. That carbon dioxide has nothing to do with the Earth’s average mean temperature is one of those details he’s overlooked.

As Secretary Chu was saying back in September 2008, “Coal is my worst nightmare.” Well, if your resume sported the fact that you headed up the “Helios Project” (named for the Sun) when you were working at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, focusing on biofuels, you too might take a dim view of the other sources that represent the energies everybody uses.

Before the BP oil spill accident, Secretary Chu was unhappy that the United States was dependent on oil (like every other nation on Earth.) The Secretary said that “most proven reserves…are now off-shore. It will cost more to extract from tar sands and (there would be) more CO2 emissions.” Earth to Dr. Chu! There’s millions of barrels of oil in Alaska, but it is off limits for fear a caribou might be harmed.

The Secretary of Energy is no big fan of nuclear power either. He cites waste problems, but apparently is unaware that the huge billion-dollar depository, Yucca Mountain in Nevada, was abandoned by the Obama administration despite having been built specifically for storing nuclear waste.

It’s more like wasting money than nuclear waste, but the United States Recovery Act, the ill-famed stimulus act, allocated $80 billion to research and use of “clean” energy such as wind and solar, and to “efficiency.” The problem is that, without a dependable supply of electricity, all the efficiency in the world will not make much difference if the lights go out.

Perhaps it’s not a good idea to send out Secretary Chu to discuss the oil spill. As reported in the May 27, 2009 edition of The Times (UK), at the opening of the St. James’s Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium, he suggested that painting the world’s roofs, roads and pavements white would be a great way to cut carbon emissions. They would “reflect up to 80% of the sunlight that falls on them.” He added that “a global initiative” would be a way to save us from global warming.

Only there is no global warming, carbon dioxide has nothing to do with the climate, and one rig out of more than three hundred in the Gulf has sprung a leak. Ironically, years ago when he was an academic at University of California-Berkeley, he received a winning bid for a $500 million grant funded by BP to study something or other.

Too many years ago than I want to recall, I was the publications director for a major northeastern institute of technology. It was filled with engineers who actually know how to make things work, build bridges, fix oil leaks and such. There were also some brilliant physicists on the faculty. The latter had trouble parking their cars between the yellow lines and other mundane tasks.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Conservative's Wishful Thinking

By Alan Caruba

One of the themes running through conservative forums and blogs these days is the question of just when Barack Obama will resign from the presidency.

Secondarily, the concern is that he would do this before or after the November midterm elections, thus leaving the nation in the hands of Joe Biden, a longtime Washington insider and goofball.

The thinking of grass-roots conservatives is that Obama is just so over-whelmed and under-equipped to deal with the daily events, foreign and domestic, that he will run home to Chicago to work on yet another autobiography.

This is not going to happen. Obama is the casebook study of a pathological narcissist and everything that happens is always about him and is always somebody else’s fault.

This is what makes the BP oil disaster so delicious at the same time it is so awful. Like a giant oil slick from which he cannot free himself, this event will indelibly stain his presidency. He was too slow to respond to it and, during his belated press conference, strove to both assert that he was in charge “from day one” and that it was up to BP to solve the problem.

Compounding his problem is his announcement a month before the rig blew up that he favored offshore drilling. In politics, timing is everything and Obama’s is astonishingly slow and tone deaf. His announcement managed to anger a big part of his base, the Greens who hate oil everywhere except at the pump when they fill up their tank. Where that gasoline comes from remains a mystery to many of them who think it is a biofuel product made from soy beans and corn.

If you look closely, you will see quite plainly that Obama’s hair is turning white. He’s been in the Oval Office for a year and a half and he is aging before our eyes. This should surprise no one because he has never really had to deal with the challenges that tend to toughen up ordinary people.

Any president’s job is a daily series of domestic and foreign crisis. The skill-set most needed is leadership, followed by management. Americans know it when they see it and, so far as Obama is concerned, they are not seeing it.

What they have seen is one big mess after another made even bigger by a president who thinks big government is the answer to every problem. Most people, except for the 30% hard core of extremist liberals, have long ago concluded that big government is the problem.

A Marxist, Obama’s instinctual response was to nationalize every sector of the economy he could. Along with fellow Marxists, Nancy Pelosi in the House and Harry Reid in the Senate, the long-sought goal of a Democrat-controlled Congress was too golden to pay any attention to the people who showed up at town hall meetings or who gathered in the hundreds of thousands outside the Capitol building.

This is why there will be a heedless rush to impose an increase in every kind of tax imaginable before they are turned out of office and political control returns to the Republican Party. The GOP lost power precisely because it too jacked up the cost of government. They have some good people in office who, after the midterm GOP victory, will take the painful steps to save the nation. Just like Bill Clinton, Obama will take the credit.

Consider this, however. President Bush ran $2.9 trillion in deficits in the wake of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. On top of that, he was fighting two difficult wars in the Middle East. In his first twenty months in office, President Obama’s spending exceeds Bush’s one hundred months in office. Obama is spending $5 for every $1 Bush spent.

The U.S. government under President Obama has spent or lent $12.8 trillion to date and the annual GDP of the nation is just about that amount or, in other words, equal to the value of everything the United States produced last year.

As noted in a recent book, “Killing Wealth”, “the private sector comprises five million companies and 115 million employees, while the public sector comprises 89,000 taxing authorities and twenty million public servants. Private sector employees earned an average $49,935 in 2008, while federal civilian employees earned 50 percent more---$79,197 for the same kind of work.” Some would argue that it really isn’t the same kind of work because making a profit is not part of the equation.

Others might point out that Obama has surrounded himself with people who are academics or full-time government employees who have never, like himself, had to run a business, meet a payroll, or satisfy investors. They are totally ideological. They are totally clueless.

Some weeks back, I asked if the United States of America was “too big to fail?” The answer is no. Greece is close to default and Spain and Italy are not far behind. The European Union is likely to dissolve as the only nation member that has any money or the prospect of making any is Germany. Bailing out the others is not a popular option for Germans and the French will not want to either.

Bailing out the United States will eventually become an equally bad idea for China, Japan, and other sovereign investors in our treasury notes unless Congress can or will staunch the insane borrowing and spending that has characterized the past decade.

Conservatives will get their wish about Obama when the 2012 elections roll around. Until then, he’s not going away.

(a) Alan Caruba, 2010

And the credit goes to....

This is going to be messy

Obama's News Conference: Blah, Blah, Blah

By Alan Caruba

5/27/10 - The President, after a lapse of 309 days, held a news conference Thursday. It came shortly after news that earlier in the day the director of the Mineral Management Service, Elizabeth Birnbaum, had either resigned or been fired. Obama professed to not know the circumstances. Yeah. Sure.

What we do know is that Obama’s method of dealing with a news conference is to talk each question to death. In addition, he makes sure that we all know that, no matter what the problem under discussion, it was all George W. Bush’s fault.

Watching Obama’s head swivel back and forth between the TelePromters as he read his opening prepared statement for the first fifteen minutes or so was mildly comical and it occurred to me that he has become a real life parody of a Saturday Night Live parody, the latter of which is at least entertaining.

The press conference was devoted largely to blaming oil company, British Petroleum, for the mess while, at the same time, saying that “BP is acting at our direction.” This is known as having it both ways. Somehow, knowing that the federal government is in charge is not all that reassuring. And, of course, the real problem began “under the previous administration.”

The president then used one of his snore-inducing answers to segue to the usual blather about a “clean energy” economy. This is pure fiction. America and the rest of the advanced nations of the world depend entirely on oil, natural gas, and coal. Long after all of us and our grandchildren are dead these hydrocarbons will still be used.

By then, however, Obama’s nonsense about clean energy jobs will have been long forgotten. They don’t exist now and they will not until the last drop of oil is extracted, the last cubic meter of natural gas, and the last lump of coal is dug from the ground. Wind and solar energy is largely a huge fraud based on the even bigger fraud of “climate change.”

And of course the President took the opportunity to push the legislation before the Senate that would put the federal government in charge of who gets energy, how much they get, and how much they will pay for it. Using the bogus claim that carbon dioxide is a threat to human life the EPA is currently trying to gain control all energy use. Cap-and-Trade, a huge tax, would destroy what little hope is left for the economy to recover.

The highlight of the conference for me was when the insane old crone, Helen Thomas, asked about Afghanistan after Obama had seemingly exhausted the subject (and the audience) on the topic of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster.

Later questions dealt with the Arizona law and the White House criticism of it and border security. Obama used them to push amnesty for illegal aliens without actually saying amnesty. Meanwhile, more and more states are fashioning their own version of the Arizona bill in lieu of the federal government’s failure to stop illegal aliens. Amnesty is a strictly Democrat “answer” to the problem.

Responding to a question about the oil spill, the President earlier had said, “I intend to use the full force of the government to protect our fellow citizens” on the southern state borders affected by the spill. One could only wish that he had the same resolve regarding the thousands of illegal Mexicans and “others” that continue to pour across.

The issue of a possible White House bribe to a candidate to drop out of the Pennsylvania primary race got danced away with the usual assurances from what we were told was going to be the most transparent White House ever.

I feared for my sanity after an hour and stopped watching and listening.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

We Must Defeat the EPA Power Grab

By Alan Caruba

“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is carrying out one of the biggest power grabs in American history. The agency has positioned itself to regulate fuel economy, set climate policy for the nation and amend the Clean Air Act—powers never delegated to it by Congress. It has done this by declaring greenhouse gas emissions a danger to public health and welfare, in a proceeding known as the ‘endangerment finding.’”

So wrote George Allen and Marlo Lewis in a recent Forbes commentary. Allen is a former U.S. Senator and Governor from Virginia. Lewis is a senior fellow in environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

The Senate is scheduled to vote June 10 on the Murkowski Resolution, S.J. Res. 26. If passed it will stop the out-of-control Environmental Protection Agency’s global warming rampage. The resolution has 41 sponsors, but needs 51 votes to pass. There will be no filibusters and no second change to reverse the worst attack on the U.S. economy and the freedom of Americans to utilize energy for business and personal use.

“If allowed to stand,” wrote Allen and Lewis, “the EPA’s endangerment finding will trigger a regulatory cascade through multiple provisions of the Act. America could be burdened with a regulatory regime more costly than any climate bill Congress has rejected or declined to pass, yet without the people’s representatives ever voting on it.”

Americans have witnessed the spending of billions in stimulus bills that have not reversed or slowed the worst unemployment rate since the Great Depression.

They have witnessed the take-over of General Motors by the federal government.

They have watched this Democrat-controlled Congress ram through a healthcare “reform” bill that takes over one-sixth of the nation’s economy and a Cap-and-Trade Act, renamed a “climate” bill, is waiting for a vote.

When the Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970 no one ever imagined that it would exceed its mandate to ensure clean air and water to such an extent that it would pose a threat to the lives of Americans and to the economy.

It is in control of two people who are virulent environmentalists. Carol Browner, an Obama “czar” whose appointment was not subject to congressional oversight was an EPA administrator during the Clinton administration. She is an avowed socialist and close associate of former Vice President Al Gore. Lisa Jackson, the current administrator, worked with her before being selected to head the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

The same day Rasmussen Reports revealed that Barack Obama has the lowest approval rating of any previous President it was reported that Ms. Jackson had cancelled attendance at a political fundraiser in New York next week.

It must have occurred to someone in her office that, in the midst of the worst oil spill in U.S. history, that might not be a good idea. They scrubbed her participation saying “her priority has continued to be protecting human health and the environment.”

If that is an EPA priority it has pursued this goal in some strange ways.

For example, it has consistently banned some of the best pesticides ever invented to protect against termite infestations that do billions in damage every year or DDT that actually won a Nobel Prize for its protection of human life against the scourge of malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases.

The EPA is so anti-chemical it is currently looking for a way to stop the use of oil dispersant chemicals to reduce the threat to marshes and other areas the spill may reach!

While this is happening, it is seeking to impose rules that would put an end to mountaintop coal mining, closing off access to an energy resource responsible for 50%of all the electricity used daily and putting an end to countless mining industry jobs.

The nation is now at a crossroads between a future in which the federal government, through the EPA, controls the entire economy or whether this evil genie gets put back in the bottle.

We live in an America in which the amount of water we can use to flush our toilets has been regulated and we will soon be unable to purchase an incandescent light bulb, one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind.

We live in a nation that requires that every gallon of gasoline include ethanol, an additive made from corn. So much corn is diverted to this that it has forced up the price of virtually every food product we purchase. At the same time it has reduced the mileage of every gallon.

If you have had a lingering feeling that something is terribly wrong, you’re right.

For now, the job at hand is to get the Murkowski resolution passed or, in effect, we might as well close the doors on America’s future because the EPA will destroy it.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Your Government at Work for You

Obama Redefines "Rapid Response"