…So far, we’ve raised the average temperature of the planet just under 0.8 degrees Celsius, and that has caused far more damage than most scientists expected. (A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.) Given those impacts, in fact, many scientists have come to think that two degrees is far too lenient a target. “Any number much above one degree involves a gamble,” writes Kerry Emanuel of MIT, a leading authority on hurricanes, “and the odds become less and less favorable as the temperature goes up.” Thomas Lovejoy, once the World Bank’s chief biodiversity adviser, puts it like this: “If we’re seeing what we’re seeing today at 0.8 degrees Celsius, two degrees is simply too much.” NASA scientist James Hansen, the planet’s most prominent climatologist, is even blunter: “The target that has been talked about in international negotiations for two degrees of warming is actually a prescription for long-term disaster.” At the Copenhagen summit, a spokesman for small island nations warned that many would not survive a two-degree rise: “Some countries will flat-out disappear.” When delegates from developing nations were warned that two degrees would represent a “suicide pact” for drought-stricken Africa, many of them started chanting, “One degree, one Africa.”

Despite such well-founded misgivings, political realism bested scientific data, and the world settled on the two-degree target – indeed, it’s fair to say that it’s the only thing about climate change the world has settled on. All told, 167 countries responsible for more than 87 percent of the world’s carbon emissions have signed on to the Copenhagen Accord, endorsing the two-degree target. Only a few dozen countries have rejected it, including Kuwait, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Even the United Arab Emirates, which makes most of its money exporting oil and gas, signed on. The official position of planet Earth at the moment is that we can’t raise the temperature more than two degrees Celsius – it’s become the bottomest of bottom lines. Two degrees…

But, as McKibben goes on to say, all of the pieces are in place to drive us well past the two degree mark in no time. As he points out, many feel that the magic number is 565. That’s the number of gigatons of carbon that we can burn before we hit the two degree mark. The problem is, the world’s oil and coal companies, as of this very moment, own 2,795 gigatons of carbon, which they’re not willing to give up. It’s an asset that they own, and they damn well intend to use it. Here’s more from McKibben.

…Think of two degrees Celsius as the legal drinking limit – equivalent to the 0.08 blood-alcohol level below which you might get away with driving home. The 565 gigatons is how many drinks you could have and still stay below that limit – the six beers, say, you might consume in an evening. And the 2,795 gigatons? That’s the three 12-packs the fossil-fuel industry has on the table, already opened and ready to pour.

We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We’d have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain.

Yes, this coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil. But it’s already economically aboveground – it’s figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony. It explains why the big fossil-fuel companies have fought so hard to prevent the regulation of carbon dioxide – those reserves are their primary asset, the holding that gives their companies their value. It’s why they’ve worked so hard these past years to figure out how to unlock the oil in Canada’s tar sands, or how to drill miles beneath the sea, or how to frack the Appalachians.

If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn’t pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet. John Fullerton, a former managing director at JP Morgan who now runs the Capital Institute, calculates that at today’s market value, those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about $27 trillion. Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists and kept 80 percent of it underground, you’d be writing off $20 trillion in assets. The numbers aren’t exact, of course, but that carbon bubble makes the housing bubble look small by comparison. It won’t necessarily burst – we might well burn all that carbon, in which case investors will do fine. But if we do, the planet will crater. You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet – but now that we know the numbers, it looks like you can’t have both. Do the math: 2,795 is five times 565. That’s how the story ends…

At this point, I was going to reiterate my global warming rant from a few days ago, but, thankfully, I found something better in a Metafilter thread about McKibben’s article. It comes from a fellow calling himself Ivan Fyodorovich. Here’s what he has to say. (WARNING: It’s not pretty.)

…I’m not happy telling you this, but this catastrophe will not be averted. There is nothing in human history that demonstrates that any such calamity will ever be avoided when the time-frame is this extended and remote (relative to normal human concerns), where the costs are distributed across large populations and not exclusively to those responsible, and where personal benefit so immediately accrues to both those responsible and everyone else as they fail avert the calamity.

Action will occur only when costs are direct, immediate, and large. And that will be far, far too late.

The Earth’s temperature will rise by at least five degrees C over the next 150 years. This will happen. It will kill billions of people, result in mass extinctions, destroy many of Earth’s ecosystems and alter the rest, utterly change global politics and economics in chaotic and militaristic fashion, and the survivors will probably curse our generation for the next thousand years. This is our future.

And, that, I’m sorry to say, is probably the truth.

By now, you’ve no doubt heard that Newt Gingrich is promising, if elected, to bring down the price of gas to $2.50 a gallon. It’s complete fantasy, of course, but there’s some percentage of our criminally uninformed electorate that will buy into the ridiculous notion that our President somehow has control over such things. And it’s not just the difference between $2.50 and $4.00 that we’re talking about, either. You see, according to Gingrich, Obama has plans to move the price of gas to $10 a gallon. Here’s what Newt had to say a few days ago: “I’m happy to say the Gingrich plan moves you towards $2.50 or less. The Obama plans moves you towards $9 or $10 or more.”

As columnist Fareed Zakaria correctly notes, it’s “pure political pandering.” Here, with more on that, is a clip from Zakaria’s blog, followed by video of him on Anderson Cooper’s show yesterday, debating the matter with Stephen Moore, senior economics writer for the Wall Street Journal.

…The world consumes about 80 million barrels of oil a day. The total U.S. increase in production, if you were to do everything that Newt Gingrich fantasizes about, would be less than half a percent of that. So the chance that it would have any impact on the price of oil, particularly in the short run, is pure fantasy. Newt surely knows better.

The truth of the matter is that we are in the middle of a great boom in domestic oil production. We are at the highest levels in 30 years. The United States for the first time is actually exporting oil rather than importing oil, and it has made no difference to our prices. In fact, as we can see, oil prices have gone up. Why? Because, (A) China is growing, India is growing, etc. and (B) people are worried about a possible war with Iran – geopolitical concerns. So these are not things that you can easily fix. You’re not going to get China to slow down. You are not going to change the fact that there are genuine concerns about Iran. Increasing American domestic production is such a marginal issue at this point that it’s really totally irresponsible for Newt Gingrich to be saying this…

And, to his credit, the President has come out swinging. Obama not only explained the situation this morning, in his weekly address, but called for Congress to end nearly $4 billion in annual subsidies to big oil, saying, “We’re going to put every single Member of Congress on record: They can either stand up for oil companies, or they can stand up for the American people.” I’d argue that he should have done that upon taking office, but better late than never… Of course, this could just be a warning shot across their bow, meant to encourage them to keep the prices at the pump low until after the election… At any rate, here’s what Obama had to say.

Hi, everybody. As I’m sure you’ve noticed over the past few weeks, the price at your local pump has been going up and up. And because it’s an election year, so has the temperature of our political rhetoric.

What matters most to me right now is the impact that rising prices have on you. When you’ve got to spend more on gas, you’ve got less to spend on everything else. It makes things harder. So I wanted to take a minute this weekend to explain what steps my Administration is taking when it comes to energy – most importantly, producing more of it while using less of it.

The truth is: the price of gas depends on a lot of factors that are often beyond our control. Unrest in the Middle East can tighten global oil supply. Growing nations like China or India adding cars to the road increases demand. But one thing we should control is fraud and manipulation that can cause prices to spike even further.

For years, traders at financial firms were able to game the energy markets, distort the price of oil, and make big profits for themselves at your expense. And they were able to do all that because of major gaps and loopholes in our regulations. When I took office, we did something about it.

The Wall Street reforms I signed into law are helping bring energy markets out of the shadows and under real oversight. They’re strengthening our ability to go after fraud and to prevent traders from manipulating the market. So it’s not just wrong, but dangerous that some in Congress want to roll back those protections and return to the days when companies like Enron could avoid regulation and reap enormous profits, no matter who it hurt.

What’s more, at a time when big oil companies are making more money than ever before, we’re still giving them $4 billion of your tax dollars in subsidies every year. Your member of Congress should be fighting for you. Not for big financial firms. Not for big oil companies.

In the next few weeks, I expect Congress to vote on ending these subsidies. And when they do, we’re going to put every single Member of Congress on record: They can either stand up for oil companies, or they can stand up for the American people. They can either place their bets on a fossil fuel from the last century, or they can place their bets on America’s future. So make your voice heard. Send your representative an email. Give them a call. Tell them to stand with you.

And tell them to be honest with you. It’s easy to promise a quick fix when it comes to gas prices. There just isn’t one. Anyone who tells you otherwise – any career politician who promises some three-point plan for two-dollar gas – they’re not looking for a solution. They’re just looking for your vote.

If we’re truly going to make sure we’re not at the mercy of spikes in gas prices every year, the answer isn’t just to drill more – because we’re already drilling more. Under my Administration, we’re producing more oil here at home than at any time in the last eight years, that’s a fact. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating oil rigs to a record high, that’s a fact. And we’ve opened millions of acres on land and offshore to develop more of our domestic resources.

Those are the facts. But we can’t just rely on drilling. Not when we use more than 20 percent of the world’s oil, but still only have 2 percent of the world’s known oil reserves. If we don’t develop other sources of energy, and the technology to use less energy, we’ll continue to be dependent on foreign countries for our energy needs. That’s why we’re pursuing an all-of-the-above strategy. As we develop more oil and gas, we’re also developing wind and solar power; biofuels, and next-generation vehicles – and thousands of Americans have jobs right now because of it. We need to keep making those investments – because I don’t want to see those jobs go to other countries. I want to create even more of them right here in America.

And after three decades of inaction, we raised fuel economy standards so that by the middle of the next decade, our cars will average nearly 55 miles per gallon. That’s nearly double what they get today. That means you’ll only have to fill up every two weeks instead of every week. And that will save the typical family more than $8,000 over the life of the car – just by using less gas.

Combined, these steps have helped put us on a path to greater energy independence. Since I took office, America’s dependence on foreign oil has gone down every single year. In 2010, for the first time in 13 years, less than half the oil we used came from foreign countries.

We can do even better. And we will. But what we can’t do is keep being dependent on other countries for our energy needs. In America we control our own destiny. So that’s the choice we face – the past, or the future. And America is what it is today because we have always placed our bets on the future. Thanks, and have a great weekend.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

First of all — exactly where in the Constitution does it say that it is acceptable to give a very small, select group of Senators or House members significant powers to write and offer historically sweeping legislation that can only be passed by the full body on a restricted, “Up or Down” vote? What does it say about the concept of “one man, one vote” when, under the so-called “Super Committee,” Senators and House members from certain states/districts will have unprecedented powers to shape such crucial policy proposals — while other districts (and even whole states) will have virtually no say?

Aside from being unprecedented (and likely, unconstitutional), the “Super Committee” is clearly nothing but political window dressing designed to enable Washington power-brokers to *finally* force through what several “bipartisan” commissions (as well as President Obama) have been recommending all along — unprecedented “reforms” to key elements of our nation’s social safety net (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.) that politically, would be next-to-impossible to implement through the “normal” (legal) process.

Perhaps the saddest part of all, however, is that, over the next several months — while Congress and the White House (and the mainstream media) are busy tying themselves in knots over the political machinations of the “Super Committee” they will continue to ignore the potential for real, substantial reforms that would not only help ordinary Americans right now — but ironically, would in the long-run, do much more to begin to bend the deficit curve in a more positive direction:

* An aggressive, quick-start program to create more and better JOBS, right now — to get more people working (and paying taxes) again, as soon as possible.

* A serious effort to deal with the MORTGAGE/FORECLOSURE CRISIS — to help families stay in their homes, and to stem the ongoing slide in home equity and property values that is devastating communities across America.

* An overhaul of our completely unbalanced and misguided TRADE POLICIES such as our multiple “free trade” agreements and “most favored nation” trade status for China — in order to begin to provide incentives (rather than disincentives) for companies to invest in domestic production and manufacturing.

* Real (rather than rhetorical) EDUCATION REFORM — with the emphasis on investing whatever it takes to make sure every child in America has a full and equal chance to reach their full potential — be it an advanced university degree, a community college diploma, a skilled-trade certificate, apprenticeship, or whatever …

* An all-out program to invest in our CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE — including building (or rebuilding) the roads, rails, ports, dams, canals, power plants, etc. that will be necessary for America to re-build our lost manufacturing base — and to provide the foundation for …

* A “moon-launch”-style effort to make America a leader in ENERGY SELF-SUFFICIENCY — focused on domestic, renewable sources, and hopefully allowing us to untangle ourselves from the so-called “War on Terror.”

Unfortunately, none of these items seem to be a priority for the various corporate interests that now essentially “own” our two major political parties — so instead, we will all spend the next few months watching the new “Super Committee” — and later Congress — as they wring their hands and grit their teeth while “reluctantly” voting to pass a series of new “painful,” “dreadful,” “regrettable …” cuts to programs that have provided a modicum of security for poor and working Americans for decades.

And, while we’re on the subject of jobs, today I learned that the Obama stimulus created more jobs in 2010 than Bush did in 8 years… The bottom line, and I think we’ve discussed this before, is that this is exactly the wrong time to be cutting government spending, and everyone knows it. What we should be doing right now, as Glen suggests, is putting Americans to work on long put-off infrastructure projects and the building of a new, more efficient, more green, energy infrastructure. These are things that need to be done anyway, and now would be the perfect time to see them completed – when manpower is relatively inexpensive, and people need the work. If we did just that, and allowed the ridiculously ill-conceived Bush tax cuts for the wealthy – which, by the way, never delivered the jobs that they promised – to expire, we’d be well on our way to a more secure, successful America. And, if, on top of that, we were to cut our military spending by just 10%, putting that money toward education instead, just imagine where we could be in ten year’s time… We have so much potential in this country. That, I think, it what pisses me off the most. I know that, right now, we could be doing incredible things. But, instead, we’re gaming the system so that the rich can keep an unprecedented amount of their wealth, and closing public libraries to see it happen. It’s absolutely unconscionable that we’ve allowed things to come to this.

Sen. Rand Paul questioned the need Thursday for new federal new coal-mining rules to reduce black-lung disease, despite federal figures showing the illness has been on the rise in recent years, killing about 1,500 miners annually.

The Kentucky Republican, a frequent critic of government regulations, said during a Senate hearing that black-lung rates had dropped dramatically since 1969, when a law to combat the illness took effect.

“Every regulation doesn’t save lives,” Paul said at a hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. “There is a point or a balancing act between when a regulation becomes burdensome and our energy production is stifled. We have to assess the cost”…

And we wouldn’t want to burden our coal mining corporations, would we?

Welcome to the libertarian paradise that is Tea Party America.

Oh, speaking of coal mining, Tuesday marks the anniversary of the

Tuesday, by the way, is the first anniversary of the tragic West Virginia mine collapse that cost 29 miners their lives. As you might recall, Massey Energy, the company that operates that mine, has been cited for over 3,000 safety violations. It’s also worth noting that Don Blankenship, the CEO of the company, has stated publicly that safety regulations are, “as silly as global warming.” Blankenship, I’m sure it won’t surprise anyone, is a major supporter of the Tea Party movement that got Rand Paul elected.

…Environmentalists and deficit hawks are eager for the president to find his voice again by using his 2012 federal budget to once again take a whack at propping up oil and coal. Last year, the idea he dangled of eliminating $38.8 billion in such subsidies through 2020 went nowhere. It’s unclear if Obama might try to duplicate those savings when he unveils his latest budget proposal in mid-February.

David Goldwyn of the State Department made it clear during a talk in Washington this week that reining in fossil fuel subsidies worldwide would help to make a significant dent in greenhouse gas emissions. The Group of 20 has committed to doing so and the International Energy Agency will be keeping score, said Goldwyn, who is stepping down today from his position as coordinator for international energy affairs.

In the United States, he pointed out, reducing subsidies “will be a political battle.”

“The one piece you can lay at the Obama doorstep is a failure to push this issue,” Steve Kretzmann, executive director of the Washington-based nonprofit Oil Change International, told SolveClimate News in an interview. “He has put it in his budget the last two years and Congress didn’t pick up on it. A campaign from the White House about eliminating subsidies could do a lot”…

For decades, tax breaks and federal incentives have been a boon to the U.S. fossil fuels industry. Numbers compiled by the Environmental Law Institute reveal that those figures totaled $72 billion between 2002 and 2008—about $10 billion annually. Figures from Kretzmann’s organization put annual U.S. subsidy figures to these mature technologies somewhere between $6 billion and $39 billion annually, depending on what is included in the count….

So, how seriously will Obama push to cut fossil fuel subsidies, and how vehemently will the Republicans, who claim to want to cut the federal deficit, fight him on it? It seems like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how persuasive corporate lobbyists can be, especially when they represent companies that write big campaign checks.

Let’s start with Joe Barton, the man who very likely could be the Chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. He, among other things, doesn’t think the government has any place telling us that we should replace our “traditional” incandescent light bulbs with those “little, squiggly, pig-tailed ones.” (Advocating for energy conservation, I think we’d all agree, has no place on the Energy Committee, especially at a time when we have such an unlimited abundance of non-renewable resources.) You might know him better, though, as that Congressman who bravely stood up and apologized to BP’s CEO Tony Hayward after the Obama administration asked the company to pay for the cleanup of the Gulf. But, others are vying for the position now held by California’s Henry Waxman. Fortunately for us, they’re all three climate change deniers.

One of these men is John Shimkus. John, like Joe Barton and almost all other Republicans these days, does not believe in global warming. Unlike these folks, though, he doesn’t rely on the bad science of oil industry lobbyists to make the case. No, he doesn’t have to. He goes right to the source – to God directly. Global climate change, according to Shimkus, can’t be real because God told Noah after the flood that he would never destroy the world again. I could see how some might think it risky to have someone with a less than open mind on such a critical issue running the Energy Committee, seeing as how an overwhelming percentage of climate scientists are telling us that we have a very small window in which to avert global catastrophe, but I for one would find comfort in his certainty that God is “infallible, unchanging, perfect.” The sad truth of the matter is that science is depressing, and what we need right now, more than anything, is to feel good about ourselves. People, after all, don’t buy SUVs, air conditioners and snuggies when they think the world is ending.

Fortunately, there’s likely to be a whole lot less science under Republican leadership. Here’s a clip from a recent article in the New York Times:

Federal financing of science research, which has risen quickly since the Obama administration came to power, could fall back to pre-Obama levels if the incoming Republican leadership in the House of Representatives follows through on its list of campaign promises.

In the Republican platform, Pledge to America, the party vows to cut discretionary nonmilitary spending to 2008 levels. Under that plan, research and development at nonmilitary agencies — including those that sponsor science and health research — would fall 12.3 percent, to $57.8 billion, from the Mr. Obama’s request of $65.9 billion for fiscal year 2011.

An analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science looked at what would happen if all of the agencies were cut to the 2008 amounts. The National Institutes of Health would lose $2.9 billion, or 9 percent, of its research money. The National Science Foundation would lose more than $1 billion, or almost 19 percent, of its budget, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would lose $324 million, or 34 percent…

That’s what I call a win – win. Not only do we save some money that can go toward corporate welfare and advanced military weapons systems, but we do so by cutting the funding of those pesky climate scientists who are to blame for all the Henny Penny hysterics over the adverse affects of CO2 in the atmosphere. And, I think we all know that the new Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner is absolutely right when he says that it’s “almost comical” to suggest that greenhouse gasses are bad for the planet. As a former executive in the plastics industry, he should know, right?

Fortunately for democracy, America’s patriotic corporations are stepping up to assist the Republicans in their righteous fight against environmental regulations. Here, on that subject, is a clip from as article in the Guardian that ran right before the midterm election:

The next Congress is expected to throw up a whole new set ofroadblocks to Barack Obama’s environmental agenda – from time-consuming investigations to budget cuts.

So how much was the fossil fuel industries willing to pay to help cast out White House allies on energy and climate change?

A lot, it turns out. Oil and coal lobby groups have spent $69.5 million on television ads specifically targetted against Obama clean energy policies in these mid-term elections, according to data compiled by the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

That’s a 10-to-1 advantage over clean energy groups. Opinion polls are all predicting big wins in tomorrow’s elections for Republicans, especially Tea Party candidates…

Climate scientists, the sneaky sons-of-bitches that they are, are speaking out en masse, but I suspect that our true patriots will come forward to drown them out with the beautiful music of corporate free speech. God bless them.

…It’s an unnatural thing, the Deepwater Horizon. It is, indeed, the very embodiment of the needs it’s supposed to serve, a monster continually bestirred. It is a boat, a ship, that floats on top of an ocean drilling an oil well a mile below the surface, and it does not move, despite currents and waves and weather. It does not move, very simply, by always moving: by never stopping. It has eight engines called thrusters, two to a corner, that interact through computers with global-positioning satellites, and they can never stop firing, adjusting, thrusting. As a result, the monster has its own needs, too. To drill for oil, it needs frequent and massive deliveries of diesel fuel, a hundred thousand to two hundred thousand gallons at a time. It needs supply ships to continually circle it and make deliveries not only of fuel and drilling mud but also of food and especially water, because in order to keep the crews in clean coveralls and clean sheets it has four enormous washing machines that wash clothes twenty-four hours a day. And mostly, it needs to justify its own expense — BP pays Transocean a half million dollars a day for the privilege of leasing it — and so the need it serves by never stopping is the need never to stop: to keep working. It is never dark, and it is never silent. Its lights are always burning, and though often compared to a city unto itself, it is more like a casino in the middle of the ocean.

It comes as no surprise, then, that there is pressure to produce — to strike oil. The Deepwater Horizon is the second Transocean rig to drill the well known to the Minerals Management Service as Mississippi Canyon block 252, to BP as Macondo, and to the drilling team as the Well from Hell. The first rig, the Marianas, tried drilling it in the fall of 2009, until it was damaged in a hurricane and had to be repaired. The Deepwater Horizon resumed drilling in February and promptly had to “cut pipe” in March, when the drill bit got stuck and a few thousand feet of drill pipe had to be left in the hole, and the well was attacked from a different direction. The Well from Hell is as gassy as a colicky baby. Men get used to feeling “kickbacks” — the burps of methane gas that are sometimes strong enough to force the drill pipe back up the well — and to seeing the warning lights on deck that prohibit chipping and other deck work that might cause sparks and also lighting a damned cigarette. The Well from Hell has cost BP weeks of added rig time and is at least $20 million over budget. By April 20, however, drilling has been completed. All that is required is for the well to be plugged with cement and for seawater to displace the drilling mud that BP is paying M-I Swaco millions of dollars for. It is not an uncomplicated process, but once it is done, the Deepwater Horizon can move on to new holes, and a production rig can begin tapping the vast and strangely vehement reservoir of oil and gas secreted two and a half miles beneath Macondo’s wellhead.

No, it is no surprise that BP pushes for the completion of the well, nor that the push comes from one of the BP managers assigned to the rig — one of its so-called company men. It is the company man’s job to push. It is not his job to be part of the so-called Transocean family of crew members. The company man eats in the same galley as the crew members but not at the same tables. The company man does not have the same quarters as the crew members, and he does not wear the same clothes. The crew members wear Transocean-issued magenta coveralls when they’re on tour, blue coveralls when they’re off. The company man wears, in the words of one Deepwater Horizon survivor, “jeans, a BP shirt, and a nice shiny white hard hat.” There is no surprise when a company man proposes changes in certain procedures and objectives because the company man is, in another survivor’s words, “always trying to change things.” There is not even any surprise when, at a preshift meeting on April 20, the company man challenges the authority of Transocean’s OIM. What does surprise the crew members of Deepwater Horizon, however, is how the OIM responds.

The OIM’s name is Jimmy Wayne Harrell. The company man’s name is Robert Kaluza. The meeting is the standard “pre-tour” meeting held twice a day, at 11:00 A.M. and 11:00 P.M., before the start of each twelve-hour shift at noon and midnight. At most pre-tours, the lines of authority are clear, if contested: The BP company man tells the OIM and the driller what he wants accomplished, and the driller tells the various crews how they’re going to accomplish it. At the 11:00 A.M. meeting on April 20, however, Robert Kaluza tells the drilling team how they’re going to displace the mud from the well and replace it with seawater. When he proposes a procedure that runs counter to the procedures the drilling team has in place, Dewey Revette, the driller, fresh from his circuit around the deck, begins to argue with him. Revette thinks that what Kaluza is proposing is reckless and premature, and when the argument grows heated, what the various crew members witnessing it remember is the passion and anger of an inherently careful man. “Dewey got pretty hot,” one says. Finally, the company man invokes his own sense of authority and says, “Well, that’s how it’s going to be.” And now it is up to Jimmy Wayne Harrell. BP leases the rig, but Transocean owns it and employs the workers gathered at the pre-tour meeting. They have always understood the Transocean OIM to be the ultimate authority on the rig, the one man who has the power to override the interests of the company man in favor of the interests of the Transocean workers and their safety. And what Jimmy Wayne Harrell says, in response to Robert Kaluza’s dictum, is, according to sworn testimony offered in the Coast Guard investigation of the Deepwater Horizon disaster: “Well, I guess that’s what we have those pinchers for.”

Those pinchers: the blowout preventer.

Those pinchers: the massive mechanical shears that are supposed to cut the pipe and seal the well in the event of catastrophe…

But, as we know now, the blowout preventer didn’t work. Furthermore, there’s evidence that BP knew that it wouldn’t.

[If you don't like this video, I've got something better. Check out this clip from last night's Daily Show. It's brilliant.]