Nice Of You Guys To Join Me

I warned last week that Obama's response to the BP oil spill was risking him being tarballed and feathered by the voters.  Nice to see other folks might believe I'm on to something here, even if it's James Carville...

Carville, the famously outspoken Louisianian who was a chief political aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton, told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Thursday that the administration's response to the spill has been "lackadaisical" and that Obama was "naive" to trust BP to manage the massive clean-up effort.

"I think they actually believe that BP has some kind of a good motivation here," he said. "They're naive! BP is trying to save money, save everything they can... They won't tell us anything, and oddly enough, the government seems to be going along with it! Somebody has got to, like shake them and say, 'These people don't wish you well! They're going to take you down!'"

Carville also accused the White House of going along with what he called the "let BP handle it" strategy.

"I'm as good a Democrat as most people, and I think this administration has done some good things. They are risking everything by this 'go along with BP' strategy they have that seems like, lackadaisical on this, and Doug is right, they seem like they're inconvenienced by this, this is some giant thing getting in their way and somehow or another, if you let BP handle it, it'll all go away. It's not going away. It's growing out there. It is a disaster of the first magnitude, and they've got to go to Plan B."

Plan B in this case is something better than "Let BP handle it."  Because they've clearly showed they can't, and every day they dick around puts another million plus gallons of crude in the Gulf.  We've seen Angry Obama, but that's not enough.  Strong action is now necessary, as in "save the Obama presidency" necessary.  But as vital as that is, it's Americans themselves who need to moderate their consumption behavior on energy.  Alternet's Scott Thill:

But this is what most junkies do, when the drugs start to wear off and run out: Keep tapping that vein. A new Associated Press/GfK poll on the spill released in mid-May supports that madness. While 42 percent of respondents felt that the Obama administration is properly prosecuting the spill, even more, 50 percent to be exact, are cool with further coastal drilling for oil and gas. In spite of all that has happened, they'd rather drill for what's left of our domestic oil supply than prepare, plan and proselytize for our inevitable post-oil future. Itinerant laziness is the true culprit in this spill. BP, MMS and other alphabet nightmares are monsters of our own consumptive creation.

"In the most general terms, I think the answer to drilling problems is better regulation and taxes to fund cleanup efforts," explained Mother Jones and Washington Monthly journalist Kevin Drum, who like Kunstler is a peak oil theorist. "Because the plain fact is that drilling is going to happen one way or another, as long as we're addicted to oil. And the answer to that is unrelated to drilling at all."

When it comes to killing addiction, the first stage is always acknowledging one. Optimistic estimations of peak oil theory explain that global supply will start dwindling in 2020, a clear-sighted metaphor if there ever was one. Even without factoring in the always reliable underestimation that leads to disasters like Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon, that's only a decade to get our heads and engines together. In other words, a light-speed snapshot of time compared to the insane workload.

"The administration needs to take this opportunity to explain the multiple hidden costs to our addiction to fossil fuels," argued Center for American Progress climate analyst Joseph Romm, the author of Straight Up: America's Fiercest Climate Blogger Takes on the Status Quo Media, Politicians, and Clean Energy Solutions. "As we're finding out with Goldman Sachs, you just can't let the industry regulate itself. But ultimately we have to get off the addiction. If the administration doesn't help us do that, it will be an incomprehensible missed opportunity."

"We need a serious carbon tax and serious climate legislation to reduce our reliance," said Drum. "I care a lot more about that than I do about the specific issues related to oil rig safety."

People keep asking who's to blame here.  BP, Obama...it's really us.  And until we admit that we consume too much energy here, more disasters like this are coming.