When I turned on the TV last night, I wanted to stand up and cheer. While watching President Obama’s State of the Union address, I felt much like I did when I watched his 2008 acceptance speech at Mile High Stadium in Denver. OK, that’s not true–not hardly. Reality has not been kind to Obama’s rhetoric, after all. But when Obama got to the energy section of the speech, I found much to applaud, not unlike in 2008. . . with some obvious caveats for his praise of dirty, dangerous, failed or flat-out fictional forms of energy production.

During the BP oil disaster, the government would generally back up BP’s estimates of flow data, and only changed when they changed. Now we learn from Kate Sheppard that the White House actually leaned on their own scientists to lowball the amount of oil being released from the busted well.

There may be ongoing claims that will drain out a bit more money. But it won’t be much more than 20% of the total funds negotiated that will be used. I don’t know whether this can be attributed to program eligibility or a lack of publicity or bad design. But that number seems quite low compared to the devastation that BP wreaked upon the Gulf Coast.

A year after Macondo the Mouth of Hell roared in the Gulf of Mexico, forever altering the ecology and lives of those who depend on the Gulf for their existence, it is business as usual for BP and a complicit Department of Justice.

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon rig off the coast of Louisiana exploded, causing an oil gusher which spewed over 205 million gallons of oil and 225,000 tons of methane into the Gulf of Mexico. In the ensuing months, a lot of time and money has been invested in selling the idea that the Gulf has been healed, and on the road to recovering its former glory. We don’t have to buy that particular product. We can instead take the lessons of folks like the Center for Biological Diversity, which used available public data to chronicle the toll on marine wildlife in the Gulf.

After a year like the one he’s had, the CEO of Transocean should count himself very lucky that, unlike Japan, America lacks an ‘old-way’ tradition for a company manager to prostrate himself with shame and grief at his job performance, especially after loss of life.

I’ve heard the American media described accurately at a bunch of 7 year-olds at a youth soccer game. There’s nothing strategic about the game; all the kids chase the soccer ball in a pack. I thought of that when I read a story about enduring sickness in the Gulf of Mexico. It didn’t come from ABC, or NBC, or CBS, or Fox News, or CNN, or any local outlet. It came from Al Jazeera.

The Presidential Oil Spill Commission has released their final report on the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Basically, they see the problems that manifested on the Deepwater Horizon well to be systemic, and ensuring the safety of rig workers and the US coastline depends on overhauling the industry completely.

Just when you thought the people of Louisiana couldn’t possibly take another shot to the face, there’s another one coming. It turns out that people who received claim money from BP could see that money taxed at the highest possible rate because the BP oil disaster wasn’t officially declared a disaster.

The oil is actually all there for the counting. No bacteria ate it. It has settled at the bottom of the Gulf, and it’s devastating the local ecosystem.