Residents of the Gulf Coast have not necessarily been card-carrying members of Sierra Club. But now that 25 percent of the Gulf of Mexico is off limits to fishing, there are a lot more people who will be questioning whether the environment is how critics have spun it: only something rich people can afford.
It is terrible that a catastrophe persuades the way logic never could: that the environment is what protects the economy of the Gulf states and not the other way around. The other way around, by the way, is how Republican leaders like Jeb Bush treated environmental policy: let the 'free' market do better for people than government. The BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe is a radical event in US history, unleashed by radicals. Not conservatives. Now, for a subset of the population who never self-identified as "environmentalists", that anger is going off the charts. It is new territory where damage from a hurricane like Katrina would be a lesser order of destruction than what Big Oil has unleashed on the Gulf. How did this happen?
Obama inherited a Bush shitstorm through which key lieutenants dismantled enforcement and regulatory capacity of environmental agencies across the board. Obama could have done more in his first year to prioritize reform of the Minerals Management Service by immediately rooting out the inefficiency and lax performances that had become standard, from EPA to the DOI and, especially, the MMS.
It is clear today--after the implosion of the financial and insurance industries and environmental disaster--that trillions of taxpayer dollars could have been saved if government had invested in professionalizing and raising up the status of service in government agencies, building competence and high standards, instead of enabling insider dealing, the revolving door between the lobbyists and government staff, and 'regulatory capture' by industry. There is no profit or glee in saying, "I told you so". The genie is out of the bottle, and the Obama presidency will never be the same.
4 comments:
what's next, the nuclear option?
I would guess the military takes over soon, while BP drills the reliever well. And if I were betting, I'd bet that the military has been following this disaster from the first. The question arises; what if explosive detonation fails. If detonating the well triggered a bigger, faster spill, the Obama presidency would be over.
I believe atomic bombs have been used elsewhere for similar problems with predictable consequences.
Like a tin-foil helmet in the micro, big-oil is still wanting to capture the crude knowing it's a lose-lose situation.
Recent history shows that man-made disasters can make and break presidents.
supposedly the Soviets used a small nuke in the arctic before to melt a well shut. Don't know if it is true but Conservative columnist Buena Sosa in the Herald thought we should emulate the Communist Russians in the Gulf.
I'm not so keen on that.
The current sufficiently jargonny "lower marine riser package" which is basically a lid for the pipe should have been the first option not the last.
Any pipefitter would tell you to cut a leaking pipe below the damaged area and fit it with a sleeve and cap. It shouldn't have taken them this long to get to this point.
Post a Comment