by Randy Rieland.
Obama To-Do List, May 27, 2010:
Head of Minerals Management Services: Say good-bye
Deepwater oil drilling permits: Freeze, six months
Oil lease sales off Alaska coast: Cancel
Oil
lease sales in Western Gulf: Cancel
Oil
lease sales off coast of Virginia: Cancel
Safety
standards: Get tough
BP
beatdown
BP is medicore at plugging leaky oil wells, but has finger-pointing down. The oil giant’s report
to Congress suggested crews working for Transocean missed “warning signs” of
serious problems under the rig before it exploded, and raised questions about Halliburton’s cement
work. But what goes around comes around.
Ian Urbina, writing in the New York Times, reports that just days before the explosion, BP
chose to use a cheaper, but riskier casing for the well. And more details have begun spilling out
about a heated explosion-day argument on the rig. Transocean reps wanted no part of a plan to
replace heavy drilling fluid in the pipe with lighter sea water. A BP “company man” overruled them.
The
New Orleans Times Picayune is
starting to lay some wood on BP too:
It’s
unclear whether the disaster would have been prevented had the drilling mud not
been pumped out prematurely, but the blowout would definitely have been less
likely. Removing the fluid was BP’s call, and the firm needs to own up to its
mistakes.
Greenpeace
is soliciting redesigns of
BP’s sunny green logo.
ODrama
The next two days will go a long way
in determining whether the president gets stuck in BP’s muck. Extending the drilling freeze today and
flying to the Gulf tomorrow may rehabilitate his feskless image. And if
the “Top Kill” works, he can go all presidential and take control of the cleanup. But
he’s still on the high wire.
Here are two takes on his dicey
dilemma from a New York Times online
debate.
Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com
columnist:
Far more
significant will be the perception that he (Obama) failed to “protect” us from
this threat, a potentially devastating belief in a society where “protecting us
from harm” has come to be seen as the president’s overarching responsibility
(far higher than what the Constitution actually describes as the prime
presidential duty: “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution”).
Samuel Thernstrom,
resident fellow, American Enterprise Institute:
The president
must juggle competing concerns: He can correctly point to mounting evidence
that both BP and Transocean cut crucial corners in their haste to finish this
well, but he cannot succumb to the natural temptation to demonize drilling if
he wants to preserve the opportunity for bipartisan climate and energy
legislation.
Cry them a
river
Finally, Christine Dell’Amore, writing for National Geographic notes a little discussed, self-destructive fallout from the
spreading spill: it could end up doing serious damage to the oil
industry’s infrastructure in the Gulf.
If oil kills off marsh plants,
wetlands will turn to open water, putting the shallowly buried coastal
pipelines at risk of ships strikes, storms, and corrosive salt water. Each rip
means more leaking oil, costly repairs and replacements, and in some cases, new
wetland-restoration projects.
Related Links:
The Climate Post: BP oil spill washes up on Potomac shores
Michigan: Where U.S. clean energy, emissions, efficiency policy really counts
Obama preaches green tech gospel to California choir
