Energy Policy Showdown
By Benjamin Locher on November 8, 2010 4:05 PM
After cap and trade died in the Senate earlier this year, and following a historic election where voters largely rejected increasing the size of government, the question for policymakers with respect to our energy future is: What's next?
Tomorrow (Tuesday, November 9th) at 2pm EST our very own Steve Everley will be debating David Roberts, senior staff writer for Grist.org, over what we can expect for American energy policy in the future, including which solutions are necessary to make America more energy independent and keep energy affordable and available.
The debate is being hosted by the Huffington Post, but you can watch the debate LIVE right here:
If you'd like to ask a question, you can do so through this interactive channel, or via Twitter using the hashtag #hpenergydebate.
Everley and Roberts have actually been debating energy issues for months, from a spirited exchange on Salon.com to an in person throw-down in Chicago this past August (it was actually a light-hearted affair moderated by Mark McGrath of Sugar Ray.) You can find more information about their past debates by clicking here.
WWW.AMERICANSOLUTIONS.COM
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FORMER BP CEO TONY HAYWARD HAS NO REGRETS
By DAN BERMAN
Tony Hayward is pictured. | Reuters
Hayward admitted in an interview that he and the company were unprepared for the spotlight.
Tony Hayward, the former BP CEO who became a media symbol of the oil giant’s uneven response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, doesn’t regret taking some time off to go yachting.
Earlier this summer, as BP’s Macondo well was spilling what turned out to be 4.9 million barrels of oil into the sea, Hayward famously complained that he “wanted his life back” and was pictured on a yacht off the Isle of Wight.
But Hayward told BBC 2 he needed the time off and wouldn’t change a thing.
"I have to confess, at the time I was pretty angry, actually,” he said, according to the BBC account of the interview. “I hadn't seen my son for three months, I was on the boat for six hours. ... I'm not certain I'd do anything different.”
Hayward, in his first interview since leaving as BP’s CEO, admitted he and the company were unprepared for the spotlight.
“BP’s contingency plans were inadequate. We were making it up day to day,” he said.
Hayward defended BP’s overall response to the spill, saying there was no way the company could deal with the media “feeding frenzy” that developed after the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig.
“We tried to be open and transparent; we gave access to the operation. But the reality is we were completely overrun and just not prepared to deal with the intensity of the media scrutiny,” he said.
“What was going on was some extraordinary engineering,” he added. "But when it was played out in the full glare of the media as it was, of course it looked like fumbling and incompetence."
Hayward also said he didn’t blame President Barack Obama or other administration officials for public comments blasting the company.
"The emotion and anger and frustration was entirely understandable, actually," Hayward said. "The U.S. administration hadn't created this mess; we had."
As for his public relations skills, Hayward suggested that training from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art would have been useful this summer.
"If I had done a degree at RADA rather than a degree in geology, I may have done better, but I'm not certain it would've changed the outcome," Hayward told the BBC. "But certainly the perception of myself may have been different."
Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s commission investigating the spill is meeting this week in Washington for its final public session. Co-chairman William Reilly blasted what he said was “emphatically not a culture of safety” on the Deepwater Horizon rig.
“BP, Halliburton and Transocean are major respected companies operating throughout the Gulf, and the evidence is they are in need of top-to-bottom reform,” Reilly said Tuesday, adding: “We know a safety culture must be led from the top and permeate a company.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/44890.html#ixzz14uKLZ2CP
