Wednesday, June 30, 2010
101 Fast Recipes for Grilling By MARK BITTMAN
June 29, 2010
101 Fast Recipes for Grilling By MARK BITTMAN
THERE, in all of their Fourth of July glory, are 101 grilling ideas begging to be tried. A vast majority take less time to prepare and grill than it takes to watch your coals turn white. (If you use gas, they’re still almost as fast as heating up the grill.) Some of them feature ingredients like corn, eggplant and tomatoes, which will be better a month from now, at least in the Northeast. But there are also suggestions for foods in season right now that not everybody thinks of putting on the grill. Please note that salt and pepper are (usually) understood.
Vegetables and Fruits
1. A winter dish, summer style: Brush thick slices of fennel bulbs with olive oil and grill over not-too-high heat. Cut oranges in half and grill, cut-side down. Put fennel on a bed of arugula or watercress, squeeze grilled oranges over top. Garnish with fennel fronds.
2. Best grilled artichokes: Cut artichokes in half, scoop out the choke, parboil until tender. Grill, cut-side down, until lightly browned; grill a couple of halved lemons, too. Combine the juice from the grilled lemons with melted butter and spoon over the artichokes. Finish with parsley.
3. Tahini tofu steaks. Thin tahini with lots of lemon juice and some minced garlic. Cut a brick of firm tofu into four slabs and brush with sesame oil. Grill over a moderate fire, turning a few times, until marked and crisp outside and custardy inside. On the last turn, baste with the tahini sauce. Serve on thick tomato slices with a drizzle of soy sauce and chopped basil, Thai if possible.
4. Spice-rubbed carrots: Roll peeled carrots in cumin, salt, pepper and brown sugar. Char, then move them away from direct heat and cover the grill until carrots are tender.
5. Grill bread; grind in a food processor to make coarse bread crumbs. (You can add garlic and/or parsley and/or Parmesan, or not.) Grill asparagus until tender. Top with bread crumbs and olive oil.
6. Brush slices of beet with olive oil and grill slowly until tender and lightly browned. Top each slice with a little goat cheese and some salad greens.
7. For perfectly ripe tomatoes only: Grill tomatoes, any size, until hot and lightly charred but not bursting. Drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and serve with fresh mozzarella (or, even better, burrata) and grilled bread.
8. Halve and grill radicchio (or Belgian endives); drizzle cut sides with honey or plain vinaigrette, pesto or parsley pesto. Or just brush with oil and finish with a little grilled prosciutto.
9. Grilled guacamole: Halve and pit avocados; lightly char them, then scoop out the flesh. Grill halved red onion, too. Chop, combine, add tomatoes, lime, garlic and spices if you like.
10. Grill corn. Serve with mayo with minced garlic, pimentón and parsley.
11. Grill more corn. Serve with curry-powder-laced yogurt and minced onion.
12. Grill corn again. Serve with coconut milk, cilantro and mint.
13. Root vegetable of your choice: Slice celeriac — or jicama, big potatoes, daikon or yams — and grill slowly, until very tender and browned. Drizzle with olive oil or melted butter and sprinkle with chopped rosemary or sage and olive oil.
14. Choose another root. Slice it, but this time char lightly and leave it crunchy. Chop and toss with chopped cilantro, a pinch of cayenne and juice of grilled lime.
15. Rub thick zucchini slices with a mixture of fresh or dried dill, yogurt, olive oil and lemon. (Or use pesto or parsley pesto.) Grill slowly.
16. More shopping than cooking: Grill an array of radishes on little skewers, four to six each. Serve with butter, salt and bread.
17. Halve Belgian endives. Brush with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper and grill over moderate-to-low heat, turning once or twice, until soft and browned. Finish cut-side up and sprinkle with grated Parmesan; close the grill to melt cheese.
18. Lightly char whole or halved heads of baby bok choy; drizzle with soy sauce and top with chopped scallions.
19. Peel and thickly slice a not overly ripe mango. Brush very lightly with neutral oil and grill just until softened; sprinkle with cilantro and/or mint and lime juice (you might as well grill the lime first, too).
20. Grill pineapple (or anything, really, from pork to tofu to eggplant). Make a sauce of half-cup peanut butter, a tablespoon (or more) soy sauce, a dash (or more) sriracha chili sauce, a handful of basil or mint and enough warm water to thin. (I’m tempted to say, “Throw away the pineapple and eat the sauce,” but the combination is sensational.)
21. Waldorf salad revisited, sort of: Grill cut apples until browned but not mushy; grill chunks of Napa or savoy cabbage, also left crisp; grill halved red onion. Chop or shred all together with blue cheese, walnuts and a little yogurt.
22. Cut a slit in as many ripe figs as you like; stuff with herbed goat cheese (or cream cheese mixed with chopped nuts) and grill slowly. Appetizer or dessert? Your call.
23. Grill red, orange and/or yellow peppers; toss with olives, capers, balsamic vinegar and olive oil.
24. Quick grilled pickle: Rapidly char thick slices of cucumber; toss with salt, vinegar and sugar; let sit for 15 minutes, then drain.
25. Charred salsa verde. Toss whole husked tomatillos, scallions and jalapeños in olive oil and grill until charred. Remove the blackened skin from the chilies and chop or blend everything with diced avocado, lime juice and cilantro. Eat with chips or top grilled chicken with it.
Meat
26. Mideast lamb chops: Shoulder cuts are the best and the cheapest; just don’t burn them. Marinate them briefly in yogurt, lemon, cardamom and mint. Serve with lemon and parsley.
27. Midwest pork chops: Again, shoulder; again, don’t burn. Marinate briefly in spicy mustard, chopped garlic and apple cider.
28. Six-minute steak (or maybe four): Salt skirt steak and grill it, quickly. Top with queso fresco, thinly sliced red onion (you could grill it first, if you like) and the juice of grilled lime.
29. Six-minute steak, plus a little marinating time: Soak skirt steak in a mixture of soy, lime juice, garlic, ginger and sugar (or mirin) before grilling. (The time it takes to heat the grill is long enough.)
30. Smear chicken leg quarters (or thighs) with a paste of garlic, chopped rosemary (thyme, too, if you like), olive oil and the juice of grilled lemon. Grill away from heat, covered; crisp briefly over high heat.
31. Steak au poivre: Sirloin strip is ideal. Press lots of cracked black pepper into both sides, sprinkle with salt and grill over fairly high heat, about three to four minutes on each side. Slice quarter-inch thick before serving.
32. Crisp (and better) duck à l’orange: Score the skin of duck breasts and press rosemary leaves, salt and pepper into both sides. Grill skin-side down over low-ish heat until crackly, then turn and grill briefly. Serve with grilled orange halves.
33. Smear hanger, skirt, flatiron or other steak with mustard. Grill and serve with grilled shallots.
34. Brush chicken thighs — boned or not — with basil, parsley or cilantro pesto. Boneless and skinless thighs can be grilled over direct heat; thighs with skin should be started away from heat.
35. Fast lamb leg: Use steaks cut from the leg, and rub them with a mix of warm spices: cumin, coriander, cinnamon and turmeric. Grill quickly, serve hot.
36. Spread flank steak or butterflied lamb leg with garlic, parsley and lemon zest. Roll and tie, or fold. (Or grill without further fuss, adding more paste occasionally.)
37. Moist grilled chicken breast? Yes: Pound chicken breast thin, top with chopped tomato, basil and Parmesan; roll and skewer and grill over not-high heat until just done.
38. Call it grilled chicken Parm: Pound breast thin, top one side with sliced tomato, mozzarella and Parmesan; fold in half, seal with a toothpick or skewer and grill for a few minutes on each side.
39. Pork (or veal) saltimbocca: Pound pork or veal cutlets thin; top with ham (prosciutto preferably) and cheese (maybe Gruyère). Roll, cook on skewers and serve with pickles.
40. Slice pork shoulder thin. Fry lots of sesame seeds, minced garlic, fresh minced chili in sesame oil; off heat, stir in some soy sauce. Grill the pork fast over high heat, smearing with the sesame paste right after flipping. Serve with lettuce leaves and cilantro, basil and/or mint for wrapping.
41. Bacon-wrapped hot dog. You know you want one.
Fish and Shellfish
42. Grill thick onion slices; purée in a blender with olive oil and lemon juice. Grill scallops for about four minutes; serve with the vinaigrette.
43. Salmon tartare with grilled stuff: Lightly grill radishes, scallions, lime halves and, if you like, plantain disks. Serve the plantains under, and the other things next to, chopped raw salmon (preferably wild) seasoned with salt and pepper.
44. Grill sardines or mackerel; serve with a squeeze of grilled lemon, grapefruit or both.
45. Stuff whole gutted trout with slices of lemon and chopped marjoram or oregano. Wrapping in bacon is optional. One per person is best.
46. Not so easy, but so impressive: Stuff squid bodies with chopped chorizo (optional), garlic-toasted bread crumbs, lemon zest and parsley. Close with toothpicks. Char quickly over a very hot fire.
47. Shrimp, Part 1: Rub with chili powder and salt, and grill quickly. Finish with cilantro and the juice of grilled lime halves.
48. Shrimp, Part 2: Rub with olive oil, salt and cumin. Finish with the juice of grilled lemon halves; garnish with chopped marjoram, if you have it, parsley if you don’t.
49. Shrimp, Part 3: Rub with curry powder. Drizzle with warm coconut milk and chopped mint, basil and/or cilantro.
50. Grilled tuna niçoise: Brush tuna with olive oil and grill; keep it rare. (You might grill some new potatoes while you’re at it.) Serve with more olive oil, lemon juice, cherry tomatoes, olives, grilled red onion and parsley. Green beans and hard-cooked eggs are optional.
51. Grilled clams on the half shell: Get them shucked (or cook in the microwave or on the grill until opened); top with bread crumbs, parsley, lemon, minced cooked bacon (optional). Grill until topping is hot.
52. You think you don’t like bluefish? Grill it, then drizzle with a mixture of chopped fennel fronds (or crushed fennel seeds), melted butter and the juice of grilled grapefruit or orange.
53. White fillets with spice: Mix salt, sugar, chili powder and paprika. Rub on sturdy white fish fillets (make sure the grill grates are clean and well oiled).
54. Buy shucked oysters. Top with juice of grilled lemon. Period. (You could grill shallots, mince and make a grilled mignonette, but this is better.)
55. Grill soft-shell crabs, brushing with melted butter and Tabasco. A little charring of the claw tips isn’t a bad thing.
56. Simmer octopus tentacles until tender (this may take a couple of hours); cool. Grill; cut into attractive little rounds and drizzle with lemon and olive oil.
57. Grill wild salmon (preferably king or sockeye) until not-well-done. Toss diced cucumbers with fresh dill, olive oil and lemon juice. Serve salmon hot, slaw cold.
Kebabs
58. Shrimp and chorizo. Serve with lemon or a little vinaigrette.
59. Lamb and carrots. In last few minutes, brush with miso thinned with a tiny bit of mirin (or sherry, wine or water).
60. Lamb and onions. Brush with a mixture of cumin and olive oil as they sizzle. You can add bell peppers, too, but somehow the stark minimalism of this is pleasing.
61. Odd, but good: Strawberries and cherry tomatoes, finished with basil-laced balsamic vinegar.
62. The New Yawk special: Italian sausage, peppers and onions.
63. The California special: Figs, with chunks of good bacon.
64. Kebab or hero? Your choice: Cut brussels sprouts in half; grill slowly on skewers, with chunks of sausage. Both slowly crisp as they cook.
65. Bread salad on a stick: Cubes of bread, black olives and cherry tomatoes. Don’t grill too long, and drizzle with basil or thyme or parsley vinaigrette.
66. Peaches, plums, strawberries and watermelon. Finish with a sprinkle of salt and perhaps a drizzle of balsamic vinegar.
67. Cubes of mango and chunks of white fish; brush with a mixture of soy, fish sauce, sriracha chili sauce and chopped mint or cilantro. Serve with a mai tai.
68. Go Hawaiian or Italian: Wrap pineapple or melon in prosciutto. Grill briefly.
Salads
69. Grilled coleslaw: Lightly char wedges of green and red cabbage and carrots. Let cool, then shred and toss with a little mayo, vinegar, salt and sugar.
70. Grill halved new potatoes or fingerlings (microwave or parboil first for a few minutes to get a head start), red onions and scallions. Chop as necessary and toss with chopped celery, parsley, mustard and cider (or other) vinegar. I make this annually.
71. Toss grilled Lacinato kale leaves with a little Caesar salad dressing (or olive oil, lemon and Parmesan) and grilled croutons.
72. Char iceberg wedges and cherry tomatoes (skewer these first). Top with blue cheese dressing.
73. Lightly grill ripe figs; brush with balsamic. Chop and toss with arugula and blue cheese. Sprinkle with olive oil.
74. Steak salad with almost no steak: Halve endives or radicchio; brush with oil and grill. Sprinkle with bits of blue cheese and bits of charred steak.
75. Ratatouille: Grill chunks of zucchini, yellow squash, mushrooms, eggplant, onion and tomatoes (or use cherry tomatoes), all until lightly browned and perfectly tender. Toss with fresh marjoram or oregano, thyme, basil and olive oil.
Burgers
76. Greek salad burger: Ground lamb with grated feta, chopped calamatas and a little oregano. Top with tomato, red onion and cucumber.
77. The pickled onions make it: Soak sliced red onions in diluted vinegar and salt while you prepare everything else. Combine ground lamb with grated carrots and cumin; grill, then top with onions.
78. Asian burger: Grind pork, combine with grated daikon and a little soy sauce. Brush with hoisin or miso and top with sliced-and-salted cucumbers.
79. Grind beef, combine with crumbled blue cheese and chopped toasted walnuts. Top, if it doesn’t sound too effete, with sliced grilled pear.
80. A chicken or turkey burger worth eating: Cook and chop bacon; mix with ground chicken (or turkey) and grill.
81. Another: Grind turkey, combine with chopped basil, shove a cube of mozzarella into the center, grill until well done (the cheese will melt). Top with tomato and more basil.
82. Grind salmon (actually, it’s better if you grind half and chop half) and combine with chopped scallions and soy sauce. Grill medium-rare, top with mayo spiked with ginger, soy and/or lime.
83. Philly cheesesteak burger: Grind beef and grill with mushrooms and onions; top with aged provolone.
Sandwiches and Breads
84. Actual grilled cheese: Use good bread, good cheese, tomato slices and maybe a little mustard; brush with melted butter or olive oil and grill with a weight on top.
85. Glorified grilled cheese: Use grilled pineapple, grilled ham, cheese, pickles and mayo; grill with a weight on top.
86. Grill bell peppers until blackened and collapsed; cover, cool and peel. Grill eggplant planks, brushed with olive oil (or pesto if you have it), until very tender. Make a sandwich with balsamic vinegar, mozzarella and basil. This is also good with strip or skirt steak: grill meat until medium-rare, then slice and salt.
87. Grilled quesadilla (simple): Fill a flour tortilla with queso fresco, Monterey Jack or Cheddar; add chicken, shrimp and/or tomato. Fold and grill until cheese melts.
88. Grilled quesadilla (not as simple): Grill and strip corn from the cob; grill red-onion slices and chop them. Combine both with chili powder and bind with a tiny bit of mayo or yogurt. Put between two flour tortillas with cheese and grill. Serve with grilled lime wedges.
89. A different kind of Cuban sandwich: Grill pork steaks (best from the shoulder, about half-inch thick). Put on baguette spread with well-seasoned mashed black beans, queso fresco, chopped red onion (grilled or not), cilantro and lime juice.
90. Grill pork steaks as above; grill red onions. Slice the meat, chop the onions, toss with thinly sliced apples and roll in lavash bread or stuff in pita with yogurt-dill dressing. You can use the meat as an accent, or as the dominant ingredient.
91. Grill sweet Italian sausage and some figs. Combine on a toasted hot dog bun; mustard is optional.
92. Grill split kielbasa or chorizo (the Spanish type). Serve in buns, filled with chopped Manchego and mayo spiked with pimentón. Some chopped dried apricots would be good, too.
Desserts
93. An idea whose time has come: Halve and grill peaches, nectarines or apricots. Brush with barbecue sauce or, if you want to be sophisticated, a mixture of bourbon, sugar and mint, or simple syrup laced with basil.
94. An idea whose time will come in September: Halve and grill pears or apples. When they’re done, drizzle with yogurt, honey and a pinch of cardamom.
95. Grilled fruit salad, and why not? Toss grilled watermelon (really good), peaches, plums, pineapple and kiwi with honey, a little salt, lemon juice and tarragon (not much), chervil, basil or mint (or a combo).
96. Cut grapefruit in half. Sprinkle with brown sugar; grill, cut-side down. You might top this with chopped pistachios or a little honey.
97. Grilled shortbread or poundcake (store-bought is totally fine) topped with grilled fruit sauce, strawberries in sugar, yogurt, ice cream, whatever.
98. Grilled angel food cake or poundcake (again, store-bought is fine) topped with Nutella, chocolate sauce, sorbet, etc.
99. Grilled s’mores: Put graham crackers (or other good quality flat cookie) on foil, top with marshmallows and chocolate and another cracker. Grill until the chocolate and marshmallow begin to melt.
100. Cut bananas into thick rounds (like scallops almost), char quickly and serve with caramel sauce, brown sugar, vanilla ice cream, Nutella ... whatever.
101. Actually, this is a drink: Skewer green olives, then char them a bit. These would be a good garnish for shrimp, chorizo or anything else. But instead, make yourself a fantastic dirty martini.
101 Fast Recipes for Grilling By MARK BITTMAN
THERE, in all of their Fourth of July glory, are 101 grilling ideas begging to be tried. A vast majority take less time to prepare and grill than it takes to watch your coals turn white. (If you use gas, they’re still almost as fast as heating up the grill.) Some of them feature ingredients like corn, eggplant and tomatoes, which will be better a month from now, at least in the Northeast. But there are also suggestions for foods in season right now that not everybody thinks of putting on the grill. Please note that salt and pepper are (usually) understood.
Vegetables and Fruits
1. A winter dish, summer style: Brush thick slices of fennel bulbs with olive oil and grill over not-too-high heat. Cut oranges in half and grill, cut-side down. Put fennel on a bed of arugula or watercress, squeeze grilled oranges over top. Garnish with fennel fronds.
2. Best grilled artichokes: Cut artichokes in half, scoop out the choke, parboil until tender. Grill, cut-side down, until lightly browned; grill a couple of halved lemons, too. Combine the juice from the grilled lemons with melted butter and spoon over the artichokes. Finish with parsley.
3. Tahini tofu steaks. Thin tahini with lots of lemon juice and some minced garlic. Cut a brick of firm tofu into four slabs and brush with sesame oil. Grill over a moderate fire, turning a few times, until marked and crisp outside and custardy inside. On the last turn, baste with the tahini sauce. Serve on thick tomato slices with a drizzle of soy sauce and chopped basil, Thai if possible.
4. Spice-rubbed carrots: Roll peeled carrots in cumin, salt, pepper and brown sugar. Char, then move them away from direct heat and cover the grill until carrots are tender.
5. Grill bread; grind in a food processor to make coarse bread crumbs. (You can add garlic and/or parsley and/or Parmesan, or not.) Grill asparagus until tender. Top with bread crumbs and olive oil.
6. Brush slices of beet with olive oil and grill slowly until tender and lightly browned. Top each slice with a little goat cheese and some salad greens.
7. For perfectly ripe tomatoes only: Grill tomatoes, any size, until hot and lightly charred but not bursting. Drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and serve with fresh mozzarella (or, even better, burrata) and grilled bread.
8. Halve and grill radicchio (or Belgian endives); drizzle cut sides with honey or plain vinaigrette, pesto or parsley pesto. Or just brush with oil and finish with a little grilled prosciutto.
9. Grilled guacamole: Halve and pit avocados; lightly char them, then scoop out the flesh. Grill halved red onion, too. Chop, combine, add tomatoes, lime, garlic and spices if you like.
10. Grill corn. Serve with mayo with minced garlic, pimentón and parsley.
11. Grill more corn. Serve with curry-powder-laced yogurt and minced onion.
12. Grill corn again. Serve with coconut milk, cilantro and mint.
13. Root vegetable of your choice: Slice celeriac — or jicama, big potatoes, daikon or yams — and grill slowly, until very tender and browned. Drizzle with olive oil or melted butter and sprinkle with chopped rosemary or sage and olive oil.
14. Choose another root. Slice it, but this time char lightly and leave it crunchy. Chop and toss with chopped cilantro, a pinch of cayenne and juice of grilled lime.
15. Rub thick zucchini slices with a mixture of fresh or dried dill, yogurt, olive oil and lemon. (Or use pesto or parsley pesto.) Grill slowly.
16. More shopping than cooking: Grill an array of radishes on little skewers, four to six each. Serve with butter, salt and bread.
17. Halve Belgian endives. Brush with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper and grill over moderate-to-low heat, turning once or twice, until soft and browned. Finish cut-side up and sprinkle with grated Parmesan; close the grill to melt cheese.
18. Lightly char whole or halved heads of baby bok choy; drizzle with soy sauce and top with chopped scallions.
19. Peel and thickly slice a not overly ripe mango. Brush very lightly with neutral oil and grill just until softened; sprinkle with cilantro and/or mint and lime juice (you might as well grill the lime first, too).
20. Grill pineapple (or anything, really, from pork to tofu to eggplant). Make a sauce of half-cup peanut butter, a tablespoon (or more) soy sauce, a dash (or more) sriracha chili sauce, a handful of basil or mint and enough warm water to thin. (I’m tempted to say, “Throw away the pineapple and eat the sauce,” but the combination is sensational.)
21. Waldorf salad revisited, sort of: Grill cut apples until browned but not mushy; grill chunks of Napa or savoy cabbage, also left crisp; grill halved red onion. Chop or shred all together with blue cheese, walnuts and a little yogurt.
22. Cut a slit in as many ripe figs as you like; stuff with herbed goat cheese (or cream cheese mixed with chopped nuts) and grill slowly. Appetizer or dessert? Your call.
23. Grill red, orange and/or yellow peppers; toss with olives, capers, balsamic vinegar and olive oil.
24. Quick grilled pickle: Rapidly char thick slices of cucumber; toss with salt, vinegar and sugar; let sit for 15 minutes, then drain.
25. Charred salsa verde. Toss whole husked tomatillos, scallions and jalapeños in olive oil and grill until charred. Remove the blackened skin from the chilies and chop or blend everything with diced avocado, lime juice and cilantro. Eat with chips or top grilled chicken with it.
Meat
26. Mideast lamb chops: Shoulder cuts are the best and the cheapest; just don’t burn them. Marinate them briefly in yogurt, lemon, cardamom and mint. Serve with lemon and parsley.
27. Midwest pork chops: Again, shoulder; again, don’t burn. Marinate briefly in spicy mustard, chopped garlic and apple cider.
28. Six-minute steak (or maybe four): Salt skirt steak and grill it, quickly. Top with queso fresco, thinly sliced red onion (you could grill it first, if you like) and the juice of grilled lime.
29. Six-minute steak, plus a little marinating time: Soak skirt steak in a mixture of soy, lime juice, garlic, ginger and sugar (or mirin) before grilling. (The time it takes to heat the grill is long enough.)
30. Smear chicken leg quarters (or thighs) with a paste of garlic, chopped rosemary (thyme, too, if you like), olive oil and the juice of grilled lemon. Grill away from heat, covered; crisp briefly over high heat.
31. Steak au poivre: Sirloin strip is ideal. Press lots of cracked black pepper into both sides, sprinkle with salt and grill over fairly high heat, about three to four minutes on each side. Slice quarter-inch thick before serving.
32. Crisp (and better) duck à l’orange: Score the skin of duck breasts and press rosemary leaves, salt and pepper into both sides. Grill skin-side down over low-ish heat until crackly, then turn and grill briefly. Serve with grilled orange halves.
33. Smear hanger, skirt, flatiron or other steak with mustard. Grill and serve with grilled shallots.
34. Brush chicken thighs — boned or not — with basil, parsley or cilantro pesto. Boneless and skinless thighs can be grilled over direct heat; thighs with skin should be started away from heat.
35. Fast lamb leg: Use steaks cut from the leg, and rub them with a mix of warm spices: cumin, coriander, cinnamon and turmeric. Grill quickly, serve hot.
36. Spread flank steak or butterflied lamb leg with garlic, parsley and lemon zest. Roll and tie, or fold. (Or grill without further fuss, adding more paste occasionally.)
37. Moist grilled chicken breast? Yes: Pound chicken breast thin, top with chopped tomato, basil and Parmesan; roll and skewer and grill over not-high heat until just done.
38. Call it grilled chicken Parm: Pound breast thin, top one side with sliced tomato, mozzarella and Parmesan; fold in half, seal with a toothpick or skewer and grill for a few minutes on each side.
39. Pork (or veal) saltimbocca: Pound pork or veal cutlets thin; top with ham (prosciutto preferably) and cheese (maybe Gruyère). Roll, cook on skewers and serve with pickles.
40. Slice pork shoulder thin. Fry lots of sesame seeds, minced garlic, fresh minced chili in sesame oil; off heat, stir in some soy sauce. Grill the pork fast over high heat, smearing with the sesame paste right after flipping. Serve with lettuce leaves and cilantro, basil and/or mint for wrapping.
41. Bacon-wrapped hot dog. You know you want one.
Fish and Shellfish
42. Grill thick onion slices; purée in a blender with olive oil and lemon juice. Grill scallops for about four minutes; serve with the vinaigrette.
43. Salmon tartare with grilled stuff: Lightly grill radishes, scallions, lime halves and, if you like, plantain disks. Serve the plantains under, and the other things next to, chopped raw salmon (preferably wild) seasoned with salt and pepper.
44. Grill sardines or mackerel; serve with a squeeze of grilled lemon, grapefruit or both.
45. Stuff whole gutted trout with slices of lemon and chopped marjoram or oregano. Wrapping in bacon is optional. One per person is best.
46. Not so easy, but so impressive: Stuff squid bodies with chopped chorizo (optional), garlic-toasted bread crumbs, lemon zest and parsley. Close with toothpicks. Char quickly over a very hot fire.
47. Shrimp, Part 1: Rub with chili powder and salt, and grill quickly. Finish with cilantro and the juice of grilled lime halves.
48. Shrimp, Part 2: Rub with olive oil, salt and cumin. Finish with the juice of grilled lemon halves; garnish with chopped marjoram, if you have it, parsley if you don’t.
49. Shrimp, Part 3: Rub with curry powder. Drizzle with warm coconut milk and chopped mint, basil and/or cilantro.
50. Grilled tuna niçoise: Brush tuna with olive oil and grill; keep it rare. (You might grill some new potatoes while you’re at it.) Serve with more olive oil, lemon juice, cherry tomatoes, olives, grilled red onion and parsley. Green beans and hard-cooked eggs are optional.
51. Grilled clams on the half shell: Get them shucked (or cook in the microwave or on the grill until opened); top with bread crumbs, parsley, lemon, minced cooked bacon (optional). Grill until topping is hot.
52. You think you don’t like bluefish? Grill it, then drizzle with a mixture of chopped fennel fronds (or crushed fennel seeds), melted butter and the juice of grilled grapefruit or orange.
53. White fillets with spice: Mix salt, sugar, chili powder and paprika. Rub on sturdy white fish fillets (make sure the grill grates are clean and well oiled).
54. Buy shucked oysters. Top with juice of grilled lemon. Period. (You could grill shallots, mince and make a grilled mignonette, but this is better.)
55. Grill soft-shell crabs, brushing with melted butter and Tabasco. A little charring of the claw tips isn’t a bad thing.
56. Simmer octopus tentacles until tender (this may take a couple of hours); cool. Grill; cut into attractive little rounds and drizzle with lemon and olive oil.
57. Grill wild salmon (preferably king or sockeye) until not-well-done. Toss diced cucumbers with fresh dill, olive oil and lemon juice. Serve salmon hot, slaw cold.
Kebabs
58. Shrimp and chorizo. Serve with lemon or a little vinaigrette.
59. Lamb and carrots. In last few minutes, brush with miso thinned with a tiny bit of mirin (or sherry, wine or water).
60. Lamb and onions. Brush with a mixture of cumin and olive oil as they sizzle. You can add bell peppers, too, but somehow the stark minimalism of this is pleasing.
61. Odd, but good: Strawberries and cherry tomatoes, finished with basil-laced balsamic vinegar.
62. The New Yawk special: Italian sausage, peppers and onions.
63. The California special: Figs, with chunks of good bacon.
64. Kebab or hero? Your choice: Cut brussels sprouts in half; grill slowly on skewers, with chunks of sausage. Both slowly crisp as they cook.
65. Bread salad on a stick: Cubes of bread, black olives and cherry tomatoes. Don’t grill too long, and drizzle with basil or thyme or parsley vinaigrette.
66. Peaches, plums, strawberries and watermelon. Finish with a sprinkle of salt and perhaps a drizzle of balsamic vinegar.
67. Cubes of mango and chunks of white fish; brush with a mixture of soy, fish sauce, sriracha chili sauce and chopped mint or cilantro. Serve with a mai tai.
68. Go Hawaiian or Italian: Wrap pineapple or melon in prosciutto. Grill briefly.
Salads
69. Grilled coleslaw: Lightly char wedges of green and red cabbage and carrots. Let cool, then shred and toss with a little mayo, vinegar, salt and sugar.
70. Grill halved new potatoes or fingerlings (microwave or parboil first for a few minutes to get a head start), red onions and scallions. Chop as necessary and toss with chopped celery, parsley, mustard and cider (or other) vinegar. I make this annually.
71. Toss grilled Lacinato kale leaves with a little Caesar salad dressing (or olive oil, lemon and Parmesan) and grilled croutons.
72. Char iceberg wedges and cherry tomatoes (skewer these first). Top with blue cheese dressing.
73. Lightly grill ripe figs; brush with balsamic. Chop and toss with arugula and blue cheese. Sprinkle with olive oil.
74. Steak salad with almost no steak: Halve endives or radicchio; brush with oil and grill. Sprinkle with bits of blue cheese and bits of charred steak.
75. Ratatouille: Grill chunks of zucchini, yellow squash, mushrooms, eggplant, onion and tomatoes (or use cherry tomatoes), all until lightly browned and perfectly tender. Toss with fresh marjoram or oregano, thyme, basil and olive oil.
Burgers
76. Greek salad burger: Ground lamb with grated feta, chopped calamatas and a little oregano. Top with tomato, red onion and cucumber.
77. The pickled onions make it: Soak sliced red onions in diluted vinegar and salt while you prepare everything else. Combine ground lamb with grated carrots and cumin; grill, then top with onions.
78. Asian burger: Grind pork, combine with grated daikon and a little soy sauce. Brush with hoisin or miso and top with sliced-and-salted cucumbers.
79. Grind beef, combine with crumbled blue cheese and chopped toasted walnuts. Top, if it doesn’t sound too effete, with sliced grilled pear.
80. A chicken or turkey burger worth eating: Cook and chop bacon; mix with ground chicken (or turkey) and grill.
81. Another: Grind turkey, combine with chopped basil, shove a cube of mozzarella into the center, grill until well done (the cheese will melt). Top with tomato and more basil.
82. Grind salmon (actually, it’s better if you grind half and chop half) and combine with chopped scallions and soy sauce. Grill medium-rare, top with mayo spiked with ginger, soy and/or lime.
83. Philly cheesesteak burger: Grind beef and grill with mushrooms and onions; top with aged provolone.
Sandwiches and Breads
84. Actual grilled cheese: Use good bread, good cheese, tomato slices and maybe a little mustard; brush with melted butter or olive oil and grill with a weight on top.
85. Glorified grilled cheese: Use grilled pineapple, grilled ham, cheese, pickles and mayo; grill with a weight on top.
86. Grill bell peppers until blackened and collapsed; cover, cool and peel. Grill eggplant planks, brushed with olive oil (or pesto if you have it), until very tender. Make a sandwich with balsamic vinegar, mozzarella and basil. This is also good with strip or skirt steak: grill meat until medium-rare, then slice and salt.
87. Grilled quesadilla (simple): Fill a flour tortilla with queso fresco, Monterey Jack or Cheddar; add chicken, shrimp and/or tomato. Fold and grill until cheese melts.
88. Grilled quesadilla (not as simple): Grill and strip corn from the cob; grill red-onion slices and chop them. Combine both with chili powder and bind with a tiny bit of mayo or yogurt. Put between two flour tortillas with cheese and grill. Serve with grilled lime wedges.
89. A different kind of Cuban sandwich: Grill pork steaks (best from the shoulder, about half-inch thick). Put on baguette spread with well-seasoned mashed black beans, queso fresco, chopped red onion (grilled or not), cilantro and lime juice.
90. Grill pork steaks as above; grill red onions. Slice the meat, chop the onions, toss with thinly sliced apples and roll in lavash bread or stuff in pita with yogurt-dill dressing. You can use the meat as an accent, or as the dominant ingredient.
91. Grill sweet Italian sausage and some figs. Combine on a toasted hot dog bun; mustard is optional.
92. Grill split kielbasa or chorizo (the Spanish type). Serve in buns, filled with chopped Manchego and mayo spiked with pimentón. Some chopped dried apricots would be good, too.
Desserts
93. An idea whose time has come: Halve and grill peaches, nectarines or apricots. Brush with barbecue sauce or, if you want to be sophisticated, a mixture of bourbon, sugar and mint, or simple syrup laced with basil.
94. An idea whose time will come in September: Halve and grill pears or apples. When they’re done, drizzle with yogurt, honey and a pinch of cardamom.
95. Grilled fruit salad, and why not? Toss grilled watermelon (really good), peaches, plums, pineapple and kiwi with honey, a little salt, lemon juice and tarragon (not much), chervil, basil or mint (or a combo).
96. Cut grapefruit in half. Sprinkle with brown sugar; grill, cut-side down. You might top this with chopped pistachios or a little honey.
97. Grilled shortbread or poundcake (store-bought is totally fine) topped with grilled fruit sauce, strawberries in sugar, yogurt, ice cream, whatever.
98. Grilled angel food cake or poundcake (again, store-bought is fine) topped with Nutella, chocolate sauce, sorbet, etc.
99. Grilled s’mores: Put graham crackers (or other good quality flat cookie) on foil, top with marshmallows and chocolate and another cracker. Grill until the chocolate and marshmallow begin to melt.
100. Cut bananas into thick rounds (like scallops almost), char quickly and serve with caramel sauce, brown sugar, vanilla ice cream, Nutella ... whatever.
101. Actually, this is a drink: Skewer green olives, then char them a bit. These would be a good garnish for shrimp, chorizo or anything else. But instead, make yourself a fantastic dirty martini.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Moratorium Won’t Reduce Drilling Risks By JOE NOCERA
June 25, 2010
Moratorium Won’t Reduce Drilling Risks By JOE NOCERA
“This case asks whether the federal government’s imposition of a general moratorium on deepwater drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico was imposed contrary to law. Before the Court is the plaintiffs’ motion for preliminary injunction. For the following reasons, the motion is GRANTED."
So began a stinging 22-page decision, issued this week by a Federal District Court judge, Martin L. C. Feldman. He was rejecting, pretty much out of hand, the Obama administration’s plan to place a six-month moratorium on all drilling projects in the Gulf of Mexico. It would have amounted to a shutdown of 33 deepwater rigs, the kind that can drill the deepest and are the most complex to operate — and the kind that can cost well over $500,000 a day even when they’re just sitting idle.
The plaintiffs consisted of a group of companies that make their money servicing gulf drilling operations; they were led by a shipping company, Hornbeck Offshore Services, which employs 1,300 and has spent nearly $700 million in the last five years building a new generation of ships for use in the gulf. “We saw this as putting our Gulf of Mexico business model at risk,” said Samuel Giberga, the company’s general counsel.
But he also believed that the administration’s edict violated the law. The secretary of the interior, Ken Salazar, had failed to take into account the enormous economic pain that would be inflicted on the gulf region by such a moratorium, as he was required to under the law, Hornbeck argued. The administration was punishing deepwater drillers that had complied with all the regulations surrounding deepwater drilling — and had gotten their permits fair and square. Right after the spill, Mr. Giberga told me, a government SWAT team had inspected all the other rigs — and found them to be safe. The Deepwater Horizon disaster notwithstanding, the federal government had failed to articulate any good reason why all the other rigs in the gulf had to be stopped as well.
And Judge Feldman agreed with Hornbeck on every count. Concluding that the decision to impose the moratorium was “arbitrary and capricious,” he wrote, “An invalid agency decision to suspend drilling of wells in depths of over 500 feet simply cannot justify the immeasurable effect on the plaintiffs, the local economy, the gulf region, and the critical present-day aspect of the availability of domestic energy in this country.”
Over the next few days, three things happened, all of them completely predicable. The Interior Department vowed to appeal. Gulf state politicians, starting with Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana — whose state has suffered tremendously as a result of the BP accident — pleaded with the federal government to drop the appeal and allow drilling to continue. And environmentalists derided Judge Feldman’s decision.
“This is the Ninth Circuit, which is the go-to court for the oil and gas industry,” said Elgie Holstein, the oil spill response coordinator for the Environmental Defense Fund. “I fully expect it to be overturned on appeal.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the president of Waterkeeper Alliance, told The Mobile Press-Register that drilling deepwater wells right now, “when we don’t even know what caused this accident, seems insane.” He added, “I don’t think anybody responsible would advocate more drilling right now.” And so on.
A simple six-month drilling moratorium. It sounds like such a sensible, obvious, uncontroversial thing to do in the wake of the worst environmental disaster in this nation’s history, doesn’t it? Turns out, it’s anything but.
•
As a percentage of the world’s oil production — some 84.5 million barrels a day — the 1.75 million barrels a day that is extracted from the Gulf of Mexico is not a huge number. (That’s why oil prices haven’t risen as a result of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.) But in terms of the country’s domestic production, it is extremely important. According to Gibson Consulting, a third of all United States oil production comes from the Gulf of Mexico.
What’s more, virtually every new well being drilled in the gulf is a deepwater well — because, after all, that’s where the oil is. “Oil from shallow waters peaked in the 1990s,” said Cutler Cleveland, a professor of geography and environment at Boston University. “And deepwater peaked five or six years ago. So now we are moving into ultra deepwater — over 5,000 feet.” And, he adds, 80 percent of the reserves that remain in the gulf are either in deep or ultra deepwater.
So the first point is: Until that glorious day comes that our cars are fueled by batteries and our homes are heated by solar power, we need as much domestic oil as we can get our hands on, oil that exists in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Shutting down drilling in the gulf — even temporarily — means we’ll be importing even more oil from other countries than we already do.
Nor is it clear, if the moratorium went into effect, the pullback would be all that temporary. For one thing, the moratorium is contingent on a special commission making yet more safety recommendations in six months, but there is no guarantee they’ll be done by then. Meanwhile, there are only so many floating rigs in the world, and Brazil, for instance, has just embarked on a $200 billion drilling program. (You read that right: $200 billion.) It takes a month to move an idle rig from the Gulf of Mexico to Brazil, where it will likely stay for years. So a six-month moratorium would quite likely have far greater effect on American oil production that it would seem at first glance.
Which also leads to a great irony: importing more oil via tankers will actually create more risk, not less. Between the 1970s and the Deepwater Horizon accident, a grand total of 1,800 barrels of oil were lost from rig accidents — an average of 45 barrels a year. That is an astonishing record. Ken Arnold, an expert who consulted with the Interior Department right after the BP spill — and a big critic of the moratorium — told me that much more oil is spilled in tanker accidents annually than from drilling rig accidents.
What’s more, he added: “The oil in those tankers was produced somewhere — somewhere that most likely has less regulation and less oversight than we have. We are not lessening the chance of a spill; we’re just transferring that risk to Nigeria and Brazil. We are not helping the world. We are just saying, ‘Brazil, we prefer to despoil your beaches, but not ours.’ ”
Then there are the battered gulf economies. It is easy enough, sitting here in New York, to argue that we should shut down oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico for as long as it takes, to be absolutely sure we’ll never have another accident like the one we’ve just had. I hear Rachel Maddow making that point most every night these days.
But a shutdown doesn’t really affect our daily lives up here on the East Coast. In the gulf, one mainstay of the economy — fishing — has already been devastated. Do we really want to finish off the rest of the Gulf Coast economy by sidelining its other pillar, oil drilling? There is a reason politicians like Mr. Jindal are pleading for drilling to continue, despite the spill’s terrible effect on his state. They’re desperate. When an airplane crashes, and several hundred people die, the government doesn’t ground every airplane until it is sure all airplanes are safe. It would be too disruptive to the economy. Shouldn’t the same logic apply here?
What has become obvious in the aftermath of the accident is not so much that offshore drilling — even deepwater offshore drilling — is inherently unsafe. It is, certainly, risky, but so are many activities, like mining or flying an airplane. One reason there have been so few accidents over the years is that the incentive for doing things safely is enormous: mistakes can lead to death.
None of which is to say that the Deepwater Horizon disaster hasn’t pointed to problems with drilling, or that new safety measures don’t need to be added. Most of all, it shows the utter inadequacy on the part of both industry and government in containing accidents when they do happen. Precisely because of the industry’s incredible safety record over the years, everyone got complacent. But a six-month moratorium isn’t going to fix that either. What are needed are new ideas that can be debated and then enacted into regulation. One appealing idea I’ve heard is that deepwater rigs should be required to drill a relief well at the same time the exploratory well is being drilled. But that would also, of course, increase the cost of drilling for oil in the gulf.
In the end, the real problem with the six-month moratorium is that it allows us to continue to kid ourselves. It helps us create the illusion that, by regulatory fiat, we can make the extraction of fossil fuels a riskless endeavor. But that can never be true. Six months from now, whether or not the Interior Department succeeds getting Judge Feldman’s decision overturned on appeal, deepwater drilling will still be risky. Drilling thousands of feet into water, searching for dangerous natural gas and oil, contained in the earth under immense pressure, is inherently risky.
We would all be better off facing that fact squarely, instead of wishing it away under the guise of a moratorium.
Moratorium Won’t Reduce Drilling Risks By JOE NOCERA
“This case asks whether the federal government’s imposition of a general moratorium on deepwater drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico was imposed contrary to law. Before the Court is the plaintiffs’ motion for preliminary injunction. For the following reasons, the motion is GRANTED."
So began a stinging 22-page decision, issued this week by a Federal District Court judge, Martin L. C. Feldman. He was rejecting, pretty much out of hand, the Obama administration’s plan to place a six-month moratorium on all drilling projects in the Gulf of Mexico. It would have amounted to a shutdown of 33 deepwater rigs, the kind that can drill the deepest and are the most complex to operate — and the kind that can cost well over $500,000 a day even when they’re just sitting idle.
The plaintiffs consisted of a group of companies that make their money servicing gulf drilling operations; they were led by a shipping company, Hornbeck Offshore Services, which employs 1,300 and has spent nearly $700 million in the last five years building a new generation of ships for use in the gulf. “We saw this as putting our Gulf of Mexico business model at risk,” said Samuel Giberga, the company’s general counsel.
But he also believed that the administration’s edict violated the law. The secretary of the interior, Ken Salazar, had failed to take into account the enormous economic pain that would be inflicted on the gulf region by such a moratorium, as he was required to under the law, Hornbeck argued. The administration was punishing deepwater drillers that had complied with all the regulations surrounding deepwater drilling — and had gotten their permits fair and square. Right after the spill, Mr. Giberga told me, a government SWAT team had inspected all the other rigs — and found them to be safe. The Deepwater Horizon disaster notwithstanding, the federal government had failed to articulate any good reason why all the other rigs in the gulf had to be stopped as well.
And Judge Feldman agreed with Hornbeck on every count. Concluding that the decision to impose the moratorium was “arbitrary and capricious,” he wrote, “An invalid agency decision to suspend drilling of wells in depths of over 500 feet simply cannot justify the immeasurable effect on the plaintiffs, the local economy, the gulf region, and the critical present-day aspect of the availability of domestic energy in this country.”
Over the next few days, three things happened, all of them completely predicable. The Interior Department vowed to appeal. Gulf state politicians, starting with Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana — whose state has suffered tremendously as a result of the BP accident — pleaded with the federal government to drop the appeal and allow drilling to continue. And environmentalists derided Judge Feldman’s decision.
“This is the Ninth Circuit, which is the go-to court for the oil and gas industry,” said Elgie Holstein, the oil spill response coordinator for the Environmental Defense Fund. “I fully expect it to be overturned on appeal.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the president of Waterkeeper Alliance, told The Mobile Press-Register that drilling deepwater wells right now, “when we don’t even know what caused this accident, seems insane.” He added, “I don’t think anybody responsible would advocate more drilling right now.” And so on.
A simple six-month drilling moratorium. It sounds like such a sensible, obvious, uncontroversial thing to do in the wake of the worst environmental disaster in this nation’s history, doesn’t it? Turns out, it’s anything but.
•
As a percentage of the world’s oil production — some 84.5 million barrels a day — the 1.75 million barrels a day that is extracted from the Gulf of Mexico is not a huge number. (That’s why oil prices haven’t risen as a result of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.) But in terms of the country’s domestic production, it is extremely important. According to Gibson Consulting, a third of all United States oil production comes from the Gulf of Mexico.
What’s more, virtually every new well being drilled in the gulf is a deepwater well — because, after all, that’s where the oil is. “Oil from shallow waters peaked in the 1990s,” said Cutler Cleveland, a professor of geography and environment at Boston University. “And deepwater peaked five or six years ago. So now we are moving into ultra deepwater — over 5,000 feet.” And, he adds, 80 percent of the reserves that remain in the gulf are either in deep or ultra deepwater.
So the first point is: Until that glorious day comes that our cars are fueled by batteries and our homes are heated by solar power, we need as much domestic oil as we can get our hands on, oil that exists in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Shutting down drilling in the gulf — even temporarily — means we’ll be importing even more oil from other countries than we already do.
Nor is it clear, if the moratorium went into effect, the pullback would be all that temporary. For one thing, the moratorium is contingent on a special commission making yet more safety recommendations in six months, but there is no guarantee they’ll be done by then. Meanwhile, there are only so many floating rigs in the world, and Brazil, for instance, has just embarked on a $200 billion drilling program. (You read that right: $200 billion.) It takes a month to move an idle rig from the Gulf of Mexico to Brazil, where it will likely stay for years. So a six-month moratorium would quite likely have far greater effect on American oil production that it would seem at first glance.
Which also leads to a great irony: importing more oil via tankers will actually create more risk, not less. Between the 1970s and the Deepwater Horizon accident, a grand total of 1,800 barrels of oil were lost from rig accidents — an average of 45 barrels a year. That is an astonishing record. Ken Arnold, an expert who consulted with the Interior Department right after the BP spill — and a big critic of the moratorium — told me that much more oil is spilled in tanker accidents annually than from drilling rig accidents.
What’s more, he added: “The oil in those tankers was produced somewhere — somewhere that most likely has less regulation and less oversight than we have. We are not lessening the chance of a spill; we’re just transferring that risk to Nigeria and Brazil. We are not helping the world. We are just saying, ‘Brazil, we prefer to despoil your beaches, but not ours.’ ”
Then there are the battered gulf economies. It is easy enough, sitting here in New York, to argue that we should shut down oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico for as long as it takes, to be absolutely sure we’ll never have another accident like the one we’ve just had. I hear Rachel Maddow making that point most every night these days.
But a shutdown doesn’t really affect our daily lives up here on the East Coast. In the gulf, one mainstay of the economy — fishing — has already been devastated. Do we really want to finish off the rest of the Gulf Coast economy by sidelining its other pillar, oil drilling? There is a reason politicians like Mr. Jindal are pleading for drilling to continue, despite the spill’s terrible effect on his state. They’re desperate. When an airplane crashes, and several hundred people die, the government doesn’t ground every airplane until it is sure all airplanes are safe. It would be too disruptive to the economy. Shouldn’t the same logic apply here?
What has become obvious in the aftermath of the accident is not so much that offshore drilling — even deepwater offshore drilling — is inherently unsafe. It is, certainly, risky, but so are many activities, like mining or flying an airplane. One reason there have been so few accidents over the years is that the incentive for doing things safely is enormous: mistakes can lead to death.
None of which is to say that the Deepwater Horizon disaster hasn’t pointed to problems with drilling, or that new safety measures don’t need to be added. Most of all, it shows the utter inadequacy on the part of both industry and government in containing accidents when they do happen. Precisely because of the industry’s incredible safety record over the years, everyone got complacent. But a six-month moratorium isn’t going to fix that either. What are needed are new ideas that can be debated and then enacted into regulation. One appealing idea I’ve heard is that deepwater rigs should be required to drill a relief well at the same time the exploratory well is being drilled. But that would also, of course, increase the cost of drilling for oil in the gulf.
In the end, the real problem with the six-month moratorium is that it allows us to continue to kid ourselves. It helps us create the illusion that, by regulatory fiat, we can make the extraction of fossil fuels a riskless endeavor. But that can never be true. Six months from now, whether or not the Interior Department succeeds getting Judge Feldman’s decision overturned on appeal, deepwater drilling will still be risky. Drilling thousands of feet into water, searching for dangerous natural gas and oil, contained in the earth under immense pressure, is inherently risky.
We would all be better off facing that fact squarely, instead of wishing it away under the guise of a moratorium.
Closing Guantánamo Fades as a Priority By CHARLIE SAVAGE
une 25, 2010
Closing Guantánamo Fades as a Priority By CHARLIE SAVAGE
WASHINGTON — Stymied by political opposition and focused on competing priorities, the Obama administration has sidelined efforts to close the Guantánamo prison, making it unlikely that President Obama will fulfill his promise to close it before his term ends in 2013.
When the White House acknowledged last year that it would miss Mr. Obama’s initial January 2010 deadline for shutting the prison, it also declared that the detainees would eventually be moved to one in Illinois. But impediments to that plan have mounted in Congress, and the administration is doing little to overcome them.
“There is a lot of inertia” against closing the prison, “and the administration is not putting a lot of energy behind their position that I can see,” said Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and supports the Illinois plan. He added that “the odds are that it will still be open” by the next presidential inauguration.
And Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who also supports shutting it, said the effort is “on life support and it’s unlikely to close any time soon.” He attributed the collapse to some fellow Republicans’ “demagoguery” and the administration’s poor planning and decision-making “paralysis.”
The White House insists it is still determined to shutter the prison. The administration argues that Guantánamo is a symbol in the Muslim world of past detainee abuses, citing military views that its continued operation helps terrorists.
“Our commanders have made clear that closing the detention facility at Guantánamo is a national security imperative, and the president remains committed to achieving that goal,” said a White House spokesman, Ben LaBolt.
Still, some senior officials say privately that the administration has done its part, including identifying the Illinois prison — an empty maximum-security center in Thomson, 150 miles west of Chicago — where the detainees could be held. They blame Congress for failing to execute that endgame.
“The president can’t just wave a magic wand to say that Gitmo will be closed,” said a senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal thinking on a sensitive issue.
The politics of closing the prison have clearly soured following the attempted bombings on a plane on Dec. 25 and in Times Square in May, as well as Republican criticism that imprisoning detainees in the United States would endanger Americans. When Mr. Obama took office a slight majority supported closing it. By a March 2010 poll, 60 percent wanted it to stay open.
One administration official argued that the White House was still trying. On May 26, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, James Jones, sent a letter to the House Appropriations Committee reiterating the case.
But Mr. Levin portrayed the administration as unwilling to make a serious effort to exert its influence, contrasting its muted response to legislative hurdles to closing Guantánamo with “very vocal” threats to veto financing for a fighter jet engine it opposes.
Last year, for example, the administration stood aside as lawmakers restricted the transfer of detainees into the United States except for prosecution. And its response was silence several weeks ago, Mr. Levin said, as the House and Senate Armed Services Committees voted to block money for renovating the Illinois prison to accommodate detainees, and to restrict transfers from Guantánamo to other countries — including, in the Senate version, a bar on Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia. About 130 of the 181 detainees are from those countries.
“They are not really putting their shoulder to the wheel on this issue,” Mr. Levin said of White House officials. “It’s pretty dormant in terms of their public positions.”
Several administration officials expressed hope that political winds might shift if, for example, high-level Qaeda leaders are killed, or if lawmakers focus on how expensive it is to operate a prison at the isolated base.
A recent Pentagon study, obtained by The New York Times, shows taxpayers spent more than $2 billion between 2002 and 2009 on the prison. Administration officials believe taxpayers would save about $180 million a year in operating costs if Guantánamo detainees were held at Thomson, which they hope Congress will allow the Justice Department to buy from the State of Illinois at least for federal inmates.
But in a sign that some may be making peace with keeping Guantánamo open, officials also praise improvements at the prison. An interagency review team brought order to scattered files. Mr. Obama banned brutal interrogations. Congress overhauled military commissions to give defendants more safeguards.
One category — detainees cleared for release who cannot be repatriated for their own safety — is on a path to extinction: allies have accepted 33, and just 22 await resettlement. Another — those who will be held without trials — has been narrowed to 48.
Still, the administration has faced a worsening problem in dealing with the prison’s large Yemeni population, including 58 low-level detainees who would already have been repatriated had they been from a more stable country, officials say.
The administration asked Saudi Arabia to put some Yemenis through a program aimed at rehabilitating jihadists but was rebuffed, officials said. And Mr. Obama imposed a moratorium on Yemen transfers after the failed Dec. 25 attack, planned by a Yemen-based branch of Al Qaeda whose members include two former Guantánamo detainees from Saudi Arabia.
As a result, the Obama administration has been further entangled in practices many of its officials lamented during the Bush administration. A judge this month ordered the government to release a 26-year-old Yemeni imprisoned since 2002, citing overwhelming evidence of his innocence. The Obama team decided last year to release the man, but shifted course after the moratorium. This week, the National Security Council decided to send the man to Yemen in a one-time exception, an official said on Friday.
Meanwhile, discussions have faltered between Mr. Graham and the White House aimed at crafting a bipartisan legislative package that would close Guantánamo while bolstering legal authorities for detaining terrorism suspects without trial.
Mr. Graham said such legislation would build confidence about holding detainees, including future captures, in an untainted prison inside the United States. But the talks lapsed.
“We can’t get anyone to give us a final answer,” he said. “It just goes into a black hole. I don’t know what happens.”
In any case, one senior official said, even if the administration concludes that it will never close the prison, it cannot acknowledge that because it would revive Guantánamo as America’s image in the Muslim world.
“Guantánamo is a negative symbol, but it is much diminished because we are seen as trying to close it,” the official said. “Closing Guantánamo is good, but fighting to close Guantánamo is O.K. Admitting you failed would be the worst.”
Current Costs
general-joness-letter-to-the-house-appropriations-committee
Gitmo Graphic
Gitmo Related Documents at NYT
Thom Shanker contributed reporting.
Closing Guantánamo Fades as a Priority By CHARLIE SAVAGE
WASHINGTON — Stymied by political opposition and focused on competing priorities, the Obama administration has sidelined efforts to close the Guantánamo prison, making it unlikely that President Obama will fulfill his promise to close it before his term ends in 2013.
When the White House acknowledged last year that it would miss Mr. Obama’s initial January 2010 deadline for shutting the prison, it also declared that the detainees would eventually be moved to one in Illinois. But impediments to that plan have mounted in Congress, and the administration is doing little to overcome them.
“There is a lot of inertia” against closing the prison, “and the administration is not putting a lot of energy behind their position that I can see,” said Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and supports the Illinois plan. He added that “the odds are that it will still be open” by the next presidential inauguration.
And Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who also supports shutting it, said the effort is “on life support and it’s unlikely to close any time soon.” He attributed the collapse to some fellow Republicans’ “demagoguery” and the administration’s poor planning and decision-making “paralysis.”
The White House insists it is still determined to shutter the prison. The administration argues that Guantánamo is a symbol in the Muslim world of past detainee abuses, citing military views that its continued operation helps terrorists.
“Our commanders have made clear that closing the detention facility at Guantánamo is a national security imperative, and the president remains committed to achieving that goal,” said a White House spokesman, Ben LaBolt.
Still, some senior officials say privately that the administration has done its part, including identifying the Illinois prison — an empty maximum-security center in Thomson, 150 miles west of Chicago — where the detainees could be held. They blame Congress for failing to execute that endgame.
“The president can’t just wave a magic wand to say that Gitmo will be closed,” said a senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal thinking on a sensitive issue.
The politics of closing the prison have clearly soured following the attempted bombings on a plane on Dec. 25 and in Times Square in May, as well as Republican criticism that imprisoning detainees in the United States would endanger Americans. When Mr. Obama took office a slight majority supported closing it. By a March 2010 poll, 60 percent wanted it to stay open.
One administration official argued that the White House was still trying. On May 26, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, James Jones, sent a letter to the House Appropriations Committee reiterating the case.
But Mr. Levin portrayed the administration as unwilling to make a serious effort to exert its influence, contrasting its muted response to legislative hurdles to closing Guantánamo with “very vocal” threats to veto financing for a fighter jet engine it opposes.
Last year, for example, the administration stood aside as lawmakers restricted the transfer of detainees into the United States except for prosecution. And its response was silence several weeks ago, Mr. Levin said, as the House and Senate Armed Services Committees voted to block money for renovating the Illinois prison to accommodate detainees, and to restrict transfers from Guantánamo to other countries — including, in the Senate version, a bar on Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia. About 130 of the 181 detainees are from those countries.
“They are not really putting their shoulder to the wheel on this issue,” Mr. Levin said of White House officials. “It’s pretty dormant in terms of their public positions.”
Several administration officials expressed hope that political winds might shift if, for example, high-level Qaeda leaders are killed, or if lawmakers focus on how expensive it is to operate a prison at the isolated base.
A recent Pentagon study, obtained by The New York Times, shows taxpayers spent more than $2 billion between 2002 and 2009 on the prison. Administration officials believe taxpayers would save about $180 million a year in operating costs if Guantánamo detainees were held at Thomson, which they hope Congress will allow the Justice Department to buy from the State of Illinois at least for federal inmates.
But in a sign that some may be making peace with keeping Guantánamo open, officials also praise improvements at the prison. An interagency review team brought order to scattered files. Mr. Obama banned brutal interrogations. Congress overhauled military commissions to give defendants more safeguards.
One category — detainees cleared for release who cannot be repatriated for their own safety — is on a path to extinction: allies have accepted 33, and just 22 await resettlement. Another — those who will be held without trials — has been narrowed to 48.
Still, the administration has faced a worsening problem in dealing with the prison’s large Yemeni population, including 58 low-level detainees who would already have been repatriated had they been from a more stable country, officials say.
The administration asked Saudi Arabia to put some Yemenis through a program aimed at rehabilitating jihadists but was rebuffed, officials said. And Mr. Obama imposed a moratorium on Yemen transfers after the failed Dec. 25 attack, planned by a Yemen-based branch of Al Qaeda whose members include two former Guantánamo detainees from Saudi Arabia.
As a result, the Obama administration has been further entangled in practices many of its officials lamented during the Bush administration. A judge this month ordered the government to release a 26-year-old Yemeni imprisoned since 2002, citing overwhelming evidence of his innocence. The Obama team decided last year to release the man, but shifted course after the moratorium. This week, the National Security Council decided to send the man to Yemen in a one-time exception, an official said on Friday.
Meanwhile, discussions have faltered between Mr. Graham and the White House aimed at crafting a bipartisan legislative package that would close Guantánamo while bolstering legal authorities for detaining terrorism suspects without trial.
Mr. Graham said such legislation would build confidence about holding detainees, including future captures, in an untainted prison inside the United States. But the talks lapsed.
“We can’t get anyone to give us a final answer,” he said. “It just goes into a black hole. I don’t know what happens.”
In any case, one senior official said, even if the administration concludes that it will never close the prison, it cannot acknowledge that because it would revive Guantánamo as America’s image in the Muslim world.
“Guantánamo is a negative symbol, but it is much diminished because we are seen as trying to close it,” the official said. “Closing Guantánamo is good, but fighting to close Guantánamo is O.K. Admitting you failed would be the worst.”
Current Costs
general-joness-letter-to-the-house-appropriations-committee
Gitmo Graphic
Gitmo Related Documents at NYT
Thom Shanker contributed reporting.
Monday, June 21, 2010
One Big Thing We Don’t Know About Stocks By CARL RICHARDS
JUNE 21, 2010, 1:03 PM
One Big Thing We Don’t Know About Stocks By CARL RICHARDS
Carl Richards
Carl Richards is a certified financial planner and the founder of Prasada Capital.
The only reason we invest in stocks is to earn more than we would get from cash or bonds. The amount you are supposed to earn by taking the additional risk of owning stocks is called the risk premium. If you don’t get paid more for taking the risk, you should put your money in bonds.
Over the last 207 years you got paid 2.5 percentage points more each year (on average) to invest in stocks than you did in bonds.
But you know what they say about statistics, right? In the real world, we have to deal with the fact that, like all averages, this one has some serious problems. Sometimes the risk premium is higher than 2.5 percent, and sometimes it goes away or is hugely negative (say, in a bear market).
Until recently, most of us thought of bear markets as those three- to five-year periods where you grit you teeth and hang on. But recent experience is more painful than that.
In an article by Robert Arnott in The Journal of Indexes, he highlights multiple 20-, 30- and even 40-year periods where we would have been better off in bonds. In other words, the risk premium did not exist.
This starts to get ugly when we admit that we have no idea when these types of prolonged bear (or sideways) markets are coming. Where are we right now in the cycle? I have no idea, and I wouldn’t bet my life savings on anyone who claims to.
So earning this mythical risk premium of 2.5 percent is largely a function of timing, and it’s not the kind of timing we can control. This is the purely random luck kind of timing: when you were born, when you sell your business, when you retire or receive a large lump sum to invest. And if the risk premium is a function of timing, and timing is a function of luck, it doesn’t take much to realize that earning the mythical risk premium is a function of pure luck, too.
This is why so many of us who have been investing for 15 years feel as if we are about back where we started, even if we did everything right (assets allocated, properly diversified, didn’t bail out at the bottom and so on).
Let me be clear, I am not saying that the risk premium is dead, or that we should run out and sell everything. But I am suggesting that with the Dow bouncing around 10,000, it might be time to consider what you define as long term. Ask yourself if you can you live through a prolonged period where you earn no risk premium at all, and make adjustments accordingly.
One Big Thing We Don’t Know About Stocks By CARL RICHARDS
Carl Richards
Carl Richards is a certified financial planner and the founder of Prasada Capital.
The only reason we invest in stocks is to earn more than we would get from cash or bonds. The amount you are supposed to earn by taking the additional risk of owning stocks is called the risk premium. If you don’t get paid more for taking the risk, you should put your money in bonds.
Over the last 207 years you got paid 2.5 percentage points more each year (on average) to invest in stocks than you did in bonds.
But you know what they say about statistics, right? In the real world, we have to deal with the fact that, like all averages, this one has some serious problems. Sometimes the risk premium is higher than 2.5 percent, and sometimes it goes away or is hugely negative (say, in a bear market).
Until recently, most of us thought of bear markets as those three- to five-year periods where you grit you teeth and hang on. But recent experience is more painful than that.
In an article by Robert Arnott in The Journal of Indexes, he highlights multiple 20-, 30- and even 40-year periods where we would have been better off in bonds. In other words, the risk premium did not exist.
This starts to get ugly when we admit that we have no idea when these types of prolonged bear (or sideways) markets are coming. Where are we right now in the cycle? I have no idea, and I wouldn’t bet my life savings on anyone who claims to.
So earning this mythical risk premium of 2.5 percent is largely a function of timing, and it’s not the kind of timing we can control. This is the purely random luck kind of timing: when you were born, when you sell your business, when you retire or receive a large lump sum to invest. And if the risk premium is a function of timing, and timing is a function of luck, it doesn’t take much to realize that earning the mythical risk premium is a function of pure luck, too.
This is why so many of us who have been investing for 15 years feel as if we are about back where we started, even if we did everything right (assets allocated, properly diversified, didn’t bail out at the bottom and so on).
Let me be clear, I am not saying that the risk premium is dead, or that we should run out and sell everything. But I am suggesting that with the Dow bouncing around 10,000, it might be time to consider what you define as long term. Ask yourself if you can you live through a prolonged period where you earn no risk premium at all, and make adjustments accordingly.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
BP Ignored the Omens of Disaster By JOE NOCERA
June 18, 2010
BP Ignored the Omens of Disaster By JOE NOCERA
“We have to get the priorities right,” the chief executive of BP said. “And Job 1 is to get to these things that have happened, get them fixed and get them sorted out. We don’t just sort them out on the surface, we get them fixed deeply.”
The executive was speaking to Matthew L. Wald of The New York Times, vowing to recommit his company to a culture of safety. The oil giant was adding $1 billion to the $6 billion it had already set aside to improve safety, the executive told Mr. Wald. It was setting up a safety advisory panel to make recommendations on how the company could improve. It was bringing in a new man to head its American operations — the source of most of the company’s problems — who would make safety his top priority. And on, and on.
That interview didn’t take place this week — a week in which BP was excoriated in Congress for the extraordinary safety lapses that led to the Deepwater Horizon rig disaster, while also being strong-armed by President Obama into putting $20 billion in escrow to compensate victims.
No, the interview took place nearly four years ago, after BP’s previous disaster on American soil, when oil was discovered leaking from a 16-mile stretch of corroded BP pipeline in Prudhoe Bay in Alaska. And that was just a year after a BP refinery explosion in Texas City, Tex., killed 15 workers and injured hundreds more.
Nor was the chief executive in question Tony Hayward, who spent Thursday before a Congressional panel ducking tough questions and evading personal responsibility — while insisting, absurdly, that as head of the company he had been “laser-focused” on safety. No, the interviewee was his predecessor and mentor John Browne, who had spent nearly 10 years at the helm of BP before resigning in May 2007.
Do you remember the Prudhoe Bay leak and the Texas City explosion? They were big news at the time, though they quickly faded from the headlines. BP was fined $21 million for the numerous violations that contributed to the Texas City explosion, and it was forced to endure a phased shutdown of its Alaska operations while it repaired the corroded pipeline, which cost it additional revenue.
In retrospect, though, the two accidents represented something else as well: they were a huge gift to the company. The fact that these two accidents — thousands of miles apart, and involving very different parts of BP — took place within a year showed that something was systemically wrong with BP’s culture. Mr. Browne had built BP by taking over other oil companies, like Amoco in 1998, and then ruthlessly cutting costs, often firing the acquired company’s most experienced engineers. Taking shortcuts was ingrained in the company’s culture, and everyone in the oil business knew it.
The accidents should have been the wake-up call BP needed to change that culture. But the mistakes and negligence that took place on the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico — which are so profound that everyone I spoke to in the oil business found them truly inexplicable — suggest that the two men never did much more than mouth nice-sounding platitudes.
Which also makes the disaster even more unforgivable than it already is. BP executives had four years to fix the company’s problems before an accident took place that was truly catastrophic. And they blew it.
•
Before the Deepwater Horizon tragedy, the greatest oil disaster in American history was the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, which spewed 10.8 million gallons of crude into Prince William Sound in Alaska. (By comparison, the gulf blowout is pouring out that much oil every four or five days.) That experience was searing for the country — but it was also pretty searing for Exxon (now known as Exxon Mobil). “A low point in the history of the company,” Exxon Mobil’s chief executive, Rex Tillerson, called it when he testified before Congress on Tuesday.
There is a reason Exxon Mobil has not had a serious accident in the subsequent 21 years. Unlike BP, it used the accident to transform itself.
Immediately after the spill, Exxon pulled together some of its most respected executives and gave them a new assignment: figure out how to embed safety into the core of the company. The message was reiterated by the top brass, including the chief executive, whenever they visited a rig or a refinery. Processes were put in place that had to be followed at any Exxon facility anywhere in the world. Redundancies were built in. Workers were encouraged to bring safety concerns to their bosses. And the statistics bear out the genuineness of this cultural change: by every measure, Exxon Mobil has by far the best safety record in the industry. The company has become so safety-crazed that an Exxon Mobil cafeteria worker takes the temperature of the lettuce in the salad bar.
Compare that to BP’s record these last four years. On Thursday, during his day before an angry House energy subcommittee, Mr. Hayward was confronted with the fact that BP had been cited by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for 760 “egregious willful” safety violations in its refineries. Mr. Hayward tried to slough this off by claiming that the violations had taken place in 2005 and 2006 — before, that is, he became chief executive and brought his “laser focus” on safety.
But Mr. Hayward was not telling the truth. According to the Center for Public Integrity, which obtained the data under the Freedom of Information Act, the violations all took place between 2007 and 2010, very much on Mr. Hayward’s watch. What’s more, the company violated something called O.S.H.A.’s “process safety management standard” — which is precisely what that BP advisory panel had been charged with examining after the Texas City explosion. In October 2009, O.S.H.A. fined BP an additional $87 million for refinery deficiencies. It doesn’t sound like the company took its advisory panel’s recommendations very seriously, does it?
Or take the Deepwater Horizon disaster itself, which was preceded by so many instances of corner-cutting and poor decision-making that an accident was practically preordained. Drilling one of the deepest wells in history, the project used only one strand of steel casing, when it should have used at least two. Halliburton recommended that BP use 21 “centralizers,” which help ensure that the well doesn’t veer off course as it goes deeper into the earth, but the company used just a half-dozen. BP failed to conduct a crucial test to make sure that the cement holding the well at the bottom of the sea was sturdy enough.
And the engineers for BP on board consistently ran roughshod over subcontractors like Halliburton, who openly worried that BP was making decisions that could have catastrophic consequences. “This is how it’s going to be,” one BP engineer reportedly said, overruling a contractor on the critical question of when to replace the drilling mud — which keeps explosive natural gas from flowing out of the well — with seawater.
What makes this all the more shocking is that BP was drilling what’s called a wildcat well, meaning it was drilling in an area that no other company had drilled before, so it had no knowledge of the conditions. For most oil companies, that would be all the more reason to take extra precautions. Yet BP did just the opposite.
Listening to Mr. Hayward’s responses on Thursday only reinforced the feeling that the company still didn’t understand what it took to instill a culture of safety. He kept saying that the blowout preventer was supposed to be a fail-safe mechanism that would keep the well from raging out of control. But other companies know that it is far too dangerous to depend on the blowout preventer alone and they build in additional safeguards, so that a problem can be dealt with long before the blowout preventer is needed. Asked about the lack of that important cement bonding test, Mr. Hayward blithely replied that he wasn’t a cement engineer so he couldn’t make a judgment about the decision.
Most telling of all, Mr. Hayward consistently denied knowing of any problems on the rig. As far as he knew everything was fine — until it wasn’t. But drilling a well offshore, miles into the earth, is one of the most dangerous activities in the world. Most companies will shut down a well at the first sign of serious trouble and kick the decision-making up to top management. The price of making a big mistake is simply too high. If Exxon Mobil had been running the Deepwater Horizon well, it is implausible that Mr. Tillerson would not have been informed of the problems. And he would also have had to approve any fix. That Mr. Hayward and his top deputies knew nothing about the problems on the Deepwater Horizon well is, by itself, a serious act of negligence.
Changing a company’s culture is always hard, no doubt about it. And it is especially hard for a company like BP, which has had such enormous success these last few years, reaping $14 billion in profits last year alone. For such companies, it often requires a crisis to change. Microsoft changed after its antitrust trial a decade ago. Tyco International changed after its chief executive, Dennis Kozlowski, went to jail. And chances are, BP is now going to change, too.
This time, the world’s attention will not quickly fade, as it did after the Prudhoe Bay spill. The financial hit, which several Wall Street analysts believe could top $100 billion, is going to be severe. The pressure from the United States government will be unrelenting.
All of this, of course, could have been avoided if the company had truly taken safety to heart four years ago. But it didn’t, and the Gulf Coast is suffering the consequences. Normally, I’d say “better late than never.” But it’s not. Not even close.
BP Ignored the Omens of Disaster By JOE NOCERA
“We have to get the priorities right,” the chief executive of BP said. “And Job 1 is to get to these things that have happened, get them fixed and get them sorted out. We don’t just sort them out on the surface, we get them fixed deeply.”
The executive was speaking to Matthew L. Wald of The New York Times, vowing to recommit his company to a culture of safety. The oil giant was adding $1 billion to the $6 billion it had already set aside to improve safety, the executive told Mr. Wald. It was setting up a safety advisory panel to make recommendations on how the company could improve. It was bringing in a new man to head its American operations — the source of most of the company’s problems — who would make safety his top priority. And on, and on.
That interview didn’t take place this week — a week in which BP was excoriated in Congress for the extraordinary safety lapses that led to the Deepwater Horizon rig disaster, while also being strong-armed by President Obama into putting $20 billion in escrow to compensate victims.
No, the interview took place nearly four years ago, after BP’s previous disaster on American soil, when oil was discovered leaking from a 16-mile stretch of corroded BP pipeline in Prudhoe Bay in Alaska. And that was just a year after a BP refinery explosion in Texas City, Tex., killed 15 workers and injured hundreds more.
Nor was the chief executive in question Tony Hayward, who spent Thursday before a Congressional panel ducking tough questions and evading personal responsibility — while insisting, absurdly, that as head of the company he had been “laser-focused” on safety. No, the interviewee was his predecessor and mentor John Browne, who had spent nearly 10 years at the helm of BP before resigning in May 2007.
Do you remember the Prudhoe Bay leak and the Texas City explosion? They were big news at the time, though they quickly faded from the headlines. BP was fined $21 million for the numerous violations that contributed to the Texas City explosion, and it was forced to endure a phased shutdown of its Alaska operations while it repaired the corroded pipeline, which cost it additional revenue.
In retrospect, though, the two accidents represented something else as well: they were a huge gift to the company. The fact that these two accidents — thousands of miles apart, and involving very different parts of BP — took place within a year showed that something was systemically wrong with BP’s culture. Mr. Browne had built BP by taking over other oil companies, like Amoco in 1998, and then ruthlessly cutting costs, often firing the acquired company’s most experienced engineers. Taking shortcuts was ingrained in the company’s culture, and everyone in the oil business knew it.
The accidents should have been the wake-up call BP needed to change that culture. But the mistakes and negligence that took place on the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico — which are so profound that everyone I spoke to in the oil business found them truly inexplicable — suggest that the two men never did much more than mouth nice-sounding platitudes.
Which also makes the disaster even more unforgivable than it already is. BP executives had four years to fix the company’s problems before an accident took place that was truly catastrophic. And they blew it.
•
Before the Deepwater Horizon tragedy, the greatest oil disaster in American history was the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, which spewed 10.8 million gallons of crude into Prince William Sound in Alaska. (By comparison, the gulf blowout is pouring out that much oil every four or five days.) That experience was searing for the country — but it was also pretty searing for Exxon (now known as Exxon Mobil). “A low point in the history of the company,” Exxon Mobil’s chief executive, Rex Tillerson, called it when he testified before Congress on Tuesday.
There is a reason Exxon Mobil has not had a serious accident in the subsequent 21 years. Unlike BP, it used the accident to transform itself.
Immediately after the spill, Exxon pulled together some of its most respected executives and gave them a new assignment: figure out how to embed safety into the core of the company. The message was reiterated by the top brass, including the chief executive, whenever they visited a rig or a refinery. Processes were put in place that had to be followed at any Exxon facility anywhere in the world. Redundancies were built in. Workers were encouraged to bring safety concerns to their bosses. And the statistics bear out the genuineness of this cultural change: by every measure, Exxon Mobil has by far the best safety record in the industry. The company has become so safety-crazed that an Exxon Mobil cafeteria worker takes the temperature of the lettuce in the salad bar.
Compare that to BP’s record these last four years. On Thursday, during his day before an angry House energy subcommittee, Mr. Hayward was confronted with the fact that BP had been cited by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for 760 “egregious willful” safety violations in its refineries. Mr. Hayward tried to slough this off by claiming that the violations had taken place in 2005 and 2006 — before, that is, he became chief executive and brought his “laser focus” on safety.
But Mr. Hayward was not telling the truth. According to the Center for Public Integrity, which obtained the data under the Freedom of Information Act, the violations all took place between 2007 and 2010, very much on Mr. Hayward’s watch. What’s more, the company violated something called O.S.H.A.’s “process safety management standard” — which is precisely what that BP advisory panel had been charged with examining after the Texas City explosion. In October 2009, O.S.H.A. fined BP an additional $87 million for refinery deficiencies. It doesn’t sound like the company took its advisory panel’s recommendations very seriously, does it?
Or take the Deepwater Horizon disaster itself, which was preceded by so many instances of corner-cutting and poor decision-making that an accident was practically preordained. Drilling one of the deepest wells in history, the project used only one strand of steel casing, when it should have used at least two. Halliburton recommended that BP use 21 “centralizers,” which help ensure that the well doesn’t veer off course as it goes deeper into the earth, but the company used just a half-dozen. BP failed to conduct a crucial test to make sure that the cement holding the well at the bottom of the sea was sturdy enough.
And the engineers for BP on board consistently ran roughshod over subcontractors like Halliburton, who openly worried that BP was making decisions that could have catastrophic consequences. “This is how it’s going to be,” one BP engineer reportedly said, overruling a contractor on the critical question of when to replace the drilling mud — which keeps explosive natural gas from flowing out of the well — with seawater.
What makes this all the more shocking is that BP was drilling what’s called a wildcat well, meaning it was drilling in an area that no other company had drilled before, so it had no knowledge of the conditions. For most oil companies, that would be all the more reason to take extra precautions. Yet BP did just the opposite.
Listening to Mr. Hayward’s responses on Thursday only reinforced the feeling that the company still didn’t understand what it took to instill a culture of safety. He kept saying that the blowout preventer was supposed to be a fail-safe mechanism that would keep the well from raging out of control. But other companies know that it is far too dangerous to depend on the blowout preventer alone and they build in additional safeguards, so that a problem can be dealt with long before the blowout preventer is needed. Asked about the lack of that important cement bonding test, Mr. Hayward blithely replied that he wasn’t a cement engineer so he couldn’t make a judgment about the decision.
Most telling of all, Mr. Hayward consistently denied knowing of any problems on the rig. As far as he knew everything was fine — until it wasn’t. But drilling a well offshore, miles into the earth, is one of the most dangerous activities in the world. Most companies will shut down a well at the first sign of serious trouble and kick the decision-making up to top management. The price of making a big mistake is simply too high. If Exxon Mobil had been running the Deepwater Horizon well, it is implausible that Mr. Tillerson would not have been informed of the problems. And he would also have had to approve any fix. That Mr. Hayward and his top deputies knew nothing about the problems on the Deepwater Horizon well is, by itself, a serious act of negligence.
Changing a company’s culture is always hard, no doubt about it. And it is especially hard for a company like BP, which has had such enormous success these last few years, reaping $14 billion in profits last year alone. For such companies, it often requires a crisis to change. Microsoft changed after its antitrust trial a decade ago. Tyco International changed after its chief executive, Dennis Kozlowski, went to jail. And chances are, BP is now going to change, too.
This time, the world’s attention will not quickly fade, as it did after the Prudhoe Bay spill. The financial hit, which several Wall Street analysts believe could top $100 billion, is going to be severe. The pressure from the United States government will be unrelenting.
All of this, of course, could have been avoided if the company had truly taken safety to heart four years ago. But it didn’t, and the Gulf Coast is suffering the consequences. Normally, I’d say “better late than never.” But it’s not. Not even close.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Saving Energy, and Its Cost By DAVID LEONHARDT
June 15, 2010
Saving Energy, and Its Cost By DAVID LEONHARDT
There once was a time when the government relied on a very blunt way of regulating the economy. It told companies and individuals what they could do and what they could not do. These were the days of command-and-control regulation.
But then came the market revolution of the last three decades. With the Soviet empire collapsing, the United States economy growing more rapidly than Europe’s, and newly market-friendly China and India booming, people saw the drawbacks of command and control. Governments were usually better off avoiding outright bans and instead giving people incentives to behave in productive ways.
The classic example was environmental policy.
Most famously, a 1990 bill signed by the first President Bush forced coal plants to buy permits if they were going to emit the sulfur dioxide that caused acid rain. With the price of emissions suddenly higher, the plants looked for innovative ways to reduce pollution — and succeeded more rapidly and cheaply than experts had predicted.
This history is the basic argument for putting a price on carbon today, and the next several weeks are likely to determine whether that happens. The chances of Congress’s passing a permit — or cap-and-trade — system that applies to the whole economy are low. But it could still create a version that covered power plants, if not factories and transportation. That would be no small thing.
“There is a little bit of a window,” says Jason Grumet, an energy expert and the head of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. The BP spill has focused attention on energy policy, and Congress still has seven weeks before its August recess. “Setting a price on carbon in the power sector,” Mr. Grumet added, “is the most significant opportunity we have to achieve domestic greenhouse gas reductions.”
•
Unfortunately, the great economic strength of market systems like cap and trade also happens to be their political weakness. They set prices and allow people to react. In the process, market systems acknowledge that reducing pollution may actually cost a little bit of money.
Politicians don’t like to admit this, because voters don’t like it. Accepting higher costs is especially hard when the economy is weak. So Congressional Democrats have been repackaging their energy bills to make them look less and less market-oriented. Senator John McCain, who supported a permit system for carbon as the Republican presidential nominee, no longer does. Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, has reversed his position as well.
What does Mr. Graham now favor? A series of command-and-control regulations. He has introduced a bill with Senator Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, that would mandate specific standards for cars, trucks, homes and offices. It would also give the energy secretary the power to award loans to companies he thought could do a good job of setting up programs to retrofit buildings. State officials would do the same for factories. The bill, in short, puts more faith in government than the market.
This approach can certainly reduce the carbon emissions causing climate change. Fuel economy rules have cut per-mile gasoline use by 40 percent since 1975. As a result, vehicles have made more progress on energy efficiency than office buildings, houses and apartments. That’s one reason a cap-and-trade system for power plants — which provide energy to offices and homes — has such potential to reduce carbon emissions.
The Lugar-Graham bill focuses on offices and homes, too, and would make a difference. But it wouldn’t make as much of a difference, and it also has other drawbacks.
In a market system, businesses and consumers have a clear incentive to reduce their carbon use, and they can choose the cheapest way to do so. Some would decide to retrofit current buildings and homes to make them more energy-efficient. Some would buy new, more efficient machinery or appliances. Some would switch to alternative energy and, in the process, create a much bigger market for it.
“Instead of leaving it up to the government to identify the solution and tell people what to do, you are leaving that decision to the people who know best,” says Nathaniel Keohane of the Environmental Defense Fund. “A bureaucrat would never have enough information to do as good a job.”
Under a command-and-control system, businesses and consumers have to focus not just on carbon use but also on the details of the government’s rules: the intricacies of vehicle and building standards, the types of appliances that qualify for subsidies, the fine print of the Energy Department’s loan applications. Each bit of compliance brings costs.
It’s just that those costs are hidden in a thicket of bureaucracy. The fuel economy rules, for example, have raised the price of minivans, pickup trucks and S.U.V.’s by limiting how many can be sold. But the price increase has not been obvious, as it would be with a gas tax. We can pretend prices are no higher than they otherwise would have been.
In some ways, it is not fair to pick on Mr. Lugar, Mr. Graham and the other senators, both Democratic and Republican, who support the command-and-control approach. It is far better than nothing. The ideal energy policy, in fact, would include some ironclad rules and regulations, because people do not always respond rationally to prices. Consultants at McKinsey & Company argue that many families and businesses could already save money by taking simple energy-saving steps, yet they don’t do so. Building standards could overcome their inertia.
But relying only on rules, regulations, standards, loan programs and research financing seems inadequate to the task we’re facing. The last 12 months have been the warmest 12-month period on record, NASA says. Nine of the 10 warmest calendar years occurred in the last decade.
The market is the most powerful tool available for dealing with the costs and risks of a hotter planet. Given how loudly politicians like to proclaim their belief in the market, it sure would be nice if they could figure out a way to make it part of the solution.
E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com
Saving Energy, and Its Cost By DAVID LEONHARDT
There once was a time when the government relied on a very blunt way of regulating the economy. It told companies and individuals what they could do and what they could not do. These were the days of command-and-control regulation.
But then came the market revolution of the last three decades. With the Soviet empire collapsing, the United States economy growing more rapidly than Europe’s, and newly market-friendly China and India booming, people saw the drawbacks of command and control. Governments were usually better off avoiding outright bans and instead giving people incentives to behave in productive ways.
The classic example was environmental policy.
Most famously, a 1990 bill signed by the first President Bush forced coal plants to buy permits if they were going to emit the sulfur dioxide that caused acid rain. With the price of emissions suddenly higher, the plants looked for innovative ways to reduce pollution — and succeeded more rapidly and cheaply than experts had predicted.
This history is the basic argument for putting a price on carbon today, and the next several weeks are likely to determine whether that happens. The chances of Congress’s passing a permit — or cap-and-trade — system that applies to the whole economy are low. But it could still create a version that covered power plants, if not factories and transportation. That would be no small thing.
“There is a little bit of a window,” says Jason Grumet, an energy expert and the head of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. The BP spill has focused attention on energy policy, and Congress still has seven weeks before its August recess. “Setting a price on carbon in the power sector,” Mr. Grumet added, “is the most significant opportunity we have to achieve domestic greenhouse gas reductions.”
•
Unfortunately, the great economic strength of market systems like cap and trade also happens to be their political weakness. They set prices and allow people to react. In the process, market systems acknowledge that reducing pollution may actually cost a little bit of money.
Politicians don’t like to admit this, because voters don’t like it. Accepting higher costs is especially hard when the economy is weak. So Congressional Democrats have been repackaging their energy bills to make them look less and less market-oriented. Senator John McCain, who supported a permit system for carbon as the Republican presidential nominee, no longer does. Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, has reversed his position as well.
What does Mr. Graham now favor? A series of command-and-control regulations. He has introduced a bill with Senator Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, that would mandate specific standards for cars, trucks, homes and offices. It would also give the energy secretary the power to award loans to companies he thought could do a good job of setting up programs to retrofit buildings. State officials would do the same for factories. The bill, in short, puts more faith in government than the market.
This approach can certainly reduce the carbon emissions causing climate change. Fuel economy rules have cut per-mile gasoline use by 40 percent since 1975. As a result, vehicles have made more progress on energy efficiency than office buildings, houses and apartments. That’s one reason a cap-and-trade system for power plants — which provide energy to offices and homes — has such potential to reduce carbon emissions.
The Lugar-Graham bill focuses on offices and homes, too, and would make a difference. But it wouldn’t make as much of a difference, and it also has other drawbacks.
In a market system, businesses and consumers have a clear incentive to reduce their carbon use, and they can choose the cheapest way to do so. Some would decide to retrofit current buildings and homes to make them more energy-efficient. Some would buy new, more efficient machinery or appliances. Some would switch to alternative energy and, in the process, create a much bigger market for it.
“Instead of leaving it up to the government to identify the solution and tell people what to do, you are leaving that decision to the people who know best,” says Nathaniel Keohane of the Environmental Defense Fund. “A bureaucrat would never have enough information to do as good a job.”
Under a command-and-control system, businesses and consumers have to focus not just on carbon use but also on the details of the government’s rules: the intricacies of vehicle and building standards, the types of appliances that qualify for subsidies, the fine print of the Energy Department’s loan applications. Each bit of compliance brings costs.
It’s just that those costs are hidden in a thicket of bureaucracy. The fuel economy rules, for example, have raised the price of minivans, pickup trucks and S.U.V.’s by limiting how many can be sold. But the price increase has not been obvious, as it would be with a gas tax. We can pretend prices are no higher than they otherwise would have been.
In some ways, it is not fair to pick on Mr. Lugar, Mr. Graham and the other senators, both Democratic and Republican, who support the command-and-control approach. It is far better than nothing. The ideal energy policy, in fact, would include some ironclad rules and regulations, because people do not always respond rationally to prices. Consultants at McKinsey & Company argue that many families and businesses could already save money by taking simple energy-saving steps, yet they don’t do so. Building standards could overcome their inertia.
But relying only on rules, regulations, standards, loan programs and research financing seems inadequate to the task we’re facing. The last 12 months have been the warmest 12-month period on record, NASA says. Nine of the 10 warmest calendar years occurred in the last decade.
The market is the most powerful tool available for dealing with the costs and risks of a hotter planet. Given how loudly politicians like to proclaim their belief in the market, it sure would be nice if they could figure out a way to make it part of the solution.
E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com
Monday, June 14, 2010
A Disaster, Privately Managed By DAVID CARR
June 13, 2010
A Disaster, Privately Managed By DAVID CARR
The three journalists crept along in a boat captained by James Ledet in a bayou near Golden Meadow, La., one early afternoon. We were all looking for the same thing as we traversed narrow stretches of water framed by swamp grass, in a landscape dotted with docked shrimp boats and old oil rigs.
And before too long, we all saw what we were looking for, almost motionless just below the surface.
A big ol’ redfish.
Of course, these days, the only thing reporters go looking for in the bayous is oil, and its collateral effects, but this was back on April 16, four days before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded 40 miles offshore. My buddies, both reporters at The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, and I were in the midst of what has become a semiannual outing to catch redfish, but we go mostly to spend time in the swamp, with its mysterious watery tentacles and to watch the sun drop as we sit on the deck of a big cabin on stilts.
But that’s past. Cajun Resorts, the spot we stayed at, is buttoned up behind a widespread ban on fishing. Our captain, a former rig rat, has switched back to his old business and is now working with BP to limit the damage. When I called Poppy Duet, our Cajun hostess who helped cook up some of those redfish we caught, she sounded quietly beside herself.
“We’ve been closed for four weeks,” she said. “The oil’s over in the next bay, not here, but we’re all shut down. We’re waiting and working on making a claim, but we don’t really know what’s going to happen next. We’re watching the news, but it’s really hard to tell what’s going on.”
She’s not alone. Because the disaster was slow-moving, the full might of American journalism has been brought to bear. In one sense, the public has never been more informed. This is the first spill that has been covered in real time, with streaming high-definition video on desktops and televisions everywhere, network anchors racking up miles flying back and forth, and throbbing info-graphics that track the mess. We can all see the video for ourselves: an angry plume that looks like hell has been breached and is sending a dark, massive emissary to the surface.
But to look for clarity amid the murk is a daily riddle. The size of the spill has been a moving target, with estimates recently doubled to 25,000 or 30,000 barrels a day, even after BP stanched some of the flow.
So what amount of oil was coming out of that hole in the first place? We will never know, in part because our government has never gained custody of information. What is clear is that even weeks into the disaster, public information has been privatized in whole or in part. Every disaster has chaotic elements and a need to maintain order and safety, but the economic interests of a large commercial enterprise are clearly impeding the free flow of information.
Journalists in the gulf are now dealing with a hybrid informational apparatus that does not reflect government’s legally mandated bias toward openness and transparency.
The Coast Guard may answer the phone when reporters call the Joint Information Center set up to provide answers, but more often than not, the phone is quickly handed off to BP officials. As my colleague Jeremy Peters wrote last week, flights carrying members of the media seeking photographs of the disaster have been restricted, and news organizations including CBS, The Associated Press and The Times-Picayune have complained that their efforts to report have been hampered by limited access. And BP has refused to acknowledge giant plumes of oil under the surface that were observed by local residents and reporters alike.
On Thursday night, Anderson Cooper of CNN complained about seemingly ridiculous efforts to control the story, including the fact that rescued oil-covered birds were being guarded and hidden from view by members of the National Guard. Tom Foreman, a CNN correspondent, tried to interview BP workers, but they would only say, over and over, as if working from a script, “I am only here to support the cleanup mission.” Mr. Foreman pressed and a guard intervened, saying, “You can’t do that! Sir! Stop! I can’t allow you to do that!”
An employee of the St. Bernard Parish government, who asked not to be identified because he was not officially authorized to speak on the matter, said that issues of access were primarily in the hands of BP.
“BP is running everything down here,” he said. “It’s their show.”
What had been a kind of détente between reporters and BP broke down at the end of May, when the efforts at a top kill were clearly failing but the company refused to acknowledge it. Reporters complained and asked for more accurate, timely information, and a BP official responded with a memorandum saying that the company was prevented from answering individual questions by disclosure rules governing trade in its stock.
“Given recent volatility in BP share price, I’m told that information related to top kill is now considered stock-market sensitive, which means it has to be managed under disclosure rules for the London and N.Y. stock exchanges,” the BP media official said in an e-mail message. “In a nutshell, that means all investors must be provided information on an equal basis. That precludes me from sending you updates as various aspects of the operation unfold.”
Really? Should the volatility of a company’s stock price determine how public information on an environmental disaster be delivered to the public?
The lack of transparency has turned James Carville, a Louisiana native and a frequent contributor to CNN, into something very similar to John Goodman’s character on HBO’s series “Treme,” a Jeremiah who is shouting into a wind of indifference.
Reached by phone on Friday in New Orleans, Mr. Carville said secrecy had a place in national affairs, just not this one.
“I believe this country is at war,” he said. “We are being invaded, but in this instance it’s not Al Qaeda or the Japanese, it’s just a hideous, greasy, stupid slick of oil that can’t adjust to our tactics, so why the secrets? It’s absurd that we have any secrecy around this, and absurd that the government is going along with it. There should be no limits on access, not for the scientists, not for the journalists, and not for the public that has every right to know what is going on down here and how much of the culture is being lost.”
A Disaster, Privately Managed By DAVID CARR
The three journalists crept along in a boat captained by James Ledet in a bayou near Golden Meadow, La., one early afternoon. We were all looking for the same thing as we traversed narrow stretches of water framed by swamp grass, in a landscape dotted with docked shrimp boats and old oil rigs.
And before too long, we all saw what we were looking for, almost motionless just below the surface.
A big ol’ redfish.
Of course, these days, the only thing reporters go looking for in the bayous is oil, and its collateral effects, but this was back on April 16, four days before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded 40 miles offshore. My buddies, both reporters at The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, and I were in the midst of what has become a semiannual outing to catch redfish, but we go mostly to spend time in the swamp, with its mysterious watery tentacles and to watch the sun drop as we sit on the deck of a big cabin on stilts.
But that’s past. Cajun Resorts, the spot we stayed at, is buttoned up behind a widespread ban on fishing. Our captain, a former rig rat, has switched back to his old business and is now working with BP to limit the damage. When I called Poppy Duet, our Cajun hostess who helped cook up some of those redfish we caught, she sounded quietly beside herself.
“We’ve been closed for four weeks,” she said. “The oil’s over in the next bay, not here, but we’re all shut down. We’re waiting and working on making a claim, but we don’t really know what’s going to happen next. We’re watching the news, but it’s really hard to tell what’s going on.”
She’s not alone. Because the disaster was slow-moving, the full might of American journalism has been brought to bear. In one sense, the public has never been more informed. This is the first spill that has been covered in real time, with streaming high-definition video on desktops and televisions everywhere, network anchors racking up miles flying back and forth, and throbbing info-graphics that track the mess. We can all see the video for ourselves: an angry plume that looks like hell has been breached and is sending a dark, massive emissary to the surface.
But to look for clarity amid the murk is a daily riddle. The size of the spill has been a moving target, with estimates recently doubled to 25,000 or 30,000 barrels a day, even after BP stanched some of the flow.
So what amount of oil was coming out of that hole in the first place? We will never know, in part because our government has never gained custody of information. What is clear is that even weeks into the disaster, public information has been privatized in whole or in part. Every disaster has chaotic elements and a need to maintain order and safety, but the economic interests of a large commercial enterprise are clearly impeding the free flow of information.
Journalists in the gulf are now dealing with a hybrid informational apparatus that does not reflect government’s legally mandated bias toward openness and transparency.
The Coast Guard may answer the phone when reporters call the Joint Information Center set up to provide answers, but more often than not, the phone is quickly handed off to BP officials. As my colleague Jeremy Peters wrote last week, flights carrying members of the media seeking photographs of the disaster have been restricted, and news organizations including CBS, The Associated Press and The Times-Picayune have complained that their efforts to report have been hampered by limited access. And BP has refused to acknowledge giant plumes of oil under the surface that were observed by local residents and reporters alike.
On Thursday night, Anderson Cooper of CNN complained about seemingly ridiculous efforts to control the story, including the fact that rescued oil-covered birds were being guarded and hidden from view by members of the National Guard. Tom Foreman, a CNN correspondent, tried to interview BP workers, but they would only say, over and over, as if working from a script, “I am only here to support the cleanup mission.” Mr. Foreman pressed and a guard intervened, saying, “You can’t do that! Sir! Stop! I can’t allow you to do that!”
An employee of the St. Bernard Parish government, who asked not to be identified because he was not officially authorized to speak on the matter, said that issues of access were primarily in the hands of BP.
“BP is running everything down here,” he said. “It’s their show.”
What had been a kind of détente between reporters and BP broke down at the end of May, when the efforts at a top kill were clearly failing but the company refused to acknowledge it. Reporters complained and asked for more accurate, timely information, and a BP official responded with a memorandum saying that the company was prevented from answering individual questions by disclosure rules governing trade in its stock.
“Given recent volatility in BP share price, I’m told that information related to top kill is now considered stock-market sensitive, which means it has to be managed under disclosure rules for the London and N.Y. stock exchanges,” the BP media official said in an e-mail message. “In a nutshell, that means all investors must be provided information on an equal basis. That precludes me from sending you updates as various aspects of the operation unfold.”
Really? Should the volatility of a company’s stock price determine how public information on an environmental disaster be delivered to the public?
The lack of transparency has turned James Carville, a Louisiana native and a frequent contributor to CNN, into something very similar to John Goodman’s character on HBO’s series “Treme,” a Jeremiah who is shouting into a wind of indifference.
Reached by phone on Friday in New Orleans, Mr. Carville said secrecy had a place in national affairs, just not this one.
“I believe this country is at war,” he said. “We are being invaded, but in this instance it’s not Al Qaeda or the Japanese, it’s just a hideous, greasy, stupid slick of oil that can’t adjust to our tactics, so why the secrets? It’s absurd that we have any secrecy around this, and absurd that the government is going along with it. There should be no limits on access, not for the scientists, not for the journalists, and not for the public that has every right to know what is going on down here and how much of the culture is being lost.”
Friday, June 11, 2010
Obama Takes a Hard Line Against Leaks to Press By SCOTT SHANE
Obama Takes a Hard Line Against Leaks to Press By SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON — Hired in 2001 by the National Security Agency to help it catch up with the e-mail and cellphone revolution, Thomas A. Drake became convinced that the government’s eavesdroppers were squandering hundreds of millions of dollars on failed programs while ignoring a promising alternative.
He took his concerns everywhere inside the secret world: to his bosses, to the agency’s inspector general, to the Defense Department’s inspector general and to the Congressional intelligence committees. But he felt his message was not getting through.
So he contacted a reporter for The Baltimore Sun.
Today, because of that decision, Mr. Drake, 53, a veteran intelligence bureaucrat who collected early computers, faces years in prison on 10 felony charges involving the mishandling of classified information and obstruction of justice.
The indictment of Mr. Drake was the latest evidence that the Obama administration is proving more aggressive than the Bush administration in seeking to punish unauthorized leaks.
In 17 months in office, President Obama has already outdone every previous president in pursuing leak prosecutions. His administration has taken actions that might have provoked sharp political criticism for his predecessor, George W. Bush, who was often in public fights with the press.
Mr. Drake was charged in April; in May, an F.B.I. translator was sentenced to 20 months in prison for providing classified documents to a blogger; this week, the Pentagon confirmed the arrest of a 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst suspected of passing a classified video of an American military helicopter shooting Baghdad civilians to the Web site Wikileaks.org.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department has renewed a subpoena in a case involving an alleged leak of classified information on a bungled attempt to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program that was described in “State of War,” a 2006 book by James Risen. The author is a reporter for The New York Times. And several press disclosures since Mr. Obama took office have been referred to the Justice Department for investigation, officials said, though it is uncertain whether they will result in criminal cases.
As secret programs proliferated after the 2001 terrorist attacks, Bush administration officials, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, were outspoken in denouncing press disclosures about the C.I.A.’s secret prisons and brutal interrogation techniques, and the security agency’s eavesdropping inside the United States without warrants.
In fact, Mr. Drake initially drew the attention of investigators because the government believed he might have been a source for the December 2005 article in The Times that revealed the wiretapping program.
Describing for the first time the scale of the Bush administration’s hunt for the sources of The Times article, former officials say 5 prosecutors and 25 F.B.I. agents were assigned to the case. The homes of three other security agency employees and a Congressional aide were searched before investigators raided Mr. Drake’s suburban house in November 2007. By then, a series of articles by Siobhan Gorman in The Baltimore Sun had quoted N.S.A. insiders about the agency’s billion-dollar struggles to remake its lagging technology, and panicky intelligence bosses spoke of a “culture of leaking.”
Though the inquiries began under President Bush, it has fallen to Mr. Obama and his attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., to decide whether to prosecute. They have shown no hesitation, even though Mr. Drake is not accused of disclosing the N.S.A.’s most contentious program, that of eavesdropping without warrants.
The Drake case epitomizes the politically charged debate over secrecy and democracy in a capital where the watchdog press is an institution even older than the spy bureaucracy, and where every White House makes its own calculated disclosures of classified information to reporters.
Steven Aftergood, head of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, who has long tracked the uneasy commerce in secrets between government officials and the press, said Mr. Drake might have fallen afoul of a bipartisan sense in recent years that leaks have gotten out of hand and need to be deterred. By several accounts, Mr. Obama has been outraged by some leaks, too.
“I think this administration, like every other administration, is driven to distraction by leaking,” Mr. Aftergood said. “And Congress wants a few scalps, too. On a bipartisan basis, they want these prosecutions to proceed.”
Though he is charged under the Espionage Act, Mr. Drake appears to be a classic whistle-blower whose goal was to strengthen the N.S.A.’s ability to catch terrorists, not undermine it. His alleged revelations to Ms. Gorman focused not on the highly secret intelligence the security agency gathers but on what he viewed as its mistaken decisions on costly technology programs called Trailblazer, Turbulence and ThinThread.
“The Baltimore Sun stories simply confirmed that the agency was ineptly managed in some respects,” said Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian and author of “The Secret Sentry,” a history of the N.S.A. Such revelations hardly damaged national security, Mr. Aid said.
Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit group that defends whistle-blowers, said the Espionage Act, written in 1917 for the pursuit of spies, should not be used to punish those who expose government missteps. “What gets lost in the calculus is that there’s a huge public interest in the disclosure of waste, fraud and abuse,” Ms. Radack said. “Hiding it behind alleged classification is not acceptable.”
Yet the government asserts that Mr. Drake was brazen in mishandling and sharing the classified information he had sworn to protect. He is accused of taking secret N.S.A. reports home, setting up an encrypted e-mail account to send tips to Ms. Gorman, collecting more data for her from unwitting agency colleagues, and then obstructing justice by deleting and shredding documents.
Gabriel Schoenfeld, author of “Necessary Secrets,” a book proposing criminal penalties not just for leakers but for journalists who print classified material, said that whatever his intentions, Mr. Drake must be punished.
“The system is plagued by leaks,” said Mr. Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative research organization. “When you catch someone, you should make an example of them.”
A spokesman for the Justice Department, Matthew A. Miller, said the Drake case was not intended to deter government employees from reporting problems. “Whistle-blowers are the key to many, many department investigations — we don’t retaliate against them, we encourage them,” Mr. Miller said. “This indictment was brought on the merits, and nothing else.”
Though Mr. Obama began his presidency with a pledge of transparency, his aides have warned of a crackdown on leakers. In a November speech, the top lawyer for the intelligence agencies, Robert S. Litt, decried “leaks of classified information that have caused specific and identifiable losses of intelligence capabilities.” He promised action “in the coming months.”
Prosecutions like those of Mr. Drake; the F.B.I. translator, Shamai Leibowitz; and potentially Specialist Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst, who has not yet been charged, have only a handful of precedents in American history. Among them are the cases of Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense Department consultant who gave the Pentagon Papers to The Times in 1971, and Samuel L. Morison, a Navy analyst who passed satellite photographs to Jane’s Defense Weekly in 1984.
Under President Bush, no one was convicted for disclosing secrets directly to the press. But Lawrence A. Franklin, a Defense Department official, served 10 months of home detention for sharing classified information with officials of a pro-Israel lobbying group, and I. Lewis Libby Jr., a top aide to Mr. Cheney, was convicted of perjury for lying about his statements to journalists about an undercover C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame Wilson.
The F.B.I. has opened about a dozen investigations a year in recent years of unauthorized disclosures of classified information, according to a bureau accounting to Congress in 2007.
But most such inquiries are swiftly dropped, usually because hundreds of government employees had access to the leaked information and identifying the source seems impossible. Often even a determined hunt fails to find the source, and agencies sometimes oppose prosecution for fear that even more secrets will be disclosed at a trial.
By Justice Department rules, investigators may seek to question a journalist about his sources only after exhausting other options and with the approval of the attorney general. Subpoenas have been issued for reporters roughly once a year over the last two decades, according to Justice Department statistics, but such actions are invariably fought by news organizations and spark political debate over the First Amendment.
The reporter in the Drake case, Ms. Gorman, who now works at The Wall Street Journal, was never contacted by the Justice Department, according to two people briefed on the investigation. With Mr. Drake’s own statements to the F.B.I. in five initial months of cooperation, along with his confiscated computers and documents, investigators believed they could prove their case without her. Prosecutors further simplified their task by choosing to charge Mr. Drake not with transferring classified material to Ms. Gorman but with a different part of the espionage statute: illegal “retention” of classified information.
An Air Force veteran who drove an electric car, Mr. Drake has long worked on the boundary between technology and management. After years as an N.S.A. contractor, he was hired as an employee and turned up for his first day of work on Sept. 11, 2001. His title at the time hints at the baffling layers of N.S.A. bureaucracy, with more than 30,000 employees at the Fort Meade, Md., headquarters alone: “Senior Change Leader/Chief, Change Leadership & Communications Office, Signals Intelligence Directorate.”
Chris Frappier, a close friend since high school in Vermont, described Mr. Drake then as fascinated by technology and international affairs, socially awkward, with “an incredible sense of duty and honor.”
When he read the indictment, said Mr. Frappier, now a legal investigator in Vermont, he recognized his old friend.
“It’s just so Tom,” Mr. Frappier said. “He saw something he thought was wrong, and he thought it had to be stopped.”
According to two former intelligence officials, Mr. Drake became a champion of ThinThread, a pilot technology program designed to filter the flood of telephone, e-mail and Web traffic that the N.S.A. collects. He believed it offered effective privacy protections for Americans, too.
But agency leaders rejected ThinThread and chose instead a rival program called Trailblazer, which was later judged an expensive failure and abandoned. Mr. Drake and some allies kept pressing the case for ThinThread but were rebuffed, according to former agency officials.
“It was a pretty sharp battle within the agency,” said a former senior intelligence official. “The ThinThread guys were a very vocal minority.”
One former N.S.A. consultant recalled “alarmist memos and e-mails” from Mr. Drake, including one that declared of the agency: “The place is almost completely corrupted.”
Mr. Drake, whom friends describe as a dogged, sometimes obsessive man, took his complaints about ThinThread and other matters to a series of internal watchdogs. He developed a close relationship with intelligence committee staff members, including Diane S. Roark, who tracked the security agency for the House Intelligence Committee. She discussed with Mr. Drake the possibility of contacting Ms. Gorman, according to people who know Ms. Roark.
The subsequent investigation, which included a search of Ms. Roark’s house, devastated Mr. Drake, his wife — herself an N.S.A. contractor — and their teenage son.
“For Tom Drake, a man who loves his country and has devoted most of his life to serving it, this is particularly painful,” said his lawyer, James Wyda, the federal public defender for Maryland. “We feel that the government is wrong on both the facts alleged and the principles at stake in such a prosecution.”
Forced in 2008 out of his job at the National Defense University, where the security agency had assigned him, Mr. Drake took a teaching job at Strayer University. He lost that job after the indictment and now works at an Apple computer store. He spends his evenings, friends say, preparing his defense and pondering the problems of N.S.A., which still preoccupy him.
WASHINGTON — Hired in 2001 by the National Security Agency to help it catch up with the e-mail and cellphone revolution, Thomas A. Drake became convinced that the government’s eavesdroppers were squandering hundreds of millions of dollars on failed programs while ignoring a promising alternative.
He took his concerns everywhere inside the secret world: to his bosses, to the agency’s inspector general, to the Defense Department’s inspector general and to the Congressional intelligence committees. But he felt his message was not getting through.
So he contacted a reporter for The Baltimore Sun.
Today, because of that decision, Mr. Drake, 53, a veteran intelligence bureaucrat who collected early computers, faces years in prison on 10 felony charges involving the mishandling of classified information and obstruction of justice.
The indictment of Mr. Drake was the latest evidence that the Obama administration is proving more aggressive than the Bush administration in seeking to punish unauthorized leaks.
In 17 months in office, President Obama has already outdone every previous president in pursuing leak prosecutions. His administration has taken actions that might have provoked sharp political criticism for his predecessor, George W. Bush, who was often in public fights with the press.
Mr. Drake was charged in April; in May, an F.B.I. translator was sentenced to 20 months in prison for providing classified documents to a blogger; this week, the Pentagon confirmed the arrest of a 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst suspected of passing a classified video of an American military helicopter shooting Baghdad civilians to the Web site Wikileaks.org.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department has renewed a subpoena in a case involving an alleged leak of classified information on a bungled attempt to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program that was described in “State of War,” a 2006 book by James Risen. The author is a reporter for The New York Times. And several press disclosures since Mr. Obama took office have been referred to the Justice Department for investigation, officials said, though it is uncertain whether they will result in criminal cases.
As secret programs proliferated after the 2001 terrorist attacks, Bush administration officials, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, were outspoken in denouncing press disclosures about the C.I.A.’s secret prisons and brutal interrogation techniques, and the security agency’s eavesdropping inside the United States without warrants.
In fact, Mr. Drake initially drew the attention of investigators because the government believed he might have been a source for the December 2005 article in The Times that revealed the wiretapping program.
Describing for the first time the scale of the Bush administration’s hunt for the sources of The Times article, former officials say 5 prosecutors and 25 F.B.I. agents were assigned to the case. The homes of three other security agency employees and a Congressional aide were searched before investigators raided Mr. Drake’s suburban house in November 2007. By then, a series of articles by Siobhan Gorman in The Baltimore Sun had quoted N.S.A. insiders about the agency’s billion-dollar struggles to remake its lagging technology, and panicky intelligence bosses spoke of a “culture of leaking.”
Though the inquiries began under President Bush, it has fallen to Mr. Obama and his attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., to decide whether to prosecute. They have shown no hesitation, even though Mr. Drake is not accused of disclosing the N.S.A.’s most contentious program, that of eavesdropping without warrants.
The Drake case epitomizes the politically charged debate over secrecy and democracy in a capital where the watchdog press is an institution even older than the spy bureaucracy, and where every White House makes its own calculated disclosures of classified information to reporters.
Steven Aftergood, head of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, who has long tracked the uneasy commerce in secrets between government officials and the press, said Mr. Drake might have fallen afoul of a bipartisan sense in recent years that leaks have gotten out of hand and need to be deterred. By several accounts, Mr. Obama has been outraged by some leaks, too.
“I think this administration, like every other administration, is driven to distraction by leaking,” Mr. Aftergood said. “And Congress wants a few scalps, too. On a bipartisan basis, they want these prosecutions to proceed.”
Though he is charged under the Espionage Act, Mr. Drake appears to be a classic whistle-blower whose goal was to strengthen the N.S.A.’s ability to catch terrorists, not undermine it. His alleged revelations to Ms. Gorman focused not on the highly secret intelligence the security agency gathers but on what he viewed as its mistaken decisions on costly technology programs called Trailblazer, Turbulence and ThinThread.
“The Baltimore Sun stories simply confirmed that the agency was ineptly managed in some respects,” said Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian and author of “The Secret Sentry,” a history of the N.S.A. Such revelations hardly damaged national security, Mr. Aid said.
Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit group that defends whistle-blowers, said the Espionage Act, written in 1917 for the pursuit of spies, should not be used to punish those who expose government missteps. “What gets lost in the calculus is that there’s a huge public interest in the disclosure of waste, fraud and abuse,” Ms. Radack said. “Hiding it behind alleged classification is not acceptable.”
Yet the government asserts that Mr. Drake was brazen in mishandling and sharing the classified information he had sworn to protect. He is accused of taking secret N.S.A. reports home, setting up an encrypted e-mail account to send tips to Ms. Gorman, collecting more data for her from unwitting agency colleagues, and then obstructing justice by deleting and shredding documents.
Gabriel Schoenfeld, author of “Necessary Secrets,” a book proposing criminal penalties not just for leakers but for journalists who print classified material, said that whatever his intentions, Mr. Drake must be punished.
“The system is plagued by leaks,” said Mr. Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative research organization. “When you catch someone, you should make an example of them.”
A spokesman for the Justice Department, Matthew A. Miller, said the Drake case was not intended to deter government employees from reporting problems. “Whistle-blowers are the key to many, many department investigations — we don’t retaliate against them, we encourage them,” Mr. Miller said. “This indictment was brought on the merits, and nothing else.”
Though Mr. Obama began his presidency with a pledge of transparency, his aides have warned of a crackdown on leakers. In a November speech, the top lawyer for the intelligence agencies, Robert S. Litt, decried “leaks of classified information that have caused specific and identifiable losses of intelligence capabilities.” He promised action “in the coming months.”
Prosecutions like those of Mr. Drake; the F.B.I. translator, Shamai Leibowitz; and potentially Specialist Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst, who has not yet been charged, have only a handful of precedents in American history. Among them are the cases of Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense Department consultant who gave the Pentagon Papers to The Times in 1971, and Samuel L. Morison, a Navy analyst who passed satellite photographs to Jane’s Defense Weekly in 1984.
Under President Bush, no one was convicted for disclosing secrets directly to the press. But Lawrence A. Franklin, a Defense Department official, served 10 months of home detention for sharing classified information with officials of a pro-Israel lobbying group, and I. Lewis Libby Jr., a top aide to Mr. Cheney, was convicted of perjury for lying about his statements to journalists about an undercover C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame Wilson.
The F.B.I. has opened about a dozen investigations a year in recent years of unauthorized disclosures of classified information, according to a bureau accounting to Congress in 2007.
But most such inquiries are swiftly dropped, usually because hundreds of government employees had access to the leaked information and identifying the source seems impossible. Often even a determined hunt fails to find the source, and agencies sometimes oppose prosecution for fear that even more secrets will be disclosed at a trial.
By Justice Department rules, investigators may seek to question a journalist about his sources only after exhausting other options and with the approval of the attorney general. Subpoenas have been issued for reporters roughly once a year over the last two decades, according to Justice Department statistics, but such actions are invariably fought by news organizations and spark political debate over the First Amendment.
The reporter in the Drake case, Ms. Gorman, who now works at The Wall Street Journal, was never contacted by the Justice Department, according to two people briefed on the investigation. With Mr. Drake’s own statements to the F.B.I. in five initial months of cooperation, along with his confiscated computers and documents, investigators believed they could prove their case without her. Prosecutors further simplified their task by choosing to charge Mr. Drake not with transferring classified material to Ms. Gorman but with a different part of the espionage statute: illegal “retention” of classified information.
An Air Force veteran who drove an electric car, Mr. Drake has long worked on the boundary between technology and management. After years as an N.S.A. contractor, he was hired as an employee and turned up for his first day of work on Sept. 11, 2001. His title at the time hints at the baffling layers of N.S.A. bureaucracy, with more than 30,000 employees at the Fort Meade, Md., headquarters alone: “Senior Change Leader/Chief, Change Leadership & Communications Office, Signals Intelligence Directorate.”
Chris Frappier, a close friend since high school in Vermont, described Mr. Drake then as fascinated by technology and international affairs, socially awkward, with “an incredible sense of duty and honor.”
When he read the indictment, said Mr. Frappier, now a legal investigator in Vermont, he recognized his old friend.
“It’s just so Tom,” Mr. Frappier said. “He saw something he thought was wrong, and he thought it had to be stopped.”
According to two former intelligence officials, Mr. Drake became a champion of ThinThread, a pilot technology program designed to filter the flood of telephone, e-mail and Web traffic that the N.S.A. collects. He believed it offered effective privacy protections for Americans, too.
But agency leaders rejected ThinThread and chose instead a rival program called Trailblazer, which was later judged an expensive failure and abandoned. Mr. Drake and some allies kept pressing the case for ThinThread but were rebuffed, according to former agency officials.
“It was a pretty sharp battle within the agency,” said a former senior intelligence official. “The ThinThread guys were a very vocal minority.”
One former N.S.A. consultant recalled “alarmist memos and e-mails” from Mr. Drake, including one that declared of the agency: “The place is almost completely corrupted.”
Mr. Drake, whom friends describe as a dogged, sometimes obsessive man, took his complaints about ThinThread and other matters to a series of internal watchdogs. He developed a close relationship with intelligence committee staff members, including Diane S. Roark, who tracked the security agency for the House Intelligence Committee. She discussed with Mr. Drake the possibility of contacting Ms. Gorman, according to people who know Ms. Roark.
The subsequent investigation, which included a search of Ms. Roark’s house, devastated Mr. Drake, his wife — herself an N.S.A. contractor — and their teenage son.
“For Tom Drake, a man who loves his country and has devoted most of his life to serving it, this is particularly painful,” said his lawyer, James Wyda, the federal public defender for Maryland. “We feel that the government is wrong on both the facts alleged and the principles at stake in such a prosecution.”
Forced in 2008 out of his job at the National Defense University, where the security agency had assigned him, Mr. Drake took a teaching job at Strayer University. He lost that job after the indictment and now works at an Apple computer store. He spends his evenings, friends say, preparing his defense and pondering the problems of N.S.A., which still preoccupy him.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Making Flowers Into Perfume By MICHAEL TORTORELLO
June 9, 2010
Making Flowers Into Perfume By MICHAEL TORTORELLO
AT some point, nearly every gardener has paused over a flower and experienced an epiphany: If I could capture the scent of that jasmine in a bottle, I’d be a millionaire. The next day the petals are gone, and the aroma with them.
Thanks for the memories. See you next year.
Andrine Olson, however, has a pickle jar in her refrigerator that holds the invigorating scent of jasmine blossoms from her overgrown garden. There are some 60 other scents, too, foraged and assembled from her yard on Vashon Island, Wash., overlooking the Puget Sound.
These tinctures are a highlight of Ms. Olson’s creations as a natural perfumer, making scents without any of the synthetic aromas used in commercial perfumery. Each solution comes from a laborious process of steeping plants in 190-proof alcohol, a drink that could drop a horse. Other flowers have been pressed into fats, like palm oil shortening, in an old-fangled process called enfleurage.
There’s a witch hazel tincture from the herb garden that smells curiously sweet, nothing like the drugstore astringents used to punish teenagers with spotty skin. A tincture of smoked clamshells, gathered from the seashore down the hill, recalls a pot of Lapsang Souchong tea. Or the smell of a lover’s T-shirt after a bonfire on the beach. Creating perfumes, soaps and deodorants from her four-acre grounds has not made Ms. Olson a millionaire. Or a thousandaire, for that matter. Which is too bad, because Ms. Olson, 47, left her career as a Seattle technical writer for the likes of Boeing and Microsoft, and she has started to worry about losing her home to foreclosure.
Frankly, she wouldn’t mind selling the house, a 1,000-square-foot, “Band-Aid-pink modular home” that she has come to think of as a beached houseboat. She’d had a mind to scrap it after she moved to Vashon Island nine years ago. But first her library of antiquarian books took over the second bedroom, and then her perfuming kit colonized the kitchen. The house put down roots, and these days she lacks the energy to dislodge it.
At the end of 2005, Ms. Olson suffered “a massive” heart attack — a blockage of the left anterior descending artery that doctors called “a widow-maker,” she said. She survived and decided that “it was time to do something different.”
Since she took up natural perfuming, Ms. Olson has discovered a fervent community of other souls exploring the craft. One of her mentors, Anya McCoy, 59, sells her original scents under the name Anya’s Garden (anyasgarden.com), and runs a Yahoo group devoted to natural perfuming. The subscription list has more than tripled since 2005, Ms. McCoy said, and currently numbers almost 2,000 members.
The great majority of these perfumers buy all their ingredients from natural scent companies, in stores or on the Web, and then blend them at home. But Ms. McCoy also uses a heady variety of homegrown scents from her lush garden in Miami Shores, Fla., a village just north of Miami.
The desire to smell good — without the aura of chemicals — did not seem to wane in the flop sweat of the recent economic panic. Ms. McCoy sells her creations at $60 to $125 for a half-ounce — not cheap. Yet “since 2007, I’d say my sales have increased 25 percent every year,” she said.
Mandy Aftel, who helped spur the modern natural perfumery movement with her 2001 book “Essence and Alchemy,” said she has “observed an absolute explosion of interest.”
“I’m an artisan, though,” she added, referring to her perfume line, Aftelier. “So an explosion for me isn’t like an explosion for Macy’s!”
Ms. Aftel, 62, connects the popularity of natural perfumes to interest in organic gardening and local food. “People are so often in front of their computer screens and detached from the sensual world,” she said.
Synthetic perfumes do a poor job of awakening that connection to green things, according to some natural perfumers. They argue that commercial perfumes can have all the subtlety of the men’s room at Yankee Stadium. And that synthetic fragrances cling indelibly to the body for 12 hours or more, like a one-night stand who demands brunch the next morning.
Jeanne Rose, 73, a natural perfumer and aromatherapy practitioner in San Francisco who has written on the subject since 1969, puts it this way: “People are walking around in our Chinatown who smell like fermented watermelons.”
Ms. Rose, who teaches classes nationally, and out of her four-story Edwardian home, said the students who enroll do so because “they think people stink.”
That opinion may seem fragrant, but Ms. Rose’s spring series of courses on tincturing, distillation and perfuming has been fully subscribed for several years now. She recently added classes in June and October to accommodate more students.
Conventional perfumers, it should be said, would not agree that they are mired in stench. “In the ’80s, perfumes were very potent, over-the-top and long-lasting,” said Mary Ellen Lapsansky, vice president of the Fragrance Foundation, a nonprofit education and trade group in New York. Unlike the commercial perfumes of yesteryear, today’s versions are “not so in-your-face,” she said.
MS. McCOY, of Anya’s Garden, heads a trade group called the Natural Perfumers Guild. She creates custom scents for hotel cosmetics and teaches natural perfuming online. But the inspiration for her work lives outside in the garden.
Before she started creating natural body products in the early ’90s, Ms. McCoy trained and worked in landscape architecture and urban design. “I’ve turned every inch of my house lot in Miami into a fragrant production area,” she said.
One of the first plants to greet visitors by the front walk is a rare 15-foot-tall Chinese perfume tree. “It has the tiniest flowers you have ever seen,” Ms. McCoy said, “about the size of a match head.” Gathering these yellow blooms, by her account, sounds like it’s about as much fun as picking cat hair off an angora sweater. But the bouquet is peerless: a little “like whole warm uncut lemon,” she said.
There’s plenty of actual citrus growing, too. The star attractions of Kaffir, a 2008 perfume, are tinctures from the leaves and fruit of a Kaffir lime tree. The supporting cast includes tinctures from eight uncommon jasmines. Two of these shrubs pour over the 30-foot-long fence in the backyard, like chest hair on a ’70s sex symbol that cannot be kept under the collar.
“My neighbors are used to seeing me out there harvesting any time from 8 in the morning until midnight,” Ms. McCoy said. She works on the blossom’s clock, whenever the bouquet is strongest, but sees it not as obsessive labor but as a kind of “artistic curiosity.”
Where else but in her own garden will she find the pure, unadulterated aroma of Michelia champaca or plumeria? The enfleurage she has made out of her plumerias "smells extraordinary," she said. "Better than anything you can buy from a supplier."
Making jojoba oil infusions out of her flower beds is partly a matter of thrift for Diana Burrell-Shipton, a 47-year-old “work-at-home mom” in Hubbard, Ohio, on the outskirts of Youngstown. An ounce of wild lavender essential oil, for instance, might cost more than $20 from an Internet catalog. And a common perfuming aroma like orris butter, made from the iris rhizome, costs $200 for just a quarter-ounce.
“I had no extra money to be buying the organic infusions even if I could find them,” she wrote in an e-mail message. She prefers to know the origin of all her ingredients, anyway.
Ms. Burrell-Shipton has tired of seeing “ ‘all-natural’ or ‘organic’ claims on the front of the label,” she wrote, “only to turn the product over and discover the real ingredients by reading the whole label.” And she said she is suspicious of any “faceless company, who has the main goal of making money.”
True to those beliefs, Ms. Burrell-Shipton doesn’t charge enough to turn a profit on the solid perfumes and sewn handicrafts that she makes in a 1973 Coachmen travel trailer and sells online (at organicgiftsbydiana.mybisi.com). Her workshop is parked behind an 1825 homestead that once belonged to her grandmother. She lives there on an acre of land with her husband and two daughters.
In economic terms, this is a captive market. Where else is her family going to buy natural perfumes? But her household is also well served. Her 12-year-old, Elaina, said that she wears her garden-grown lavender balm to relax before a big exam or a choral concert.
Ms. Burrell-Shipton’s mother, meanwhile, has her own custom blend of plum- and peach-peel infusions from the yard. It’s a source of comfort, she said, as her mother copes with Stage 4 cancer.
Natural perfuming, in some regards, is an offshoot of aromatherapy. According to Ms. Aftel, the proliferation of aromatherapy oils online in the ’90s inspired new perfumers to experiment.
Scent-makers like Yonnette Fleming, 42, of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, continue to bridge the worlds of aesthetics and healing. Ms. Fleming, an urban farmer and community organizer who grew up among farming people in rural Guyana, planted a 40-by-20-foot herbal plot at the Hattie Carthan Community Garden at the corner of Marcy and Lafayette in Bedford-Stuyvesant. She sells her body products and scents at the Saturday farmers’ market she founded there last year.
Ms. Fleming spends “probably about 70 hours a week at the garden,” she said. But she creates her oil infusions and tinctures at home, in a garden-floor brownstone apartment a block away.
She makes a “grieving oil,” she said, by slowly simmering white rose petals in virgin olive oil. To this, she marries vitamin E oil, a stabilizer.
“Someone may feel melancholy without a reason,” Ms. Fleming said, but “there are all these memories that come up when they use the oil.”
Her rue-and-sage spritzer — a blend of alcohol-based tinctures — is more of a bummer-exorcist. Let’s say a brooding “neighbor comes over,” Ms. Fleming said, “and after she leaves, it still feels like she’s sitting in your living room.” That’s a situation that definitely calls for the scent of rue.
AS a teenager in her native Iran, Maggie Mahboubian started making “kitchen cosmetics.” Henna mixed with coffee created one hair color; henna with chamomile, another.
Ms. Mahboubian is in her late 40s now, living with her husband and their 5-year-old daughter in a West Hollywood, Calif., bungalow. And she’s still mixing up body products in the kitchen. She also has an architecture degree from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.
This training gave her an almost-mystical vocabulary to discuss her inventions as a natural perfumer. Her twinned perfumes, Noesis and Noema, for instance, represent “act of thought” and “object of thought” in phenomenology.
As descriptions go, this actually seems more evocative than saying the first smells a little like men’s soap and the second like flowers.
Ms. Mahboubian is not immune to a little enchantment in the garden, either. She overhauled the yard after she moved in five years ago. (The only original plant, she said, is a bird of paradise, supposedly a gift from Elvis Presley to the house’s first owner, his hairdresser.) And she took up biodynamic gardening.
According to Ms. Mahboubian, this practice involves following a lunar calendar for sowing seeds and treating the soil with herbal preparations. Periodically, she’ll also create her own vortex and bury a cow’s horn.
“There’s a certain aspect of witchcraft to it,” she said. “It’s fun.”
In any event, there must be some sort of sorcery involved in Ms. Mahboubian’s loveliest fragrance. The label on the tiny vial is plain enough: “tincture perfume.” Inside are preparations of native plants she has collected and flowers and herbs from the yard. California sagebrush, rosemary, bay laurel, yarrow.
First a breath, then the scent: It’s Maggie’s garden, ever in bloom.
Creating A Tincture Of Flowers
SAMPLING some of the essential oils that go into natural perfumes couldn’t be easier: just look for an herb or a blossom in the garden.
“If you take a leaf and fold it up in your hand and smell your palm, it’s a wonderful aroma,” said Mandy Aftel, an author and leader in the natural perfume movement. Preserving those scents is trickier — like capturing the sublimity of a sunset with a cellphone photo. Yet it’s possible to make fragrant tinctures at home with a minimum of gear.
The first ingredient is the plant. You may be wondering, should I tincture citrus leaves or citrus blossoms? Mint or rosemary? Rose petals or rose hips? The answer is “yes.”
Collect plant materials whenever their scent seems strongest and the leaves aren’t wet. “Clover drying” them — airing them out until they’re limp — helps reduce the water content, which is as destructive to a tincture as a maraschino cherry in a dry martini.
The next ingredient, obliteration-grade alcohol, may take a little creativity. Jeanne Rose, an author and teacher in the field of aromatherapy and natural perfumes, recommends organic neutral grape alcohol. It has a “fruity scent,” she said, a remarkable claim for a liquid that’s 190 proof. It costs about $125 a gallon. (Some states, including New York, require industrial permits.)
Less desirable to Ms. Rose, but typically more affordable at less than $15 for a 750-milliliter bottle, is 190-proof Everclear, a grain spirit familiar to college binge-drinkers. (Again, you’re on your own with the paperwork.)
The last two items are a square foot of fiberglass netting (available at most hardware stores) and a clean Mason jar. Can you use an old peanut butter jar? Yes, Ms. Rose says — if you want your tincture to smell like peanut butter.
The rest of the process is straightforward. And repetitive. Drop the whole petals or leaves into the jar and pour in just enough alcohol to cover the top. Maybe slosh it around a little. Wait a day, then strain out the petals or leaves through the netting. The alcohol level will drop, but don’t add more. Instead, add new, clover-dried petals. And more petals. And do it again. And again. And again.
Some tinctures take a half-dozen plant changes, some three dozen. And a typical natural perfume may contain 5, 10 or even 20 different scents.
A side-pour of 190-proof spirits might seem like a way to shorten the wait. But no floral tincture will mask the smell of someone who passed out in gardening clothes.
Making Flowers Into Perfume By MICHAEL TORTORELLO
AT some point, nearly every gardener has paused over a flower and experienced an epiphany: If I could capture the scent of that jasmine in a bottle, I’d be a millionaire. The next day the petals are gone, and the aroma with them.
Thanks for the memories. See you next year.
Andrine Olson, however, has a pickle jar in her refrigerator that holds the invigorating scent of jasmine blossoms from her overgrown garden. There are some 60 other scents, too, foraged and assembled from her yard on Vashon Island, Wash., overlooking the Puget Sound.
These tinctures are a highlight of Ms. Olson’s creations as a natural perfumer, making scents without any of the synthetic aromas used in commercial perfumery. Each solution comes from a laborious process of steeping plants in 190-proof alcohol, a drink that could drop a horse. Other flowers have been pressed into fats, like palm oil shortening, in an old-fangled process called enfleurage.
There’s a witch hazel tincture from the herb garden that smells curiously sweet, nothing like the drugstore astringents used to punish teenagers with spotty skin. A tincture of smoked clamshells, gathered from the seashore down the hill, recalls a pot of Lapsang Souchong tea. Or the smell of a lover’s T-shirt after a bonfire on the beach. Creating perfumes, soaps and deodorants from her four-acre grounds has not made Ms. Olson a millionaire. Or a thousandaire, for that matter. Which is too bad, because Ms. Olson, 47, left her career as a Seattle technical writer for the likes of Boeing and Microsoft, and she has started to worry about losing her home to foreclosure.
Frankly, she wouldn’t mind selling the house, a 1,000-square-foot, “Band-Aid-pink modular home” that she has come to think of as a beached houseboat. She’d had a mind to scrap it after she moved to Vashon Island nine years ago. But first her library of antiquarian books took over the second bedroom, and then her perfuming kit colonized the kitchen. The house put down roots, and these days she lacks the energy to dislodge it.
At the end of 2005, Ms. Olson suffered “a massive” heart attack — a blockage of the left anterior descending artery that doctors called “a widow-maker,” she said. She survived and decided that “it was time to do something different.”
Since she took up natural perfuming, Ms. Olson has discovered a fervent community of other souls exploring the craft. One of her mentors, Anya McCoy, 59, sells her original scents under the name Anya’s Garden (anyasgarden.com), and runs a Yahoo group devoted to natural perfuming. The subscription list has more than tripled since 2005, Ms. McCoy said, and currently numbers almost 2,000 members.
The great majority of these perfumers buy all their ingredients from natural scent companies, in stores or on the Web, and then blend them at home. But Ms. McCoy also uses a heady variety of homegrown scents from her lush garden in Miami Shores, Fla., a village just north of Miami.
The desire to smell good — without the aura of chemicals — did not seem to wane in the flop sweat of the recent economic panic. Ms. McCoy sells her creations at $60 to $125 for a half-ounce — not cheap. Yet “since 2007, I’d say my sales have increased 25 percent every year,” she said.
Mandy Aftel, who helped spur the modern natural perfumery movement with her 2001 book “Essence and Alchemy,” said she has “observed an absolute explosion of interest.”
“I’m an artisan, though,” she added, referring to her perfume line, Aftelier. “So an explosion for me isn’t like an explosion for Macy’s!”
Ms. Aftel, 62, connects the popularity of natural perfumes to interest in organic gardening and local food. “People are so often in front of their computer screens and detached from the sensual world,” she said.
Synthetic perfumes do a poor job of awakening that connection to green things, according to some natural perfumers. They argue that commercial perfumes can have all the subtlety of the men’s room at Yankee Stadium. And that synthetic fragrances cling indelibly to the body for 12 hours or more, like a one-night stand who demands brunch the next morning.
Jeanne Rose, 73, a natural perfumer and aromatherapy practitioner in San Francisco who has written on the subject since 1969, puts it this way: “People are walking around in our Chinatown who smell like fermented watermelons.”
Ms. Rose, who teaches classes nationally, and out of her four-story Edwardian home, said the students who enroll do so because “they think people stink.”
That opinion may seem fragrant, but Ms. Rose’s spring series of courses on tincturing, distillation and perfuming has been fully subscribed for several years now. She recently added classes in June and October to accommodate more students.
Conventional perfumers, it should be said, would not agree that they are mired in stench. “In the ’80s, perfumes were very potent, over-the-top and long-lasting,” said Mary Ellen Lapsansky, vice president of the Fragrance Foundation, a nonprofit education and trade group in New York. Unlike the commercial perfumes of yesteryear, today’s versions are “not so in-your-face,” she said.
MS. McCOY, of Anya’s Garden, heads a trade group called the Natural Perfumers Guild. She creates custom scents for hotel cosmetics and teaches natural perfuming online. But the inspiration for her work lives outside in the garden.
Before she started creating natural body products in the early ’90s, Ms. McCoy trained and worked in landscape architecture and urban design. “I’ve turned every inch of my house lot in Miami into a fragrant production area,” she said.
One of the first plants to greet visitors by the front walk is a rare 15-foot-tall Chinese perfume tree. “It has the tiniest flowers you have ever seen,” Ms. McCoy said, “about the size of a match head.” Gathering these yellow blooms, by her account, sounds like it’s about as much fun as picking cat hair off an angora sweater. But the bouquet is peerless: a little “like whole warm uncut lemon,” she said.
There’s plenty of actual citrus growing, too. The star attractions of Kaffir, a 2008 perfume, are tinctures from the leaves and fruit of a Kaffir lime tree. The supporting cast includes tinctures from eight uncommon jasmines. Two of these shrubs pour over the 30-foot-long fence in the backyard, like chest hair on a ’70s sex symbol that cannot be kept under the collar.
“My neighbors are used to seeing me out there harvesting any time from 8 in the morning until midnight,” Ms. McCoy said. She works on the blossom’s clock, whenever the bouquet is strongest, but sees it not as obsessive labor but as a kind of “artistic curiosity.”
Where else but in her own garden will she find the pure, unadulterated aroma of Michelia champaca or plumeria? The enfleurage she has made out of her plumerias "smells extraordinary," she said. "Better than anything you can buy from a supplier."
Making jojoba oil infusions out of her flower beds is partly a matter of thrift for Diana Burrell-Shipton, a 47-year-old “work-at-home mom” in Hubbard, Ohio, on the outskirts of Youngstown. An ounce of wild lavender essential oil, for instance, might cost more than $20 from an Internet catalog. And a common perfuming aroma like orris butter, made from the iris rhizome, costs $200 for just a quarter-ounce.
“I had no extra money to be buying the organic infusions even if I could find them,” she wrote in an e-mail message. She prefers to know the origin of all her ingredients, anyway.
Ms. Burrell-Shipton has tired of seeing “ ‘all-natural’ or ‘organic’ claims on the front of the label,” she wrote, “only to turn the product over and discover the real ingredients by reading the whole label.” And she said she is suspicious of any “faceless company, who has the main goal of making money.”
True to those beliefs, Ms. Burrell-Shipton doesn’t charge enough to turn a profit on the solid perfumes and sewn handicrafts that she makes in a 1973 Coachmen travel trailer and sells online (at organicgiftsbydiana.mybisi.com). Her workshop is parked behind an 1825 homestead that once belonged to her grandmother. She lives there on an acre of land with her husband and two daughters.
In economic terms, this is a captive market. Where else is her family going to buy natural perfumes? But her household is also well served. Her 12-year-old, Elaina, said that she wears her garden-grown lavender balm to relax before a big exam or a choral concert.
Ms. Burrell-Shipton’s mother, meanwhile, has her own custom blend of plum- and peach-peel infusions from the yard. It’s a source of comfort, she said, as her mother copes with Stage 4 cancer.
Natural perfuming, in some regards, is an offshoot of aromatherapy. According to Ms. Aftel, the proliferation of aromatherapy oils online in the ’90s inspired new perfumers to experiment.
Scent-makers like Yonnette Fleming, 42, of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, continue to bridge the worlds of aesthetics and healing. Ms. Fleming, an urban farmer and community organizer who grew up among farming people in rural Guyana, planted a 40-by-20-foot herbal plot at the Hattie Carthan Community Garden at the corner of Marcy and Lafayette in Bedford-Stuyvesant. She sells her body products and scents at the Saturday farmers’ market she founded there last year.
Ms. Fleming spends “probably about 70 hours a week at the garden,” she said. But she creates her oil infusions and tinctures at home, in a garden-floor brownstone apartment a block away.
She makes a “grieving oil,” she said, by slowly simmering white rose petals in virgin olive oil. To this, she marries vitamin E oil, a stabilizer.
“Someone may feel melancholy without a reason,” Ms. Fleming said, but “there are all these memories that come up when they use the oil.”
Her rue-and-sage spritzer — a blend of alcohol-based tinctures — is more of a bummer-exorcist. Let’s say a brooding “neighbor comes over,” Ms. Fleming said, “and after she leaves, it still feels like she’s sitting in your living room.” That’s a situation that definitely calls for the scent of rue.
AS a teenager in her native Iran, Maggie Mahboubian started making “kitchen cosmetics.” Henna mixed with coffee created one hair color; henna with chamomile, another.
Ms. Mahboubian is in her late 40s now, living with her husband and their 5-year-old daughter in a West Hollywood, Calif., bungalow. And she’s still mixing up body products in the kitchen. She also has an architecture degree from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.
This training gave her an almost-mystical vocabulary to discuss her inventions as a natural perfumer. Her twinned perfumes, Noesis and Noema, for instance, represent “act of thought” and “object of thought” in phenomenology.
As descriptions go, this actually seems more evocative than saying the first smells a little like men’s soap and the second like flowers.
Ms. Mahboubian is not immune to a little enchantment in the garden, either. She overhauled the yard after she moved in five years ago. (The only original plant, she said, is a bird of paradise, supposedly a gift from Elvis Presley to the house’s first owner, his hairdresser.) And she took up biodynamic gardening.
According to Ms. Mahboubian, this practice involves following a lunar calendar for sowing seeds and treating the soil with herbal preparations. Periodically, she’ll also create her own vortex and bury a cow’s horn.
“There’s a certain aspect of witchcraft to it,” she said. “It’s fun.”
In any event, there must be some sort of sorcery involved in Ms. Mahboubian’s loveliest fragrance. The label on the tiny vial is plain enough: “tincture perfume.” Inside are preparations of native plants she has collected and flowers and herbs from the yard. California sagebrush, rosemary, bay laurel, yarrow.
First a breath, then the scent: It’s Maggie’s garden, ever in bloom.
Creating A Tincture Of Flowers
SAMPLING some of the essential oils that go into natural perfumes couldn’t be easier: just look for an herb or a blossom in the garden.
“If you take a leaf and fold it up in your hand and smell your palm, it’s a wonderful aroma,” said Mandy Aftel, an author and leader in the natural perfume movement. Preserving those scents is trickier — like capturing the sublimity of a sunset with a cellphone photo. Yet it’s possible to make fragrant tinctures at home with a minimum of gear.
The first ingredient is the plant. You may be wondering, should I tincture citrus leaves or citrus blossoms? Mint or rosemary? Rose petals or rose hips? The answer is “yes.”
Collect plant materials whenever their scent seems strongest and the leaves aren’t wet. “Clover drying” them — airing them out until they’re limp — helps reduce the water content, which is as destructive to a tincture as a maraschino cherry in a dry martini.
The next ingredient, obliteration-grade alcohol, may take a little creativity. Jeanne Rose, an author and teacher in the field of aromatherapy and natural perfumes, recommends organic neutral grape alcohol. It has a “fruity scent,” she said, a remarkable claim for a liquid that’s 190 proof. It costs about $125 a gallon. (Some states, including New York, require industrial permits.)
Less desirable to Ms. Rose, but typically more affordable at less than $15 for a 750-milliliter bottle, is 190-proof Everclear, a grain spirit familiar to college binge-drinkers. (Again, you’re on your own with the paperwork.)
The last two items are a square foot of fiberglass netting (available at most hardware stores) and a clean Mason jar. Can you use an old peanut butter jar? Yes, Ms. Rose says — if you want your tincture to smell like peanut butter.
The rest of the process is straightforward. And repetitive. Drop the whole petals or leaves into the jar and pour in just enough alcohol to cover the top. Maybe slosh it around a little. Wait a day, then strain out the petals or leaves through the netting. The alcohol level will drop, but don’t add more. Instead, add new, clover-dried petals. And more petals. And do it again. And again. And again.
Some tinctures take a half-dozen plant changes, some three dozen. And a typical natural perfume may contain 5, 10 or even 20 different scents.
A side-pour of 190-proof spirits might seem like a way to shorten the wait. But no floral tincture will mask the smell of someone who passed out in gardening clothes.
Tuesday, June 08, 2010
A Few Steps Short on Jobs By DAVID LEONHARDT
June 8, 2010
A Few Steps Short on Jobs By DAVID LEONHARDT
Washington
One of the political mysteries of the last year is why the White House and Congress have not been even more aggressive about trying to put people back to work.
It is true that President Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress favor more stimulus and have been stymied by Republicans and, more recently, conservative Blue Dog Democrats worried about the deficit. But it’s also true that Mr. Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have done less than they could have.
The president has not wrapped his arms around teachers, firefighters and other government workers facing layoffs and dared Republicans to oppose him, much as he did with financial reregulation. He has not pushed for a big new round of tax cuts, which could also put Republicans in a bind. And the White House has been slow to fill vacancies at the Federal Reserve that could go to officials who favor the Fed’s doing more to lift economic growth.
None of these steps would have cured the job market on their own. The aftermath of the financial crisis was always going to be long and harsh. Still, the Democrats find themselves in the position of heading into a midterm election campaign with the unemployment rate near 10 percent, knowing that they have not done everything in their power to bring it down.
Publicly, Mr. Obama’s advisers reject this description. “Job creation and economic recovery were and remain President Obama’s top priority,” Lawrence Summers said recently. Mr. Obama is now lobbying the Senate to pass a larger jobs bill than the House passed two weeks ago and pushing for an energy bill that could also create jobs.
But when they are not speaking for quotation, some White House and Congressional officials acknowledge that they could have done more to stimulate the economy, and sooner. In part, they have been busy with other things: legislation on health care, finance and education that could shape the economy for decades to come. The bigger reason, though, is politics.
In the face of near-united Republican opposition, top Democrats have decided that the political costs of aggressively pushing for more stimulus are too high. Any new bill will help only on the margins, and it will give Republicans another chance to blame Mr. Obama for the deficit, even though the current deficit is more of their own party’s making. The Democrats may be right, too. We will never know, because we will never be able to re-run the 2010 election under a different set of circumstances.
Yet the current circumstances bring their own political risks and their own economic costs, especially for anybody who is out of work or soon may be.
•
If there was any doubt that the government could put people to work, at least temporarily, last year’s $787 billion stimulus program should have removed it.
The bill passed in February 2009, when the economy was shedding more than 700,000 jobs a month, and it was greeted with considerable skepticism. Some economists went so far as to suggest it would hurt the economy. Michael Boskin, a Stanford professor and former aide to the first President Bush, wrote an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal on March 6, 2009, blaming Mr. Obama and his policies for the stock market’s drop in previous weeks.
Soon, though, job losses began shrinking. The details — a rebound in state spending, an increase in corporate investment and a spurt in home sales helped by tax credits — suggested that the stimulus bill was a major cause. The Congressional Budget Office and private research firms estimate that the bill has added on the order of 2.5 million jobs. Since Mr. Boskin’s op-ed article appeared, stocks are up 56 percent.
But the stimulus has been less popular than effective, polls show. People see that the economy remains in bad shape, and they have a hard time getting excited by the notion that it could be worse.
These lukewarm views have then been aggravated by the country’s very real deficit problem. The federal government has promised to pay out vastly more in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security over coming decades than it will collect in taxes. Any additional stimulus would only increase the deficit.
Of course, it would have a much smaller impact on the deficit than the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, the bipartisan Medicare prescription drug program or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan did. The bond market, for its part, remains utterly calm about the near-term deficit, based on the government’s extremely low borrowing costs.
But the political dynamic is set. Voters are wary of stimulus and worried about the deficit. Almost nobody in Congress is agitating for the ideal economic solution: a combination of short-term stimulus with longer-term spending cuts and tax increases. It’s easier just to express somber concern about both the deficit and jobs.
Against this backdrop, Mr. Obama and his aides decided not to go all out for more stimulus.
The one part of their strategy that seems almost impossible to defend is their approach to the Fed. By law, the Fed’s mission is to maintain low inflation and maximum employment. Over the last three months, inflation has been zero. Over the last two years, it has risen at the slowest pace in more than 50 years. Meanwhile, 15 million people remain unemployed.
Yet the Fed has taken no recent action to spur the economy — like buying bonds to reduce long-term borrowing costs for households and businesses, as Joseph Gagnon, a former Fed economist, has urged. And the White House and Treasury Department have allowed two of the seven Fed governor spots to sit empty since Mr. Obama took office. He finally announced nominees on April 29, and they await Senate confirmation.
Despite all this, there is reason to think that more stimulus may finally be on the way. Last Friday’s jobs report showed little private-sector job growth in May, which was a good reminder that recoveries from financial crises are usually rocky. The report has the potential to persuade Congress to expand the jobs bill passed by the House, which is now before the Senate.
As is, the House bill would cut taxes for businesses and temporarily extend jobless benefits, among other things. By the end of the year, it would add about 170,000 jobs, Moody’s Economy.com estimates. Expanding the bill to include extra Medicaid funds for states — which seems politically conceivable — could add 100,000 more jobs. Expanding it to keep teachers employed — which is unlikely — could add 200,000 or so.
Will another half-million jobs make the economy feel strong again? No. Will the next round of stimulus be more popular than the last one? Probably not.
Is it nonetheless the right thing to do? That’s another question entirely.
A Few Steps Short on Jobs By DAVID LEONHARDT
Washington
One of the political mysteries of the last year is why the White House and Congress have not been even more aggressive about trying to put people back to work.
It is true that President Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress favor more stimulus and have been stymied by Republicans and, more recently, conservative Blue Dog Democrats worried about the deficit. But it’s also true that Mr. Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have done less than they could have.
The president has not wrapped his arms around teachers, firefighters and other government workers facing layoffs and dared Republicans to oppose him, much as he did with financial reregulation. He has not pushed for a big new round of tax cuts, which could also put Republicans in a bind. And the White House has been slow to fill vacancies at the Federal Reserve that could go to officials who favor the Fed’s doing more to lift economic growth.
None of these steps would have cured the job market on their own. The aftermath of the financial crisis was always going to be long and harsh. Still, the Democrats find themselves in the position of heading into a midterm election campaign with the unemployment rate near 10 percent, knowing that they have not done everything in their power to bring it down.
Publicly, Mr. Obama’s advisers reject this description. “Job creation and economic recovery were and remain President Obama’s top priority,” Lawrence Summers said recently. Mr. Obama is now lobbying the Senate to pass a larger jobs bill than the House passed two weeks ago and pushing for an energy bill that could also create jobs.
But when they are not speaking for quotation, some White House and Congressional officials acknowledge that they could have done more to stimulate the economy, and sooner. In part, they have been busy with other things: legislation on health care, finance and education that could shape the economy for decades to come. The bigger reason, though, is politics.
In the face of near-united Republican opposition, top Democrats have decided that the political costs of aggressively pushing for more stimulus are too high. Any new bill will help only on the margins, and it will give Republicans another chance to blame Mr. Obama for the deficit, even though the current deficit is more of their own party’s making. The Democrats may be right, too. We will never know, because we will never be able to re-run the 2010 election under a different set of circumstances.
Yet the current circumstances bring their own political risks and their own economic costs, especially for anybody who is out of work or soon may be.
•
If there was any doubt that the government could put people to work, at least temporarily, last year’s $787 billion stimulus program should have removed it.
The bill passed in February 2009, when the economy was shedding more than 700,000 jobs a month, and it was greeted with considerable skepticism. Some economists went so far as to suggest it would hurt the economy. Michael Boskin, a Stanford professor and former aide to the first President Bush, wrote an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal on March 6, 2009, blaming Mr. Obama and his policies for the stock market’s drop in previous weeks.
Soon, though, job losses began shrinking. The details — a rebound in state spending, an increase in corporate investment and a spurt in home sales helped by tax credits — suggested that the stimulus bill was a major cause. The Congressional Budget Office and private research firms estimate that the bill has added on the order of 2.5 million jobs. Since Mr. Boskin’s op-ed article appeared, stocks are up 56 percent.
But the stimulus has been less popular than effective, polls show. People see that the economy remains in bad shape, and they have a hard time getting excited by the notion that it could be worse.
These lukewarm views have then been aggravated by the country’s very real deficit problem. The federal government has promised to pay out vastly more in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security over coming decades than it will collect in taxes. Any additional stimulus would only increase the deficit.
Of course, it would have a much smaller impact on the deficit than the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, the bipartisan Medicare prescription drug program or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan did. The bond market, for its part, remains utterly calm about the near-term deficit, based on the government’s extremely low borrowing costs.
But the political dynamic is set. Voters are wary of stimulus and worried about the deficit. Almost nobody in Congress is agitating for the ideal economic solution: a combination of short-term stimulus with longer-term spending cuts and tax increases. It’s easier just to express somber concern about both the deficit and jobs.
Against this backdrop, Mr. Obama and his aides decided not to go all out for more stimulus.
The one part of their strategy that seems almost impossible to defend is their approach to the Fed. By law, the Fed’s mission is to maintain low inflation and maximum employment. Over the last three months, inflation has been zero. Over the last two years, it has risen at the slowest pace in more than 50 years. Meanwhile, 15 million people remain unemployed.
Yet the Fed has taken no recent action to spur the economy — like buying bonds to reduce long-term borrowing costs for households and businesses, as Joseph Gagnon, a former Fed economist, has urged. And the White House and Treasury Department have allowed two of the seven Fed governor spots to sit empty since Mr. Obama took office. He finally announced nominees on April 29, and they await Senate confirmation.
Despite all this, there is reason to think that more stimulus may finally be on the way. Last Friday’s jobs report showed little private-sector job growth in May, which was a good reminder that recoveries from financial crises are usually rocky. The report has the potential to persuade Congress to expand the jobs bill passed by the House, which is now before the Senate.
As is, the House bill would cut taxes for businesses and temporarily extend jobless benefits, among other things. By the end of the year, it would add about 170,000 jobs, Moody’s Economy.com estimates. Expanding the bill to include extra Medicaid funds for states — which seems politically conceivable — could add 100,000 more jobs. Expanding it to keep teachers employed — which is unlikely — could add 200,000 or so.
Will another half-million jobs make the economy feel strong again? No. Will the next round of stimulus be more popular than the last one? Probably not.
Is it nonetheless the right thing to do? That’s another question entirely.
Monday, June 07, 2010
Wake-Up Time for a Dream By JOE NOCERA
June 7, 2010
Wake-Up Time for a Dream By JOE NOCERA
Sheila Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, began her week with a bit of honest heresy, the kind that only she, among all the bank regulators, seems willing to utter in the wake of the financial crisis.
Deep in a speech she delivered Monday before the Housing Association of Nonprofit Developers — a speech that got surprisingly little attention — Ms. Bair listed her three main recommendations to “put the mortgage industry on a sounder footing.” The first two were the usual suspects: better consumer education and protection, and a reformed securitization market. Her third proposal, however, was a shocker, taking dead aim at one of the most sacrosanct tenets of American politics: the lofty goal of homeownership.
“For 25 years federal policy has been primarily focused on promoting homeownership and promoting the availability of credit to home buyers,” Ms. Bair said. She mentioned some of the many subsidies home buyers get, including the home mortgage interest deduction and the ability to deduct property taxes.
She tossed in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two “G.S.E.’s” (government-sponsored entities) whose role as a guarantor and securitizer of mortgages greatly expanded the ability of mortgage originators to make loans to home buyers — and which are now, of course, in federal conservatorship, with taxpayers holding the bag for their gargantuan losses.
She also pointed out that during the bubble, when anyone with a pulse could get a mortgage, the percentage of Americans owning homes rose to an unprecedented 69 percent, a number that was greeted with bipartisan hurrahs, but which turned out to be “unsustainable,” Ms. Bair said.
She concluded: “Sustainable homeownership is a worthy national goal. But it should not be pursued to excess when there are other, equally worthy solutions that help meet the needs of people for whom homeownership may not be the right answer.” Like, you know, renting.
The point is: the financial crisis might well have been avoided if we as a culture hadn’t invested so much political and psychological capital in the idea of owning a home. After all, the subprime mortgage business’s supposed raison d’être was making homeownership possible for people who lacked the means — or the credit scores — to get a traditional mortgage. It’s also why bank regulators and politicians were so willing to avert their eyes from the predations and excesses of the subprime companies.
Yet even now, it is difficult for the body politic to face this truth squarely, so intertwined is homeownership with the American Dream. Which is why Ms. Bair’s comments were so heretical. Maybe, she seemed to be suggesting, it’s time to break that link, painful though it would be. Maybe she’s right.
•
The idealization of homeownership by both the public and the federal government is hardly a recent phenomenon, of course. The Federal Housing Authority has been around since 1934. Fannie Mae was founded in 1938. After World War II, the G.I. Bill included modest loans allowing veterans to buy their first homes, according to Michael D. Calhoun, the president of the Center for Responsible Lending. For decades, the savings and loan industry existed solely to make loans to home buyers. In return, the government gave savings and loans certain regulatory advantages over the banks. The mortgage-backed security itself — which emerged in the 1980s, and made the securitization of mortgages possible — required the passage of a handful of laws, which Congress happily provided.
And every president, Democrat and Republican alike, trumpeted the virtues of homeownership for all Americans. Bill Clinton put numerical goals on the percentage increase he wanted to see in homeownership, and greatly increased Fannie and Freddie’s affordable housing goals. (Those goals had first been in put in place during the presidency of George H. W. Bush.) George W. Bush trumpeted his “ownership society”— and increased those housing goals. Fannie Mae, for its part, explicitly wrapped itself in the American Dream; anyone who opposed Fannie Mae was quickly labeled “anti-homeownership” by the company’s lobbyists.
Indeed, conservatives tend to view the affordable housing goals imposed on Fannie and Freddie as the central reason for the credit crisis. “In order to increase homeownership, Fannie and Freddie were required to decrease their standards,” said Peter Wallison, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and perhaps the country’s leading critic of the G.S.E.’s. “We made a big mistake in trying to force housing onto a population that couldn’t afford housing.”
But, to my mind, that view is only half-right. Yes, people got loans who had no hope of paying them back, and that was insane. But Fannie and Freddie’s affordable housing goals — which the G.S.E.’s easily gamed — were not the main reason. Rather, it was the rise of the subprime lenders — and their ability to get even their worst loans securitized by Wall Street —that was the main culprit. Fannie and Freddie lowered their standards mostly because they were losing market share to the subprime originators.
Did government policy make the rise of the subprime lenders possible? You betcha. Over time, the federal government gradually loosened regulations and interest rate caps that allowed the business to first become viable and then to explode. And it completely bought into the idea that the subprime industry was a force for good, because it was expanding homeownership. This, of course, is something the mortgage originators encouraged. Angelo Mozilo, the founder of Countrywide Financial, was as vocal about his company making the American Dream possible as any Fannie Mae lobbyist.
But it was a lie. Gary Rivlin, my former colleague at The New York Times, has just published a scathing, important book, “Broke, USA,” which includes one shocking anecdote after another of people being conned into taking on mortgages, filled with hidden fees and adjustable rates, that they couldn’t possibly afford. The companies that did these things were not the outliers — they were the bulwarks of the industry: Household, Countrywide, New Century and a raft of others. And when state officials tried to crack down on these unseemly practices, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, instead of investigating, blocked their efforts. After all, homeownership was on the rise!
Somewhat to my surprise, the housing activists I spoke to — people who had been in the forefront of trying to stop the subprime lenders — generally didn’t agree that homeownership should be de-emphasized. “Let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater,” said John Taylor, the chief executive of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. “I think owning a home is the most common way for working-class people to join the middle class.” Mainly, he said, that was because of a home’s appreciation, which gave people the opportunity for wealth creation that would otherwise have remained out of reach. Others mentioned additional societal benefits of homeownership, like stable neighborhoods. And homeowners had every incentive to keep their homes up, precisely because of the equity in their homes.
The academics I spoke to, however, were not so convinced that homeownership offered benefits to society that were so important they demanded federal subsidies. Especially since those subsidies were so huge, and so distorting to the economy. For instance, in 2009, according to the Congressional Budget Office, government subsidies for housing amounted to a staggering $230 billion.
“You hear all this rhetoric about stability caused by homeownership,” said Richard Florida, the author of “The Great Reset,” and a professor at the University of Toronto. “But the communities that survived the housing bubble the best were the ones that had the highest percentage of renters.”
Edward Glaeser, a professor at Harvard and a contributor to The Times’s Economix blog, said that if homeownership had to be encouraged — which he was not at all convinced of — it should be through a “flat homeowners’ tax credit” rather than a home mortgage deduction that essentially “bribes people to buy bigger houses.” What he says he really believes, though, is that renters offer plenty of social good themselves, helping creating vibrant cities. “The idea that homeownership is always great and renting is un-American is an awful state of affairs,” he said.
Obviously, the country is too psychologically invested in the idea of homeownership to ever abandon completely the homeownership ideal, or to put renting on a equal footing with owning. Which is why I found the most appealing idea to be Mr. Rivlin’s.
Despite having spent the last two years of his life reporting on the destruction wrought, in part, by the government’s unthinking push for ever more homeownership, he still wasn’t willing to abandon it completely. Rather, he thought the big policy mistake we had made as a culture was in promoting policies that encourage all home purchases, under any circumstance. “Why should the government help me buy a second home? Why should it subsidize a refinancing?” he asked. (I was amazed to discover that, if you qualify, you can actually get an F.H.A. loan for a refinancing.) “We have missed the essential piece,” he added. “The social good is in helping qualified first-time buyers own a home. That should be our goal. After that, people should be on their own.”
Right now, more than two years after the fall of Bear Stearns, which represented the beginning of the financial crisis, the federal government is more involved in the mortgage industry than it has ever been in its history. As wards of the state, Fannie and Freddie are insuring three out of every four mortgages. Most of the remaining 25 percent are being guaranteed by the F.H.A. As much as you might resent the fact that the taxpayers now have to pick up behind new Fannie and Freddie, the sad truth is that without them, no one in America would be able to buy a home.
Surely, that’s the logical culmination of decades of government policy promoting homeownership. Eventually, of course, the private market will return to the mortgage business, though it is hard to know when. Fannie and Freddie will be reconfigured in some way. But unless we change the way we think as a society about the virtues of homeownership, the fundamental fact will remain: the government will always be the backstop for the mortgage business, with the taxpayers always liable for the losses.
Is that really what we want?
Wake-Up Time for a Dream By JOE NOCERA
Sheila Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, began her week with a bit of honest heresy, the kind that only she, among all the bank regulators, seems willing to utter in the wake of the financial crisis.
Deep in a speech she delivered Monday before the Housing Association of Nonprofit Developers — a speech that got surprisingly little attention — Ms. Bair listed her three main recommendations to “put the mortgage industry on a sounder footing.” The first two were the usual suspects: better consumer education and protection, and a reformed securitization market. Her third proposal, however, was a shocker, taking dead aim at one of the most sacrosanct tenets of American politics: the lofty goal of homeownership.
“For 25 years federal policy has been primarily focused on promoting homeownership and promoting the availability of credit to home buyers,” Ms. Bair said. She mentioned some of the many subsidies home buyers get, including the home mortgage interest deduction and the ability to deduct property taxes.
She tossed in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two “G.S.E.’s” (government-sponsored entities) whose role as a guarantor and securitizer of mortgages greatly expanded the ability of mortgage originators to make loans to home buyers — and which are now, of course, in federal conservatorship, with taxpayers holding the bag for their gargantuan losses.
She also pointed out that during the bubble, when anyone with a pulse could get a mortgage, the percentage of Americans owning homes rose to an unprecedented 69 percent, a number that was greeted with bipartisan hurrahs, but which turned out to be “unsustainable,” Ms. Bair said.
She concluded: “Sustainable homeownership is a worthy national goal. But it should not be pursued to excess when there are other, equally worthy solutions that help meet the needs of people for whom homeownership may not be the right answer.” Like, you know, renting.
The point is: the financial crisis might well have been avoided if we as a culture hadn’t invested so much political and psychological capital in the idea of owning a home. After all, the subprime mortgage business’s supposed raison d’être was making homeownership possible for people who lacked the means — or the credit scores — to get a traditional mortgage. It’s also why bank regulators and politicians were so willing to avert their eyes from the predations and excesses of the subprime companies.
Yet even now, it is difficult for the body politic to face this truth squarely, so intertwined is homeownership with the American Dream. Which is why Ms. Bair’s comments were so heretical. Maybe, she seemed to be suggesting, it’s time to break that link, painful though it would be. Maybe she’s right.
•
The idealization of homeownership by both the public and the federal government is hardly a recent phenomenon, of course. The Federal Housing Authority has been around since 1934. Fannie Mae was founded in 1938. After World War II, the G.I. Bill included modest loans allowing veterans to buy their first homes, according to Michael D. Calhoun, the president of the Center for Responsible Lending. For decades, the savings and loan industry existed solely to make loans to home buyers. In return, the government gave savings and loans certain regulatory advantages over the banks. The mortgage-backed security itself — which emerged in the 1980s, and made the securitization of mortgages possible — required the passage of a handful of laws, which Congress happily provided.
And every president, Democrat and Republican alike, trumpeted the virtues of homeownership for all Americans. Bill Clinton put numerical goals on the percentage increase he wanted to see in homeownership, and greatly increased Fannie and Freddie’s affordable housing goals. (Those goals had first been in put in place during the presidency of George H. W. Bush.) George W. Bush trumpeted his “ownership society”— and increased those housing goals. Fannie Mae, for its part, explicitly wrapped itself in the American Dream; anyone who opposed Fannie Mae was quickly labeled “anti-homeownership” by the company’s lobbyists.
Indeed, conservatives tend to view the affordable housing goals imposed on Fannie and Freddie as the central reason for the credit crisis. “In order to increase homeownership, Fannie and Freddie were required to decrease their standards,” said Peter Wallison, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and perhaps the country’s leading critic of the G.S.E.’s. “We made a big mistake in trying to force housing onto a population that couldn’t afford housing.”
But, to my mind, that view is only half-right. Yes, people got loans who had no hope of paying them back, and that was insane. But Fannie and Freddie’s affordable housing goals — which the G.S.E.’s easily gamed — were not the main reason. Rather, it was the rise of the subprime lenders — and their ability to get even their worst loans securitized by Wall Street —that was the main culprit. Fannie and Freddie lowered their standards mostly because they were losing market share to the subprime originators.
Did government policy make the rise of the subprime lenders possible? You betcha. Over time, the federal government gradually loosened regulations and interest rate caps that allowed the business to first become viable and then to explode. And it completely bought into the idea that the subprime industry was a force for good, because it was expanding homeownership. This, of course, is something the mortgage originators encouraged. Angelo Mozilo, the founder of Countrywide Financial, was as vocal about his company making the American Dream possible as any Fannie Mae lobbyist.
But it was a lie. Gary Rivlin, my former colleague at The New York Times, has just published a scathing, important book, “Broke, USA,” which includes one shocking anecdote after another of people being conned into taking on mortgages, filled with hidden fees and adjustable rates, that they couldn’t possibly afford. The companies that did these things were not the outliers — they were the bulwarks of the industry: Household, Countrywide, New Century and a raft of others. And when state officials tried to crack down on these unseemly practices, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, instead of investigating, blocked their efforts. After all, homeownership was on the rise!
Somewhat to my surprise, the housing activists I spoke to — people who had been in the forefront of trying to stop the subprime lenders — generally didn’t agree that homeownership should be de-emphasized. “Let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater,” said John Taylor, the chief executive of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. “I think owning a home is the most common way for working-class people to join the middle class.” Mainly, he said, that was because of a home’s appreciation, which gave people the opportunity for wealth creation that would otherwise have remained out of reach. Others mentioned additional societal benefits of homeownership, like stable neighborhoods. And homeowners had every incentive to keep their homes up, precisely because of the equity in their homes.
The academics I spoke to, however, were not so convinced that homeownership offered benefits to society that were so important they demanded federal subsidies. Especially since those subsidies were so huge, and so distorting to the economy. For instance, in 2009, according to the Congressional Budget Office, government subsidies for housing amounted to a staggering $230 billion.
“You hear all this rhetoric about stability caused by homeownership,” said Richard Florida, the author of “The Great Reset,” and a professor at the University of Toronto. “But the communities that survived the housing bubble the best were the ones that had the highest percentage of renters.”
Edward Glaeser, a professor at Harvard and a contributor to The Times’s Economix blog, said that if homeownership had to be encouraged — which he was not at all convinced of — it should be through a “flat homeowners’ tax credit” rather than a home mortgage deduction that essentially “bribes people to buy bigger houses.” What he says he really believes, though, is that renters offer plenty of social good themselves, helping creating vibrant cities. “The idea that homeownership is always great and renting is un-American is an awful state of affairs,” he said.
Obviously, the country is too psychologically invested in the idea of homeownership to ever abandon completely the homeownership ideal, or to put renting on a equal footing with owning. Which is why I found the most appealing idea to be Mr. Rivlin’s.
Despite having spent the last two years of his life reporting on the destruction wrought, in part, by the government’s unthinking push for ever more homeownership, he still wasn’t willing to abandon it completely. Rather, he thought the big policy mistake we had made as a culture was in promoting policies that encourage all home purchases, under any circumstance. “Why should the government help me buy a second home? Why should it subsidize a refinancing?” he asked. (I was amazed to discover that, if you qualify, you can actually get an F.H.A. loan for a refinancing.) “We have missed the essential piece,” he added. “The social good is in helping qualified first-time buyers own a home. That should be our goal. After that, people should be on their own.”
Right now, more than two years after the fall of Bear Stearns, which represented the beginning of the financial crisis, the federal government is more involved in the mortgage industry than it has ever been in its history. As wards of the state, Fannie and Freddie are insuring three out of every four mortgages. Most of the remaining 25 percent are being guaranteed by the F.H.A. As much as you might resent the fact that the taxpayers now have to pick up behind new Fannie and Freddie, the sad truth is that without them, no one in America would be able to buy a home.
Surely, that’s the logical culmination of decades of government policy promoting homeownership. Eventually, of course, the private market will return to the mortgage business, though it is hard to know when. Fannie and Freddie will be reconfigured in some way. But unless we change the way we think as a society about the virtues of homeownership, the fundamental fact will remain: the government will always be the backstop for the mortgage business, with the taxpayers always liable for the losses.
Is that really what we want?
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