The Gulf Disaster: Whose Asses Need Kicking?

A combination of industry recklessness and regulatory failure led to the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe. It will happen again unless Washington, business and the rest of us change

By Bryan Walsh Thursday, June 10, 2010
    • Eric Grigorian / Polaris

    Brown Pelicans covered with oil from the BP oil spill in a holding pen at Fort Jackson Oiled Wildlife Rehabilitation Center waiting to be cleaned.

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    IV. Washington's Challenge: The Other Mess
    As difficult as cleaning the oil over the next several months will be, mopping up the bureaucratic slop that led to the Gulf spill will be far tougher. For one thing, deepwater drilling has become an integral part of the U.S. energy mix. Wells dug more than 1,000 ft. below the Gulf's surface now supply a quarter of U.S. oil production, a proportion that will likely rise. Ironically, in Louisiana, ground zero for the spill, support still runs high for offshore drilling, a major employer in the state. Both of Louisiana's Senators have called on the President to lift the moratorium on new deepwater drilling as soon as possible, and even some of the widows of rig workers want the industry to continue. "I fully support offshore drilling, and I always will," Natalie Roshto, whose husband was killed in the Deepwater Horizon explosion, said at a congressional hearing in Louisiana on June 7.

    But it's clear that the industry can't continue as it has and that oil companies need to be pushed into making needed changes. Breaking up MMS was a good start, though the success of the strategy will depend on whom Obama can find to run whatever is left of the agency. His first pick, S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, was an outsider and an environmentalist, but she proved unable to change the entrenched, industry-friendly culture at MMS before she was pushed out last month. The mission will require finding officials close enough to the oil industry to act as knowledgeable regulators without being co-opted altogether. That's a balance every good regulator needs to strike, but it's particularly tough in the tight social circle that makes up much of the energy business. As one MMS official put it in a recent inspector-general report, "We're all oil industry. We're all from the same part of the country."

    Given the enormous amount of influence the oil and gas industry has — it spent $174.8 million on lobbying last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics — Obama, if he really wants to break that circle, will need to make it a major priority and institutionalize oversight so that it will outlast his Administration. More than that, he'll need to make the case to Americans that smart and aggressive regulation of drilling isn't an obstacle to maintaining a successful energy industry but a prerequisite. That would buck the general trend of deregulation that goes back years, well before George W. Bush and Dick Cheney began turning a portion of the Interior Department into an annex of the American Petroleum Institute.

    Part of the challenge will be not just political but technical. Frontier-pushing oil companies have rapidly expanded their ability to drill deep wells, racing far ahead of the government's ability to keep track of what they're doing. The same thing happened in the financial sector, as increasingly exotic financial instruments flummoxed even the experts who were supposed to determine their soundness. "The fact is that technology on drilling has outpaced our ability to deal with the problems that can come with that technology," says Tyson Slocum, director of watchdog Public Citizen's energy program.

    Of course, no offshore-drilling program will ever be spillproof, but there are smart and noncontroversial steps that can be taken now to prepare for the next accident. We need to invest in developing cutting-edge cleanup technologies — like microbes that can eat oil — so that we have more options than shoreline boom and in situ burns. Oil companies should be required to keep more well-killing equipment on hand, so we don't have to wait for them to build a containment dome from scratch, as BP did. And the government must have its own remotely operated undersea vehicles so that it can independently gather information on the next blown well rather than being forced to rely on the industry. Otherwise, as film director James Cameron put it recently, the government is effectively "asking the perpetrator to give you the video of the crime scene."

    And then there's the rest of us. Of course, it's our appetite for gas — cheap gas — that provides the hundreds of millions of dollars oil companies keep spending to drill offshore and the billions they make in profit. We buy gas-guzzling cars, resist the use of public transportation and howl at the idea of carbon taxes or other measures that would bankroll research into alternative energy sources and make them competitive once they reach the market. We accept the business argument that regulation is an evil that isn't necessary, rather than a necessary evil, and then we're surprised when a rig blows and disaster ensues. Well, what did we expect? "The American public expects safety to happen by magic and without pain," says Berkeley's Robert Bea. "There's plenty of blame to go around." We've been warned — now we have to learn.

    — With reporting by Steven Gray / Grand Isle, La., William Lee Adams and Tara Kelly / London and Alex Altman and Mark Thompson / Washington

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