It’s fascinating to listen to the media, with lots of encouragement from the right wing, inch its way toward blaming the BP Oil Spill on President Obama. Apparently the President’s job description includes a previously unknown provision about deep-sea plumbing expertise.
Let’s follow the media’s path for a moment here. First we heard media whining that the President was insufficiently engaged in the crisis, on the strength of no evidence whatsoever. Then the press went through a "false equivalency" phase, with a wave of speculation over whether this was, “Obama’s Katrina.” Then we heard howls from FOX commentator Sarah Palin (she of “drill, baby, drill” fame) that he hadn’t cozied up personally to BP CEO Tony Hayward. Now former American Enterprise Institute Fellow and current Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum complains that he’s bending too far in the opposite direction, engaging so visibly in managing the crisis that he’s raising false hopes that the government can indeed apply some sort of fix to the leak, which, of course, makes him look weak to the rest of the world.
President Obama’s in a horrible spot. Neither the oil industry nor the federal government has the technology to fix the leak anytime soon – that much is painfully clear. BP will surely have its chance to explain to Congress and to a judge why it represented repeatedly that it had such technology when it didn't. And the Minerals Management Service will get its chance to explain why it took those assertions at face value. But in the meantime, the sheer enormity of the problem creates a huge appetite for blame-laying. And the President is all too inviting and visible a figure to escape some share of it.
But I feel about this the same way I did about the argument over whether President Clinton’s deregulatory policies or President Bush’s deregulatory policies were responsible for the banking crisis that plunged us into recession. I don’t care so much who the media decides to blame, so long as we correctly identify the policies that are to blame. In this case, one glaring policy failure is that the federal government is inexcusably lax in its regulation of the oil industry. That’s no accident, of course. Industry likes it that way, and its allies on the Hill are similarly contented. Note, for example, that you haven’t heard a chorus of Republicans calling for stronger regulation of the oil industry, even though the political benefits for staking out such a position would be almost limitless for them.
My hunch is that the American public fundamentally understands that the President isn’t the guy responsible for designing or approving drilling systems. But he is the guy who’s responsible for making sure policies get put in place to correct the problems that left us vulnerable to the BP oil spill, and for making sure the federal government does what it can to make sure the mess gets cleaned up as best as it can be. Those seem like perfectly fair yardsticks to measure him by, and sooner or later, I expect voters will do just that.
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Matthew Freeman | June 15, 2010
It’s fascinating to listen to the media, with lots of encouragement from the right wing, inch its way toward blaming the BP Oil Spill on President Obama. Apparently the President’s job description includes a previously unknown provision about deep-sea plumbing expertise. Let’s follow the media’s path for a moment here. First we heard media whining that the […]
Holly Doremus | June 14, 2010
(Cross-posted from Legal Planet.) In January 2009, the Sixth Circuit in National Cotton Council v. EPA struck down a Bush-era rule declaring that pesticide application to or over waters was exempt from the Clean Water Act’s NPDES permit program, under which a permit is required for any discharge of pollutants to waters of the U.S. […]
Daniel Farber | June 11, 2010
Cross-posted from Legal Planet. On Thursday, the Senate voted down a resolution from Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-AK) to halt EPA regulation of greenhouse gases. The vote was 53 to 47. What are we to make of the vote? The resolution was offered under the Congressional Review Act, which provides a fast-track mechanism for Congress […]
Daniel Farber | June 11, 2010
Rob Verchick’s new book, “Facing Catastrophe: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World,” might help avoid future disasters like the Deepsea Horizon blowout. Verchick views wetlands, lakes, forests, and rivers as a kind of infrastructure, providing ecosystem services that are just as important as the services provided by other infrastructure, such as roads and dams. For instance, […]
Shana Campbell Jones | June 10, 2010
If I remember my Sunday School lessons correctly, “clean living” should result in a lot of good things in addition to a heavenly reward: a strong character, an orderly home, and a healthy body and environment. Ironically for the Amish, a clean living group if there ever was one, clean living also produces dirty waters. As […]
Shana Campbell Jones | June 9, 2010
We’ve all seen the dramatic headlines recently concerning large-scale environmental disruptions, including a catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf and mining disasters killing workers from West Virginia to China. Meanwhile, in Congress, climate change bills are proposed, altered, weakened, and eventually shelved, and the United States still fails to take action on climate change. CPR’s Member Scholars […]
Yee Huang | June 8, 2010
Hundreds of offshore extraction platforms dot the world’s oceans, funneling millions of gallons each day of oil, natural gas, and other extracted resources to the surface. While these operations are regulated by the country where they’re located, they have the potential to cause international environmental disasters when located near boundary waters or near large currents. The New […]
Rebecca Bratspies | June 7, 2010
Cross-posted from IntLawGrrls Ever since the Deepwater Horizon began gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, BP has been dazzling the American people with a series of colorfully named “solutions:” the dome; top hat, junk shot, top kill. However, as the days turned into week, and the weeks turned into months, one thing has become […]
Victor Flatt | June 4, 2010
In the little-followed but hugely important “joint federalism” system through which our environmental laws are implemented, a seismic change may be afoot that could vastly improve environmental compliance and environmental quality in the future. Last week, Al Armendariz, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region VI, indicated that unless significant changes are made by […]