WORLD VIEW:Despite the Gulf of Mexico disaster one US party strongly opposes industry reforms, writes PATRICK SMYTH
‘IN ALABAMA and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty.”
Back in January Republican Senator Mitch McConnell’s impassioned defence of offshore drilling sounded a bit over the top. After the Deepwater Horizon disaster, it is bizarre. But the good senator and his Republican allies have not changed their tune. While oil and water may not mix, oil and Republican politics most certainly do.
In the week the Obama administration reported the leak successfully sealed, a bitter partisan battle has been fought out in Congress that uncannily echoes the attempts of the administration to put manners on Wall Street. Republicans and the oil industry are opposing tooth and nail legislation imposing new safeguards on offshore oil drilling.
The new rules, agreed by the House but not yet by the Senate, would tighten environmental controls, sharply increase spill penalties, and in other ways seek to minimise the risks of coastal oil and gas exploration. Both houses’ Bills would reorganise the agency at the department of the interior responsible for overseeing drilling – an agency, as the New York Times put it, “whose serial misbehaviour and conflicts of interest allowed BP to manipulate the system and short-circuit regulatory reviews that might have prevented the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico”.
Both Bills would provide added powers to the presidential commission investigating the blowout, require companies to give more detailed response plans before getting permits, and eliminate the $75 million liability cap for those responsible for a spill.
Republican opposition to such measures runs deep in a party with deep roots in oil. In fact Obama gave in to it just three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon blew up, announcing he would open up previously protected parts of the country to offshore drilling. The practice was not as risky as he had thought, he explained: “Oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.”
That wasn’t enough for Sarah Palin, who derided plans for more studies before drilling. “My goodness, folks, these areas have been studied to death,” she told the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans, just 11 days before Deepwater Horizon. “Let’s drill, baby, drill, not stall, baby, stall!”
It was the logic that had long ago already shaped the Gulf of Mexico. The gulf may be one of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet, a stopping point for migratory birds from South America to the Arctic, home to abundant wildlife and natural resources, but, for years, it has been very far from pristine – there are about 4,000 offshore oil and gas platforms and tens of thousands of miles of pipeline in the central and western gulf, where 90 per cent of US offshore drilling takes place.
In these waters more than half a million barrels of oil and drilling fluids had been spilled offshore before the Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 20th spewed some 4.9 million more barrels into the sea. And runoff and waste from cornfields, sewage plants and golf courses drain into the Mississippi from vast swathes of the US, flowing down to the gulf, creating a zone of lifeless water about one-quarter the size of Ireland just off the coast of Louisiana.
On the 107th day Obama, on Tuesday, said the Deepwater Horizon battle was won, the Macondo well largely sealed, the slick largely dissipated. But anyone who saw George Bush in 2003 on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln under the “Mission Accomplished” banner will have winced. It’s dangerous for a president who had called the oil leak “greatest environmental disaster” in US history to be so categorical, to tempt fate.
“It’ll look like it’s mortally wounded but may not be dead,” said Tom Hunter a member of energy secretary Steven Chu’s scientific team. The latter was even more cautious: “You want to make sure it’s really dead, dead, dead.”
The oil slick, the once-horrific expanse of red-orange gunge, has largely disappeared, even though the amount of oil left, put at 26 per cent of the total spill, is still more than four times that dumped by the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.
Government scientists have said that vigilance is still called for even if the “static kill”, sealing the well with concrete, worked. Other scientists warned the administration’s figures are based on over-optimistic models with significant margins of error.
Not, of course, that we are anywhere near the end of the story. The job of restoration of the marine environment, wildlife and fisheries, and repairing the economic damage to the gulf coastal communities is only beginning – the Alaskan fisheries have yet to recover fully from the Exxon Valdez spill, and some species of fish never returned
BP, which on Thursday announced that it has already paid out over $300 million in claims, has said it will put aside about $32 billion, selling off about 10 to 12 per cent of its exploration and production assets to cover the costs.
Meanwhile, deep-water drilling remains under a moratorium. But the oil industry and its political allies are keen to see it resumed. Michael Bromwich, director of the new Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, this week said he would like to lift the ban as soon as the agency is “comfortable” that enough safety improvements are in place. After all, oil rigs are such pretty things . . .