http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/opinion/19friedman.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

NEW YORK TIMES

May 18, 2010

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

President Obama’s handling of the gulf oil spill has been disappointing.

I say that not because I endorse the dishonest conservative critique that the gulf oil spill is somehow Obama’s Katrina and that he is displaying the same kind of incompetence that George W. Bush did after that hurricane. To the contrary, Obama’s team has done a good job coordinating the cleanup so far. The president has been on top of it from the start.

No, the gulf oil spill is not Obama’s Katrina. It’s his 9/11 – and it is disappointing to see him making the same mistake George W. Bush made with his 9/11. Sept. 11, 2001, was one of those rare seismic events that create the possibility to energize the country to do something really important and lasting that is too hard to do in normal times.

President Bush’s greatest failure was not Iraq, Afghanistan or Katrina. It was his failure of imagination after 9/11 to mobilize the country to get behind a really big initiative for nation-building in America. I suggested a $1-a-gallon “Patriot Tax” on gasoline that could have simultaneously reduced our deficit, funded basic science research, diminished our dependence on oil imported from the very countries whose citizens carried out 9/11, strengthened the dollar, stimulated energy efficiency and renewable power and slowed climate change. It was the Texas oilman’s Nixon-to-China moment – and Bush blew it.

Had we done that on the morning of 9/12 – when gasoline averaged $1.66 a gallon – the majority of Americans would have signed on. They wanted to do something to strengthen the country they love. Instead, Bush told a few of us to go to war and the rest of us to go shopping. So today, gasoline costs twice as much at the pump, with most of that increase going to countries hostile to our values, while China is rapidly becoming the world’s leader in wind, solar, electric cars and high-speed rail. Heck of a job.

Sadly, President Obama seems intent on squandering his environmental 9/11 with a Bush-level failure of imagination. So far, the Obama policy is: “Think small and carry a big stick.” He is rightly hammering the oil company executives. But he is offering no big strategy to end our oil addiction. Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman have unveiled their new energy bill, which the president has endorsed but only in a very tepid way. Why tepid? Because Kerry-Lieberman embraces vitally important fees on carbon emissions that the White House is afraid will be exploited by Republicans in the midterm elections. The G.O.P., they fear, will scream carbon “tax” at every Democrat who would support this bill, and Obama, having already asked Democrats to make a hard vote on health care, feels he can’t ask them for another.

I don’t buy it. In the wake of this historic oil spill, the right policy – a bill to help end our addiction to oil – is also the right politics. The people are ahead of their politicians. So is the U.S. military. There are many conservatives who would embrace a carbon tax or gasoline tax if it was offset by a cut in payroll taxes or corporate taxes, so we could foster new jobs and clean air at the same time. If Republicans label Democrats “gas taxers” then Democrats should label them “Conservatives for OPEC” or “Friends of BP.” Shill, baby, shill.

Why is Obama playing defense? Just how much oil has to spill into the gulf, how much wildlife has to die, how many radical mosques need to be built with our gasoline purchases to produce more Times Square bombers, before it becomes politically “safe” for the president to say he is going to end our oil addiction? Indeed, where is “The Obama End to Oil Addiction Act”? Why does everything have to emerge from the House and Senate? What does he want? What is his vision? What are his redlines? I don’t know. But I do know that without a fixed, long-term price on carbon, none of the president’s important investments in clean power research and development will ever scale.

Obama has assembled a great team that could help him make his case – John Holdren, science adviser; Carol Browner, energy adviser; Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize winner; and Lisa Jackson, chief of the Environmental Protection Agency. But they have been badly underutilized by the White House. I know endangered species that are seen by the public more often than them.

Obama is not just our super-disaster-coordinator. “He is our leader,” noted Tim Shriver, the chairman of Special Olympics. “And being a leader means telling the rest of us what’s our job, what do we need to do to make this a transformative moment.”

Please don’t tell us that our role is just to hate BP or shop in Mississippi or wait for a commission to investigate. We know the problem, and Americans are ready to be enlisted for a solution. Of course we can’t eliminate oil exploration or dependence overnight, but can we finally start? Mr. President, your advisers are wrong: Americans are craving your leadership on this issue. Are you going to channel their good will into something that strengthens our country – “The Obama End to Oil Addiction Act” – or are you going squander your 9/11, too?

Special thanks to Richard Charter

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 18, 2010

Contact:
David Guest, Earthjustice, (850) 681-0031, ext 103
Robert Wiygul, Waltzer& Wiygul, (228) 990-1228
Joel Waltzer, Waltzer & Wiygul, (504) 430-0844
Cynthia Sarthou, Gulf Restoration Network, (504) 525-1528 ext. 202
Kristina Johnson, Sierra Club, (415) 977-5619

No blowout scenario or oil spill response  produced as required

New Orleans, LA -The Gulf Restoration Network and the Sierra Club filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Minerals Management Service for exempting oil companies drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from disclosing blowout and worst case oil spill scenarios, as well as formulating detailed plans for such. The groups are represented by Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, and the New Orleans law firm of Waltzer & Wiygul.

“I’ve worked for 15 years to protect and restore the beaches, wetlands and wildlife of the Gulf of Mexico,” said Cynthia Sarthou of the Gulf Restoration Network. “We are bracing ourselves against the environmental catastrophe this will bring. BP’s drilling disaster will
likely destroy countless victories we’ve won for a healthy Gulf.”

By law, MMS is required to include blowout and worst case oil spill scenarios before approving exploratory offshore drilling plans. These blowout and worst case scenario disclosures must include the maximum volume of oil, the maximum flow rate, the maximum duration of the blowout, and an estimate of the time it would take to contain the resulting oil spill.

For the BP Deepwater Horizon rig exploration plan, MMS approved the plan without this required step because MMS had issued a notice to oil companies telling them that they didn’t have to comply with those blowout and worst case oil spill rules. Additionally, MMS was required by law to produce an analysis of potential environmental impacts in the event of a blow-out; but failed to take that necessary step as well.

“The basic problem here is that the Minerals Management Service tried to change the law without telling anybody,” said Robert Wiygul, an environmental lawyer involved in the lawsuit. “That’s bad policy, and the BP mess proves it’s a disaster for the environment.”

This legal challenge asks the court to invalidate the MMS practice of sending notices to oil companies informing them that they don’t have to comply with the rules and to order review of existing offshore drilling plans that do not comply with existing rules.

“This case is about lax regulation by the Minerals Management Service” said Earthjustice attorney David Guest.  “It is actually easier to get a permit for an offshore oil well than for a hot dog stand.”

“The MMS failed to protect us from the worst-case scenario of offshore drilling and now we are watching this scenario play out before our eyes,” said Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune. “Response to the blowout has included desperate measures like lighting the sea on fire, pouring potent chemicals into the water, using trash and human hair to prevent the flow of oil, and proposals to dredge the sea and create new barrier islands. If oil companies aren’t capable of responding to a blowout, they shouldn’t be permitted to drill.”

“Our government clearly missed the painful engineering lessons taught by the design failures that caused our levees to collapse in Hurricane Katrina.  When analysis of real data is abandoned in favor of assumption, disaster is sure to follow,”  said Joel Waltzer, a New Orleans lawyer who lost his home to failed floodwalls in Katrina. “Is the bottom of the ocean that different south of Louisiana and Mississippi?”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

New York Times
May 19, 2010

 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/science/earth/20noaa.html

By JUSTIN GILLIS
Tensions between the Obama administration and the scientific community over the gulf oil spill are escalating, with prominent oceanographers accusing the government of failing to conduct an adequate scientific analysis of the damage and of allowing BP to obscure the spill’s true scope.

The scientists assert that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies have been slow to investigate the magnitude of the spill and the damage it is causing in the deep ocean. They are especially concerned about getting a better handle on problems that may be occurring from large plumes of oil droplets that appear to be spreading beneath the ocean surface.

The scientists point out that in the month since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, the government has failed to make public a single test result on water from the deep ocean. And the scientists say the administration has been too reluctant to demand an accurate analysis of how many gallons of oil are flowing into the sea from the gushing oil well.

“It seems baffling that we don’t know how much oil is being spilled,” Sylvia Earle, a famed oceanographer, said Wednesday on Capitol Hill. “It seems baffling that we don’t know where the oil is in the water column.”

The administration acknowledges that its scientific resources are stretched by the disaster, but contends that it is moving to get better information, including a more complete picture of the underwater plumes.

“We’re in the early stages of doing that, and we do not have a comprehensive understanding as of yet of where that oil is,” Jane Lubchenco, the NOAA administrator, told Congress on Wednesday. “But we are devoting all possible resources to understanding where the oil is and what its impact might be.”

The administration has mounted a huge response to the spill, deploying 1,105 vessels to try to skim oil, burn it and block it from shorelines. As part of the effort, the federal government and the Gulf Coast states have begun an extensive effort to catalog any environmental damage to the coast. The Environmental Protection Agency is releasing results from water sampling near shore. In most places, save for parts of Louisiana, the contamination appears modest so far.

The big scientific question now is what is happening in deeper water. While it is clear that water samples have been taken, the results have not been made public.

Lisa P. Jackson, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, told Congress on Wednesday that she was pressing for the release of additional test results, including some samples taken by boats under contract to BP.

While the total number of boats involved in the response is high, relatively few are involved in scientific assessment of the deep ocean.

Of the 19 research vessels owned by NOAA, 5 are in the Gulf of Mexico and available for work on the spill, Dr. Lubchenco said, counting a newly commissioned boat. The flagship of the NOAA fleet, the research vessel Ronald H. Brown, was off the coast of Africa when the spill occurred on April 20, and according to NOAA tracking logs, it was not redirected until about May 11, three weeks after the disaster began. It is sailing toward the gulf.

At least one vessel under contract to BP has collected samples from deep water, and so have a handful of university ships. NOAA is dropping instruments into the sea that should help give a better picture of conditions.

On May 6, NOAA called attention to its role in financing the work of a small research ship called the Pelican, owned by a university consortium in Louisiana. But when scientists aboard that vessel reported over the weekend that they had discovered large plumes undersea that appeared to be made of oil droplets, NOAA criticized the results as premature and requiring further analysis.

Rick Steiner, a marine biologist and a veteran of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, assailed NOAA in an interview, declaring that it had been derelict in analyzing conditions beneath the sea.

Mr. Steiner said the likelihood of extensive undersea plumes of oil droplets should have been anticipated from the moment the spill began, given that such an effect from deepwater blowouts had been predicted in the scientific literature for more than a decade, and confirmed in a test off the coast of Norway. An extensive sampling program to map and characterize those plumes should have been put in place from the first days of the spill, he said.

“A vast ecosystem is being exposed to contaminants right now, and nobody’s watching it,” Mr. Steiner said. “That seems to me like a catastrophic failure on the part of NOAA.”

Mr. Steiner, long critical of offshore drilling, has fought past battles involving NOAA, including one in which he was stripped of a small university grant financed by the agency. He later resigned from the University of Alaska at Anchorage and now consults worldwide on oil-spill prevention and response.

Oceanographers have also criticized the Obama administration over its reluctance to force BP, the oil company responsible for the spill, to permit an accurate calculation of the flow rate from the undersea well. The company has refused to permit scientists to send equipment to the ocean floor that would establish the rate with high accuracy.

Ian MacDonald of Florida State University, an oceanographer who was among the first to question the official estimate of 210,000 gallons a day, said he had come to the conclusion that the oil company was bent on obstructing any accurate calculation. “They want to hide the body,” he said.

Andrew Gowers, a spokesman for BP, said this was not correct. Given the complex operations going on at the sea floor to try to stop the flow, “introducing more equipment into the immediate vicinity would represent an unacceptable risk,” he said.

Thad W. Allen, the Coast Guard admiral in charge of the response to the spill, said Wednesday evening that the government had decided to try to put equipment on the ocean floor to take accurate measurements. A technical team is at work devising a method, he said. “We are shoving pizzas under the door, and they are not coming out until they give us the answer,” he said.

Scientists have long theorized that a shallow spill and a spill in the deep ocean  this one is a mile down  would behave quite differently. A 2003 report by the National Research Council predicted that the oil in a deepwater blowout could break into fine droplets, forming plumes of oil mixed with water that would not quickly rise to the surface.

That prediction appeared to be confirmed Saturday when the researchers aboard the Pelican reported that they had detected immense plumes that they believed were made of oil particles. The results were not final, and came as a surprise to the government. They raise a major concern, that sea life in concentrated areas could be exposed to a heavy load of toxic materials as the plumes drift through the sea.

Under scrutiny from NOAA, the researchers have retreated to their laboratories to finish their analysis.

In an interview, Dr. Lubchenco said she was mobilizing every possible NOAA asset to get a more accurate picture of the environmental damage, and was even in the process of hiring fishing vessels to do some scientific work.

“Our intention is to deploy every single thing we’ve got,” Dr. Lubchenco said. “If it’s not in the region, we’re bringing it there.”
Robert Gebeloff, Andrew W. Lehren, Campbell Robertson and Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-19/republicans-put-taxpayers-on-hook-for-oil-damage-obama-says.html
Business Week May 19, 2010, 12:04 AM EDT

By James Rowley and Jeff Plungis

May 19 (Bloomberg) — Senate Republicans threaten to leave taxpayers “on the hook” for damages from the BP Plc spill in the Gulf of Mexico by blocking legislation to raise the liability limit, President Barack Obama said.

“This maneuver threatens to leave taxpayers, rather than the oil companies, on the hook for future disasters like the BP oil spill,” Obama said yesterday in a statement. “I urge the Senate Republicans to stop playing special-interest politics and join in a bipartisan effort to protect taxpayers and demand accountability from the oil companies.”

A Democratic bid to pass a bill raising liability to $10 billion from $75 million was blocked yesterday by Republican Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma. Inhofe said a higher limit would make it impossible for independent producers to drill in the Gulf, where they account for 63 percent of natural-gas production and 36 percent of oil pumped from wells.

“Big Oil would love to have these caps there so they can shut out all the independents,” Inhofe said.

The legislation would apply retroactively to companies, such as BP and Transocean Ltd., in the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform. The rig sank two days later about 40 miles (64 kilometers) off Louisiana’s coast, triggering a spill that threatens the Gulf Coast with oil.

Obama plans to consult with Congress on setting an appropriate level to cap economic damages in spills, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said yesterday at a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing.

BP Pledge

BP has pledged to compensate for losses even if costs exceed the $75 million limit without seeking aid from taxpayers, Salazar said, citing the company’s response to a May 14 letter he sent with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

“In our view, that liability limitation doesn’t apply to BP because they have affirmatively stated that they will pay for all damages,” Salazar told Inhofe during the hearing.
Salazar in a separate appearance told the Senate Energy Committee that U.S. drilling companies are resisting efforts by the administration to beef up oversight of offshore oil and natural-gas operations on federal leases.

An overhaul at the Minerals Management Service, which oversees platforms such as the Deepwater Horizon, “raised the ire” of companies, Salazar said in remarks at the energy panel’s hearing. Lawmakers have said the MMS failed to ensure that BP and other drillers were operating under proper safety guidelines.

‘Impediments, Roadblocks’

“In the past 16 months, our efforts at reform have been characterized as impediments and roadblocks to the development of our domestic oil and gas resources,” Salazar said.

Obama has vowed to end the “cozy relationship” between companies and regulators. The administration is splitting MMS to separate inspection and safety enforcement from leasing and royalty collection. The agency generates about $13 billion a year for the U.S. by partnering with companies to develop oil and gas, trailing only the Internal Revenue Service in revenue.

Obama is planning to create a commission to investigate the accident, similar to presidential probes of the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident and the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. The president has suspended issuing offshore drilling permits for 30 days.

“There’s plenty of responsibility to go around,” Salazar said. “That responsibility, I will say, starts first with the Department of Interior and the Minerals Management Service. We need to clean up that house.”

Oil Collecting

The well is leaking an estimated 5,000 barrels of oil a day, according to BP, the U.S. Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. BP yesterday said it doubled the amount of oil it’s able to collect from the leak using a mile-long pipeline connecting the well to a ship on the surface.

Regulators have authorized BP to employ a technique that uses chemicals under water to disperse oil near the seabed, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. The dispersants are toxic and must be monitored, she said.

“Dispersants are generally less toxic than the oils they break down,” Jackson said. “However, the long-term effects of dispersants on aquatic life are unknown.”

‘Scot Free’

Florida Democratic Senator Bill Nelson said “there is no logic” to the Republican opposition on the liability limit because it suggests that a small oil company that causes a big disaster should get off “scot-free.”

“The Republican opposition will collapse because they simply cannot stand there with a straight face and support the oil industry and say the taxpayers going to have to pay for all these economic devastations,” Nelson told reporters.
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration had confirmed that some of the oil slick is now in the loop current that flows around the edges of the Gulf, “and professors at the University of South Florida are telling us it will be in the Keys in five days,” Nelson said.

–With assistance from Julianna Goldman and Jim Efstathiou Jr. in Washington. Editors: Steve Geimann, Larry Liebert
To contact the reporters on this story: James Rowley in Washington at jarowley@bloomberg.net; Jeff Plungis in Washington at jplungis@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Mike Tackett at mtackett@bloomberg.net; Larry Liebert at lliebert@bloomberg.net. Special thanks to Richard Charter