He’s still out there doin’ a “heckuva job.”
One of the oddest byproducts oozing up from the sea floor as a result of the BP’s mega-spill in the Gulf of Mexico is Mike Brown, former head of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Administration, during the disastrous aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
In a bizarre twist, the onetime Bush appointee and professional horseshow judge, has been making the rounds of several cable news shows in a bid to recast his buffoonish image as an bumbling bureaucrat into an equally unintelligible conspiracy nut. According to Brownie, President Obama is planning to use the Gulf spill as a political platform to ban offshore oil drilling altogether.
Even though Brown may have moved from the Incompetent Bureaucrats Hall of Fame to the center of the lunatic fringe, his incoherent ramblings on Fox and other cable channels contain a kernel of truth.
He Is Blowing a Chance
While the President’s ardor for offshore oil may have understandably cooled, Mr. Obama will have little to do with political push-back that invariably will happen in the wake of the spill. Applications for offshore drilling probably will fall off as a natural outgrowth of the billions in claims BP is facing from thousands of lawsuits, and the gathering momentum on both sides of the political aisle to raise the liability ceiling on such environmental events from its current cap at $75 million.
Rather, Mr. Obama is missing a rare political opportunity to press his alternative energy and renewable fuels agenda.
Press reports showed the President on the West Coast touting the success of a federal loan guarantee given to a solar cell manufacturer in Northern California. In spite of this brief regional appearance, Mr. Obama has been remarkably silent about his green initiatives since the Gulf spill began more than a month ago.
Recently, the President was even upstaged in California by his former British counterpart retired Prime Minister Tony Blair. The ever erudite Blair was in Moss Landing, north of Monterey and Carmel) the other day promoting a revolutionary carbon sequestration process that converts greenhouse gasses into a usable and benign building component.
The dapper ex-P.M. was on hand with Vinod Khosia – arguably venture capital’s leading green investor – to pitch a facility that transforms heated CO2 flue emissions from a coal-fired power plant operated by Pacific Gas & Electric Co. into calcium carbonate aggregate by bubbling the waste through adjacent seawater. The result is a solid aggregate that is an essential component that can be used in cement and concrete products.
While he is known primarily as a liberal, Blair has never been identified as a green politician. Although Blair was quick to point out the potential significance of this industrial process in the battle against global warming, his main focus was on the economic and business upside of recycling carbon waste into a commercially viable product.
He Is Savvy Except for…
The climate bill that the White House has been negotiating calls for limited greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, transportation fuels and eventually factories. To appease conservatives, it also includes large incentives for drilling offshore, nuclear power plant construction and so-called “clean-coal” technology. Along with these provisions, the proposed bill attempts to set levels of renewable electricity use nationwide in concert with several sweeteners to minimize start-up costs for this new industry.
At the present time, the President’s bill has bogged down in the Senate. Always the optimist, Mr. Obama is continuing to call for the passage of an energy and climate bill this year. It is astonishing, however, that this otherwise politically savvy President has not linked the passage of this bill or any part of his green agenda to the Gulf of Mexico spill.
The President’s political circumspection is all the more surprising especially given the fact that it was his own Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel who was infamously credited with counseling that “you don’t ever want to let a good crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.”
The fight against global warming and in support of green alternate energy jobs are already on this populist president’s plate. As a result, it hard to fathom why he has not swung at the slow curve served up in the form of BP and its bungling of the Gulf spill.
Even though his poll numbers are slipping, Mr. Obama could knock this one out of the park. All he needs to do is step up to the plate.
John Cohn is a senior partner in the Globe West Financial Group based in West Los Angeles. He may be contacted at www.globewestfinancial.com
