In a Surprise Move "Moderate" Republican Lindsey Graham Declares Oil Spill Makes Climate Bill "Impossible" Rather Than Necessary

TPM

"Some believe the oil spill has enhanced the chances energy legislation will succeed," Graham said. "I do not share their view."

His reasoning?

[O]pposition to expanded offshore drilling… has grown among certain Senate Democrats.

Gee, I wonder why?

I have come to a different conclusion on the issue and strongly believe that in order to become energy independent we must include these options.

In other words, in the aftermath of the latest earthshattering offshore oil drilling disaster in the Gulf fewer Democrats than before are still willing to hold their noses and reluctantly tolerate the obvious madness of "Drill Baby Drill" Republicans in order to get the minimum votes necessary for even a ridiculously inadequate first small effort to ameliorate complete climate catastrophe in the face of the irresponsibility and irrationality of monolithic Republican obstructionism.

Although there isn't enough offshore oil actually available to provide more than a negligible supply dwarfed by our demands until we invest in earnest in renewable alternative sources of energy and subsidize more energy efficient practices, and although we do not know how to drill for oil safely offshore at the depths at which remaining sources are ever more likely to be located, and although the total costs of disasters from oil-drilling under these conditions incalculably outweigh the worth of the resources themselves, and although it is hard to see how even the few billionaires who finally benefit from the profits of this dangerous offshore oil drilling can continue to enjoy their profits in a dead world; nevertheless, even the supposedly "moderate," supposedly "bipartisan"-spirited Republican Lindsey Graham prefers such profits for billionaires over the smallest effort to address earthshattering climate catastrophe, and decries such efforts as less possible rather than more possible precisely because the evidence of catastrophe is now so conspicuous that he fears he can no longer funnel enough money to his climate-criminal friends.

It is to be hoped -- though it certainly cannot be counted upon -- that elsewhere in the madhouse of the GOP caucus there can be found a single Senator whose "family values" might include the notion of leaving the next a world that isn't a poisonous sewer boiling with greenhouse storms, or recalls that "conservative" is a term with a non-negligible connection with the term "conservation."