Whose blowout is it, anyway?

If BP can cap the well in time to prevent an absolute calamity in the Gulf, Obama will escape politically. If it doesn’t, it will become his Katrina.

By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
oilspill311 (photo credit: ASSOCIATED PRESS)
oilspill311
(photo credit: ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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 Barack 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 – 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 theSeptember 2009 letter from Obama’s National Oceanic and AtmosphericAdministration accusing Interior’s Minerals Management Service ofunderstating the “risk and impacts” of a major oil spill? When you geta blowout 15 months into your administration, and your own InteriorDepartment had given BP a “categorical” environmental exemption inApril 2009, the buck stops.
In the end, speeches will make no difference. If BP can cap the well intime to prevent an absolute calamity in the Gulf, the president willescape politically. If it doesn’t – if the gusher isn’t stopped beforethe relief wells are completed in August – it will become Obama’sKatrina.
That will be unfair, because Obama is no more responsible for thedamage caused by this than Bush was for the damage caused by Katrina.But that’s the nature of American politics and its presidential cult ofpersonality: We expect our presidents to play Superman. Helplessness,however undeniable, is no defense.
Moreover, Obama has never been overly modest about his own powers. Twoyears ago next week, he declared that history will mark his ascent tothe presidency as the moment when “our planet began to heal” and “therise 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 syndicated columnist with The Washington Post.