Bob Hayes Online

How much better off would we be if we were drilling in ANWR or similar areas, rather than in deepwater?

We don’t yet know how bad the Deepwater Horizon spill will end up being. Let’s go super-worst case, and say that it reaches the level of the worst-ever oil spill: the 1991 deliberate spill in the Persian Gulf. The high end estimate of that spill is 520 million gallons. Let’s say it’s twice that bad – 1000 million gallons, a nice round billion. Worst. spill. ever.

We know what that looks like in water. It’s bad. How does it look on land?

A gallon is 0.13 cubic feet. (I know, it looks like more than that when you hold a gallon jug of milk, but a cubic foot is actually a fairly hefty volume of space.)

Thus, a billion gallons is 130 million cubic feet. Holy cow – we’d flood Alaska!

Or would we? The nice thing about an oil disaster on land is that it is relatively easy to throw up a berm to stop the spill from spreading. (In fact it’s so much easier to stop a spill on land that there would never be a billion gallons spilled – there wouldn’t even be a million gallons spilled. Check that list – of the top 12 spills, only one was on land, and that one happened when just such a berm collapsed after eight months of the spill being neglected. But let’s assume for the moment that we’re going to have to contain the entire billion gallons.)

Berms vary in height, but let’s not wait for the Corps of Engineers to show up. We want to protect the Alaskan wilderness, after all, before the tide of black gold drowns Governor Palin and Mr. McGinnis and all the little Alaskan bunny rabbits. Let’s limit ourselves to a berm 10 feet high. That’s something that yahoos in pickup trucks can manage, let alone serious civil engineers. How big a circular berm do we need to contain our spill?

At a height of ten feet, to encompass 130 million square feet, we need a radius of 2034 feet. Now, that’s not a tiny berm. Our rednecks in pickup trucks are going to need some friends. (Of course, they have months to build it, given the spill RATE is “only” a few hundred thousand gallons a day at most.) It’s a circle about 4/5 of a mile across. Not trivial, by any means – not a weekend project. Still, even if throwing up the berm costs $1000 a linear foot (and it wouldn’t, not nearly), we’re looking at $12,779,000 for the whole project – chump change. (And hell, the billion gallons of oil in the berm is worth about $2.4 billion on the open market, so you might even make a little profit on the deal.)

How much Alaska would be wiped out? Less than a single square mile.

THAT is why we should be drilling in Alaska (and Canada and a few other places), rather than out in deepwater.

At Alas!, Amp posts this (rather on-point) cartoon basically pointing out that it isn’t black people’s job to reassure white people that the white people are on the side of the angels. A fair point, and it’s a pretty funny cartoon too, esp. the last inset panel, where the black lady asks “do you even hear the words I say?” and the white lady responds “the ones I like”.

A few days later, Amp’s coblogger Mandolin makes a post discussing white views of racism, and making the interesting historical point that white opinions about racism and race relations haven’t changed very much in the last 40-50 years, and that arguably this demonstrates a large degree of disconnect between white people’s experiences and black people’s experiences on race in the US. (Short version, in the 1960s white people thought racism wasn’t a problem even though nowadays we pretty much all recognize that it was; today white people still think racism isn’t a problem, and Mandolin’s argument is that this indicates that we should be cautious about validating that perception.)

In the discussion following the post, yet-another-coblogger Myca writes in response to a white commenter’s dismissive opinion of Mandolin’s point:

Well, and this is why I think it’s so important to privilege the words and experiences of PoCs in conversations about racism…When you have zero skin in the game, it’s easy to be cavalier. Maybe we should listen to the folks whose skin is the game.

Also a fair point. So a couple of comments later, an African-American commenter named BluntHammer comes in and posts a long comment, not so much disagreeing with Mandolin’s argument as saying that the black community has made its own contribution to white perceptions.

And, well, wow. Mandolin’s response is basically an unbelievably snotty, educated white liberal’s dismissal of a black person’s contribution to the conversation. She starts off by mocking his (completely innocuous) handle. She then goes on to explain why this man’s life experience is irrelevant to the discussion, because it disagrees with “the sociology”, and says that he is “gloating” about his success in escaping the ghetto. She tells him that his opinion is at variance from what the majority of black people think, and that therefore she doesn’t have to take it seriously. She expresses doubt that he is actually black. She…oh, go read it for yourself, it’s quite a remarkable text. (I’m going to go ahead and reproduce it below in full, just to have an archival record, because I wouldn’t be surprised if she ends up editing.)

So I guess that privileging the words and experiences of people of color in discussions of racism…kind of depends on the content of those words and experiences. Black people who don’t buy into the progressive worldview of racism? Deluded tools, explicitly compared to UFO abductees.

Progressives love to listen to black people. At least, the black people who say the things that progressives want to hear.

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