Obama’s Dr. Strangelove – BP Tentacles Extend

The former Chief Scientist for BP Oil is now the chief scientist for the US Department of Energy. 

That’s right, Dr. Steven Koonin, the former Chief Scientist at BP – whose own bio notes that he was responsible for “providing technical advice to senior BP executives” – is the Obama Administration Department of Energy’s chief scientist (title: Undersecretary for Science).

Not only that, but Koonin is one of the world’s leading proponents of a “beyond Strangelovian“ technology scheme known as “geoengineering” – an absurd “intervention in the climate system”  where aerosols would be injected into the upper atmosphere to dampen sunlight and reduce global warming.

If anything, the man made disaster in the Gulf is an example of technological hubris – of engineers gone wild.

It is the result of a profound arrogance and moral failure to understand or even consider risks to natural systems and human communities caused by technological schemes.

Koonin’s global “climate intervention” scheme  (which he championed while at BP) would make deep sea oil drilling seem like child’s play.

Another key lesson of the Gulf is what Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse described in an historic Senate speech as (text and video are here)

the revolting specter of an agency of government subservient to – captive to – the industry it is supposed to regulate.  […]

So the question is, after all those years of corporate control of government in the Bush years, how far-reaching is the insinuation of corporate influence? We know big Pharma wrote the Bush pharmacy benefit legislation. We know big oil and big coal sat down in secret with Dick Cheney to write their energy policy. But down below the decks, down in the guts of the administration’s agencies, how far were the tentacles of corporate influence allowed to reach? How many industry plants are stealthily embedded in the government, there to serve the industry, not the administration or the public.

Revolting specter, for sure.

Yes Dr. Koonin, just how far do those corporate tentacles extend?