Posted on 05/28/2010 6:57:10 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
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 barren areas to populated ones, 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 and 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 — 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.
— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist.
I posted this concept here on FR a month ago. Glad to see it gaining ground.
He’s right. Once again, environmentalists do more harm than good.
“To replace them with what?”
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Exactly!
How many engineers are there in the world with the knowledge and experience needed to plug that hole? Ten? Twenty? Thirty?
I just asked my husband, a retired biochemist and holder of 6 patents, how many in the entire world could **immediately** have stepped in and handled your job? Answer: NONE!
“To replace them with what?” asked the estimable, admirably candid Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen,
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Hopefully, someone will do a thriller movie ( Similar to Apollo 13) on those very smart geeky engineers who “plugged” the hole.
Guess Charles just doesn’t understand it’s all the fault of the corrupt Bush Administration. Obama said so.
Find later
Just as they got NASA to change the foam adhesive on the main tank that lead to the Shuttle Columbia disaster.
—bflr—
He's wrong.
No doubt there are enviro issues but it has more to do with electoral votes and sharing of the federal OCS royalties with the states.
It was Clinton and Lawton Chiles who first proposed the "beyond 100 miles" limit, tho they never actually implemented that.
Then George and Jeb agreed to the beyond 100 mile limit. And George Bush did auction leases beyond 100 miles, tho the republican congress revoked those leases.
And, in 2006, it was the republican congress who reset the limit to "beyond 125 miles". And in that same act, TX, LA, MS, and AL were given revenue sharing. Now, because of the blowout/oil spill, the four gulf oil producing states are agitating for more revenue sharing. And FL is saying we have the same risk so we should get revenue sharing also.
If you expect to drill VA and/or other Atlantic states, the 2006 legislation has to be amended to "beyond 45 miles" and the interior states have to consent to giving revenue sharing to those Atlantic states.
I think this oil spill is a “Godsend” for enviornmental whackos. This will be their “Three Mile Island” to stop offshore drilling. Obama has already taken his “permission” to drill off of Virginia back!
I'm no big fan of Krauthammer, but I have to admire his way with words. LOL.
Just a little context :
When Sarah Palin used the words — DRILL BABY DRILL — she was referring to ANWR, not off-shore drilling.
I don't understand. Are you saying that if the well is far enough from the shoreline, that all the states in the area are considered as having a claim to it?
The more I think about what you said, the more confused I get. Why would Texas want to share revenue with the smaller states when it seems likely that they would have the most to gain (or keep) by not doing so?
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