Charles Krauthammer sums up the whole Gulf spill situation brilliantly.
Here’s my question: Why are we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place?
Many reasons, but this one goes unmentioned: Environmental chic has driven us out there. As production from the shallower Gulf of Mexico wells declines, we go deep (1,000 feet and more) and ultra deep (5,000 feet and more), in part because environmentalists have succeeded in rendering the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production. (President Obama’s tentative, selective opening of some Atlantic and offshore Alaska sites is now dead.) And of course, in the safest of all places, on land, we’ve had a 30-year ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Ouch. There’s a spin you haven’t heard in the media.
So we go deep, ultra deep – to such a technological frontier that no precedent exists for the April 20 blowout in the Gulf of Mexico.
Exactly. The procedures that were in place for decades, and served us well for all that time never adapted to the new depths. Then when all hell broke loose, they all start looking at each other as if “I thought you brought the beer”.
Not that the environmentalists are the only ones to blame. Not by far. But it is odd that they’ve escaped any mention at all.
The other culprits are pretty obvious. It starts with BP, which seems not only to have had an amazing string of perfect-storm engineering lapses but no contingencies to deal with a catastrophic system failure.
Yup. And Hayward has this “deer in the headlights” look all through this whole thing. What the press mentioned a lot less was all the government deer with the same look.
However, the railing against BP for its performance since the accident is harder to understand. I attribute no virtue to BP, just self-interest. What possible interest can it have to do anything but cap the well as quickly as possible? Every day that oil is spilled means millions more in losses, cleanup and restitution.
Ya think? To listen to the left, you’d think that oil spills are profitable. I fail to see the income stream.
Read the whole thing. It’s pure, unadulterated Krauthammer brilliance.
In the end, speeches will make no difference. If BP can cap the well in time to prevent an absolute calamity in the Gulf, the president will escape politically. If it doesn’t – if the gusher isn’t stopped before the relief wells are completed in August – it will become Obama’s Katrina.
That will be unfair, because Obama is no more responsible for the damage caused by this than Bush was for the damage caused by Katrina. But that’s the nature of American politics and its presidential cult of personality: We expect our presidents to play Superman. Helplessness, however undeniable, is no defense.
Moreover, Obama has never been overly modest about his own powers. Two years ago next week, he declared that history will mark his ascent to the presidency as the moment when “our planet began to heal” and “the rise of the oceans began to slow.”
Well, when you anoint yourself King Canute, you mustn’t be surprised when your subjects expect you to command the tides.
A bazillion updings.
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One thing that’s missing from the whole discussion is an understanding of how emergency response is supposed to work. If your house is on fire, and the fire dept comes, they don’t ask you where your extinguishers and hose bibs are, they ask you to stand aside and put it out with their equipment and personnel.
However, if you have an explosives plant, you have a different situation. The way it should work, the fire chief should visit the plant, become familiar with the facility and the procedures, and a protocol is hammered out so that when the unthinkable happens, everyone knows what to do.
That’s what should have happened in this instance. The company filed a drilling plan, the dept of interior, who runs the drilling concession, approves it, and on paper everybody knows what to do. Other government agencies that have an interest in this are the Coast Guard, the EPA, Homeland Security (apparently because FEMA is under their auspicious), and probably some others and the State of Louisiana. I see little evidence that anybody was prepared, and yet Obama was thumping his chest about how the government was going to “take control”. I can imagine a circumstance when this might be appropriate; such as when they agreed in writing to have certain equipment available, and turned out not to.
But as I said, BP wasn’t the only deer in the headlights. This was just plain piss poor emergency planning all around, and while apportioning an appropriate part of the blame to BP, it wasn’t their responsibility to manage the government.
And now we hear from all the usual quarters that the problem was deregulation under Reagan. Complete 100% bull. The regulations were there. The agencies weren’t following them, and they probably weren’t properly updated for deep water drilling. The people who complain that there aren’t enough regulations, whether it’s in oil drilling of the financial markets never enforce the regulations that are on the books, but always want more.
Why? You decide.
Tags: Gulf Oil Spill Some data on past oil rig disasters:
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