The Spirit of '86

I was in college in the Spring of 1986 when the Chernobyl nuclear power plant had its meltdown. Without Twitter, Blogs or Facebook we actually had to sit around and hyperventilate with each other face-to-face, it was terrible. Sure it sounded bad, but not so clearly bad that it was the imminent end of the world -- so no "rapture sex", and there I was just sitting on all that stock footage of fireworks and rockets launching on betamax tapes.

One thing we did have is Reagan Administration officials on television telling us that non-commie nuclear reactors were perfectly safe and we need to build more-- "why look at France" they said, "the French nuclear reactors are wonderful!" Republicans praising France, it was a different time. But still, no new nuclear plants were getting built.

Move forward a quarter-century and without the Soviets to kick around these ecological disasters just cannot be spun so easily, so things go in reverse.

In the days since President Obama announced a moratorium on permits for drilling new offshore oil wells and a halt to a controversial type of environmental waiver that was given to the Deepwater Horizon rig, at least seven new permits for various types of drilling and five environmental waivers have been granted, according to records.

That's quite a re-imagining of the definition of moratorium -- and speaking of moratoriums.

Meanwhile, the oil geyser gets worse. Maybe we should bring in those Russian folks who fixed the problems at Chernobyl? Oh...right.

[somewhat cross-posted at Firedoglake]