Is Obama Serious?
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010The reviews are streaming in now of President Obama’s Oval Office address to the nation last night about BP and the catastrophic oil-spill in the Gulf of Mexico – including those originating over here on the Atlantic’s East side, even though only extreme Obama-junkies or else paid political reporters stayed awake into early Wednesday morning to actually watch it live.
It was apparently a rather long speech, with a panoply of various points within it that one can choose among to emphasize – also, if desired, the sheer fact that it was delivered from the Oval Office, something that is generally supposed to denote an especially serious occasion, as Viktoria Unterreiner points out writing for the German paper Die Welt. Still, the title of her piece is “Obama declares the end of ‘cheap oil’,” and that is one aspect of the President’s address that certainly has attracted particular attention over here. Namely: Can America – the land of the Chevy Corvette and Route 66 – really wean itself from cheap oil, even while spurred on by tarred beaches and dying pelicans? Unterreiner is herself doubtful; she notes that, after Obama made that declaration, “he however became no more concrete” about how to go about it. Perhaps a start would be his CO2/climate bill – but that’s currently in “suspended animation” (im Schwebe-zustand) in the Congress. (more…)
