Another Green Monday
What do President Obama and The Tea Party have in common? They’re both partially to blame for the oil spill. Like the attacks by Al Qaeda, the disaster in the Gulf was preceded by ample warnings -- yet the administration had ignored them. Instead of cracking down on MMS, as he had vowed to do even before taking office, Obama left in place many of the top officials who oversaw the agency's culture of corruption. He permitted it to rubber-stamp dangerous drilling operations by BP -- a firm with the worst safety record of any oil company -- with virtually no environmental safeguards, using industry-friendly regulations drafted during the Bush years. He calibrated his response to the Gulf spill based on flawed and misleading estimates from BP -- and then deployed his top aides to lowball the flow rate at a laughable 5,000 barrels a day, long after the best science made clear this catastrophe would eclipse the Exxon Valdez. And now for the Tea Party. We very much doubt the hits of yesteryear - “Drill, Baby, Drill”, “Drill here, drill now” - have the same resonant punch. Check excerpt from a post over at Exiled Online: "So remember that when you look at the poisoned Gulf of Mexico, and the ruined beaches of Florida: That’s the Tea Party Vision turned into our reality. The gang running the Tea Party movement has some direct responsibility for the catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico, maybe more so than BP itself. No wonder the Tea Party crowd is staying out of sight and hoping everyone’s forgotten. They’ve been talking about dumping tea, but all along they’ve been dumping oil, and now we’re finding out just how “maverick” and “anti-establishment” their movement really is" You have to go back to the origin of the movement. Meet Eric Odom. He’s the new media coordinator for the Koch-affiliated Sam Adams Alliance. His job was to “make it look like a spontaneous outburst of middle-class support was joining forces with the Republican politicians in Congress, who fused together in one great oil-drilling movement.” Koch is the main funding source behind the Tea Party but they are well known for catastrophes after deregulation. In 2000, the EPA fined them $30 million for its role in 300 oil spills that resulted in more than three million gallons of crude oil leaking into ponds, lakes, streams and coastal waters. Ultimately, we share more of the blame than both. We’re the users, after all. 
(Graphic courtesy of Grist. Read their breakdown HERE.)
Let’s start with Obama. In the new Rolling Stone, Tim Dickinson has a great piece titled “The Spill, the Scandal, and the President,” basically saying it’s too little, too late.
From the very beginning, we were dubious of Obama’s selection of Ken Salazar as Interior Secretary. Salazar put a record 53 million offshore acres up for lease in the Gulf in just his first year. Not surprising: As a senator, Salazar pushed the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act. That opened 8 million acres in the Gulf to drilling. Dude even criticized President Bush for not forcing oil companies to develop existing leases faster. Perhaps the worst part is passing the buck by leaving BP in charge of capping the well. Ones scientist involved in the government cleanup said that is "like a drunk driver getting into a car wreck and then helping the police with the accident investigation."
It blows in Montana and some people want to keep it ALL there. We're talking wind power of course and we're talking about the state's big energy company NorthWestern Energy and it's ambitions to export wind power without any desire to be a buyer. Said Bret Kenfield, who has been trying to arrange a contract to sell power to NorthWestern from a 20-megawatt project he'd like to build in north-central Montana, "It's ironic how they are promoting the state as a wind farm - but how much wind have they purchased from wind farm producers in Montana?" Read more HERE.
Cap and trade in the great west. Remember the Western Climate Initiative, that seven state and two Canadian province conglomerate that was developed to work on a regional greenhouse gas camp-and-trade system? Well it's back in the news and it's a little smaller than we remember - though it did pick up a state since we last wrote about it. At any rate, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, it's "likely to start out smaller than planned because some state governments don’t have laws in place to join the regional emissions market." You can read all about the posturing HERE.
And finally, a little spark to start your week off.... and count this as the first time we've ever reference the Fox News website for a story. But a good friend of ours passed this story on to us (maybe because one of us is getting married in a few weeks). At any rate, a sexual health columnist recently delved in to ways you can go green and still have a red-hot sex life. We feel there's not much more for us to say so HERE you go - check it out for yourselves.
