Negative Railroad

The Deepwater Horizon seems to have finally become background noise in the news cycle. The New Orleans Times-Picayune isn’t featuring a “day counter” on their website anymore. Up through about Day 78, it was at the top of the front page.

It‘s Day 84, and BP may be about to close the leak with a new cap. That’s no cause for panic or angst, so I guess it isn’t worth top-value pixels.

And after 84 days of wailing and hand-wringing, how many birds have actually died?

Less than 200:

Via TJIC, a graphic explanation of how a blowout preventer works, and what failed on the Deepwater Horizon.

Take a look. And remember, this thing is installed and operated by remote control a mile under the sea. Cool. Except the “failure” part…

It’s 1949, and what’s a well-dressed lady going to drive?

The daring ones drive a Nash Airflyte:

Its aerodynamic body shape was developed in a wind tunnel. Nils Wahlberg's theories on reducing an automobile body's drag coefficient resulted in a smooth shape and enclosed front fenders. The "cutting-edge aerodynamics" was the most "alarming" all-new postwar design in the industry.

A month after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Big Media is finally getting some pictures of oily birds and mucked-up shoreline. It’s the story they wanted to tell:

When it began April 20, Louisiana and the world feared a quick and dramatic result, a black tsunami washing over one of the world's most productive and valuable coastal ecosystems. Expecting a disaster with iconic images to rival the environmental mugging of Prince William Sound by the Exxon Valdez, the planet's media rushed to the scene. Within days fishing towns like Venice and Hopedale became datelines in newspapers from Paris to Hong Kong, which painted pictures of a culture bracing for ecosystem Armageddon.

It is certainly true that valuable and delicate things are being harmed. But this is unfolding not so much as a major disaster and more like an accidental tragedy:

From the Facebook page for Deepwater Horizon Response
(post at 7:08pm, May 6th):

To help stop the flow of oil from the source, BP intends to drill two relief wells. The first well was started on May 2 and proceeding as expected. This process usually takes 2-3 months and involves going 5,000 feet to the seabed, drilling an additional 18,000 feet, and reaching a target the size of a basketball.

That’s a mile of seawater, then three miles of earth. By remote control. In hurricane season. Accurate within fifteen inches.

Maximally optimized systems are fragile systems.

Quoted from: NZC, a regular commenter at TJIC.

With the current President finally on the scene of the Transocean Horizon oil spill, expect increased hysteria from Big Media. Like this story from Christian Science Monitor (from last week when the explosion was breaking news):

Transocean Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion shows new risks

The dramatic oil rig explosion and fire aboard the Transocean Deepwater Horizon rig 50 miles off the Louisiana coast illustrates the growing risk for oil companies as they drill ever deeper into the earth's crust to satisfy domestic and international demand for fuel.

Via TJIC:

Rick Webb: "The telephone was an aberration in human development. It was a 70 year or so period where for some reason humans decided it was socially acceptable to ring a loud bell in someone else's life and they were expected to come running, like dogs. This was the equivalent of thinking it was okay to walk into someone's living room and start shouting."

Oh sweet Jesus yes. I couldn't agree more.

Can I get an Amen!

Here’s a fellow from Rockwell Industries who probably went on to join the Car Talk staff:

According to the folks at Maggie’s Farm, this was an off-the-cuff bit to test the sound levels before they shot the real video.

Recycling is one of the sacraments of the lefty/greenie religion. Sometimes, it is actually a good idea, too. Sippican offers an experiment to determine whether all that washing and sorting of your garbage is an act of faith or an exercise in reasoned stewardship of nature’s bounty:

As righties and lefties argue about the merits of “drill, baby, drill”, the domestic energy industry has quietly been drilling here, now. For natural gas:

production hit a new record level in 2009, breaking the previous record set in 2008. The 2.2% increase in 2009 follows increases of 4.4% in 2008, 4.8% in 2007, and 0.33% in 2006, bringing last year's production to a level 12.2% above the output in 2006.

This surge in domestic natural gas production over the last three years has enabled the United States to overtake Russia as the world's No. 1 producer of natural gas, and is all due to advanced drilling methods now being used to drill for gas through a type of rock known as shale.

A vintage ad from NRR’s left sidebar caught my eye:

From the ad copy, we learn that, in 1956, buying a week’s worth of food at one time and storing it at home was a new trend. It was clearly seen as a convenience to have all the food at hand. In the 50s, the big benefit was reducing the time spent making trips to the grocer. Today we might include saving the energy and pollution those trips generate, too.

This work-saving (and planet-saving) appliance, available in decorator colors, was priced at $229.95. In today’s dollars, that’s $1,852.89.

After a decade or more of mainstream urging, I suggest that nearly everyone who wants to “go green” has done so. Or has at least started down a greener path.

Green messages may have reached a saturation point, becoming ubiquitous so we stop noticing them. There are still fortunes to be made—even outside subsidy capture—but green isn’t cutting-edge cool anymore.

So what’s next?

Going gray:

Forty years from now, one out of four Americans will be 65 or older.
Twenty million will be over 85.
One million will be over 100.

If you’re reading this, you have access to the intertubes. Which also means you have access to this:

The web has made it easier than ever before to get a free education, and you'd join the ranks of great thinkers in history who were also self-taught, like Joseph Conrad, Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Paul Allen, Agatha Christie and Ernest Hemingway. You, too, can be an autodidact; the breadth of free educational materials available online is absolutely astonishing.
…

In his State of the Union address last night, the current President repeated his vision for a “clean-energy economy” as a cornerstone to creating jobs. This time, Obama included something that many argue is not clean energy:

But to create more of these clean-energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives, and that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.