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April 7, 2011 Tomgram: Ellen Cantarow, Dirty Energy's Dirty Deeds
When it comes to energy there are no easy
answers. This was painfully evident last week when President Barack
Obama gave a speech on “
America’s Energy Security” at Georgetown University.
“We’ve known about the dangers of our oil dependence for decades,” Obama told the audience, explaining that every president since Richard Nixon has talked about “freeing ourselves from dependence on foreign oil,” without delivering anything of the sort. Already a member of that club, he doubled down, telling the crowd that in ten years: “[W]e can cut our oil dependence by a third.” The speech was destined to be a loser and the caveats came on fast and furious. America needed to cut its reliance on foreign oil, Obama told the crowd of politicos and college students, and drilling at home was one avenue toward that goal. He proudly announced, “we’ve approved 39 new shallow-water permits; we’ve approved seven deepwater permits in recent weeks. When it comes to drilling offshore, my administration approved more than two permits last year for every new well that the industry started to drill.” While embracing a “drill, baby, drill” ethos, the president was forced to admit it was not a long-term solution. He not only acknowledged that there isn’t nearly enough domestic oil to meet the country’s needs, but the specter of disaster loomed so large that he had to address it as well. “I don’t think anybody here has forgotten what happened last year, where we had to deal with the largest oil spill in [our] history,” he said, according to the White House’s official transcript. Later he came to the subject of nuclear power. If BP’s Gulf of Mexico disaster was the elephant in the room, Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station was a blue whale. “Now, in light of the ongoing events in Japan, I want to just take a minute to talk about nuclear power,” the president began, before extolling its supposed virtues as a clean energy source. “So those of us who are concerned about climate change, we’ve got to recognize that nuclear power, if it’s safe, can make a significant contribution to the climate change question.” By the end, he left no room for debate about the future of atomic power in the United States, telling the audience: “[W]e can’t simply take it off the table.” Ongoing events. It was a curious and entirely disingenuous way to describe the ever-worsening disaster at Fukushima when, just the day before, Japan’s prime minister, Naoto Kan, told his Parliament, “The earthquake, tsunami and the ensuing nuclear accident may be Japan’s largest-ever crisis.” He said this, it’s worth reminding ourselves, about a country that, within living memory, saw more than 60 of its cities reduced to ashes through systematic firebombing and two metropolises obliterated by atomic bombs, losing hundreds of thousands of its citizens in one of the most devastating wars of a conflict-filled century. In fact, the very morning that Obama gave his speech, the New York Times quoted Tetsuo Iguchi, a professor in the department of quantum engineering at Nagoya University, about a subject that only a few outside observers had dared to previously broach: the prospect of a swath of Japan becoming an irradiated dead zone. “The worst-case scenario is that a meltdown makes the plant’s site a permanent grave,” Iguchi said. Between his soft-peddling of ecological and humanitarian catastrophes resulting from dirty energy and his advocacy of a variety of dubious strategies for freeing America from the chains of foreign petroleum, the president admitted that the U.S. would continue to import oil for the foreseeable future. “It will remain an important part of our energy portfolio for quite some time until we’ve gotten alternative energy strategies fully in force,” Obama told the crowd. “And when it comes to the oil we import from other nations, obviously we’ve got to look at neighbors like Canada and Mexico that are stable and steady and reliable sources.” Unlike offshore drilling and nuclear power, reliance on neighboring countries for a particularly dirty form of energy didn’t prompt any excuses or handwringing from the president, as if petroleum from Mexico (a place his secretary of state likened to insurgent-embattled Colombia of the 1990s) and Canada posed no problems. If you believe that, then I’ve got an electric power company in Japan to sell you. As Ellen Cantarow makes clear, oil flowing south from Canada poses its own devastating risks, and if pipelines proceed as industry desires, may someday turn out to be yet another debacle to be explained away in a future American presidentʼs energy security speech. Nick Energy Is Ugly |
