There's The Rub

A grim-faced U.S. President Barack Obama talked to his constituents from the Oval Office about "the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now", repeating what presidents have said mechanically for the past 40 years, since reality was brought home during the 1973 Arab oil embargo. Despite which oil dependency has grown implacably, and no one can visualize life without fossil fuel dependence.

Which hasn't stopped the general public from demanding that their governments do something about the situation, connected largely to concerns about carbon dioxide emissions spewing into the atmosphere and degrading the environment. A whopping percentage of people on two continents insist that government 'do something' to limit air pollution. Just do it, please, and make corporations limit their emissions of greenhouse gases.

An equal percentage of the public is confoundingly averse to altering their mode of lifestyle, since it is rather comfortable and we do enjoy living in the manner to which we have become accustomed. That large percentage is unequivocally opposed to raised taxes on electricity and gasoline, and to a reduction imposed upon them of their consumption of same.

This is, after all, human nature; what we will not put up with and what we demand for ourselves are not necessarily a match made in environmental heaven.

President Obama, however is serious about this. One can tell that he is. That set jaw, for one thing, the frown on his handsome face. His impeccable appearance. And the fact that the family photographs of his wife and daughters sitting on his desk face the cameras. He anchors the frame, but they book-end him. Isn't that classic? This is a stern, uncompromising man of family values and ethical decision-making. What he decides has clout, and it echoes world-wide.

What has occurred with the misfortune in the Gulf of Mexico is a symbolic of failure; of not moving more efficiently and determinedly to accept clean-energy alternatives to fossil fuels. "The consequences of our inaction are now in plain sight. The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now."

There he goes, talking the talk, but is he walking the walk? In the sense that he is reassuring U.S. voters, assuredly.

He has BP's feet to the fire. They are the culprits. The government agency that is tasked to oversight, to ensuring safety is held out by him to have been in collusion with the oil industry and he has appointed a new trustworthy overseer, to replace the new trusty overseer he had previously appointed. Does the buck stop with him? It most certainly does.

Did he not place a moratorium on further deep-water drilling until this nightmare is behind him? (Did he ensure that this nightmare could never surface?) Ill-timed news keeps cropping up. New estimates of the amount of oil spewing into the ocean, now up to 60,000 barrels of oil a day; considerably more than the 5,000 confidently asserted initially.

Even nature is conspiring to complicate matters; a lightning strike firing a tanker so BP had to halt pumping oil into the drill ship for 5 hours until the fire was extinguished. Details, bloody details. "Because there has never been a leak of this size at this depth, stopping it has tested the limits of human technology", explains President Obama.

See, the academic-minded find teaching moments at all times of stress and duress. In the process easily disposing of personal responsibility in favour of pointing out the error in judgement of those 'responsible' for the travesty of harvesting fossil fuels from the depths of the ocean floor with no back-up safety mechanisms in place, because there was no requirement for them to do just that. Oops.

President Obama holds BP entirely responsible. He has the power and the strength and the censure of Congress behind him. Congress is well aware that last year BP reaped $27.7-billion in cash profit. President Obama has demanded that BP set aside funding for future liabilities before paying out shareholder dividends. BP, after high-level consideration, has agreed to a fund of $20-billion to be placed in escrow and controlled by an outside, neutral body.

Congress knows, moreover that the five companies drilling in the area have spent $20-million each on safety, accident prevention and spill-response research and development, while shelling out $39-billion in exploration for new gas and oil potentials. In the process pulling in $289-billion in profit over the past three years of operation. Not exactly confidence-building, looking at those numbers and the commitment inherent in them.

"For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered. For decades, we have talked and talked about the need to end America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels. And for decades we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires."

Well, solar power, wind power and other alternate energy sources are in their infancy. But they are all more costly than gas and oil, and less reliable; storage is a problem and there are many imponderables involved, the most strenuously compelling being the match-up between alternate energy availability matching energy output in modern societies. Nuclear, coal?

Too, too depressing.