A surprisingly good speech from Obama, covering some areas which really needed to be discussed. The corruption of the MMS was covered, along with pointing out that the insane policy of deregulation where industry regulates itself, more or less, leads to disaster (one has to ask, however, why this same point and speech was not made about the grotesque abuses of the financial services sector.

Obama also points out that we consume 20% of the global oil production but have only about 2% of the oil reserves means we need to start dropping oil consumption. Discussion of clean energy and the mythical ‘energy independence’ we like to fantasize about.

You can get the speech transcript here. There’s also a useful page of links to more speeches available.

We’ll see how this goes. Obama brings up history, World War II, landing men on the moon, and so on. I guess it helps to try, even though unfortunately, dealing with resource constraints isn’t in the same category as burning/using massive amounts of resources to achieve some goal, like building tanks in WWII, making rockets to fly to the moon, and so on.

And this of course is where the speech making falls flat, trying to sell the model of consumption/resource plenitude as a method of dealing with resource constraints/scarcity. That’s just not going to work, and I’m not sure how long that type of rhetoric is really going to fly. Maybe we’ll just keep doing it, I don’t know.

As we wind down, each step of the way we’ll just grow into believing this is the new normal, which is the same as the old normal (a nice column by Dmitri Orlov which has an amusing story about our tendency to think in this way no matter what reality actually shows us)….

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 15th, 2010 at 18:08 and is filed under Our World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.