Raping the Planet: Strip mining at Fort McMurray. Greenpeace / Colin O'Connor

President Obama will address the nation on Tuesday night, June 15, after a two-day trip to the Gulf, and tell us whose ass he has decided deserves kicking over the oil leak.  BP was told by the Coast Guard to come up with a plan to better deal with the leaking oil.  The deadline was Sunday night.  From the New York Times:

The order came in a letter sent to the company on Friday by Rear Adm. James A. Watson, who is the federal government’s on-scene coordinator for the cleanup effort. The letter, which was released to the media on Saturday, was sent to Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer.

“I am concerned that your current plans do not provide for maximum mobilization of resources to provide the needed collection capacity consistent with the revised flow estimates,” Admiral Watson wrote. “Recognizing the complexity of the challenge, every effort must be expended to speed up the process.”

Below is a link to a very interesting talk  that puts our use of oil in perspective.  This is a  presentation by author Michael Klare on the follies and dangers of our unwavering ursuit of extreme energy. Klare’s latest book is Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet.  Oil is now actually “extreme energy”  and unconventional rather than normal,  because we are now getting it out of shale, from under miles of ocean water,  and from tar sands in Canada, for example.  We have passed peak oil, so oil is no longer readily available except by these extreme measures of extraction that push the very edges of what is possible.  And while they are pushing those edges, some of the very nastiest environmental degradation and pollution is taking place.  As a result, the Gulf of Mexico may have a permanent “dead zone” far bigger than anything imagined in the past.   Is this really what we want to do to our planet for a bit of energy that we will burn tomorrow and then it’s gone forever?

Michael Klare’s entire talk can be heard and downloaded here.  Watch, if you want to see the slides, from here.

Klare also wrote the following which was cross-posted on TomDispatch and Huffpo:

The Relentless Pursuit of Extreme Energy
A New Oil Rush Endangers the Gulf of Mexico and the Planet
By Michael T. Klare

Yes, the oil spewing up from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico in staggering quantities could prove one of the great ecological disasters of human history.  Think of it, though, as just the prelude to the Age of Tough Oil, a time of ever increasing reliance on problematic, hard-to-reach energy sources.  Make no mistake: we’re entering the danger zone.  And brace yourself, the fate of the planet could be at stake.

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