White House Edited Oil Drilling Safety Report

bonch writes "The Interior Department inspector general has released a report stating that the White House edited a drilling safety report by reordering paragraphs to make it appear as though a seven-member panel of independent experts supported the six-month ban on offshore drilling. The IG report states, 'The White House edit of the original DOI draft executive summary led to the implication that the moratorium recommendation had been peer-reviewed by the experts,' but the panel had only reviewed a draft of safety recommendations and not a drilling ban. The White House has issued a statement saying that there was 'no intentional misrepresentation of their views.' This follows complaints from scientists and environmentalists that the administration has not been holding to its promise of policy guided by science and not ideology."

Comments

I'll give ya half credit

[RingDev]

I'm mostly okay with what you're saying, maybe not to the degree you are taking it, but largely I would agree. Save for one point:

- Democrats - Clinton's White House created a "no person shall be turned down" policy in 1997 which directly led to the housing boom

The "no person shall be turned down" policy of 1997 only effected a very specific subset of banks. Specifically, of the top 20 sub prime mortgage lenders in the build up to the 2008 blow out, 2 we under the regulations applied by that law. And they were (IIRC) 18th and 20th for the total amount of money lent to sub-prime loans.

No, the underlying cause of the housing bubble is a standard free-market behavior couple with greedy people willing to lie. You had a whole lot of upper-middle and upper class individuals with money to invest. They gave their money to investment firms (and banks, which after the repeal of the GS act, could behave like investment firms). These investment companies had too much liquidity, too much money in the pocket, and not enough out in the market earning interest. So they pushed for more loans. Business loans, construction loans, home loans, personal loans, etc...

Well then it becomes a supply and demand issue. There are a finite number of "good bets" on the market at any given time. And with the excess liquidity in the credit market, all those were snatched up first. From there, we had loads of "pretty good bets". And those too got snatched up.

Then we started getting into the "completely crap bets." Ideally, there shouldn't be enough liquidity in the credit market that these loans are ever going through. But between the huge amount of demand for investments, and the completely bogus CDL vehicles misrepresenting the risk, they were selling like hot cakes.

Now, had the GS Act still been in place, all of this would have happened to investment firms, which should have known better, should have protected there investments, and if they neglected the signs, gone bankrupt. The problem though, is that banks were in on the deals. And when a bank loses hard like this they have insurance through AIG and if things get bad enough, FDIC. And that's when everything went to crap.

So yeah, the dismantling of GS opened the tax payers and economy to this risk, but it wasn't the cause. Nor was Clinton's affordable housing initiative.

The underlying cause is the exact same thing that lead up to the great depression: The excessive consolidation of wealth. I'm not a bleeding heart commie, but it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out that when we have too much money in too few of hands, the economy suffers significantly.

Tax the wealthy. Not because it's right. Not because they can pay. Not because they have some obligation. Do it because it promotes a stronger middle class and leads to economic stability. The needs of the many out weigh the needs of the few, no matter how rich.

-Rick

Re:Anybody got a diff?

[RingDev]

It's a shame really. It could be so clear. Every comment about the moratorium starts off with "The Secretary recommends..." where as all of the peer reviewed stuff starts off with "The Report recommends..."

The problem though, is the word "This". A paragraph immediately following one of the paragraphs that states "The Secretary recommends ... a 6 month moratorium ... " starts off with the following:

The recommendations contained in this report have been peer-reviewed by seven experts
identified by the National Academy of Engineering.

The "this" in that sentence is suppose to be referencing the report that the peer-review group passed. But since the paragraphs have been re-ordered, it appears to reference the report that we are currently reading. And thus implying that the Secretary's recommendations have been peer reviewed.

-Rick

Re:EXTRA! EXTRA! Read all about it.

[Totenglocke]

I'm with you on everything except Katrina. That was a State level issue and the Governor and Mayor of New Orleans were responsible for dealing with it - after they proved utterly incompetent, they tried to claim it was a Federal issue (when no hurricane has ever been labeled as such) in order to shift the blame to someone else.

Sorry, but even if it's someone I dislike (such as Bush) I hate when people blame them for something that was not their fault in any way.

Re:Is this a surprise?

[Black Gold Alchemist]

For example if we switched to Solar energy, we'd need to pave over Nevada with light-sensitive silicon. And that still wouldn't provide a way to fuel cars or freight trucks.

Nonsense. If we switched to solar PV, we'd need roughly 70,000 km^2 of panels. That's based on US energy consumption, taking in to account clouds, day/night, all the stuff solar deniers like to pretend is an issue. Now, 70,000 km^2 sounds like a lot, but it really is about 270 km on a side. Convert that to miles, get 165 miles on a side. Big, but not as big as Nevada. Expensive as hell, sure. But not too big.

Now of course, we could build those cells on our roofs, and cut that by a major number.