Dana Blankenhorn

The Blitz of the Gulf and the War Against Oil

What has happened in the Gulf, what continues to happen, is not Barack Obama's Katrina. Nor is it anyone else's. It's not Pearl Harbor, nor is it 9-11.

What it's most comparable to, in terms of American history, is the London Blitz.

(I don't like using AP or even linking to them, but the picture on this page, by the APs Charles Riedel, is becoming the Iwa Jima Flag-on-Mount-Sirabachi moment in this disaster, so I've thumbnailed it. Historians know that an earlier group's arrival on that mountain, with a smaller flag, was the real deal to the men fighting there, and the second flag was put up for show. Yet it's that one we remember. As we'll remember Riedel's Laughing Gull. I entirely agree with AOL's Matt Mendolson on that.)

For most Americans the Gulf is distant. This can be hard to believe but it's true. Even here in Atlanta, where I live, the impacts for now are slight. My neighbor won't be heading to Destin any time soon. Beyond that life remains normal.

This is how America was during the Blitz. It was something happening elsewhere and to other people. What most today have forgotten is that, for many Americans of that time, this was highly desirable. War was highly controversial.

What President Roosevelt did, what Barack Obama needs to do, was to mold public opinion, slowly, toward a war footing. The movies which appeared and were green-lighted in 1940 were not all propaganda pieces, as they would become in the succeeding years. But many did take the gathering darkness as their subtext. And in that era, movies were the dominant medium.

Today the Internet is the dominant medium. It is a medium that is very difficult to dominate. Anything with the taint of propaganda is taken with a grain of salt. Yet, as we see time-and-time again in the Middle East, propaganda gets through.

It gets through when the target is clear and the aim is simple. The Administration's problem lies in its targeting.

The oil is not the enemy. Even BP is not the enemy. The enemy is the system that makes this eternal search for oil necessary, and that makes it the path of least resistance for BP's profit.

I'm not naive enough to think that we can flip a switch and create a world of bullet trains and windmills.  But I'm unwilling to accept the inevitability of oil, and all the bloodshed and destruction that entails.

What has people down right now is just this, the idea that we have no choice but to drill and fight, fight and drill, in order to continue our way of life. That's why the President's approval ratings are down so far, I believe, because his sights are set too low.

Raising those sights means creating a political environment in which an energy bill that moves incentives decisively from carbon to renewables is seen as patriotic, as a jobs bill, and as simple common sense, so that any opposition is seen as unpatriotic. In the face of Big Oil the President has been acting as Chamberlain at Munich, pushing back slowly hoping for "peace in our time."

He needs to become Churchill, not against BP but against the system that made this disaster inevitable. 

Convenient Enemes

The way you push back against what seem like heavy odds is to find a convenient enemy. (The painting is called Fisherman, by Roland Heath. From his blog, with permission.)

I've been one. It's no fun being a convenient enemy. But the convenient enemy gets no sympathy, and can be used to bulldoze through what seem like impossible problems.

More important, a President can use convenient enemies to make a larger point, and win that point, so that opponents who once appeared all-powerful become amenable to compromise or can be bulldozed.

In this President's case, his two biggest problems right now involve financial reform and energy reform. He is fortunate in that history has given him two very convenient enemies, Goldman Sachs on the one hand and Don Blankenship on the other.

I'll explain.

Republicans are re-running their health care strategy with financial reform. That is they're united in opposition, not just to a specific set of proposals but to the idea that anything can be done while Democrats are in power. The same is true with climate change legislation.

With health care, the President had to compromise-and-compromise with his entire party -- even the most rigidly opposed -- in order to get a bill passed over that opposition.

This time he's going to use the convenient enemies. He's going to win through because convenient enemies work both in Congress and before voters. No one wants to stand with the convenient enemies when voters go to the polls -- you're likely to be hung alongside them.

Antebellum Era of the American Suburb

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 3 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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It's easy to see 1896 Thomas E. Watson Populism in today's Republican Party. But despite the cooling of the economic fever, the anger against President Obama and Democrats generally feels more like that of 1860.

 

Why?

 

I have decided the answer lies in the American suburb.

 

Year of Renewal

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 52 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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There is a natural respiration to American politics.

A new leader wants the bad news to come out early in the term, so there is time for recovery before the next election.

This is how Ronald Reagan won re-election overwhelmingly. This is how Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole. Hard times are followed by good times.

In the present case green shoots are already apparent. The Republican opposition dismisses this and focuses on the deficit they did so much to create. But ask some Tea Party asshat whether we should have gone into Iraq or whether we should not have cut taxes eight years ago. If deficits matter, they matter. If deficits don't, they don't. To Republicans they only matter when Democrats are doing borrowing. They know the power of money and fear it when it's in the other side's hand.

The present issue is what any business does when it's in a hole. You either pull back and hope you can increase your profit margin, or you can invest anew in hopes that new profit, and bigger sales, will make the old debt look smaller.

Guess which course winning businesses take?

Argument Clinic

There are scientific arguments and there are political arguments.

They are different.

• Science proceeds from evidence. It often moves slowly. Minority views are respected, so long as they bring evidence to the party. Evidence is data. Without data there is no argument. Even after a consensus is reached, new evidence may still upset it. But without evidence the argument will not be re-opened.
• Politics proceeds from belief. It can move quickly. Minority views can be suppressed, and the smaller the minority the more possible this becomes. All is fair. You can argue based on anything you like. Consensus is rare, the majority rules. Well-organized minorities can beat loosely-organized majorities. Heat is often prized over light.

ClimateGate is politics. It is not science. It brings nothing new to the party, save for some wild charges based on a deliberate misreading of stolen e-mails. It alleges a grand "conspiracy" among the world's climate scientists, motivated by hope of financial gains, but even here its evidence is weak.

It is the big lie, meant to distract us from what must be done to save the lives of our grandchildren. It represents short-term values, which are powerful in politics.

Piece Work

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 46 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Here is the difference between a political campaign and running an American government.

In a campaign you have a platform. That platform includes many different parts. They are an integrated whole.

But once you start governing you have to separate the pieces. Anything requiring Congressional action must be passed separately. Thus Presidents are told to concentrate on doing just one big thing.

A great economic plan, jammed through Congress by a narrow majority, has been the instrument of choice for a generation now. Reagan used it, Clinton used it, Bush used it. This set the table for everything else they did, or tried to do.

This was not possible with President Obama. There were just too many things that have to be done. His stimulus plan, while massive, only turned the nose of the airplane up and kept it from crashing to the ground. It was not what he was about, not what we voted him in for.

The actual Obama program consists of two other pieces of legislation. Call them the labor bill and the jobs bill.

Real Stimulus

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 29 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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There are two kinds of stimulus.

The kind that passed is a capital injection. The collapse of the housing bubble, and the Confederate Money associated with it, took an enormous amount of money, supply, and demand out of the market. Think of it as an emergency saline drip, given to a patient found in the desert. It will keep you alive, but that's all it is designed to do.

The other kind, the one contained H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act, is the more important kind. It's designed to transform the incentives of the market, equalizing the price of carbon and non-carbon energy, reducing subsidies that have existed in the law for generations.

Conservatives are kicking and screaming. Their most dangerous argument is that global warming is a "myth," when in fact its impacts are already with us, and as our glaciers melt those impacts will accelerate. It takes 80 calories to melt ice, to raise its temperature by one degree. That's an enormous global shock absorber. But once the glaciers are gone, and they're going fast, it will take only 80 calories to bring the temperature of that water up to 112 degrees Fahrenheit.

As long as the glaciers are with us, in other words, the effects of global warming are somewhat muted. Once they're gone you're cooked. Think about that next time some asshat right-winger tries to tell you that the evidence of your eyes isn't real.

Their second argument is that the closing the carbon loophole is a "tax" that will drag the economy down. Like the global warming nonsense, this is also a lie.

Throughout American history, our government has driven our economy forward by creating market incentives for growth. Railroads were given free land. Oil companies were given depletion allowances. Car companies were given roads. These were government actions, meant to further economic growth in specific directions. And it worked. The railroads connected the markets of the continent, oil provided cheap energy for a century, and cars created the suburbs.

This has the exact same intent. We aren't going to get growth from new oil. We're not going to get it from financial manipulation. If we're going to get it, it will be from creating new forms of new energy, and new ways of delivering that energy to market.

How America Must Lead

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 25 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Last week I talked about why America will win the future.

Now I want to talk about how to do that, and our responsibility for making that happen. 

America will continue to lead because of the hard work we have all done in the last generation, not so much in Washington but in our lives and communities. 

All the many movements of the last generation -- the womens' movement, the gay rights movement, the civil rights movement, the fight for rights for the disabled and ethnic minorities, the environmental movement -- all of what I have called the AntiThesis to the Nixon Thesis, or the outright rejection of that thesis -- all have had an impact. 

All of them have taken us further down the road of progress than most other societies have even contemplated going, and what came to me most clearly during my recent trip was that elites elsewhere recognize that progress, and envy it.

What they have given our society is flexibility, mobility, an ability to adapt to change unparalleled in human history. The ruins of failed societies all around the world attest to this. Change is the hardest work a society can undertake. No society has succeeded at it like ours, and none has done more to unite people worldwide around the idea that change is both good and necessary.

The clearest proof is living in the White House right now. But we can't rest on that laurel. Here is what we must do:

1. Set high goals 
2. Learn what real leadership means 
3. Embrace the change process

  Let me take these one at a time:

Take What You Can Get

The President seems to frustrate his supporters at every turn.

• Rather than confront the military over its misadventures, he tries a Petreaus plan in Afghanistan. 
• Rather than confront Wall Street over its failures he appoints bank regulators whose experience includes the season of crime. 
• Rather than confront the Bush Torture Regime he seems to dither, refusing to endorse either a special prosecutor or a "truth commission," giving the former Vice President and the Republicans every opportunity to defend what they did in public. 

This is just as true regarding The War Against Oil as anything else. "Mr. Obama’s “new” energy policy is more of the same old pandering," writes Bob Gordon of The Auto Channel. He doesn't call us to a war against oil. He just negotiates higher mileage standards. 

Of course as frustrated as liberals are conservatives are, squared. They're mad as hell, but to them it feels like they're raging against the wind. He borrows trillions, literally trillions, he remakes the economy and all the rules, yet he remains enormously popular. It drives them crazy, and we can only pray the Secret Service can do its job.

But there is something else going on. It's something the media is only barely conscious of, so intent are they on triangulating him, on trying to pin him down. 

The Technology on Which Space Depends

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 16of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Why have so few of us reached space? Why is even the International Space Station a fraction of the size most sci-fi writers predicted a half century ago?

Cost. Specifically the energy cost of getting out of Earth's gravity well.

It's not that people have lost interest. When a company called Solaren announced a deal to install solar panels in space and sell the resulting power to PG&E early this week, so many people rushed to the rail that Solaren's site quickly exceeded its bandwidth limit and was taken down. 

The deal is pie-in-the-sky. It was the utility's presence in the story that made it newsworthy, but in fact that company risked nothing. If Solaren gets its system working PG&E will buy its power. If.