Hold Fast

President Barack Obama, in last night’s second presidential debate: And when I hear Governor Romney say he’s a big coal guy, I mean, keep in mind, when — Governor, when you were governor of Massachusetts, you stood in front of a coal plant and pointed at it and said, “This plant kills,” and took great [...]

[Read more →]

First, read this article by Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone. OK, now that you’ve done that and we’re both terrified, let’s move forward. McKibben sees a real need as making the fossil fuel industry out to be a villain, a global villain. Here’s why: If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid [...]

[Read more →]

Originally posted at AMERICAblog. This is a big deal – the Marcellus Shale natural gas field is becoming like the new ANWR, only instead of being in the Alaskan wilderness, it’s a gas field that runs through the highly populated east coast and midwest. Instead of risking the health and well-being of rare animals as [...]

[Read more →]

John Moyers at AMERICAblog makes a great point, namely nuclear power is an industry defined by privatized profits and socialized risks. This is exactly like the financial sector around the world, where banksters made hundreds of billions of dollars in profits and bonuses doing things that blew up the global economy and begat a massive [...]

[Read more →]

Dan Froomkin does a very good job explaining all the ways that last night’s speech on BP by President Obama failed to be the turning point the White House claimed it would be. Froomkin concludes: As for inflection points, there may have been one on Tuesday night after all, just not the one the White [...]

[Read more →]

The New York Times editorial board captures the main question that I have which speaks to why I and many others are upset with the response to the BP spill by both the administration and BP. Fifty-six days into the spill and it is not clear who is responsible — BP, federal, state or local [...]

[Read more →]

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism has a really good post on how, finally, Obama is getting tough on BP and more importantly, how absurd BP’s assumption that they would not be held fully accountable by the US government for this spill has been. The upcoming meeting between Obama and BP executives seems to have them [...]

[Read more →]

On TPM, Theda Skocpol is given space to respond to Robert Reich’s case for President Obama putting BP America in receivership so the company would be forced “to use all its available resources and submit itself to full federal oversight and control.” Skocpol’s response is purely taken from a political standpoint: When a huge private [...]

[Read more →]

Of course it isn’t shocking that the deficit hawks that want to cut Social Security don’t give two wits about the damage the BP oil spill causes to future generations and the costs that today’s actions are incurring for them. Sarcastic cynicism aside, Dean Baker is right when he writes, “[deficit hawks] just want to [...]

[Read more →]

It’s great that an anonymous oil industry insider writes to TalkingPointsMemo to say he thinks BP is doing a swell job, but should the rest of us care? Yes, having someone who understands it beyond reporters for the Times or CNN provide perspective is useful. But we are at a point where industry experts have [...]

[Read more →]