Is the U.S. Learning the Oil Spill Lesson?

From the petroleum waste in the Gulf of Mexico, the greatest environmental disaster in U.S. history, one lesson could be learned: Governments should take the lead in resolving catastrophic situations of this magnitude.

On May 29, British Petroleum failed again in its latest attempt to block the leak of crude oil with mud and cement, using the so-called “top kill” method. Until now, the quantity of oil that came out of the well has been between 18 and 40 million barrels, all of which are extending throughout the Gulf of Mexico.

U.S. politicians have questioned and criticized the government’s leadership in responding to this disaster. “The American people deserve to know why the administration was slow to respond, why necessary equipment was not immediately on hand in the area and why the president did not fully deploy cabinet-level federal officials” to the coast of the Gulf of Mexico until April 30, said U.S. Congressman Mike Pence.

Although Barack Obama has defended himself against criticism, he has also admitted that the federal government had erred in overestimating the capacity of the petroleum industry, and depended entirely too much on the industry to deal with the problem.

This was demonstrated by the fact that, during the first four weeks, BP was the only one to have estimated the quantity of spilled oil and the only one to have taken action to prevent its extension. However, all of these preventative actions were failures. There was no supervision nor regulation on the part of the authorities.

American conservative groups have strongly condemned this absence of leadership on the part of the federal authorities. “BP has every financial incentive to downplay the scale of the spill and the damages,” stated Jeremy Symons, senior vice president for Conservation and Education at the National Wildlife Federation.

Obama’s administration has tried to defend itself on two points.

First of all, the U.S. Oil Pollution Act of 1990 makes the oil companies, not the government, primarily responsible for making preparations to react in the case of a spill, and this includes the provision of containment walls and separators, the deployment of these tools when needed, and the control of any accident and its related cleaning duties. Second, the government does not have better technology than BP to resolve the problem efficiently. “The federal government does not possess superior technology to BP,” affirmed Obama.

Nevertheless, the U.S. media has revealed two other reasons that explain the limited leadership on the government’s part in this catastrophe.

The U.S. newspaper, Mother Jones, recently published “Obama’s Sluggish Oil Spill Response,” which analyzed several possible reasons that could explain the administration’s reluctance to deal with recovery efforts.

One reasons could be that “No one — not BP, not the administration — seems to know how to stop the gushing well. Nor do they know just how bad this mess could get. The administration would prefer that the blood stay on BP’s hands.”

Another reason noted in the article is that hardly eighteen days before the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon blowout, the White House announced a vast expansion of offshore drilling. For this reason, the federal government might want to maintain a low profile in order to avoid questioning of its promotion of offshore drilling.

Obama argues that the federal government has been taking care of the disaster since it started. However, this doesn’t offer the American people what they want: containment of the petroleum waste.

The oil has affected more than 160 km of Louisiana’s coast, as stated on Wednesday by Governor Bobby Jindal. The Department of Commerce has recently declared that in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, all states with significant seafood exports, a “fishery catastrophe” has occurred due to the spill. The oil spill has also caused significant losses in Florida’s tourism sector.

After Hurricane Katrina, the U.S. has come to a conclusion regarding the role of the government in situations of disaster.

“The federal government does have a unique and important role to play,” James Carafano, senior research fellow for the Heritage Foundation, noted in his essay, “Improving the National Response to Catastrophic Disaster.”

“Facing catastrophic disaster, governments cannot escape from playing their irreplaceable role and should take immediate actions. Governments across the world should always bear this lesson in mind.”