Obama Brittle
For quite a while, everybody wanted to believe the BP/White House spin that the Gulf oil tragedy was relatively small and under control. After weeks went by, complaints mounted that maybe, since the leak wasn't actually so small, the White House should be doing more. The White House's response has been, and remains, that BP, and the oil industry generally, has the best expertise in the world and, therefore, while government should provide any requested assistance it should otherwise stay out of the way. A lot of people think this makes sense. OK, leave BP in charge. But even under casual examination the White House argument appears less a thoughtful, substantive response than a further rationalization for continuing to downplay the seriousness of the situation.
The White House, for its own inscrutable political purposes, wants to continue deep water off-shore drilling. And it's been clear that it won't budge. Being so completely inflexible, however, it's failed to recognize the possibility that even if BP and the oil industry do in fact have the best available technology for dealing with a runaway deep water gusher, that technology may not be good enough.
Set aside the White House's ineffectual clean up efforts, its disinterest in oil recovery, and its obsessive secrecy regarding data. The priority is to plug the leak. What is the chance that BP will fail or that in failing make the leak irreparable? Does anyone have any idea at all what a billion barrels of oil (or more) leaked into the Gulf would mean?
Everybody wants to hope that BP will have managed to plug the leak sometime within the year, and that then we can move on to clean-up and litigation. That's what the White House hopes too. But 'hoping for BP' isn't responsible policy.
Instead, the government should initiate a crash program to assess the risks of catastrophic failure and develop brand new technologies to cope with worst case scenarios. And it should take over direct management of the situation from BP. It might get away with doing less but if its gamble doesn't turn out Mr. Obama's way, he's finished.
He must be feeling lucky...
Posted by George Kenney on June 12, 2010 8:40 AM 
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Comments
The Gulf can become an open sewer for all we care. The risk of catastrophic failure stopping this (and future) leaks in deep water wells pales in comparison to the loss of gas in our cars. We will do anything, suffer any destructive after-effects, pay any ecological cost — so long as it's not in our backyard — to be able to fill up anytime, anywhere at a price per gallon we don't mind paying. One cannot go wrong overstating the short-sightedness of the American people.
Posted by: Richard Greener | June 12, 2010 10:43 AM
Another danger here is that we will see this as an isolated case concluding that offshore oil drilling is dangerous, but that some other fossil fuel is better. It is dead wrong. We're getting deluged with ads about "clean natural gas" but for those who live near areas where they are extracting natural gas from shale deposits can tell you that there's nothing clean about it. (I recommend the movie Gasland that's making the rounds at the moment.)
We already know that people die mining coal and that clean coal technology is a pipe dream, and don't even get me started on nuclear — a technology so dangerous only the government has the creditworthiness to insure it (at least at the moment).
A local columnist (unfortunately not online) wrote a great piece this week on the tragedy caused by a safety failure in a proposed local wind farm that caused a blade to fall off knocking down several blades of grass and causing the wind to flow unimpeded into the valley. Now that's an energy disaster we can live with.
Posted by: Charles D
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June 12, 2010 12:05 PM