You say it's your Earth Day....

Tomorrow is Earth Day, a great American tradition that started 45 years and -- like a lot of great American traditions -- is more honored in the breach than in the observance. So far in 2015, we've shown our love and appreciation for Mother Earth by contributing to the hottest year since humans started keeping track, thanks to our flair (flare?) for creating greenhouse gases. Joe Biden's in Philadelphia right now, hailing Earth Day Eve by calling for more renewable energy (yay) and better infrastructure to keep exploiting fossil fuels (meh).

I was already thinking about Earth Day when I read this shout out from the great author Naomi Klein for a speech given at the 1970 inception by the iconic investigative journalist I.F. Stone, who pointed out that it's kind of silly to talk about saving the planet when so many of our tax dollars are wasted on killing machines (Apologies for the dated Nixon reference, although that's kind of what we do here at Attytood):

We are spending, on new weapons systems alone, more than ten times as much, in this coming fiscal year, in the Nixon budget, than we're going to spend on air and water. We're spending a billion dollars more a year on space than all our expenditure on natural resources. The priorities of this government are lunatic—absolutely lunatic. And we're not going to save the air we breathe and the water we drink without very many fundamental changes in governmental policy and governmental structure.

Some things never change! This week is also, very coincidentally, the 5th anniversary of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. If anything screamed out for "fundamental changes," it should have been this catastrophe, which (in addition to killing 11 people) spewed 4 million barrels of oil, give or take, into America's most precious natural resources. It deposited gunk in vital marshlands and tar balls on once-pristine beaches, sickened the clean-up workers and left Louisiana's shrimp and crab fishermen with empty nets. But even though a second spill of this magnitude would destroy the Gulf, little has been done to prevent that from happening.

Earlier this year I mentioned here that I had a great outside opportunity to work with one of the nation's top environmental lawyers, New Orleans' Stuart H. Smith, on his autobiography, Crude Justice: How I Fought Big Oil and Won, and the New Environmental Attack on America. (Subliminal hint: Buy it). Yesterday, he published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times decrying the lack of action on spill safety:

But Congress — controlled by Republican lawmakers indebted to their Big Oil campaign contributors — still has not enacted the offshore-drilling safety measures recommended by the president's Oil Spill Commission. It has not given strong regulatory powers to the agency that replaced the scandal-scarred Minerals Management Service. And it has not raised the ridiculously low cap of $75 million for corporate liability on major spills.

Congress has also failed to make money available for an oil-spill research fund. A proposed "safety institute" hasn't materialized. Neither has the new training center for federal regulators, meant to help them carry out more rigorous inspections of offshore rigs.

The Obama administration, for its part, has been a lot more aggressive about awarding new leases than developing stricter regulations for blowout preventers similar to the one that failed aboard the Deepwater Horizon.

New rules weren't proposed until this month, and although they are clearly a step in the right direction, they don't change the bigger picture. Indeed, the rules, which aim to upgrade oil-rig technology, took so long that some environmentalists worry they'll soon be out of date. On balance, the culture of safety for offshore drilling has not substantially improved since April 2010.

It's sad, because it's certainly fair, and important, to note that pollution control technology has improved exponentially since the early 1970s. But the risks that we take to fuel our addiction to oil -- drilling in dangerous environments like deep water or the Arctic, or fracking first and asking questions later about earthquakes or sucking up billions of gallons of water -- tend to outstrip those gains. One of these happy Earth Days we'll get it right. Just not in 2015, not yet.