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suitanim
05-30-2010, 12:35 PM
http://www.ohio.com/editorial/commentary/95208904.html

Why BP must drill in 5,000 feet of water

By Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post

Published on Sunday, May 30, 2010

WASHINGTON: 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.

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.

There will always be catastrophic oil spills. You make them as rare as humanly possible, but where would you rather have one: in the Gulf of Mexico, upon which thousands depend for their livelihood, or in the Arctic, where there are practically no people? All spills seriously damage wildlife. That's a given. But why have we pushed the drilling from the barren to the populated, from the remote wilderness to a center of fishing, shipping, tourism and recreation?

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.

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.

Federal officials who rage against BP would like to deflect attention from their own role in this disaster. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, whose department's laxity in environmental permitting and safety oversight renders it among the many bearing responsibility, expresses outrage at BP's inability to stop the leak, and even threatens to ''push them out of the way.''

''To replace them with what?'' asked the estimable, admirably candid Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the national incident commander. No one has the assets and expertise of BP. The federal government can fight wars, conduct a census and hand out billions in earmarks, but it has not a clue how to cap a one-mile-deep, out-of-control oil well.

Obama didn't help much with his finger-pointing Rose Garden speech in which he denounced finger-pointing, then proceeded to blame everyone but himself. Even the grace note of admitting some federal responsibility turned sour when he reflexively added that these problems have been going on ''for a decade or more'' — translation: Bush did it — (Bu-bu-bu-Bush from Obama now...I should have copyrighted that!)while, in contrast, his own interior secretary had worked diligently to solve the problem ''from the day he took office.''

Really? Why hadn't we heard a thing about this? What about the September 2009 letter from Obama's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration accusing Interior's Minerals Management Service of understating the ''risk and impacts'' of a major oil spill? When you get a blowout 15 months into your administration, and your own Interior Department had given BP a ''categorical'' environmental exemption in April 2009, the buck stops.

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.

Krauthammer is a Washington Post columnist. He can be e-mailed at letters@charleskrauthammer.com.

GitNoLuv
05-30-2010, 03:00 PM
And the longer he's in office, the worse he makes things for himself. Nov '12 can't come around fast enough.

Godfather
05-30-2010, 03:11 PM
Krauthammer's making a weak argument on this one. If the environmentalists had their way, there would be no offshore drilling at all. And it was the Bush administration that made the Eastern Gulf off limits to drilling in 2002--they were hardly a "green chic" bunch.

The incentive argument doesn't fly here either. If someone had told him 45 days ago that BP was cutting corners on safety he would have dismissed it and said they have an incentive to avoid risk. But look where we are right now.

If you want to go after the left, go after Obama for blocking state and local mitigation efforts. We could have barrier islands built in strategic spots along the Gulf by now. Instead the feds are still dithering over whether or not state and local officials should be allowed to build those islands, and they've been hemming and hawing for longer than it took Bush to clear the Superdome and Convention Center. We're finally rolling on that because the Louisiana attorney general issued an opinion that the state doesn't need federal permission to start an emergency project, and that has the force of law unless overturned by a judge.

Devilsdancefloor
05-30-2010, 03:50 PM
sierra club

suitanim
05-30-2010, 04:01 PM
First off, apologies for putting this in the wrong place.

I don't necessarily think Krauth's argument is weak...it's more about getting an alternate conversation going. One could also bring up the fact that big oil CAN drill some places on Federal land but refuse too because of the huge royalties the gov't would demand of them...and that feeds back into the loop of "taxed enough already".

I also am not sure that the PR hit BP is taking should be so easily dismissed. They have spend hundreds of millions upgraded and improving their safety measures since the Texas City explosion. People were sacked and new blood was brought in to change the paradigm...but it takes time for that kind of stuff to happen. I read somewhere (and this was last week) that BP had lost something like 36 billion so far from this accident (I'm sure stock drops make up the bulk of that). That's a big hit even for a huge global conglomerate oil company.

I'm not necessarily defending BP, and I'm actually not going to be too hard on Obama....Krauth makes the VERY salient point that Katrina was as much Bush's fault as this mess is Obama's...and that in the end, it always takes a huge disaster like this to really bring about change. The bottom line is that this is a tragedy, one that could have been avoided, and it WILL bring about many changes (and some bad ones) in the future....