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[Night on] Earth Day

Let’s just take a look back at this little episode, shall we? Yes, we shall:

A massive deepwater oil spill is nearly as likely today as it was in 2010, experts warn, 10 years after the disastrous explosion of BP’s rig in the Gulf of Mexico that caused an environmental catastrophe.

The blowout killed 11 workers and spewed 4m barrels of petroleum into the ocean for 87 days before it could be capped, devastating marine life and polluting 1,300 miles of shoreline. Thousands were put out of work in oil, fisheries and tourism.

But experts say an incident of similar scale could happen again and has been made more likely by the Trump administration’s decision to loosen Obama-era safety rules. Those standards had grown from an independent commission’s damning findings of corporate and regulatory failures leading up to the spill.

Frances Ulmer, who served on the commission and is a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, said the government and industry have not made sufficient changes to prevent or respond to another mammoth spill.

Sufficient changes. Just what might those those be? It isn’t me walking to work (I do), or building a solar charging station for the car (we are). Those things are those things and they make my life better as they ease some pollution in my local community. But they’re not going to save anything – only collective action will do that. Governments working together to re-assert control that has been systematically ceded to corporations for the purpose of pillage and profit. Reigning in the unaccountable and including the costs of externalities in the price of everything we can buy are the things that will begin make a difference. The reduced economic activity of the past six weeks should give us a little hint of what is required if we had to cram for the test. If we [all] decided to start studying a little everyday, it would mean different political leaders, building codes, transportation alternatives, land development regulations, and prices than the ones we have today. How many of these are possible in the near term?

There’s an election in November.

Image: A man lays oil-absorbent boom as oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill impacts Cat Island in Barataria Bay, Louisiana, in 2010.
Photograph: Gerald Herbert/AP

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And it begins

Rob from GPB wanted me to say something about the death of the suburbs, and I did. And I delicately touch on this in the column regularly (there is no delicate way to say it). And now, enter the Washington Post.

As housing prices have plummeted and credit has shriveled, more residents of the District and Washington’s inner suburban counties have chosen to stay put, all but ending the steady exodus to the region’s less expensive, outer suburbs that characterized most of this decade, according to Census Bureau estimates released today.

“I looked at these numbers and said, ‘Wow!’ ” said William H. Frey, a demographer from the Brookings Institution who analyzed the figures. “This is a more drastic change in U.S. migration patterns than we’ve seen in a long time, and I don’t think we’ve seen the end of it.”

Indeed not, Mr. Frey. I’ll venture to say it will increasingly become much less of a novel comment to say that suburbs/exurbs are dying and have no future. There was a great euphemism in an LAT article recently: phased abandonment. It’s good that we’ll get beyond this polite boundary and get to what comes next. What comes next for these locales remains to be determined, but probably will have much to do with quiet and farming, and sometimes both, together.

Posted on

And it begins

Rob from GPB wanted me to say something about the death of the suburbs, and I did. And I delicately touch on this in the column regularly (there is no delicate way to say it). And now, enter the Washington Post.

As housing prices have plummeted and credit has shriveled, more residents of the District and Washington’s inner suburban counties have chosen to stay put, all but ending the steady exodus to the region’s less expensive, outer suburbs that characterized most of this decade, according to Census Bureau estimates released today.

“I looked at these numbers and said, ‘Wow!’ ” said William H. Frey, a demographer from the Brookings Institution who analyzed the figures. “This is a more drastic change in U.S. migration patterns than we’ve seen in a long time, and I don’t think we’ve seen the end of it.”

Indeed not, Mr. Frey. I’ll venture to say it will increasingly become much less of a novel comment to say that suburbs/exurbs are dying and have no future. There was a great euphemism in an LAT article recently: phased abandonment. It’s good that we’ll get beyond this polite boundary and get to what comes next. What comes next for these locales remains to be determined, but probably will have much to do with quiet and farming, and sometimes both, together.