how bad is obama's offshore drilling pandering?

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This is a good one to read to get an idea of the toxicity of drilling muds, the kind of death we're talking about, and the kind of people pushing to drill offshore, where it's every bit as lethal as onshore and harder to contain. And then consider this snippet from a piece by Elizabeth Kolbert in the faithful New Yorker about our current situation. We start out with a victory on a Danish island, a completely carbon neutral Danish island:

The residents of Samsø that I spoke to were clearly proud of their accomplishment. All the same, they insisted on their ordinariness. They were, they noted, not wealthy, nor were they especially well educated or idealistic. They weren’t even terribly adventuresome. “We are a conservative farming community” is how one Samsinger put it. “We are only normal people,” Tranberg told me. “We are not some special people.”

This year, the world is expected to burn through some thirty-one billion barrels of oil, six billion tons of coal, and a hundred trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The combustion of these fossil fuels will produce, in aggregate, some four hundred quadrillion B.T.U.s of energy. It will also yield around thirty billion tons of carbon dioxide. Next year, global consumption of fossil fuels is expected to grow by about two per cent, meaning that emissions will rise by more than half a billion tons, and the following year consumption is expected to grow by yet another two per cent.

When carbon dioxide is released into the air, about a third ends up, in relatively short order, in the oceans. (CO2 dissolves in water to form a weak acid; this is the cause of the phenomenon known as “ocean acidification.”) A quarter is absorbed by terrestrial ecosystems—no one is quite sure exactly how or where—and the rest remains in the atmosphere. If current trends in emissions continue, then sometime within the next four or five decades the chemistry of the oceans will have been altered to such a degree that many marine organisms—including reef-building corals—will be pushed toward extinction. Meanwhile, atmospheric CO2 levels are projected to reach five hundred and fifty parts per million—twice pre-industrial levels—virtually guaranteeing an eventual global temperature increase of three or more degrees. The consequences of this warming are difficult to predict in detail, but even broad, conservative estimates are terrifying: at least fifteen and possibly as many as thirty per cent of the planet’s plant and animal species will be threatened; sea levels will rise by several feet; yields of crops like wheat and corn will decline significantly in a number of areas where they are now grown as staples; regions that depend on glacial runoff or seasonal snowmelt—currently home to more than a billion people—will face severe water shortages; and what now counts as a hundred-year drought will occur in some parts of the world as frequently as once a decade.

Today, with CO2 levels at three hundred and eighty-five parts per million, the disruptive impacts of climate change are already apparent. The Arctic ice cap, which has shrunk by half since the nineteen-fifties, is melting at an annual rate of twenty-four thousand square miles, meaning that an expanse of ice the size of West Virginia is disappearing each year. Over the past ten years, forests covering a hundred and fifty million acres in the United States and Canada have died from warming-related beetle infestations. It is believed that rising temperatures are contributing to the growing number of international refugees—“Climate change is today one of the main drivers of forced displacement,” the United Nations’ high commissioner for refugees, António Guterres, said recently—and to armed conflict: some experts see a link between the fighting in Darfur, which has claimed as many as three hundred thousand lives, and changes in rainfall patterns in equatorial Africa.

“If we keep going down this path, the Darfur crisis will be only one crisis among dozens of others,” President Nicolas Sarkozy, of France, told a meeting of world leaders in April. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, has called climate change “the defining challenge of our age.”

In the context of this challenge, Samsø’s accomplishments could be seen as trivial. Certainly, in numerical terms they don’t amount to much: all the island’s avoided emissions of the past ten years are overwhelmed by the CO2 that a single coal-fired power plant will emit in the next three weeks, and China is building new coal-fired plants at the rate of roughly four a month. But it is also in this context that the island’s efforts are most significant. Samsø transformed its energy systems in a single decade. Its experience suggests how the carbon problem, as huge as it is, could be dealt with, if we were willing to try.

Then, even without considering the ten years -- that we don't have -- it would take to take a couple cents off gas prices, tell me, oh, tell me do please, just how lucid this bullshit about offshore drilling coming out of the presidential candidates' mouthes is. Do you really think public opinion is in favor of it? And if it actually is, what then would you expect of a president in this case? McWarmonger was against it before he was for it, and, actually, considering all "serious" candidates must be willing to indulge the war kleptocracy, is it even fair of me to call McWarmonger "McWarmonger" anymore? Do I maybe start with O'Warmonger to keep this as dirt honest as I can? Give me a break! They are now officially BOTH *'s third term!

Oh, well, you say, McWarmonger means it and O'Warmonger doesn't. Yeah? And we can tell this by who started stumping for it first?

No. It isn't disputed by anyone of good faith that 20 January 2009 is the starting gun for the last race... to keep this planet habitable by living things. We've used up absolutely all of our lead time. It's right now, or we're dead. Oh, oh, but they can't talk about that or they will get shot, or the biggest media blitz in the history of media goes down against them. Well, guess what! These remain true even after one of them is elected... assuming we could even rightfully call it an "election". This intense, life and death, pressure NOT to heed their morals will not ebb an iota after 20 January 2009. The personal stakes for them will be just as high. Both of them cave completely under this pressure. Plain as the nose on your face.

Wake up.