Name: Alan, aka "theamericangreen"
Email:
Bio: TheAmericanGreen - The founding member of the American Green institute, and a New York based producer and writer hoping to make the jump from "freelancer" to "documentary producer".
Posts by theamericangreen:
Evolving is one word for it…
June 17th, 2010The crazy folks at TPM are all going hippy-dippy about the same point that we made on this site a few days back. The whole “BP might have changed their tune on the amount of oil that was spilled and the resulting tune changing has adversely affected the response to the spill to date” thing. They, however, put more time into it, and actually made a pretty picture. As always, a picture is worth somewhere between 960 and 1,027 words, so we’ll count this as a long post for the tabulating of word counts in this week’s LtAG competition.
To note: the top end estimate is now greater then 60,000 barrels, which is once AGAIN a change (and significant mark up) on what we wrote last week.
Check it out:
This is a to-scale image of what is now drawn on the back of BP's CEO Tony Hayward
Double that Mother!
June 11th, 2010On hearing the news that the best and brightest minds on the case of the gulf oil spill have decided to double the estimate of how much oil has been leaking into the Gulf of Mexico since this thing started, we have an important question. At this point, it seems like a complete toss up: is this the best PR way to play this thing, or the worst? Our heartless money driven corporate overlords started us out slow, gentle even. But there regularly scheduled upgrades to the estimate of how much is leaking keep making things feel worse and worse. Every time we look back there are a new number of barrels being accredited to the same picture of gushing brown stuff. How much is a barrel, again? Read the rest of this entry “
BP is just bad at all sorts of spills, huh?
June 10th, 2010You know, BP really just got unlucky. Could have happened to any of the giant oil-drilling behemoths that are also not doing a very careful job of checking their machinery in a desperate attempt to drive the bottom line even higher. You almost feel bad for them, don’t you?
Yeah, neither do I. This is brilliant though:
Ayup
June 9th, 2010I would add some snark to this, but it’s basically the prefect BP message.
Poor multi-national corporation. They are closing in on a perfect 10.0 on the evil/inept scale.
BP #1!
May 27th, 2010Suck it, Exxon. BP just straight up passed you.
Exxon Valdez: #2 in our hearts.
As the battle for who can us the phrase “Top Kill” the most times in a 24 hour news cycle rages on, Exxon has moved to #2 in the all time Oil Spill rankings. That’s right: no matter what oil metric you are using, Deepwater has passed the Valdez for the worst oil spill in American history.
But with the plug procedure that is seemingly going well right now, our nation is gearing up to start the blame game. Aw Shucks Jindal and James the Raging Cajun are pretty sure it’s that egghead Barry’s fault, either because he let it happen or because he’s not down there cleaning up oil right now. Both takes seem fair to us.
On the other hand, the people we shouldn’t be blaming are the Government watchdog group Minerals Management Service. Do you know how hard they work? How much they do every day to steward the national mineral wealth this nation holds for our collective common good? They should be allowed to take a few days off every so often, and blow of some steam, but because of those crazy government rules they end up having to blow off steam at work. And by “blow off steam”, we mean “watch porn and do meth”, which basically just sounds like an average Wednesday afternoon board meeting to us.
Perhaps more damming then the porn and the drugs (more damning? Really? Did we just write that??) is this:
“Her biggest concern is the ease with which minerals agency employees move between industry and government, Kendall said. While no specifics were included in the report, “we discovered that the individuals involved in the fraternizing and gift exchange — both government and industry — have often known one another since childhood,” Kendall said.”
That don’t sound at all like the thing that Obamistan ran on the platform of not allowing at all to happen, does it?
As amazing as all that is this video might be even more amazing. This is where BP really moves past Exxon in the hearts and minds of the public — in the disturbing and horrifying images that, before this week, the Valdez spill still had on lock. Well, watch this and then tell us: Who’s Number One now, Bitches?
From the Annals of Excellent Reporting…
May 4th, 2010
Oh GOD! Why is HE here?? Is he BACK?? Who would want to listen to HIM?
Today, that bastion of Liberal NewsSpeak, the New York Times, ran a story about how even the crazy conservationists were saying that, you know, maybe this whole oil spill thing might actually be able totally overblown and hey, maybe we can get this thing cleaned up after all!
The Gulf of Mexico Foundation, basically in the same tree-hugging love fest as GreenPeace, had this to say, as quoted in the NYT:
“The sky is not falling. We’ve certainly stepped in a hole and we’re going to have to work ourselves out of it, but it isn’t the end of the Gulf of Mexico.”
A realistic, but positive take on the whole kerfuffle!
The Times didn’t bother to mention that the group in question was directly connected to the offshore drilling industry, including the people who made the rig that caught on fire and started pouring out oil. But, since Transocean, the company that owns the Deepwater Horizon rig (which rents the rigs to BP), is the paragon of virtue, we can only assume that their people are on point and that the Times was right to take them exactly at their word and not disclose anything more about them then that they were a “conservation organization”. That is what we are assuming. Settle down, you wild eyed Talking Points Memo hand-wringers. Read the rest of this entry “
#whatIizupto
April 12th, 2010Pointy-bearded Ivory Tower intellectual Andrew Revkin is appearing every week for the month of April on the Radio Show for which I sometimes toil. Known mostly for his blog Dot.earth, Revkin kicked off Earth Month by moving to the opinion page of the Times, essentially admitting that his constant crusade for the socialist “Global Whining” farce is his opinion.
That, or so that he can stop having to bring a journalistic objectivity to something that doesn’t deserve it. In his own words,
I am an advocate, for sure — for reality.
Well… that’s just like, your opinion, man. Either way, hear him speak his egg-headed economy killing lies on Carbon Tax and Trade here:
and on the hard science behind the Global Warming Hoax here:
Wait ‘ill Glenn Beck hears o’ this, Revkin — you might end up on his black board!
<<Fo real: Andrew Revkin is one of the more rational and reasonable voices writing on the whole climate change issue. While his writing and thinking is saturated in the leading research of climatologists, his main focus (not completely reflected in the above two episodes) is working on understanding why the gap between what science knows about climate change and what the public perception is about climate change is so different. One of the better writers, and a daily must check for me!>>
Cloudy with a chance of Stupid
April 7th, 2010
Remember the end of 2007? Lo, those many years ago. Even sitting president Shrubers came forward to tell us that Global Warming was probably happening, and might even be our fault. Sure, we were all shocked that George “Oilz” Bush would go soft on us like that, but the country as a whole was starting to take notice. Then came 2008, the great socialist take over, and everyone was pretty sure that we had fixed the whole climate thing once and for all, or at least had agreed to start working on it.
Well, here we are in 2010, and guess what we’re debating? If climate change is real! Yup, that’s right — do to a whole bunch of stupid stupid things done by the scientists side of the scientist v. loud people on the internet debate, (email gate, Coppenhagen’s dramatic fail) we’re back to having the “is this thing for real” discussion.
But this is odd: leading the charge for the “I’m dubious” crowd is a group of scientists this time: your friendly neighborhood Weathermen! But wait, you might say, I thought all the scientists were sure that this thing was in the bag! Isn’t this what those point headed Ivory Tower intellectual ninnies have been saying since the 1950s? Well, you would be right. But these meteorologists — who are often completely wrong about what the weather is going to be doing three days from now — are sure that NO one could be doing it better then they are and that the long term picture is even cloudier then the weekend forecast. Thus, De facto, QED and IED, Global Warming models are probably just taking the little mistakes the weathermen made with this years SNOWPOCOLYPSE and compounded it a few thousand times in making their extremist “we’re all going to die” claptrap.
Taking a break from Health Care to focus on Copenhagen
December 7th, 2009I had hoped that one of my progressive causes (Y.I. campaign for Health Care reform, join the Facebook group.) would be concluded before we as a country got to the climate conference in Copenhagen. Not the case, unfortunately.
I am feeling a little bit behind with the debate. And I am feeling extremely frustrated that the segue into this entire thing is the “climate-gate” scandal of the leaked emails. I’ve railed on this before, and will, I’m sure, rail again, but who is being served when the national media discussion on Copenhagen is about emails being leaked? Will there be hundreds of stories written about the visible and track-able changes already happening on the coast of china, in the Texas sized trash heap in the pacific, or in the increasing size of the Sahara desert? My guess is no. As of right now, the Google count on “climate-gate” is growing exponentially. It only takes one story like this to completely muddy the waters of American perception. In that sense, then, the global warming skeptics are correct — this email story has already done more (because of the lack of information on the global scale) then anything else in the last ten years to set back the discussion of how to combat massive destruction of the environment. Let me be the first to congratulate them on a job well done! Read the rest of this entry “
Trees with Guns!
November 23rd, 2009Man, Al Gore is funny. Or he has good writers — or both. Either way, he just did an amazing bit on SNL where he summed up my feelings about the environmental movement right now: second fiddle to a bunch of stuff, and when we need someone to talk about something, we trot out Al Gore. Again. This — though I love him to death – is exactly what I’m talking about when I say that the movement is searching for some charismatic new Ideas people. Watch and Enjoy!
