http://washingtonindependent.com/102166/why-the-oil-spill-hasnt-been-a-major-midterm-election-issue

Washington Indpendent: Why the Oil Spill Hasn’t Been a Major Midterm Election Issue

By ANDREW RESTUCCIA 11/1/10 12:03 PM
Fred Grimm at The Miami Herald has a great column today on how the oil spill has not been a driving factor in the midterm elections in Florida and around the country.
He traces the oil spill narrative roughly like this: Outcry about the environmental effects of the spill turned into concerns about the moratorium on drilling, which, when the moratorium was lifted, turned into everybody moving on to something else.

At first, it seemed like an inevitability that the oil spill would become a major issue in the midterm elections. And in some cases it was – Grimm points to Florida Gov. Charlie Crist’s early Senate campaign rhetoric on the environmental impacts of the spill, and I’ve written before about how Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) and Rep. Charlie Melancon (D-La.) zeroed in on the drilling moratorium.

But oil spill rhetoric has faded significantly for a number of reasons. The first is time. It’s been more than six months since the spill, and the incident rarely gets front-page billing these days. The second, as Grimm points out, is the administration’s decision to overturn the moratorium. The decision took some of the wind out of arguments that the administration was destroying the Gulf economy, though Sens. Vitter and Mary Landrieu (D-La.) have both raised concerns that new drilling rules will slow the pace of new drilling.

The third is a little more complicated. On the one hand, many Democrats seem reluctant to make the oil spill an election issue, because in doing so, they would have to acknowledge one embarrassing little detail: The Senate has failed to pass an oil spill response bill. On the other hand, many Republicans would have to reconcile their support for expanded offshore drilling with the obvious safety concerns. At the end of the day, it’s a thorny issue for both sides of the aisle.

After the midterms, once our elected officials trek back to D.C. to do the less glamorous job of legislating, the big question is this: How will Congress deal with offshore drilling? Right now, it’s unclear. The momentum to pass an oil spill response bill is gone, and with it go the prospects that we’ll see stand-alone legislation on the issue. While it could come up in the lame-duck session, it seems more likely that oil spill response provisions will make their way into a broader energy bill next year that will focus on low-hanging fruit issues like electric vehicles and efficiency, possibly paired with a renewable energy standard. Of course, the outcome of the midterm elections will likely determine the lame-duck agenda.

Just how stringent oil spill response provisions will be depends largely on the outcome of behind-the-scenes liability negotiations between, among others, Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), who would prefer unlimited liability on any company responsible for a spill, and Sens. Landrieu and Mark Begich (D-Alaska), who are trying to devise a mechanism by which companies can pool their liability in the event of a large disaster.

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http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/10/24/1888736/oil-spill-fades-from-political.html

Miami Herald

Column, Fred Grimm

So much for the oil spill’s impact

BY FRED GRIMM
FGRIMM@MIAMIHERALD.COM
Not only did that giant horrible plume of oil seem to disperse in the Gulf, it disappeared from politics.

Six months ago, the gusher in the Gulf of Mexico was seen as both the worst natural disaster in American history and the most vexing problem in American politics. “This is what I wake up to in the morning, and this is what I go to bed at night thinking about,” President Obama said.

The ruinous effect of 4.1 million barrels of red, gooey crude washing onto the Gulf Coast would surely affect the November elections.

Thanks to the spill, Gov. Charlie Crist, commanding a flotilla of plastic booms off the Florida Panhandle beaches, was able to resurrect his candidacy in the U.S. Senate race. In early summer, Crist was transformed into the environmental governor with lots of media attention and a lead in the polls.

But in the final weeks of the campaign, the spill — along with Crist’s allure — has receded from public consciousness.

The gusher was capped three months ago. Worried talk of an environmental catastrophe was soon drowned out by an angry harangue from oil-state politicians demanding an end to the moratorium on new deep-water wells. Elected officials formerly concerned for shrimpers, fishermen and the Gulf Coast tourist industry talked incessantly about the loss of drilling jobs.

On Oct. 12, the Obama administration lifted the moratorium. And the worst natural disaster in American history became no more relevant to American voters than those vaguely remembered wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Over in Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal has stubbornly persevered with his $360 million chain of earthen berms 40 miles offshore, despite protests from environmentalists and marine scientists.

So far, his sand barriers have intercepted only about 1,000 barrels of oil. That works out to $36,000 a barrel — not such a cost effective way to protect the coast. But Jindal’s berm project, also known as Jindal’s folly, was a political conception, a monument to himself when it was proposed in May, a time political leaders were still obsessed with the Gulf disaster.

Lately, not only has the oil spill faded from the public narrative, so have other environmental concerns — except as the stuff of derision from tea party insurgents.

The new right-wing activists, poised to chase Democrats out of their majority positions in Congress, regard talk of global warming as biblical heresy. As former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, reincarnated as a tea party intellectual, put it, “The Lord God Almighty made the heavens and the Earth to his satisfaction. It is quite pretentious of we little weaklings here on earth to think that we are going to destroy God’s creation.”

A New York Times/CBS poll this month found only 14 percent of the tea partiers called global warming an imminent problem. More than half doubted that global warming posed a future problem.

After Nov. 2, the new political establishment will ignore all those secular worries about melting polar caps, massive wildfires, dust storms, ocean dead zones and a rising sea that could inundate much of the Florida peninsula.

So much for worries about preventing future deep-water spills. So much for carbon-cutting measures that might slow global warming. If climate scientists are right about rising sea levels, and the tea partiers are wrong, so much for Florida.

Special thanks to Richard Charter